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…)

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…)

As a brief reprieve from the normal articles I shoot out, I figured I’d take a moment and talk to you all about something that bugs every gamer – Bad Endings.

Now I don’t mean bad endings as in “You didn’t complete a mission objective – bad end” sorta bad endings, but ones that are just highly disappointing and brief or offer little closure.

This may become a weekly thing, I’m not too sure, but today we cover four from the days of my childhood.

#4 – Bad Dudes :

Internet memes aside, really what the hell, a solid beat’em up on the NES where President Ronnie takes the Bad Dudes out for Hamburger after they beat up a legion of ninjas who kidnapped him. I mean really think about that. That’s it? I’d feel kinda pissed off if I was them. Also, what the hell did the ninjas kidnap the president for? Was this part of a larger global plot? What were their demands? Also – why the hell weren’t these guys part of the President’s elite personal security to begin with if they’re such Bad Dudes?

Screw you man, saving your ass is only worth a Burger?

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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…)

Long ago, there was a web game called Neopets.  It was basically a collection of minigames, combined with Pokemon-like cockfighting.  When I was about 13 or 14, EVERYONE was into it:  Male, female, kids, pederasts… It was a sensation.

If you’re unfamiliar, I’ll give you a quick rundown.  There are a bunch of cute little animals you could adopt in a variety of colours and designs, with whom you can play games (Which are more often than not cutely redecorated clones of Apple IIe 5 1/4in floppy titles reprogrammed in Flash), train at various schools to raise their stats, and of course, have the viciously beat the hell out of each other.

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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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I’ll bite.  The following is gaming as it relates to my life, or vice-versa.

Childhood

I did not have a pleasant childhood.  My mother had some severe psychological disorders and chemical imbalances, as did I.  My brother always seemed to be barely aware of the world around him.

I know, I know, poor me.  However, these terrible things are what led me to Ebeneezer’s, the local arcade, where I quickly became ‘Little Sister’ to the majority of the regulars.  I was not allowed to be myself at home, even as young as three or four years old, but since my mother couldn’t handle having me around, I was often dropped off at the arcade or the library.  The arcade was where I learned about various arcade hardware which lead me to working on computers later in life, and spurred my interest in digital music.  It also introduced me to the phrase ‘winners don’t do drugs,’ which popped up on the intro to nearly every game.

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