I bet you missed me, huh? Don’t lie~

Anyway, Sonic games. Yeah yeah, I know. sonic has been REALLY bad lately. And it hurts me deep… but there are good ones. Lemme show yah what ones.

Starting with a newer game:

Sonic and the Black Knight

No, really. I’m not kidding. The concept for this game was HORRIBLE, but the execution is pretty damn good. Sonic is summoned to the land of King Arthur by a cute loli version of Merlin named (surprise!) Merlina and after some delicious chili dog eating, Sonic gets a magic talking sword named “Caliburn”. The action is fast, and the sword allows you to obliterate most enemies without a care in the world. Now, like Secret Rings, there are a few slowdowns. There are points where you have to give villagers rings and there are large enemies that don’t go down in one hit, but everything else in the game is a pretty damn good time. I don’t really recommend it for someone who doesn’t like Sonic, but it’s worth a try even if  you don’t. (continue reading…)

While Sony has made several blunders in the current gen console war one of the biggest was allowing Call of Duty 4 to go multi-platform. The game has become such a runaway success that it could have single-handedly changed the face of the war as we know it. Perhaps equally as big was allowing Grand Theft Auto 4 to go multi-platform. Although the game sold about 45/55%  on the PS3 and Xbox 360 respectively, there are rumblings that the next installment in the GTA series may become a Playstation exclusive by default.

Wait, what the hell are you talking about?

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They say that variety is the spice of life, but I believe passion can be equally spicy. It’s what drives people to write fanfiction and to petition developers to turn dreams into reality.

Passion can be a double-edged sword, though. Sometimes, all it takes is a single real or perceived disappointment  to turn your feelings against the object of your emotional attachment.

Take the case of a little discussion I had with a friend of mine last night. Being die-hard fans of the Atlus’ Trauma Center series, my friend and I were understandably elated when we heard that Trauma Team would be coming to the Wii in the near future.

Please note that my friend is a BIG Nozomi Kimishima (aka Naomi Weaver) fan. Being the inquisitive student that she is, she immediately Googled around for more info about the game and her favorite character. What she discovered made her emotions do a complete one hundred and eighty degree turn. You see, she unfortunately came upon this little article.

Remember the comment I made in my other article about how some of the new doctors look like younger versions of verteran Trauma Center surgeons? It turns out I was partly right. The lady with silver-blue hair in the roster of Trauma Team specialists is apparently Dr. Kimishima herself, and she has graduated from being a hotshot doctor to being a forensics expert.

My friend immediately flew into a rage at the revelation. She vehemently argued that Dr. Kimishima is a master surgeon, not a CSI agent. This led to a bit of a discussion wherein I tried to calm her down. Perhaps this is an alternate universe Kimishima, I theorized. After all, didn’t producer Kanada-san mention something about Trauma Team being a whole new game and not a sequel?

Despite my best efforts, my friend would have none of it. Seething with righteous indignation, she seems to be dead set on boycotting this new medical sim completely.

On the other hand, I’m feeling a bit more forgiving. Granted, the good doctor may have made a rather…odd career move, and her new portrait makes her look suspiciously younger than she’s supposed to be (plastic surgery, perhaps?), but it’s still nice to see her alive and well after Second Opinion.

Now all Atlus has to do is to announce the existence of a playable obstetrician slash gynecolotist in Trauma Team and my day will be complete.

It really pays to subscribe to newsletters sometimes. You’ll never know what bit of fantastic news might just leap out at you when you least expect it.

I just opened my e-mail inbox recently when I came across an Atlus announcement: a new medical sim (a genre made popular by the Trauma Center series) will be coming to the Nintendo Wii sometime spring of next year. Dubbed Hospital slash Trauma Team, this new game passes the torch to six new doctors ready to continue the legacy of Drs. Styles, Weaver, Vaughn and Blaylock.

Of course, I’m assuming that those three veterans aren’t in the game to begin with. Three of the doctors look like younger and stylishly redrawn versions of the veteran surgeons. A fourth doctor in the series gives us a glimpse of what Dr. Styles may look like sans glasses, darker hair, vampiric bloodlust and an androgynous charm borrowed from a certain Persona 4 sleuth.

The prospect of having six specialists this time around instead of two miracle doctors who do all the work (with a hot nurse nagging them all throughout the process) sounds like an interesting concept. This way, you can have one doctor stitch up all the wounds  while another glues back broken pieces of bone with mystical antibiotic gel. A third surgeon can focus on removing tumors with impunity while the other two are preoccupied.

Of course, we’ll have to wait and see if all of them will actually be working together during the operation itself, or if they’ll be taking turns during the entire process of testing, diagnosis, surgery and post-op. The latter case may be likely, as one of the doctors is supposed to be a diagnostician.

Also, a quick glance at the initial screenshots will tell you that the classic syringe, forceps, gel et al are still in there. Some gameplay elements may also involve timing bits reminiscent of the defibrillator and “massage” scenarios of past games. There’s appears to be a part where you have to hammer some bones into place as well.

It’s most unfortunate that the official website contains very little info as of this time. I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled on this one, though. Anything that gives me a good excuse to probe a woman’s bare midriff is A-okay in my book.

What do you do when you’re faced with a major loss? Some people go for the extreme “solution” and commit suicide. Others attempt to drown out their sorrows with alcohol. Me, I fixate on video games.

This was especially true during the first half of 2007. During that year, two people were diagnosed with cancer.  One was the father of a friend of mine. The other one was my mother.

To make a long story short, my friend’s father pulled through. My mother didn’t.

I’d already played a bit of Trauma Center: Second Opinion before she died. After her passing, I went all out. I rented the Nintendo Wii at my friend’s Internet Cafe.  I played almost non-stop everyday from the time it opened till the time it closed its doors before dawn. At the time, it seemed to be one of my main forms of coping with the stages of Kubler-Ross’ model. (continue reading…)

Would you wait nine years before you bought a console of your own?

I’d like to think that the universe sends you signs when the time for something is right. For example, I noticed certain hints in the past few weeks, and all of them had at least one common denominator.

Sign Number One: a friend of mine who owns an Internet cafe (the very same cafe where I’ve been renting his PS2 per hour) said “maybe you should get your own console.”

Sign Number Two: I received a little news item when I logged on to Windows Live Messenger. Sony had apparently slashed the price of the PlayStation 2 down to US$100.

Sign Number Three: An ad on the Internet mentioned that someone was selling her PS2 for a little over US$50.

I figured these three signals were enough for me to go around. It was time. (continue reading…)

The following article contains SPOILERS.  You done been warned.

When I was a kid, there was a game series  that EVERYONE played, or else they were stupid.  Even the local Sega fans begrudgingly picked up a SNES, or borrowed one from a friend, for just one game.  If you’re in the know, and read the title of this article, you’ve probably guessed that the series in question is The Legend of Zelda.  If you didn’t guess that, you probably owned (Or still own) an XBox.

Now, I bring this up because I’ve been playing The Wind Waker again, because I just got my GameCube back, and unfortunately, my favourite games, Metroid Prime 1&2, were destroyed.  So I pulled out my next favourite, and it’s definitely worthwhile to play through.

I won’t recap the story or something, this isn’t a review of the game.  This is me stating the reasons why I love Toon Link, and why you’re a jerk if you don’t.

1. (continue reading…)

Presenting…

…The Top Five Signs That a DLC Should Have Just Been Free

Brought to you by Fedora Man

Well it finally April and you have to love how easy it is to open an article with the lines “so it’s finally whatever month we’re in right now”. It’s time for the next step in my great journey to earn money through a video game blog. Now I know you might be wondering “I thought you had billions! Were you lying to me?” The answer is of course, no. Stupid. Why would I make something like that up? But the difference between that money and the money I’ll earn on this site is I actually had to do work to earn it, unlike my corporation where I really don’t do any work at all. I can show all my friend “yeah this is the ten dollars I earned THROUGH WORK!” and if they say that they also have a job and have made more money, I’ll pull out my emergency one million dollars that I always keep stashed in my pants and laugh at them, probably while rubbing the money all over myself. (continue reading…)

Grandia is a game I played over and over when I was younger, and now, nearly eight years down the line, I decided to give it another go for nostalgia’s sake.  Many of the flaws escaped my notice when I was just a wide-eyed kid, new to the RPG genre and still fascinated by the idea of a storyline in a video game, but what I loved about the game- the fun battles, the colorful characters, the sheer sense of fun and adventure- have all aged like a fine wine.

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Voice acting in video games was once an enthralling, amazing, almost unheardof thing.  It was pretty awesome to hear ‘VALKYRIE SHOT THE FOOD’ come from a Gameboy’s mono speaker.  Yeah, I saw that shit-eating grin, you remember.

As technology grew though, it became more and more common to have soundbytes of your hero screaming and yelling, and eventually games became fully voiced.  There are ups and downs to such things that I won’t discuss here, ’cause that’s best left to an article dedicated thereto.  Here, I wanna discuss Star Fox.

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