Wow...it's June already. This is going to be a big month for me. I have two weddings within four days of each other (I'm the best man in one of them), my own anniversary is about five days later, and unless something pops free in the next few weeks, I'll be jobless by the 30th. But, unlike Mark McGwire at the steroid hearings on Capitol Hill, I am here to talk about the past. May, to be exact.

I'm still ahead of my pace for the year, with eleven games completed. I knocked out my two for the month, but it was painful:

10. Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust (X360)
11. Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes (Xbox)

Leisure Suit Larry was an absolute abomination. And that's about all I can say about it. It was rescued from the scrap heap by Codemasters...they should have left it there. It's ugly, the controls are broken, and it's not funny at all. Patrick Warburton as Damone LeCocque was the only bright point in the whole game. That game was physically painful to play...I think I'm going to have to go back and play through The Simpsons game and apologize to it.

Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes was much more pleasant to play. Once again, if you're a hack n' slash fan, it's worth a spin. I finished it as the human warrior (my usual choice...whichever allows me to use the biggest sword possible). It's not very long, but the pacing is a bit odd. It seems to stop and start, being ridiculously easy for most of it, with little difficulty spikes here and there.

Remember when I said that I was going to cut back the game buying a bit? Well, that was before rummage sale season started. My wife has standing instructions when she goes to pick up anything video game related that she sees if it's reasonably priced. She came through with flying colors this time, nabbing a box full of NES, SNES and Genesis stuff with very few dupes for only $7. Here's May's damage(all rummage sale acquisitions are marked with *):

May Acquisitions
-Extreme G (N64)
-Mario Party (N64)
-Super Mario Land (GB)
-Major League Baseball 2K7 (X360)
-Sega Rally Revo (X360)
-GRID (X360)
-The Godfather II (X360)
-A Boy and His Blob (NES)*
-Bandai Golf: Challenge Pebble Beach (NES)*
-Championship Bowling (NES)*
-Conquest of the Crystal Palace (NES)*
-Crystal Mines (NES)*
-Days of Thunder (NES)*
-Double Dragon II (NES)*
-Little Nemo the Dream Master (NES)*
-Rampage (NES)*
-Super C (NES)*
-Super Dodge Ball (NES)*
-Wheel of Fortune (NES)*
-Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind (SNES)*
-Super Bomberman (SNES)*
-Bill Walsh College Football '95 (Gen)*
-NBA Showdown '94 (Gen)*
-Space Invaders '91 (Gen)*
-Ultimate Qix (Gen)*
-Winter Olympic Games (Gen)*
-NBA Street: Homecourt (X360)
-Project Gotham Racing 4 (X360)

Yep...sailed right past 900 total games too!

I've been in a racing mood lately, and GRID is totally filling the bill right now. I'm starting to think that maybe Codemasters should just stick to the racing genre (I also love DiRT and and eagerly await DiRT 2) and forget about anything else (see Leisure Suit Larry...). I'll go back to Sega Rally at some point, I guess. And I'm thinking my NES is going to get some love...Metal Gear and Metroid, perhaps. I should also probably start cleaning up some of the 360 games I started and stopped somewhere in the middle of...The Simpsons Game, Mass Effect, Dead Space, etc.

That's all for now...see you next month!

The departure of a lot of the core guys at EGM (and it's subsequent, but more or less unrelated demise) took away one of the places I went for gaming news and coverage. Naturally, I was quite pleased when aspro73 mentioned a new website that was in development that included many of the ex-EGMers I liked. I "became a fan" on my FaceBook page and waited for the day the site launched.

A couple weeks before the site launched, they posted a request for questions to answer in their mailbag. So, on a whim, I emailed them the question I've been asking for about two years now about the supposedly upcoming L.A. Noire. Here's the link to the mailbag.

And now, for the really cool part. If you'll notice, not only did they answer my question, but I was the FIRST ONE!!! That just seems kind of cool to me. The site itself is in its infancy, but it has a lot of potential. I'll be interested to see what they have coming up.

Well, April was kind of an up and down month for me. It was a decent acquisitions month and I knocked out three games (putting me ahead of my pace for the year). But I also learned earlier this week that my job will be eliminated due to budgetary concerns at the end of June. It's not all bad...I'll be getting out from under the world champion of incompetence and ineptitude that is my boss and I'm not going to have to keep an eye out for porn in our computer lab anymore. I'm sure I'll find something...it just may take awhile. With that in mind, my April completions:

7. WWE Legends of Wrestlemania (X360)
8. Soul Blazer (SNES)
9. Fight Night Round 3 (X360)

After my whole blog about Legends, you probably don't need a recap of that one. I did wind up renting Smackdown vs. Raw 2009 just to appease my achievement whore-ness (and took it back literally fifteen minutes later...otherwise I'd still have it). It's an awesome game overall once you get used to the controls. It's a great nostalgia trip that I wouldn't mind seeing expanding to other major WWF/E pay-per-views or events.

Soul Blazer seems like it might be a very underrated game. When people mention the great games of the SNES, it very rarely comes up in conversation. If you take The Legeng of Zelda: A Link to the Past and stuff it in a blender with ActRaiser, you get Soul Blazer. If I'm not mistaken, it's part of a very loosely related trilogy with The Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma. If you still mess with the SNES at all, track Soul Blazer down...it's well worth it.

Fight Night Round 3 is alright, but boxing games really aren't my thing. I spent a lot of this month in a fairly pugilistic mood (I saw my job loss coming, so I went home from work wanting to hit people a lot), so Fight Night filled a need. I absolutely hate the right thumbstick fighting though, so I switched it to the face button control mode. It's pretty enough for an early 360 game and has a pretty thick roster of fighters. I rated it an 8.0 based on it's merits, but for me it was merely ok.

April was another medium-big month for new stuff. This is a pattern that will not hold unless I come up with a job in the next two months. I've been trying to cut back for awhile now, but I'm so tantalizingly close to 900 games that I keep picking up interesting things. At any rate, April's damage:

April acquisitions
-WWE Legends of Wrestlemania (X360)
-Bankshot Billiards 2 (XBLA)
-Coffeetime Crosswords (XBLA)
-Fight Night 2004 (Xbox)
-Fight Night Round 2 (Xbox)
-Fight Night Round 3 (X360)
-Tekken (PS)
-Castlevania: Curse of Darkness (PS2)
-Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (Xbox)
-Manhunt 2 (PS2)
-Swashbucklers: Blue vs. Grey (PS2)
-Tekken 4 (PS2)
-Metroid Zero Mission (GBA)
-Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust (X360)
-Dead Space (X360)

I'll be finishing Leisure Suit Larry soon. I have one stupid trophy to find before I go to finish the game. Then I have to do a speed run for the last achievement. I can say this though...STAY AWAY FROM THIS GAME! Don't make the same mistake I did. It's terrible. It should never have been released. After that, I'm thinking I'll fiddle around with Dead Space. It's supposed to be pretty good and, if you follow 360voice.com at all, you know that a survival-horror badge is pretty easy to get.

That's all for this month, folks. Summer's a-comin! I'm trying to figure out how to get my tv and 360 on the roof of my house so I can play up there at night...

So, there I am, happily stomping my way through the first tier of the Legend Killer mode in WWE Legends of WrestleMania and having a great time. I get finished with the first tier with my knock-off Razor Ramon and bask in the unbelievably satisfying "boop"s that signify the three achievements I unlocked. I decide to check the remaining tiers to see what their unlock requirements are. They're all fairly straightforward...until I come to the last tier. It's requirement: Import SvR 2009 roster.

Um...why?

I hate this for a couple reasons. First (and perhaps most importantly), it requires me to buy, rent, or borrow Smackdown vs. Raw 2009 to complete the game. This is the first time I've ever heard of a case where you have to obtain "Game B" to finish "Game A". I don't really want to buy SvR 2009 right away, but it looks like I'm going to have to if I want to finish Legends. Renting is out for so many reasons (mainly the fact that buy the time I return a rental, my late fee would have bought it and I don't rent enough to justify a GameFly account) and I don't know anyone who has it to borrow (plus it's pretty hypocritical to borrow a game when I won't lend any of mine out...).

My other problem is that I don't want the WWE's current roster in my old-school game. I see absolutely no reason to slap Batista or Edge or John Cena into WrestleMania III. I bought this game to play as the guys I grew up watching. I fail to see any logic in forcing someone to import SvR 2009's roster into the game other than to try to sell more units of SvR. This is definitely one of the dumber things I've seen in any game. The only way I'll be happy with this is if I get to take my imitation Razor Ramon and beat the crap out of the new guys.

That said, Legends of WrestleMania is an interesting premise and a ton of fun. The second I turn it on, I'm instantly a kid again, sitting cross-legged on the floor yelling my brains out for Hulk Hogan and The Ultimate Warrior and trying to figure out how Bret "The Hitman" Hart is going to get the Sharpshooter on Yokozuna. It's probably a rental for most people and hardcore wrestling game players will most likely hate it. But for people who grew up with Hogan, The Barber, Superfly, JYD, and the rest of the gang, it's really almost a return to innocence.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but tell me Michael P.S. Hayes' Fabulous Freebirds entrance music doesn't sound like it should be on a .38 Special Greatest Hits album... ;)

Opening Day is nearly here and my beloved White Sox are getting ready to embark upon what I figure is going to be a third-place season where they hover around .500 all year long (of course, the last time I entered a season thinking so pessimistically was in 2005...when they won the World Series, so who knows?).

With baseball season almost upon us, I fully expect my gaming to drop a bit. Good thing I got back on pace with three completed games in March:

4. DiRT (X360)
5. Dash of Destruction (XBLA)
6. Rygar (NES)

DiRT was a bit of a cheapie. I'd already completed the single-player aspect of the game. I only needed the last two multiplayer achievements to finish it. So I tossed it in on a whim to see if I could squeeze them out. When I tried before, I kept running into players that were on "Such and Such Racing Team" or whatever...in other words, guys who do this fairly competitively. I got destroyed. This time around the competition wasn't so fierce and I was able to win a couple of races fairly quickly. At any rate, if you like rally racing (or any racing at all) you should definitely give DiRT a try. I heartily recommend it.

Dash of Destruction was free. And that's about the best part of it. Granted, it's a Doritos themed game (and it was free), so I wasn't expecting much. But it took me about a half an hour to run through the whole thing and pop all 200 achievement points out of it. At least it was free...

Rygar was one of those games that I loved as a kid, but had absolutely no clue what I was doing. This time, I sat down and actually paid attention to where I was going and figured out what "tone" and "last" were (that was key!) and was able to finish it for the first time ever. Rygar is one of those lost clas sics on the NES. While there are some graphical hiccups here and there (doesn't every NES game have those?), it has surprisingly good music and very tight controls. Track a copy of this down if you still mess around with the NES at all.

The highlight of the monthwas undoubtedly the Midwest Gaming Clas sic. This was the first gaming convention of any type I had ever attended and I will definitely be back next year. My wife, my often-mentioned best friend Steve and I spent two days running around a hotel conference/ball room area filled with some of the coolest gaming and pinball stuff ever created. The museum was unbelievable. There were things there I never thought I'd lay eyes on (like one of the Hello Kitty Xboxes) and things I never thought I'd see again (like the Atari phone attachment). My wife found every possible way to play Pac-Man they had and we lost her in the pinball machines a few times. Steve got hammered in a Tetris tournament and came home with a boatload of stuff. I also met up with GameSpot's ownCodingGenius, proving that there are actually people behind these avatars! If you ever have a chance to go to this event (or any other one like it), take the opportunity.

I also acquired a ton of new games this month, mostly because of the MGC. The vendor section there was huge, so I was able to whittle my wish list down significantly. All MGC acquisitions will have a * next to them:

March Acquisitions
-Frogger (XBLA)
-Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting (XBLA)
-Street Figher IV Collector's Edition (X360)
-StarTropics (NES)
-Spider Figher (2600)*
-Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (2600)*
-1942 (NES)*
-3-D World Runner (NES)*
-Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (NES)*
-Battle Chess (NES)*
-Bee 52 (NES)*
-Double Dare (NES)*
-Firehawk (NES)*
-Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (NES)*
-Short Order/Eggsplode (NES)*
-Zelda II: The Adventure of Link gold cart (NES)*
-Crue Ball (Gen)*
-The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons (GBC)*
-Mario Golf (N64)*
-Feet of Fury: Mobile Tactical Dancing Action (DC homebrew)*
-Adventure Island (NES)*
-Dash of Destruction (XBLA)
-Fear Effect (PS)
-Jet Grind Radio (DC)
-Tetris Splash (XBLA)

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Backwas the last 2600 game that I can remember having as a kid that I hadn't yet reacquired. Feet of Fury is a homebrew produced by the guys who put on the convention. They were given away in welcome bags to attendees. I'm not sure if everyone got a copy or if it was a limited thing.

I have yet to decide what I'm going to play this month. I've got Call of Duty: Finest Hour (Xbox) about half-finished, there are five or six 360 games I've been eyeballing, and Dead Space seems to be calling me from the shelves at the store. I've also batted around the idea of playing through the Resident Evil games on my GameCube. Who knows? By this time next month I'll probably have gone in an entirely different direction.

That's all for now. Next update is approximately thirty days away.

I'm going to the Midwest Gaming Classic just outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin this weekend. My main goal is to NOT spend every penny I have. Hopefully, I'll have some pictures up here early next week. Until then, take it easy, kids!

I'm so glad February is over. It's my least favorite month (followed very closely by January). Winter just drags on forever and, for a kid who grew up playing baseball all summer, that can be excruciating. Lucky for me, I have video games to dull the pain of ice, snow, and single-digit windchills.

I was able to meet my two-game quota for the month:

2. Champions of Norrath: Realms of Everquest (PS2)
3. Max Payne (PS2)

Champions is an excellent hack n' slash title from the folks who made the first (also excellent) Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. If you're a fan of this type of game, give it a try. It's a ton of fun if you just feel like turning your brain off and killing stuff. As a matter of fact, if anyone knows of any similar titles (outside of BG: DA, the Champions series, or Gauntlet), let me know. I love my dungeon hacks!

Max Payne is one of those games that got hamstrung by it's control scheme. While it's a great game...I love it's premise and overall vibe and the voice acting is delightfully cheesy in a nod to campy old film noir...it could have been legendary. Unfortunately, the controls are terribly mushy and a bit counterintuitive to begin with. Try the drug trip scenes or any part that requires any type of platforming to see what I mean.

I spent a paragraph last month talking about how I was going to play Super Mario RPG, Saints Row 2, and Fallout 3. Obviously, it didn't happen. I've started Mass Effect, but I highly doubt you'll see that on my completion list for this month...it's LOOONG! I'm looking at Rygar (NES), Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (PS2), and Champions: Return to Arms (PS2) as possible gap fillers/change-ups. But, to be completely honest, I have no idea what I'll be in the mood for by mid-month. Plus, I've got the collector's edition of Street Fighter IV on the way. Which is a perfect segue into:

February Acquisitions
-Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned (X360)
-Word Puzzle (XBLA)
-King's Knight (NES)
-Spy vs. Spy (NES)
-Target: Renegade (NES)

That's about it for now. Until next time...

The collectors among my friends will definitely know where I'm coming from here. In order to control my obsessive game collecting, I've started trying to find goals to focus on instead of just randomly buying whatever catches my eye.

The unfortunate demise of Electronic Gaming Monthly has given me an idea. I've started compiling a list (seen here) of all the Games of the Month in EGM's entire run. I have every issue from #158 forward. Everything before that seems to be my problem. Here's where you come in!

Anyone who has issues predating September 2002 (#157) and doesn't mind taking a look, please PM me the game of the month and platform* it was reviewed for (and the issue number and month, of course...;) ).

Any help anyone can give me would be awesome. The link to the list is right there, so anyone who wants to try to collect all the games can use it. Thanks to all in advance!

*This is kind of important. While many games were categorized under multiple platforms (for instance PS2/XB/GC), some were either deemed superior on one platform (Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 on PS2) or were named Game of the Month multiple times (Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on the Xbox being named GotM eight months after the PS2 version won the award).

Ah...February already. Pitchers and catchers are getting ready to report for spring training, my wife won't tell me what to get her for Valentine's Day, and I'm behind on my quest to finish 24 games this year.

I was only able to finish one game in January:

1. Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude (Xbox)

I actually played it completely through twice. The first time I forgot to pick up Judd Nelson's phone number when I found it and it wasn't there when I came back. While most people would have been happy with the 99% completion and moved on to something else, the little anal-retentive gremlin in my head wouldn't let me. So, I deleted the save and started all over. This time, I was able to get my precious 100% and move on. It's a below average game to be sure...I just seem to be a glutton for punishment and have a high pain threshold.

As for right now, I'm getting ready to restart both Saints Row 2 and Fallout 3. With Saints Row, I want to go back and do most (if not all) the minigames and fetch quests before I really even touch the story. Fallout 3 is a different animal. I like it. A lot. But for some reason, it just doesn't seem to be sticking. I spent all weekend starting and stopping the game. then it hit me...

I'm feeling retro!

I've got a 115+ day streak going on my 360, so I won't be giving that up entirely. But I think I'll be spending a bit more time with some of my neglected consoles, beginning with a runthrough of the (from what I've heard) excellent Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. Which reminds me...

January Acquisitions
-Fallout 3: Lunchbox Edition (X360)
-Paper Mario (N64)
-WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Party Game$ (GCN)
-Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies
-Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (SNES)

Well, that's it for now. Gotta get to work on making up that deficit.

So, I bought a new computer yesterday after the demise of my last one left me pc-less for several months. It's nothing special...it goes to the interwebs, has Office 2007, etc. It fits my needs just fine. I now no longer have to wait until I'm at work to check my email or mess around on here. I fully expect my production at work to increase exponentially.

I had been waiting to get a computer because my Xbox 360 wasn't getting IP addresses from my network. I had taken my 360 up to my dad's house when I visited for Christmas and when I got back, I couldn't connect to my home network. I called tech support and they couldn't figure it out and I couldn't get into my router settings without a computer. My wireless adapter on my 360 is apparently pretty powerful because it detected several wireless networks around me...just none of them very well. So, while I was able to get online for at least a few minutes per day, the connection wasn't stable enough that I felt safe playing anything multiplayer or even downloading updates.

This went on for nearly a month. Then yesterday, after I got my computer hooked up and it wouldn't connect, I found myself on the phone with my ISP's tech support...again. Once we got the computer online, I decided to ask about my wireless setup. As it turns out, whatever genius I had the first time I called (back in mid-December) gave me the wrong password for my network.

Sigh...

At any rate, I'm now back online, both with a PC and my 360. As it turns out, I could have been on with my 360 a long time ago. Ah well...