Rather than blargh all over any and everything that I read and watched concerning E3 this year, I'm just going to boil it down by system:

PS2:  There are still some great games coming up.  I'm looking forward to getting my hands on Valkyrie Profile 2 and Disgaea 2, but beyond them and perhaps a few other (mostly Square Enix) titles, it looks like the PS2's days are numbered.

PS3:  On the one hand, this system will undoubtedly have some games on it that I'll want to play, but on the other, I'm not willing to shell out $600 for a video game system.  Especially not for a system from a company that has historically had an unfavorable number of defective consoles in the first year or two following launch.  If I pay that much money for a console, I'd like to feel assured that it won't conk out on me if I give it a funny look.  Beyond the price issue, however, I do think that Final Fantasy XIII and Metal Gear Solid 4 look great.  My only other real concern for the system is that the backwards compatibility is as robust as the PS2's was for the PS1.

PSP:  ...?

Xbox 360:  Microsoft put on a solid showing, but I didn't really see anything that made my mouth water.  Blue Dragon looks good, and I hope Ninety-Nine Nights lives up to its promise, but otherwise there's very little that I'm interested in at the moment.  Still, I'll probably end up getting a 360 before a PS3 simply because the price is more affordable.

GameCube:  Hey, what do you know?  The old lunchbox still has some kick left.  Super Paper Mario is the first game in the Paper series that actually interests me, and a few other titles like Zelda and Baten Kaitos II should be out by the end of the year, as well.  There may not be much life left in it, but it's good to know that GameCube owners aren't completely high and dry until the Wii comes out.  Speaking of which.

Wii:  Woo!  E3's just ended, and there are already more than enough games in line for the Wii that have me ready and willing to buy Nintendo's next console.  It was great to see some actual game demonstrations for a variety of games, which really helps give me a better idea about how the whole Wiimote concept will work.  Metroid Prime 3 looks great, and from the video I've seen, it should play great, as well.  The system is even seeing some preliminary third party support from some of the big names, so the long-term future for the system will hopefully be better than the GameCube's.  Plus, there's a new Fire Emblem coming.  That, along with the perceived $200-$250 system price is enough to the system to me.

DS:  Talk about night and day.  While the PSP had very little that was new, original, or exciting in any way, the DS has a whole sea of upcoming titles that sound promising.  Square Enix is finally getting Final Fantasy III into release later this year, Ouendan is coming in the form of Elite Beat Agents, there's a new Castlevania in the works, and Phoenix Wright, the coolest defense attourney since Matlock, is getting a well-deserved sequel.  Hotel Dusk looks like a promising adventure game, but it had better be at least four times longer than Trace Memory.  Seriously.

GBA:  There's not much, but what little was shown has me interested enough to keep the GBA game slot in my DS ready and waiting.  Super Robot Taisen:  Original Generation and Yggdra Union are both games that I'd like to play.

My twenty-fifth birthday was this past Saturday, and aside from the cheaper auto insurance I'm allowed (which is useless since I don't own a car) and the ability to rent a car (I hate driving to begin with), the only real thing I had to look forward to at all this year were the gifts.  I got an unusually high concentration of gaming items this year:

• Suikoden V
• Dynasty Warriors 5: Empires
• Cash, which I ended up using to buy Drakengard 2
• Final Fantasy:  Advent Children

Yeah, this is going to keep me busy for a while.  An RPG, a beat'em up, and an RPG beat'em up with some Panzer Dragoon thrown in.  Now this is the life!

As for Advent Children, I had already seen the movie last year; it's a decent enough movie for fans of Final Fantasy VII, but in terms of its quality as a film as a whole, it's not really that astounding.  The plot is weak and fairly cliched, the fight scenes could at times use better editing, and overall, it's not even as deep as the already shallow Final Fantasy:  The Spirits Within.  All that being said, I do appreciate the DVD as a gift, as it still has its fun moments, and while Final Fantasy VII ranks low on my list of favorite games in the series, that doesn't take away from the fact that I found it fun back when I first played it.

I spent the past weekend finishing off my half-finished save in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance.  I've owned the game since its release last October and had previous made it to chapter seventeen, but I decided to take a break from it and go on to other games for a while.  Things got off to a rousing start this past Friday evening when I marched my way through chapter seventeen, which is a ridiculously massive four-part battle.

However, things didn't really hit a high note until Saturday, when I started playing at roughly ten in the morning and didn't stop until I was about to fall over from hunger around dinner time.  During that time, I plowed my way through chapters eighteen to twenty-five, and dear sweet lord, did my eyes hurt after that.  I took a break until Sunday afternoon, at which point I smashed my way through to the end of the game.  My eyes were once again on fire, but it's a good kind of burn.  The sort of burn I'd only feel after shutting off my NES after playing Tetris for four hours straight without blinking.

Of course, now I'm feeling like going through the game again, maybe on hard mode this time.  I can't let those bonus features like the fix stat growth go to waste.  However, if there's one thing I don't agree with in this game, it has to be the way that Intelligent Systems implimented unlocking the bonus characters for the trial maps.  Fifteen playthroughs is a hell of a lot of work to unlock the final boss.

This year is going to be a busy one for the gaming industry.  With the Xbox 360 on shelves (where you can find one, anyway :P), the PS3 and Revolution both due this fall, and prime games in the works for just about every current console and handheld, there's a lot to choose from.

However, looking at my wallet, there's zero chance that I'll be able to afford everything that I could possibly desire.  All three of the new consoles will probably have to wait until 2007 at the earliest unless I end up with $200-$300 in extra spending cash from relatives this Christmas, and even then, I'd only be able to afford one new system.  And HDTV?  Not this year, either.

So what is there for me to look forward to?  A lot of great games for systems I already own.  Valkyrie Profile:  Silmeria promises great things, as do the DS games New Super Mario Bros., and possibly Ash and Final Fantasy III, if they hit stores this year.  Twilight Princess is also look rather hot, although I must admit that my love for the Zelda series has cooled somewhat since the N64 era.

Against my better judgement, I've even put down a preorder on Final Fantasy XII.  The demo was garbage, but the latest preview at GameSpot covers the retail Japanese version, and it featured a couple of elements that sound promising.  Whether it's enough to save FFXII from its crap-ass combat system remains to be seen.  I may just switch the preorder money over to Silmeria once its U.S. release date is announced.

So this really doesn't leave me a whole lot of new games to play right now, does  it?  Well, yes and no.  I'm not exactly going crazy at Gamestop these days, but I have been able to use this time to get back to my backlog.  I had Mario Golf:  Toadstool Tour sitting on my shelf, barely played for nearly half a year before digging it out and spending a good portion of January and February tearing up the links.  Samurai Warriors and Kessen III, both games that I purchased in the first half of 2005, have sustained me this March, and will continue to do so into April.  I also still have to finish up Fatal Frame III, and there's the non-human story path to play through in Radiata Stories, as well.

I'm sure I'll have plenty of great new gaming experiences in the latter part of the year, but as for right now, the games I already have are more than enough to entertain me.

I've been on a horror film kick lately, and in the past couple of weeks I finally got around to watching both the Japanese and American versions of Dark Water (the latter of which I watched earlier tonight).  This isn't really a post about those films, however, so for those of you that haven't seen them yet, I won't speak of them in much detail.  Instead, what I'm writing about is a question that these films and others have brought to mind.

Namely, is it possible to create a horror video game that isn't either based around the concept of fighting or fleeing from omnipresent foes?  In Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Fatal Frame, antagonists of various sorts are constantly lurking around, and the player needs to fight back with the game's choice of weapons.  Clock Tower is a bit more unique in that the majority of the time is spent actively running away and hiding from the enemy, but  the threat of imminent death is always one wrong step away.

So what if you got rid of all of the monsters?  What if there were a game that required the player to explore a mansion from the perspective of a Fatal Frame game that didn't have ghosts constantly phasing out of the woodwork to kill you?  What if you were locked in a mansion and were forced to solve a mystery within a given time limit, such as twelve hours, and that death would only come once that time is up?  Sure, there could still be ghostly presences, unsettling noises, and so on, but the only real threat to life and limb is failing to make the time limit.  I could imagine the scares starting out very small, but as time passes and the game comes closer to the fateful hour, the scares and general creepiness would grow stronger, further intensified by the player's own stress in meeting the deadline.

Am I the only person that would want to see a game like this, or is this something that others might want to play?  Would it even be possible for such a game to truly be effective?  I'd like to hear some thoughts on this.

If there's one thing above anything else that the video rental I frequent should be praised for, its the healthy stock of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode DVDs that they have readily available.  MST3K is one of the greatest television series of all time.  Don't even try to argue with me, or I'll shower you with...something really unpleasant to be showered with.  Yeah.

Even if you don't recognize the title, a lot of you will probably be familiar with the show's premise.  Essentially, a poor sap is trapped in space by a mad scientist, and is forced to endure the worst movies ever made with the help a couple of robots built out of spare parts.  Their only defense?  Mocking with extreme prejudice.

The series lasted a good ten seasons between cable access, Comedy Central, the Sci-Fi Channel, and a theatrical film before the show came to an end for good in 1999.  Although it's still disappointing that the show is no longer on the air, even after all these years, it's great that the series is still available to watch on DVD.  Classic episodes featuring "classic" movies like The Brain That Wouldn't Die, Mitchell, Invasion of the Neptune Men, and the queen mother of them all, Manos:  The Hands of Fate*, never get old.

Seriously, if you've never had the opportunity to watch this show, you really don't know what you're missing.  To be quite honest, the series is still genuinely funnier than most every comedy on television today.  The premise may sound simple and corny, but in its execution, Mystery Science Theater 3000 could only be described as sublime.  On the GameSpot scale, this show would rank as an 11.awesome.

*:  I'm not kidding when I say that Manos:  The Hands of Fate is quite possibly the worst film ever aired on MST3K.  Its sheer awfulness on every single conceivable level is simply jaw dropping.  The MST3K episode of it is the only way I would recommend that anyone watch the film.  I actually have a friend who once watched the uncut, regular release version of Manos despite my every warning not to, and the next time he talked to me, the first thing he did was apologize for ignoring my advice.  Of course, by being so bad, it's also become one of the best MST3K episodes ever, so if you've never seen the show, I'd definitely recommend this episode as an introduction.

But seriously, don't watch the uncut version of Manos.  Ever.

I've been fair and patient, GameSpot.  For the most part, I like the look and feel of the website since the most recent redesign.  There are a lot of useful features, and I've had good opportunity to make use of most if not all of them.  That said, my patience is wearing thin, and there are certain problems with the GS Community and Forum features that have been left unfixed for so long that what were once minor nuisances have become almost infuriating.

#1.  I can't directly access my own profile 99 times out of a hundred.  Instead, I have to work my way around by clicking a link into someone else's blog, and then click into my own blog through the link to my most recent entry displayed on the friend's list.  Even more absurd, I can't directly click into the entry itself; I have to click on the link to the page that will let me view replies. (i.e.: 0 replies, 1 reply, etc.)

If I try to click directly into my own profile, the page will not load the vast majority of the time.  The black background and gray borders that serve as a backdrop to the actual content will appear, but no actual content.  No banners, links, text, or graphics.  Refreshing has no effect, either.

#2.  Threads in the forums break frequently, probably more frequently than they did two months ago.  Sometimes, a thread won't load properly and I'll receive a white screen, or possibly a white screen with some garbage code along the top.  Others can apparently see and reply to these threads just fine, but for some reason, it won't allow me to.  Rarely, and I mean extremely rarely, refreshing will fix this problem, and I'll be able to read and respond to the thread, but this becomes particularly obnoxious when it happens to a thread that I wrote and posted myself.  Even worse, this occasionally occurs in non-forum related pages, such as reviews, news articles, and feature stories.

And to top it off, here's what I really don't get.  I have a fairly new (November 2005) Windows XP computer running the latest version of IE on a dial-up connection.  This is not some crazy independent browser like Firefox that could cause the occasional compatibility issue.  This is a standard hardware/software package that any website with competent coding should be able to handle.

So really, GameSpot, after having all this time to work out the kinks in the redesign, why does your forum and community functions still perform so obnoxiously?  Neither of the previous forum designs of yours that I've used (dating back to Lithium) were so bug-filled.  These problems I keep encountering are unacceptably frequent, and they prevent me from fully enjoying website features that I would love to get more use out of.

Rant over.

Last week, I used up what credit I had at EB in order to pick up a used copy of Nightshade.  It's a fun game, and it doesn't suffer too much from the fact that the game is missing its manual.  I've been having fun with it, and had intended to alternate it with Dragon Quest VIII in my gaming diet.

I am an ignorant fool.

Yesterday, I went through my DVD shelves and realized that I had a lot of titles that I just wasn't interested in watching anymore, for one reason or another.  They were all pretty much just taking up space, and so I put about a good number of them in a bag and took them down to Gamestop in order to trade them in and clear up some space.  I ended up wracking up over $55 in credit, and so I decided to grab a new copy of Fatal Frame III:  The Tormented.

That Nightshade/Dragon Quest VIII combo?  Not happening.  When I got home, I popped Fatal Frame III into my PS2 and proceeded to play it for the rest of the evening.  The game has me hooked, and so it's unlikely that I'll touch either of the other games until I've had my fill of shooting ghosts in the face with a camera.

Of course, I still had over five dollars left in credit after the purchase, and so, against my better judgement, I decided to place a preorder down on Final Fantasy XII.  With the way I was unimpressed with the demo, it felt like signing a devil's pact in blood.  Despite the fact that I feel FFXII is a huge misstep in waiting, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt for now, but I might end up cancelling and transferring the order once Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria is confirmed for a U.S. release.

Here's a link for you all to look at:

http://www.gamespot.com/ps2/rpg/radiatastories/player_review.html?id=256249

Radiata Stories is an incredible RPG, and while I was expecting good things from tri-Ace, I wasn't expecting how enthralling the game would be.  I'd definitely recommend this game to anyone looking for a good, light-hearted RPG that doesn't take itself seriously.

Having lived in Seattle since I began college in 1999, I've grown very attached to this city.  I grew up in a town of roughly eight thousand people back in Wyoming.  I've had more than a few bits of culture shock, and it took me a bit longer to adjust to certain aspects of city life than I would have preferred, but I have to say that while Seattle has its flaws, I really wouldn't want to live anywhere else right now.

However, transplanted resident or not, pretty much everyone in Seattle is experiencing something new as of right now.  The Seahawks actually made it to the Super Bowl.  Seattle isn't a total stranger to sports championships, but the sad fact is the Sonics haven't won the NBA championship in decades, the once-proud UW Huskies football team is in a state of disrepair resulting from a series of scandals and lawsuits (although the women's volleyball team won the national title this year), the Mariners consistantly underperform, and only three people in the entire city even care that Seattle won the 2005 WNBA title.  To top that all off, the last time the Seahawks won a playoff game, Voltron was on television without any ironic Cartoon Network commentary.

So with the Seahawks actually in the Super Bowl this year, things have gotten pretty weird in Seattle.  Usually, everone's tried to put the team out of mind by this time of year, but now the city is succumbing to the same brand of lunacy that a lot of a other sports cities have felt at times like this.  Billboards are plastered with messages asking God to bless the Seahawks.  Seahawk jerseys have suddenly become a roaring fashion trend. I was actually out in the University District for a short while when the Seahawks won the NFC title, and there was everything from general hooting and hollaring to celebratory gunshots.

(You know, there might be something to that "loud and gun-crazy" stereotype the Japanese see in us.)

This whole experience is new to me, as you can probably tell.  If the Seahawks win, I have absolutely no idea what's going to happen.  On the one hand, I can see a situation where half the city will riot in celebration, and I won't feel safe enough to leave my apartment for two days.  On the other, the Seahawks will lose, and...it'll pretty much just keep raining here.

Sports are weird.