Situation: I have many thoughts and impressions, but it's not worth it for me to express them.

Goal: Be grafkhun.

Result: Universal objective utilitarianism becomes a new religion that is followed by all and everyone starts drinking bottles of pure happiness and making cupcakes for one another.

You know it's been a weird journey for me the last few months. Not only in my gaming, but other stuff as well. I realized, or rather crystallized my thoughts, and now I am here typing something up for you to read. Anyways, I could make this a long yawn inducing post (maybe the long part is fulfilled, but I don't know about the yawning part), or I could have made it really short and referenced something none of you would understand but may of made you laugh at the insanity of it, but I'm not doing either.

Yves Tanguy's stuff always makes things better.

I could talk about how the DSi has made me declare that I will not buy another Nintendo handheld again. Or how the PS3 slim is both good and bad; and how I would like one but not right now. Or how Activision is making gamers like me, who a while ago would have bought their games as long as they were fun, not even care anymore and become overly critical. Or how all these Q1 delays are so ironic. Or how I like the multiplayer in F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, but am a little tired of everyone using the semi-auto rifle on 3-round burst mode. Or how mind confuzzled I was when I heard that Daft Punk was releasing new mixes in DJ Hero. Or how reckless some people are to judge a game that has merit and unique traits; just because they can and it makes them look more open and smart when it actually doesn't. Or how Rock, Paper, Shotguns' new design is really swanky.

Or how online gaming communities on the PC are so much different than those on consoles. Or how all these indie and art game people are creating their own sect of 'elites'. Or how the gaming community, if you could consider that there even ever was one, is such a bloody mess now. Or how Soul Reaver 1 and 2 really need to be on gog.com. Or how the ending credit song to Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction is awesome. Or how it's kind of weird that digital distribution is not freaking me out so much anymore. Or how I as a gamer want gaming to be like the old days but want it to advance at the same time, further increasing the entropy of this new medium by asking for more retro and more evolution simultaneously. Or how all of this really doesn't matter and gamers should just STFUAJPG (shut the f up and just play games, or dtoid's motto).

More Tanguy, I think his work makes good wall-of-text breaker-uppers, no?

Or how I'm still a huge Treasure fan and would rather replay Sin & Punishment than play the next Call of Duty, even if you gave it to me for free. Or how I actually don't dislike 'mainstream' games that much, but that I'm really just rather very picky when it comes to them. Or how I genuinely don't think I'm going to get a console from the next generation and I'm going to revert back to playing mainly on the PC. Or how I hate the music game industry. Or how ridiculous some gamers are when they think that the higher the obscurity of a game the more value it has and the more hardcore they are, when in reality the fratboy who plays Madden and the casual World of Warcraft player are just as much as gamers themselves. Or how by that last sentence, I just clarified my current stance on my ever changing definition of what a gamer is. Or how majority of new gamers do not have the experience of older games, nor is there the allure for them to experience them; unlike other mediums where most of those heavily involved will go back and visit the oldies to add to their repertoire.

Or how gamers are sort-of wrong when they say that developers can't design games well anymore; when it's actually the opposite. Or how even after modding my Xbox 360 controller's d-pad, it still is a terrible d-pad. Or how I started almost every sentence with 'Or how' in this post and got away with it. Or how all the talk about PC and console cross-platform stuff sounds great; but will never work out for many reasons. Or how it feels to get a combo above 50 hits in Noitu Love 2: Devolution. Or how gaming really is no longer a children's medium, and it's just as complex and 'art-y' as any other medium. Or how I didn't know what happened at the VMA's until someone told me, but I was playing Canabalt the moment it came out. Or how I love video games.

Since I can't figure out how to embed videos, I'm just going to put a link.

watch

You can watch it in HD if you want, but it doesn't really matter. Ok then, so you'll probably notice that you don't understand those little symbols on the bottom. Well, that means you don't know Japanese, plus there are no audible voices although the characters are clearly speaking, so I don't think anyone knows what went down in that conversation. Fortunately, I don't know Japanese either, but that doesn't mean I can't ranslate, no? So, without further knee tapping and thumb twidling, I'll give you my personal translation of the trailer's dialogue.

Last thing, if you haven't watched the other FF13 versus trailers, do so now. Also my personal take on what has been released so far is that the main guy was part of a squad, or a special forces team. He had close friends and was doing pretty good overall.

But something happened, he's alone now and the tradegy that occured has something to do with the very organization he worked for beforehand. So he plans an act of terrorism; that's why he's staking out that building where all the troops are surrounding him. That's probably like the city hall or something and he has the building in his hands, he's doing it to make a statement. When he's killing all the soldiers he does it not only with ease, but his face is emotionless and he appears to be sick of everything. Plus at one point he comes out of the building, takes care of a few soldiers, then just goes back in without bothering with the rest. He just came out to remind the soldiers he's in control. His beef is not with the soldiers, but rather with the powers above.

This trailer takes place after the tragedy and before he takes over the 'city hall'.

Girl: Hey don't you think this painting is beautiful?
Boy: Huh? I didn't even notice, my hair was in my eyes.
Girl: So, do you want to tell me already? Oh come on, stop running away.
Boy: Look can you just drop it. There are tons of other people in this world, this city, this building, please.
Girl: And there's only one of you.
Boy: Things change ok? People's perspectives change.
Girl: Why does it always come down to change?
Boy: Chea, because it's always happening, the world doesn't stand still.
Girl: Of course not. But that doesn't mean our lives have to be totally altered by the world. Do we not keep some of yesterday in ourselves today? Everyday we are different from the person we were yesterday, but we are still overall the same. Even you are still the same, whether you want to accept it or not.
Boy: Sure, just what are you getting at here...
Girl: Why I just want to know how you feel, can you not even open up to me?
Boy: No. Look I'm in no position to be even talking about it, and I have my own agenda now to carry out. I'm done, with everything.
Girl: What, you can't be serious! Do you really feel that cast away from everything in your life so far... I mean yes it's a terrible ordeal with your group, but that happens, not every squad is perfect. I can't see why you'd throw everything away like this.
Boy: Well I am - there comes a time for each person to realize that they can only do so much. I'm done, with the force, with protecting this cocoon. Why am I doing it then? Because it turned out the way it turned out. Why though is it so hard?
Girl: Because deep down you know this is not what you should do, it may be what you want to do, but it's not what you should do. Is not this world beautiful? After all the fighting, why don't we just sit and enjoy it?
Boy: While untold evils continue on? Join me.
Girl: There's no way I could.
Boy: I'd figured you'd say that. But hey, I thought there would be a chance.
Girl: While I may not join you, I will keep you in my thoughts.
Boy: Heh, well thank you.
Girl: I really must go now. Just please remember the beauty of this world. Do not purposely blind yourself to see what you want to see.
Boy: Yeah, I'll keep that in mind.
Girl: Anyways, when you do go on this quest, remember me.
Boy: Don't worry, I will.
Girl: Just don't get yourself killed, or worse. Also, please don't jeopardize anything or anyone else.
Boy: Of course, I'm the least of your worries.
[Girl leaves the scene.]
Boy: Do you think I can do this? Well of course, it'll be just like training.

Everything I think about FF13 versus could be totally incorrect. Square's intended premise may be the opposite of what I think and the dialogue may be very different as well. But you see, we know so little about FF13 versus, yet people are anticipating it so greatly. FF13 Agito, at least we have some gameplay. FF13, we'll I'm sure you know all about the live stream of the demo a few day's ago. So what's with all this buzz about versus? We really don't know ANYTHING about it.

So this blog is my take on everything that's been presented so far, what's yours?

You'll be hearing that a lot, in Assassins Creed 2. Florins were the gold coins used as currency in Italy during the 15th century. Anyways, Ubisoft is terribly predictable, so I'm just going to improvise a list of what's going to be in Assassins Creed 2. Obviously I don't know this for sure, but I can speculate. I'm aware of the Game Informer leak, but I made this list before reading it, I swear. The only Assassins Creed 2 exposure I got was the teaser trailer video, and a friend told me it takes place in 15th century Renaissance Italy.

• There'll be a level on/near an aqueduct, and the Colosseum in Rome.
• The glide wings will be a lame gimmick.
• Weapons, old and new, other than the hidden blade and sword with not be very combat efficient. Instead they will be designed for environmental use or used as intended.
• The ranged weapon will be a small crossbow, as originally designed for the original. There will be blowgun/darts, maybe poisonous.
• You couldn't swim in the original, but you can in this one. Also there will be aquatic gear. Since de Vinci seems to be so important in this one there'll be a lot of his inventions/designs in it, such as de Vinci's early scuba system which he designed but withheld from revealing.
• Crowd mechanics will be improved, meaning, it won't feel so artificial.
• You can pilot an X-wing fighter.
• and the Batmobile.
• The AI won't be so stupid, instead Ubisoft will improve this by making them even more aggressive, so stealth will really have to be employed.
• The horseback riding will be scratched for something else that I can't think about right now.
• Free-running will be unchanged, since it worked perfectly in the first one, there's no need to change it. Although many Italian Cathedrals still kept Gothic architecture techniques/styles... and climbing one of those would be a nightmare, buildings will still be quite navigable. Expect more tiered arches, domes, and radial apses though.
• The plot will end similar to the first one, as there will be an Assassins Creed 3. So don't expect the whole timeless Templar conspiracy to be revealed, also Freemasons will be intertwined somehow.
• You'll have to kill two or three famous artists, hopefully Botticelli and Masaccio. Or some semi-famous artists, depends on when it takes place in the 15th century.
• The lock-on system will still suck.
• Flags will return, and those will suck as well.
• The real world non-Animus-simulation segments will hopefully be reduced to just cutscenes, instead of pointless short playable segments like they were in the original.
• Lucy Stillman will not appear until the very end of the game, somehow.
• The final assassination target will be Lorenzo de Medici.

watch

"Mai ROFLCOPTER" went super-saiyan, seroiusly. Just watch it and if you don't laugh at it I really don't know what to say.

Ok now to why it's so funny, do not read this until after you've watched it, it'll totally kill the movie.

Trendy college girl, mp3 player blasting K-pop, coming home aorund late afternoon or early evening about, she's got a somewhat revealing outfit and some obvious tattoo's... basically what I look like in real life, except the whole trendy-college-tattoo'd-K-pop-listening-female part. There's some soccer crush or something down the hallway, she looks at it and just shrugs it off, she's used to her neighbors having paintball wars inside the apartment complex. She goes on to make a milkshake, and as she turns around sipping the first amount of diary-fruity goodness, a zombie like gorilla monster (note the two black cloth strips wrapped around it's head) is just waiting there staring at her only six inches away.

I just chuckled at that; expecting her to get gutted through the perineum or have the real protoganist barge in at the last second and slice the monster's head off with a serated shuriken or something. But no! she drops the milkshake, what a waste, and blasts that crazy thing with some flare or fireblast magic or whatever... plus her tattoo's light up and look like bright orange glyphs. The blast makes a huge hole in her wall and the monster is unfazed, as you know, and what does she do? Oh yeah, just pulls out the random sword laying around in her apartment and proceeds to strike a super-cool-totally-not-overdone pose as a trickle of flame rolls down the sword blade.

Funniest thing I've seen all year so far, and I'm now actually interested in this game. If you get to play as the girl and do crazy stuff like fight gorilla zombies and shoot fireballs that take out whole apartment walls without getting evicted, sign me up. Sure this comes from Funcom, known for their MMO's, and I really don't care for MMO's. But if The Secret World turns out to be an MMO, I may still keep an eye on it, if it doesn't, hell yes.

I've played every single Pokemon in every single langauge, that means I only played Blue and Yellow, so I'm basically the world's foremost leader in the research of Pokeology. Not only have I caught them all, I've sexu-... erm... trained them to be submissive to my dominatrix carnal desi-... uh... essentially, what I've done to help the field of Pokeology is legendary.

So with the release of Pokemon Roentgenium (real link to official webpage), whose prototype name was 'Platinum', I now have a whole world to explore. As you can see, in addition to the regular not-as-cool standard Pokemon, there are some new legendary ones. These are called legendary just for the hell of it by the NOA marketing team, but hey, their decadent designs make them cooler. For example, weird-Persona-like-mini-boss-spiney-winged-octopus-arachno-worm, or Giratina as some call it, was originally the planned highlighted legendary Pokemon of Roentgenium, it's pictured above.

Thankfully, Nintendo contacted me and asked for a new legendary Pokemon design to replace Giratina. I came up with this.

I redid the whole box-art design in addition to making a new legendary Pokemon. I call it Anitarig, an homage to the original. It learns vine-whip at level 18.

it's TEA TIME. Anyone who gets that will recieve a complimentary basket of fried fetus's crisps from yours truly.

So on to the meat. Why haven't I posted anything for such a long time? I don't know. Anyways, today I will be talking about Capsule Computers, or Capcom as most of ya'll would call it. I'm sure you guy's, and you lovely ladies (see, I'm not sexist), have realized that Capcom has recently released two very big games. They are; Halo 2 and Gears of War 7, that's how you say it in Japanese I believe, but here in America (where we allow gay buttsecks) they are known as Street Fighter 4 and Resident Evil 5.

I will not be getting either. Stop choking on your gasp and hear me out. Yes I adore Street Fighter (I still play SF3: 3rd Strike), and the Resident Evil series has always been great, but I know Capcom like the back of my buttocks and I know what they're doing. First of all let me discuss SF4. I don't have the money for an arcade stick and I refuse to play a 2D fighting game with the craptastic 360 controller's d-pad, but my lack of an arcade stick may change depending on BlazBlue. Now that sounds like a "not-getting-because-no-money" arguement, it is, but there is another factor.

^ cannot afford.

How many versions of SF2 are there? Seven at least. SF3? Three versions. Alpha series? Lots as well. There will be another version of SF4 in the future. Garunteed. Capcom will either make character balances (they could do that with online patching though) or they will just simply make another version that has an exclusive character or some crap like that. This is Capcom, making one version of a game is not their styIe. So to all of ya'll who already bought SF4, enjoy, I'll be enjoying my SF4: Championship Edition (or whatever it'll be called) that has T Hawk in it... and costs only $40.

Now let's talk about Resident Evil 5. Ok well we got a good game here, no doubt, but I won't be adding it to my library. Firstly, RE5 has lost the campy vibe of the RE series. It just looks like the story is actually GOOD. The characters appear to be thought out, the plot seems to make sense, and overall story-wise it seems actually decent. Anything more than a laughably bad plot and 'funny-for-the-wrong-reasons' voice acting in an RE game just seems weird to me. I'm willing that there is not a single line in RE5 half as hysterical as Barry's "You were almost a Jill sandwich" or Luis's "I see the president has equipped his daughter, with ballistics."

Similar to SF4, RE5 will have another version released later on. I'm not so certain about this, but this is Capcom we're talking about. Also, the online versus mode that you have to purchase thing. Let me just say this first, Capcom is the only developer that can get away with something like this. People are going to buy this versus mode no matter what it is priced and Capcom knows this, so that's why they do it. now go back a bit, imagine RE4 with DLC. That game seems perfect for DLC right, some new weapons, a new area, a few new enemies and Capcom would of made tons of dough, fortunately RE4 couldn't connect to the internet in any way, so our wallets were safe.

^ RE4 thankfully had that

But RE5 is totally different. I think Capcom is going to ride the DLC cart through the whole mine with this game, just look at the versus mode. I for one am kind of sick of Capcom doing this major milkage to us. Then Capcom will release a RE5 Special Edition for 30 bucks that has all the DLC on it and some new content, and it will take a shat on the standard RE5 version... you know... kind of like how the GC version of RE4 got shat on by all the other versions after it.

So yeah, there you have it. I won't be smacking people around with Chun-Li's spinning bird kick or blasting crazy infected Africans with shotguns... for a while. I mean I'll be getting these eventually, you knew that the whole time. But I'm not paying more than 40 dollars for both of them combined. Well, I'm off to search for those rascaly golden knickers.

watch (it's really short, also make sure you watch in high quality)

If only someone would fund Paul Robertson to make a videogame, it would be the best thing EVAR. Imagine if Treasure and Robertson teamed up to make a 2d action game? I'd give both my kidneys for that.

and so I did.

I have two new reviews, and I'm submiting the final draft of my Dead Space review now. Critique away.

one

two

trailer at VGA

^ watch.

Oh yeah, I can't wait. Between this, Bayonetta, Darksiders: Wrath of War and Prototype, there's going to be a lot of sweet action games coming up.

Anyways, I'll keep this short (plus I wasn't planning on making a blog anyways). EA Redwood Shores, the studio that made Dead Space, is making this game. If you've never played Dead Space, then not only do I highly suggest you do so, but you'll be missing the obvious potential for just how amazing Dante's Inferno can be. Dead Space has tons of Gothic architecture and the earthy palette and muted colorscape do invoke a somewhat medieval vibe. I think the atmosphere of Hell will be excellently executed by the folks at Redwood Shores. Also Redwood Shores proved they can make a great game with tight gameplay and I'm sure they'll do just that in Dante's Inferno.

Ok let's move away from Dead Space and onto Dante's Inferno. I know, many of you thought, "Oh sahweet, a Devil May Cry spin-off!" Well then, if you thought that, I'd suggest you either go study Italian literature or just pay attention to the world around you, because Dante's Inferno is not some unknown property. Although it's a 700 year old book, it serves more as a starting block for Redwood Shores rather than an outline leading all the way to the credits. Also, notice it's called 'Inferno' and that the other two (more positive) parts 'Purgatorio' and 'Paradiso' are not mentioned. Going through and selling roses for $0.00 to everyone in the nine circles of Heaven is not nearly as fun as going through the nine circles of Hell beating everyone on the noggin with crosses, right?

Criticism is going to follow this game like me following the scent of Yan-Yan's. Making an arguement that the game cannot possibly be capturing the spirit of Mr. Alighieri's book is ridicolous. First of all, from the trailer, the art styIe actually appears to be toned down from the source material. Granted late-medieval/early-Renaissance art was still elementary in it's profiling, perspective and detail, but the illustrations were still ruthless in what they depicted. They serve as artistic inspiration rather then an exact code of how the game should look like. The art styIe in that time period was boring as well, let's get that out of the way. All the art back then was designed as stage sets, with little narrative or interpretive elements and close to zero detail at times. Do you really want Redwood Shores to make a game that looks solely based on early-Renaissance artwork? I don't think so.

Also argueing that it shouldn't be heavily influenced by the book doesn't make sense either. It's based off it right? So it should be similar to it. Whether or not it follows the book and to what degree, well that will be up to Redwood Shores, but I'm sure they know what they're doing. Think about it, if you had to choose a developer team to make a game based off of Dante's Inferno, who would you choose? I would choose Redwood Shores. Next ask yourself, do we need a game based off Dante's Inferno? No, we don't. But if it's done right and it plays great, we sure as hell want one. I mean the idea in itself is just mind-boggling, but wait a second, it's coming from EA? Here's to EA for trying something new (for the third time this year) and the possibility to finally gleefully crack skulls with crucifixes, you all know you want to do that.

Gamespot, oh wow, this is just something to remember guys.

Ok remember a while ago I started my 'experiment'? I was trying to see if I could get rid of my Reviewers Emblem? Guess what? I just got a PM from GS saying, here it is direct qoute, scout's honour and I swear on everyone in my families graves:

"Congrats! The Top 500 Community Reviewers emblem in your profile has been replaced with the Top 100 Community Reviews emblem. You can see this change located in your profile."

Cheers mates.