For those of you who are at all curious, here is a detailed view of the proposal for the new Rand Paul budget that shows how he would save the U.S. $500 billion per year. Before I proceed further, I want to show you all two important visual representations of how the U.S. spends your tax dollars if you live in this country. Now, back to Senator Paul's budget. Look at it. I mean REALLY look at it. This is about as dead on arrival as is politically possible for a budget proposal to be. These two items positioned right next to each other show you everything that you need to know. DEFENSE.......................................................$47,500,000,000. (6.5%) EDUCATION..................................................$78,000,000,000 (83%) Only the Pell grant program survives. Cutting out 47.5 billion dollars from the Defense budget would only reduce it by 6.5%, but Rand Paul would rather eliminate over 83% of our Education Budget? This is honestly nothing more than a Republican wet dream put on paper. I doubt that there are even that many Republicans that want to go face the voters and say things like: "Because we think our children are the future of this country and we're falling behind the rest of the world in things like math and science, we've cut spending on their education by 83%."

"Because it's so important for the U.S. to be on the cutting edge of new scientific developments, we've cut the National Science Foundation by 62%."

"Because we think it is important that there be no discrimination when it comes to Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, we're eliminating the Department of Housing and Urban Development completely." (Among other things that cabinet level position is responsible for...) You get the idea. These programs/government entities exist and get more and more funding every year for two very important reasons: 1. They do useful things. Things that we, as a country, have felt is the legitimate role of government for decades.



2. The U.S. keeps growing each year, therefore the jobs that these programs/government entities do needs more resources because the job they need to do keeps getting bigger. As a simple analogy, think of staffing a tech support call center. Let's say that three people can handle 40 calls a day and give good service. If the call volume goes up to 80 per day, then those three people may not be enough and you need to invest in a larger tech support staff. Pretty basic right? It's the same way things like education work. If the number of kids that need to be educated goes up, then the money you need to spend to do things like build and maintain more schools, hire and train more teachers and support staff, etc. also goes up. And since the U.S. population is going to continue to grow, so is the size of government if we want to continue to have a public school system. So for Mr. Paul to blithely suggest cutting the education budget by 83%, what does he think is going to be the result? Unless you really feel that our education system is so bloated and inefficient that we can magically IMPROVE the quality of our schools and our education by removing 83% of the funding then what will happen is that our kids will get deeply dumber, less of them will be able to go to college, and the U.S. will gradually over time lose our ability to compete globally. Go through the rest of the list and think about what each one does and how slashing their funding billions and billions of dollars a year will impact their ability to do what they do successfully. So all these cuts that would utterly ravage our government's ability to do important things, and it still wouldn't actually accomplish it's goal. We'd still have a huge budget shortfall of approximately 800 billion to 1 trillion dollars. Let me repeat that: Even if every single one of Senator Paul's draconian cuts to all these discretionary spending programs went through, we'd still have an annual budget deficit of one trillion dollars. A serious approach to reducing the longterm structural deficit involves precisely three things. 1. Entitlement program changes (Social Security, Medicare, etc.) 2. Defense/military changes 3. Tax changes Any deficit reduction plan that is not 95% composed of some combination of cuts to Entitlement and Defense and increases in taxes is, flat out, not a serious deficit reduction strategy. It is unserious from a political standpoint, since I would wager even the majority of Republicans will run away as fast as they can from Rand Paul's recommended cuts to the "everything else" category of the first pie graph above. And it's unserious from the end goal it is trying to accomplish: actually reducing the longterm deficit since those are not the major areas we spend the vast majority of our money.

This is not difficult to understand when you take a high level view and look at where our spending really comes from as a country.

Link Okay, so maybe I'm a bit deranged, but I found this hilarious.

I just recently got an expanded hard drive for my 360, so I don't need this bargain...but $70 for a Microsoft branded 250GB hard drive for the 360 seems like a good deal to me. Link

As always, if you find my review informative, useful or helpful in any way - even if only to let you know that the game isn't one that you're interested in - then please visit here and recommend my review to others. I got all sad and frowny faced when my previous review of King's Bounty: The Legend got only one recommendation that I know for a fact was from my wife. Hopefully reviewing a game that is a little more recent, and a lot more popular, might get a few more of you lazy slackers to click that button for me. The Good: Roughly 20 more hours of the same great gameplay and setting from the original game. The usual excellent voice acting from Bioware games. Interesting new gameplay aspects, spells, talents and skills. A new cast of characters to get to know. Excellent story concept. Plenty of impact of your story choices on the ending you get in the Awakenings epilogue.



The Bad: Awakenings shows extremely little impact and carry-over of your storyline choices from the first game into the second and is the most buggy Bioware game in years. Recycled sound clips. Poor pacing. Feels a bit like a cash-in title. Rushed story and slightly underdeveloped characters. As the first true expansion for Bioware's thrilling "Dragon Age Origins" game, the events in "Awakenings" take place immediately after the end of the first game and brings back the same great setting, gameplay, combat and a few NPC favorites (like Master Wade) from the first title. Before you get too excited about that first sentence, the most glaring and annoying fault of Awakenings is introduced nearly immediately: precious little of your choices from the first game carry over into this expansion. Indeed, Awakenings is shocking in just how much it feels like a rushed money grab. As an example of this, prior to the most recent Bioware patch, if you had a love interest from the first game, unless that interest was Alistair then he or she is completely absent and hardly referenced at all in the sequel. In the most recent patch, you are supposed to get a (very) short letter from your beloved from the first game in your inventory (though I did not) explaining their absence. And this really does set the tone of how Awakenings is a bit of a disappointment, despite being a great game in its own right. Bioware titles have consistently made their mark as being immersive, story and character driven sagas over the years with personal choices having a tremendous impact on what happens. With just how much Bioware carried over from original Mass Effect into the sequel, fans of the company could legitimately expect that the several dozen hours they spent creating the perfect save game to be imported to the next release in the Dragon Age setting would get a little more respect for their efforts. They would be mistaken. Unless you played a human noble in the first game, your choices from the first game are largely forgotten. Building on this theme are some of the new characters that get introduced. The characters that you have to interact with feel either a bit like copies of the characters from the first title (with Velanna very strongly resembling Morrigan and Anders sounding and acting eerily similar to Alistair...despite being an Apostate mage) or are a little underdeveloped and rushed (Justice and Sigrun). This evidence of recycling shows as well in some of the sound clips. Many people will remember Leliana's exclaiming "brilliant!" after you won an easy battle in the first game. That clip plays in Awakenings as well for instance. Adding onto some of the feelings of disappointment are a myriad of bugs. While none of them are exactly game breaking, they are fairly persistent and immersion breaking. Whether they are merely annoying, such as gifts being glitched for some characters (like Ohgren) to not give the amount of influence they are supposed to, or downright frustrating such as quests themselves not working quite right (ex: depending on the order you undertake the plot missions some character development missions may not trigger properly) they crop up with regularity. This is not to say that Awakenings does not have a lot going for it and is worth the reduced ($40) price of admission. For starters, nearly all your equipment and abilities transfer over. Beyond that, a host of new skills, spells, talents and tactic options are added in to further customize your party. These will come in handy as the game also throws several new types of Darkspawn at you and expands the level cap to 35. In some cases, these additions are completely incremental, such as the fantastic new "Runecrafting" talent that allows you to create your own new runes similar to creating potions, poisons or traps in the first game. Similarly, adding "armor" runes to the available weapon runes in the first game is a great addition. (Although here, too, there is evidence of a rushed title. Early on you find a "Novice Barrier Rune" that adds additional armor points when to any armor it is enchanted with. It's the only Barrier rune in the game and evidence that this was a rune type that got cut at the last minute.) In other cases, the additions are replacements for skills, spells or talents from the first game that weren't very useful. Warrior, Rogue and Mage classes all get some tweaks that make them more interesting and keep them fresh to experiment around with. And last but not least, in this game you are the "Warden Commander" and there's some castle management and decision making to do to serve as a nice change of pace, though this too feels rushed, poorly paced out, and is more than a little bit buggy when compared to, for example, the keep building experience from Neverwinter Nights 2.



More important than the new bells and whistles are the new types of enemies and the environments that you will meet them in. Much of the storyline in the expansion revolves around a new type of talking Darkspawn that shows intelligence and organization. These "Awakened" Darkspawn are a great story concept, though like many other things in the game it could have used more fleshing out and just how it will be integrated into the canon of Dragon Age 2 is unclear. Still, the concept is interesting enough to make for an entertaining hook for players returning to Thedas for another pass. In fact, given that the most memorable villain from the first game wasn't really a Darkspawn at all, this development stands out as one of the very best parts of the game since it gives the Darkspawn some actual personality rather than making it feel like you're battling the equivalent of a very large, very ugly plague of locusts like the Darkspawn were presented as being in the first title. You will face these enemies in three distinctly new environments that are one of the best, most fully integrated pieces of the expansion. All three of the main new places to visit show an admirable amount of polish and love. Traveling around while exploring and fighting within them will remind you a great deal of what you loved so much about the original title and are wonderful additions to the setting lore. In particular, the return to the Deep Roads and one of the lost dwarven cities reveals a piece of backstory that is both touching and sad.



If you're looking for the next great Bioware title, this isn't it. If you're looking for an entertaining and fun return to Thedas for a second pass as a Gray Warden, Awakenings will nicely tide you over until Dragon Age 2. True Score: 8.2

Clue 1: Van Nguyen Clue 2: Jody Robinson Clue 3: Guy Cocker Clue 4: Matthew Gravish Clue 5: Chris Watters Clue 6: Kevin VanOrd Clue 7: Aaron Sampson Clue 8: Alex Sassoon Coby Clue 9: Wernher Goff Clue 10: Jan Heir Clue 11: Randolph Ramsay Clue 12: Andrew Park Clue 13: Mark Walton Clue 14: Justin Calvert Clue 15: Sophia Tong Clue 16: Kurtis Seid Clue 17: Giancarlo Varanini Clue 18: Justin Porter Clue 19: Ryan McDonald Clue 20: Tyler Winegarner Clue 21: Maxwell McGee Clue 22: James Kozanecki Clue 23: Frank Adams Clue 24: Sarju Shah Clue 25: Shaun McInnis Clue 26: Ricardo Torres Clue 27: Tom Magrino Clue 28: Dan Chiappini Clue 29: Homer Rabara Clue 30: Takeshi Hiraoka Clue 31: Tor Thorsen Clue 32: Jim Maybury Clue 33: Carolyn Petit Clue 34: Tom McShea Clue 35: Dan Mihoerck Clue 36: Jane Douglas Clue 37: Brendan Sinclair Clue 38: Laura Parker

I'm not really sure what the appropriate category to put this video into is, but it was interesting enough to throw down on my blog. The Pope's expressions are worth reading too much into if you're at all interested in poker and the concept of a "tell". Also, the music selection almost made me fall out of my chair laughing. Link Apologies to any Catholic whom I may have inadvertently offended. It should be noted for the record that I myself was raised Catholic. (No snide comments about how that "explains so very much" please.) P.S. - Yes, I'm a terrible person. I know this. It's the little things that amuse me. (No snide comments about "little things" either please.) :P

Been a couple of months since my last review. As always, if you enjoy the review or find it useful, please visit here and recommend it to others as being a helpful one. Summary: A fun and charming little time-consumer of a game with three distinct gaming experiences provided by the three character choices. The Good:

Charming sound track and beautiful art design of the various settings of the game. Fun combat system. Tons of hours of enjoyment with each playthrough and a great deal of replay value. Randomization based at the start of each new game ensures a unique experience each time. Lighthearted sense of humor.

The Bad: Generic, throwaway storyline and characters. Gameplay is a bit derivative. No spoken dialog and plenty of typos in the written dialog. Tutorial and instructions are lacking. No central place to recruit units means a lot of boring backtracking and wandering around the maps to get replacement armies. King's Bounty: The Legend will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has played any of the various "Heroes of Might and Magic" style games in the past and it would be tempting to end the review right now and simply state that it is a clone of those style of games and leave it at that. It would also be misleading and inaccurate, and do a disservice to a very fun and entertaining gaming experience.

While it is true that King's Bounty looks, feels, and even plays, very similar to that game series in particular and several other imitators in general, it has plenty of its own features, quirks, and ideas that do more than enough to differentiate it and create its own unique gaming experience.

The first thing you need to do is select between one of three character classes. This is actually a critically important decision as the classes play very differently and the game is quite long. This is one choice that will have a large scale impact on your gaming experience for dozens of hours.

Your three choices are between "Warrior", "Paladin" and "Mage". A Warrior builds Leadership and Rage (more on this in a minute) the fastest, a Mage (you guessed it) has the best spell casting capabilities and a Paladin attempts to split the difference between the two. No matter which class you choose, you CAN do many of the same things that the other classes would do, but just not as well. Each class has its own unique abilities that differentiate it from the other two. A Paladin, for example, is exceptionally skilled in putting down the forces of the undead whereas a Mage gains the ability to cast multiple spells per turn to offset its smaller armies and a Warrior accumulates Rage faster than other classes and obtains larger armies. Once the selection is made, the game opens with you preparing to graduate from your training school. You're given the opportunity to take a test to determine your aptitude and what your new position in life is going to be or just have your teacher select something for you. Like many of the future "choices" beyond your initial character creation, this one is pretty much a mirage. If you choose to take the test you get some extra early goodies by going through an optional dungeon, but either way you end up with the designation "Royal Treasure Searcher" when all is said and done. Your title is indicative of the type of humor that you'll see a lot of in the game. It is explained to you that since the principle source of income for the kingdom is, of course, finding and raiding old crypts and tombs the position of "Royal Treasure Searcher" was created. In reality, you're pretty much a glorified, all-purpose errand boy for the king. The rest of the game will involve you wandering around the world battling a lot of different types of monsters as the plot slowly - verrrry slowly - unfolds around you. The plot is not particularly in-depth or important. It exists to give you a valid reason for fighting lots and lots of battles filled with various type of enemy units as you slowly take on more and more challenging tasks for the king and rise up the ranks of the nobility. It is a good thing, then, that the combat system is as fun as it is, because you'll be spending many hours involved in it. Combat takes place in a grid style layout similar to a chess board. And combat can be influenced by other factors. Sometimes there are helpful (or harmful) items on the board that will influence the units that get close to them. Other times there are natural obstacles that create barriers that must be moved around or destroyed. Awareness and best use of the terrain by playing to your own unit's advantages is critical to winning battles with minimal losses. Each unit has different strengths and weaknesses and the possibilities of combining units together are as varied as the units themselves. For example, some units are immune from retaliation when they launch an attack. Others have ranged capabilities, or the ability to resurrect others. Some are extremely fast moving but fragile whereas others can take amazing amounts of punishment and keep on fighting. A particular unit might be very strong in a fiery setting and weak in a cold one.

With five unit stacks to choose from, finding the right combination to your own particular play style can be a great deal of fun. Since each unit has its own "Leadership" requirements, sometimes even the lowliest of units can be devastatingly effective if used correctly. How many soldiers of a particular type are willing to join your army depends on how high your leadership score vs. their requirement is. If a unit requires 100 leadership and your total score is 1000, you can only hire ten of them. Would you rather have 1000 fast, light-hitting but immune to retaliation Lake Fairies or 10 slow moving, hard hitting, damage soaking Giants? The answer may surprise you at times. The other two elements that will dictate your choices are Mana and Rage. Mana is, simply put, the amount of energy that you have at your disposal to cast spells from your spellbook. Spells can be upgraded up twice for increased impact at the cost of magic crystals and additional mana requirements. Warriors and Paladins can cast up to one spell per turn to tip the course of battle in their favor. Mages obtain the special ability to cast multiple spells per turn. Rage is an ability whose use is not immediately apparent. During the course of the main adventure, you'll eventually gain ownership of a magical item containing four different "spirits of rage". They're the approximate equivalent of magical "summons" from the Final Fantasy games that grow in power the more that you use them and function somewhat similarly to "Limit Breaks". Essentially, either dealing or receiving damage in combat builds up your Rage meter. Using the Spirits of Rage reduces it. Obtaining their services and making good use of them is a key element of the game that is not adequately explained in the sparse tutorial. If you dawdle and get them late, they can impact you for the rest of the game. While the enemies are all visible on the map, and many can be avoided as you choose, voluntarily attacking various stacks of enemies is essential to surviving the various pre-scripted and plot-driven battles that the game has in store for you. Note: This does not mean that you should blindly charge into any enemy stack you see as you are wandering around the various beautiful settings that range from idyllic "Hobbit" style grasslands to magical elven forests to mountainous dwarven strongholds as you're listening to the game's beautiful soundtrack. It will also surprise some people to learn that you don't completely clear one setting before going onto the next, but instead will be forced to defer some battles until you are stronger before returning to the same map. Hence, scouting an enemy stack by right-clicking on it to see it's strength is essential to the survival of your army. The game has resource limitations. Put another way, once you use up all of a particular type of unit that one of the game's building generates there may not be anymore of that unit for the duration of the game. This design decision is both frustrating and exhilarating at the same time. On the one hand, having a limited number of a particular type of unit randomly generated when you start a new game preserves a unique game experience every time and incents you to be very conscious of losing too many units in the battles you fight. It forces you to experiment with different unit combinations to build up your forces which in turn dictates different combat strategies. It also further adds to the customization of each playthrough. Units are not the only thing that are randomly generated. Most of the equipment that is for sale or is found in the field is also randomized. As is, ironically, your "family" life. There are a half-dozen or so different "wives" available in the game. Each comes with their own unique equipment slots and bonuses. Whereas one wife may have a couple of slots to place weapons, another might have multiple artifact slots. One wife may give bonuses to human units and another to dwarven ones. Each wife can also have up to three children that come with their own bonuses and use up their own equipment slots. Some of the bonuses the children give, such as boosting your defense score by 20%, are exceptional. Others are not as good as the slots that they take up.

Since which children each wife will have are determined at the start of the game, you take a gamble if you choose to have children because they'll be permanently using up a valuable equipment slot. Of course if you end up with children that give bad bonuses relative to your playstyle or find equipment that doesn't match your wife's available slots, you're free to divorce your wife...at a cost. She'll take 1/5th of your gold, all your children, and any equipment that she may be wearing at the time in the settlement.

Add it all up and you have a game that manages to be a great deal of fun and have a surprising amount of depth that can be had at a very low bargain price. If strategy games are at all your thing and you're looking for a single player one that will grant you hundreds of hours of enjoyment, the King's Bounty games may well be worth a look. True Score: 8.5

Author's Note: I'm grumpy tonight. Any stereotypes thrown around during the course of a very ranting blog post are to be taken with a grain of salt because I kind of hate the entire world and everyone in it at the moment. Buckle your seatbelts. You have been warned. Link [quote="Linked Article"] Looking ahead, Atari said that it will continue its "strategic shift towards online/casual/social gaming, a market segment where Atari intends to benefit from new growth drivers."

Yep. This is just the sort of thing to fill me with enough hatred and contempt for the world to prompt a new blog post. A company partially responsible for such gems as The Witcher, Neverwinter Nights 2, Neverwinter Nights 2: The Mask of the Betrayer, and Indigo Prophecy among others is throwing in the towel and deciding to chase after the exact same damned market segment that everybody else is! The problem is, I'm just not sure how to say what I want to say. Or rather, I'm not sure if there's anything at all new for me to say that I haven't said approximately 142,609 times over the past few years. (Rounded down.) Game developers and publishers are ALL focused on the casual gaming market. Hell, all the console manufacturers are focused on it. This year's E3 was one giant fluff job for casual gamers.

Whether it was making Dragon Quest IX truly multiplayer with no dialog from anyone in your party, deciding to put out a FACEBOOK version of Dragon Age, turning the next Knights of the Old Republic game into an MMO or EVERY console maker deciding that they needed to focus on coming out with some rebranded version of "Wii Sports", all of the things that were MINE in the gaming industry are being given away to other peoples' tastes. Because of this, my interest in video games is at an all-time low. Right now I'm like one of those sad old people who complain about how Hollywood doesn't make any good movies anymore. The reality is that good games are still being made, but they just aren't being made according to my tastes. The video game industry has matured. It has made its way out of the dark basements of my youth. No longer are gamers nerds. Now all the coolest high school jocks are totally down with playing the ten millionth version of Call of Duty Online.

And it's killing me. Just absolutely freaking killing me.

What's next? Going to make a new version of Dungeons and Dragons where the goal is to hook-up with some dreamy, tortured vampire-lite? Wait a minute...that's Twilight. ****!

Look, I get it. I'm reacting like a nerdy guy who got stood up for the big dance because the girl I asked had a better offer come along. I'm not the target demographic of the gaming industry anymore. It doesn't matter that I've spent, literally, probably thirty thousand dollars or so over my lifetime on video games and video game related items. Economics are an impersonal slut and there's more money to be made in an MMORPG or a sterile, lifeless shooter title than there is in four Alan Wake type titles.

I just don't know really what to do or say now.

I'm thirty-one years old. I make over $100K per year in income (without even counting my wife's salary) while living in a portion of the country with a very low cost of living. I don't have kids. This all translates into a buttload of disposable income. I've been playing video games for over two decades now…and the industry isn't targeting me. In fact, they're running away from me as fast as they can. And the really sucky part is that they're targeting a lot of the people who hated the industry while I was growing up.

They're targeting folks like my parents with the motion capture technology. These would be the same parents who, on the incredibly rare occasion that they showed any real interest in my gaming habits other than to disapprove of them and worry that they were going to permanently damage me by making me unable to interact socially with people, really seemed to believe by moving their controller around while playing it would help what happens on the screen. Bless their hearts, now it does.

They're targeting folks like the high school jocks with online multiplayer shooters. These would be the same jocks who regarded video gaming as totally a "nerd" thing, up until the point where now they can actually take their whole "insecure desire to dominate" issues out on folks by swearing into headsets, pretending to crouch on people they shoot, etc. Bless their hearts, now the shooter genre is making the single player campaigns almost an afterthought just for them.

They're targeting folks like my sister, who is absolutely incapable of spending more than five minutes by herself without starting to twitch with the desire to surround herself with other people, with the social gaming. Bless her heart; I'm sure she'll appreciate a family friendly version of Dragon Age being made for freaking Facebook given that she hasn't purchased a video game since...well...she's never actually bought a video game.

So all of this is what it is. I guess the question that I'm currently wondering at is, what do I now do with my disposable income? What's my new hobby? Where do I now spend my time that I devoted towards gaming? Because I'm honestly not sure that the industry wants, cares or needs gamers like me anymore.

I love the Fallout games. I want them to breed and have dozens, no, hundreds of little Fallout children and gradually every game can be just like them. Because of this, it is with great sadness that I declare Fallout: New Vegas to be an unplayable mess. Important Caveat: I bought this game for the PC. Supposedly, the PC version is the less buggy version of the game. (Although if that is the case, then I cringe for those playing the PS3/360 versions.) But the point is that there are millions of different hardware and software configurations for PCs out there, and just because my own experience with New Vegas has been of a game that is utterly and completely horrible, it doesn't mean that some other lucky JERK out there who has a different PC won't have a really great experience with New Vegas. So, having said all that, here are my personal specs. Windows 7 Ultimate: 64 Bit Edition NVidea GTX 260 (Latest driver.) Intel Core 2 Duo, E8500@3.16 GHZ 4 GB Memory Creative X-FI SB So what's the problem Jim? Well, there are a multitude of glitches, bugs and general annoyances. Whether it is general stuttering, odd frame rate drops out of nowhere, texture popping, etc. if you can imagine it, then chances are that I've experienced it. And I've got a beefy enough system and graphics settings on my game set low enough that I shouldn't be having them, but those aren't what I'm grumpy about. There are two bugs in particular that I have had over and over again that have made me decide to stop playing a Fallout game I've waited over a year for. 1. The game crashes my computer. Note, I did not say the game crashes. I said that the game completely crashes my computer. As in, approximately every 45 minutes my computer TURNS ITSELF OFF while playing this game. It utterly stops working. Note, this is a problem unique to New Vegas. I can plug in other games and play them indefinitely, and depending on level of buggyness I do get crashes to the desktop. This is the only game where I worry that continuing to play it will do irreparable harm to my computer itself. 2. The game's AI doesn't consistently recognize friend from foe. New Vegas is a faction based game. By helping one faction, you tend to tick off another. Sound theory in principle. Sadly, the game randomly decides to have FRIENDLY factions decides to shoot your ass up. It does it often enough to be utterly and completely maddening. One moment I'll be scrolling through a New California Republic compound and then the next, I'm being gunned down from all sides. Not from stealing, not from opening fire on them, for walking down a damned corridor. This game is not playable, at least not for me. Oh, and in conclusion, Damn you Bethesda and Obsidian! I don't know which of you jerks is responsible for ruining a FALLOUT game for me, but damn you both very much.

As always, if you like my review please go and recommend it here. Thank you! And now onto the review. The Good: A large cast of characters with distinct personalities and quirks. Similar gameplay to original Valkyria Chronicles that made the game so fun. Lots more customization options than previous game. New Game+ features. The Bad: Cast of characters nowhere near as good as the first game. Lots of repetition in map/level design. Poor story pacing. Tons of throwaway missions and filler content. Annoying emoting. Realism/believabilitiy issues. Abrupt enemy level jumps. When developing a sequel to a game as good as the original Valkyria Chronicles for the PS3 was, there is often a tendency to error towards two opposite extremes. Either a developer will play it too safe and not create a game that truly feels like an original offering, or they'll change up too many things and lose the spirit and personality that made the original game so popular to begin with. The second offering in the Valkyria Chronicles series falls squarely into the second category and comes close to ruining what could have ended up being one of the greatest games for the PSP available. Valkyria Chronciles 2 takes place two years after the Gallian War from the end of the first game. Following the revelation that the queen of Gallia is herself a member of the hated Darcsen race, widely believed to be responsible for devastating the continent of Europa many centuries ago, and having successfully repelled the outside forces of the neighboring Empire, Gallia has devolved into a bitter civil war. On one side are the loyalist faction that supports the monarchy that has ruled Gallia well and prosperously for centuries while they were pretending to be the heirs of the legendary Valkyrur thought responsible for saving Europa from the "Darcsen Calamnity" all those centuries ago. On the other side is the rebel army whose recruiting is largely based on not-so-thinly veiled racism, greed, ambition and lust for power. You play the protagonist Avan Hardins, who joins the Lanseal Military Academy that is supporting the Queen's rule after being told that your brother Leon died on a special, dangerous, and classified mission. Avan joins because he does not believe that his brother - whom he idolizes to the point of utter and creepy obsession - is anything short of invincible and therefore MUST be out there and live somewhere. If you join the academy, then maybe eventually you can get knowledge of the secret mission your brother was involved in. Avan typifies both the greatest strengths and the greatest weaknesses of the game itself. He is good intentioned, easy going, friendly and always cheerful. On the other hand, he's an utter moron, frequently annoying, and completely unbelievable as a military hero. This is a pretty good metaphor for the game itself. When the game is enjoyable, it is both charming and light hearted. When the game drags on for huge stretches of time, it is annoying, repetitive, cliche filled and aggravatingly stupid. From a technical standpoint, the game is a great success. Valkyria Chronicles 2 manages to stuff a LOT of content into a single UMD. The amount of character and vehicle customization, dialog, character scenes and missions is simply impressive. The visual presentation is solid - even if it is a large and very obvious step downwards from the beautiful art design of its predecessor - and a great deal of time and care was obviously taken in designing the various areas of Lanseal Academy. Unfortunately, all of this is marred by a host of flaws of a non-technical nature that combine to substantially reduce the enjoyment of an otherwise impressive game. One example is the grating little sound clips that play over and over again whenever a particular character is expressing a particular sentiment. After the 300th or so time you hear Avan declare "I'll do it!" while striking a idiotically dramatic pose you're going to want to proclaim "I'll do it" with a gun to your own head. Even worse is his laugh, that sounds suspiciously like the laugh that "mentally challenged" kids do. You will hear this laugh again. And Again. And Again.

And sadly, the same can be said of every, single, other character. Whether it is Zeri's 700th repetition of "Honestly" with the same emote pose or the latest irritating rendition of Cosette's ditzy cheeriness, this game's characters will drive many people nuts. Though the characters are all differentiated from one another, very few of them really stand out as interesting. Aside from a very small subset of the very annoying main characters, the other characters feel very much like two dimensional stereotypes. At times - such as with one very rare black character portrayed as, shall was say, "jungle" for lack of a better phrase - these stereotypes can feel just a bit uncomfortable. Furthermore, very few of the characters feel like they belong anywhere near a gun let alone fighting alongside (and against) tanks. They're high schoolers with automatic weapons. With the first game, a great deal of effort was put in to make at least the core cast of characters believable in the roles they occupied. Whether it was Welkin Gunther, the military genius, Largo the experienced veteran, or Isara Gunther the brilliant engineer, you seldom got the sense that it was just plain, flat out unrealistic that they could be accomplishing what they were accomplishing. Contrast that to Avan Hardins, who the game goes at great lengths to portray as a complete idiot (if a really nice and happy idiot) and you find yourself scratching your head and wondering, "Wait, I'm supposed to believe that this guy is decimating the rebel forces?" Unfortunately, you're going to be spending a LOT of time with these unrealistic characters suspending your disbelief as the main story trudges onwards at an unbelievably slow pace. You are required to do a set number of "key" missions every month you are at the academy before you gain access to the "story" mission, and the ratio of story to non-story missions has a tendency to be daunting and lead to a feel that the war itself is something of an afterthought. With the enemy having a face and personality so rarely, it's hard to really feel any sense of urgency or importance in what you're doing. This is a tremendous disappointment for anyone who played the first game and loved the fact that every mission you did felt like it mattered a great deal. The first game focused on a core cast of characters and developed them quite well. While it is technically possible to do only a bare minimum of key missions each month and quickly get to the story, the game discourages this by scaling the enemy levels in leaps and bounds at times. I was quite surprised the first time I saw my enemy levels jump from 18 during the story mission of one month all the way up to 30 for the first key mission of the next month. With this design decision, you have plenty of incentive to take each "Extra" mission or even repeat easy or quick missions to gain additional experience or class change items. The game partially compensates for the enemy level jumps by recycling maps very frequently, so once you learn the basic strategy for conquering one particular map, you can overcome huge disparity in levels or abilities by reusing the same strategy repeatedly, but this simply contributes to the other problem of each mission not feeling very distinct or important from any other.

Add it all together, and this game is far from being a worthy spiritual successor to its distinguished predecessor. You'll get a great many hours of play out of it if you can stick with it, - particularly if you take advantage of the New Game+ replay option - but how high quality those hours are will depend greatly on your own personal patience level.