That being said, I thought of something that I think will make for an interesting series of articles: I am going to play every NES game ever released in North America.

I don't plan to beat every game ever released in the U.S.; I'm not a masochist. But I will play every game for at least five minutes, preferably half an hour if I can spare it. Enough to get a decent idea of what the game's like and deliver some solid impressions. If you want reviews, there's GameFAQs.

Later today I hope to invest some time in the first game on my list, 10-Yard Fight. Oh boy, a twenty-three year-old American football game made by a Japanese company? This...isn't going to end well.
12.4.08 @ 12.18

And then, when I was flicking through British TV one afternoon after a nap, there was a cricket game on TV. It looked really neat, although I understood maybe 5% of what was going on. I got the gist, but why people cheered when dudes slide in front of the ball before it hit the rope made no sense. The color commentary didn't help; it sounded like what someone making fun of cricket would say.

So when I got home I wouldn't let it die and was lucky enough that my store actually had Cricket for Dummies in stock. What are the odds?

...I'm not entirely sure what the point of this post is, other than to illustrate I like weird things. But if I lived in England, or Sri Lanka, I would have one less unpopular opinion.

Same thing for Fable. Remember how hyped everyone was for that game, and then you play it and not only do you not really get to age your character -- you skip about 10 years after the tutorial area -- the game beyond it just wasn't that good. Now people are all misty-eyed for Fable 2, and it doesn't seemed like they learned from their mistakes, just tacked on lame mechanics no one wanted (one-button combat? Whee!).

I'm hosting a Super Smash Bros. Brawl tournament on the release day. So far it seems like damn near everyone from work is going to be there. It is going to be fucking intense. Now I just need everyone to shut the fuck up about the roster.

(Why does everyone insist on knowing everything about a game before it comes out? What's wrong with a little discovery? I don't want to know a goddamned thing since I had so much fun unlocking stuff in Melee.)
2.24.08 @ 22.51

Anyway, yeah, it feels like I've skipped school or something, like the time when I was about 8 and I woke up really late and missed the bus. I'd been doing that a lot at that point, so I was scared to go wake up my mom and tell her. Instead I hid in my closet when she woke up and basically played in my room all day and ate Oreos for lunch when she left to do errands. At 2:30, my usual arrival home from school, I plunked down in front of the TV for some Duck Tales. She hears the TV and, waking up from a nap, comes into the living room looking at me a little funny. "Hey Bub, I didn't even hear you come in." "Really? 'Cause I totally came home from school just now."

The freelancing thing is for real, though. Props to Jamie's dad for the hookup; the CEO of the company I'm doing the work for is a member of her dad's gym, and it was Frank who mentioned that his son-in-law is a writer.

Which brings me to something else. If you look at the picture of my tattoo below, you can see my neato wedding ring. But! I totally skipped over my wedding. Here, I mean. Obviously I was there. See?

Halo 3's single player is officially underwhelming. Very pretty, but the controls feel very floaty, the much-lauded AI seems no more crafty than any of the other billion shooters out there, I still think the aliens sound/look/are totally lame, and the story's really, really dumb. Can't wait for multi, though.

As I alluded just moments ago, WoW's sucked me back in. Ken and I started up brand new characters to level together, solving the problem of never having someone to play with because they're all a billion levels above you. And since my newbie is an Undead priest, that kinda takes the wind out of my other secondary, an Undead priest. I've still got my 61 Shaman that I love so very much, but at that level it gets really hard to solo. So, I rolled a Blood Elf mage, and I'd sworn that I would never roll a Blood Elf. Turns out it was a stupid restriction, because Blood Elves 1) are pretty awesome, 2) have a great starting area that's really refined. It's challenging without being too difficult, and is exquisitely paced. None of this running for seven years to get to the next area. Also, mages are so great it hurts. Fuck mages being "glass cannons"--I can take down a mob before he even gets close enough to take a swing, sheep the first add, destroy the second, potion it up, then destroy that first one again.

Smash Bros. Brawl is pretty much all I think about at work. I think I'm going to have a release day tournament. Details to come.
2.11.08 @ 11.28

While I was getting them, I tried to capture how it felt in words, because I knew people would inevitably ask. I mean, I certainly did. First of all, it hurts like a motherfucker. At one point the artist asked me how it felt, how I was doing, and I said, "It hurts more than I thought it would, and a lot less than I thought it would." I think you will agree that's a pretty wide margin.

How does it feel? It doesn't tickle. It feels like one to five super sharp needles are being poked into your skin up to fifty times a second. Metaphorically, it feels like getting clawed by a cat over and over and over again, and the cat has super-good aim and always hits the same spot. Since I got it on the wrists, whenever he got close to the wrist "knuckle" the needle vibrated my entire ulna. And for some reason my right arm hurt a hell of a lot more than my left. I have no idea why.

Oh, and did you know that after, like, twenty-five minutes the needle feels hot? That's a pleasant surprise.

I am very happy with the tattoos, though, and, like a lot of good things in life, you have to suffer for it.

It's funny to watch people's reactions to it. People who play video games immediately go, "Triforce?" Or simply, "Awesome." People who don't play games ask, "What's it mean?"

Anything else? ...MLB Power Pros is my new favorite baseball game of all time, AND it's got a great "baseball RPG" mode where you take a player from college to the majors in a surprisingly well-written journey. Call of Duty 4 was overrated, although the one plane mission where you're raining death on people five hundred feet below while your pilot goes, "Good kill, good kill" is just chilling. Smash Bros'. continued delay is freakin' killing me. I should have been playing it three times over by now. Now I have to contend with near constant spoilers. Seriously people, the game will be out in a month, and I'd like to preserve some of the mystery for when I actually play the game. 1.31.08 @ 19.11

How am I torturing myself lately, you ask? I have two preferred methods. The first is the Pokemon Trading Figure game, which got pushed back a whole month. I should have been spinning those little bastards around by now, but alas. Twenty more days.

And now this: the Helio Ocean. I don't know why I want this thing so much, but I do, much like another piece of hardware I wanted so desperately. Except this one I flat-out can't afford. $300 for the unit and $65 a month for the lowest-priced plan that is also worth a damn? Guess I'm stuck with eating...

I'm about 130+ pages into a novel. Have I talked about this yet? I feel like I have, because I talk about it all the time at work since I use all of my breaks to write. At any rate, for a first draft (itself a first; I rarely write drafts, mostly because I get disgusted with what I've written and never touch it again) I think it's going quite well. My usual stumbling blocks, i.e. where the hell do I go from here?, have been overcome by a liberal sprinkling of, "Stop taking it so seriously. It's only a first draft."

Oh, and I used to think those authors who talked about their characters "speaking" to them or "going off on their own" were crazy. They're not, just imprecise. While writing things you never thought of occur to you out of the blue; it occurs to you that this character would say this; action or story you thought would be so cool turns out not to be, and when you think about it, your characters wouldn't go there but here. They both happened quite a bit, but the latter happened quite unexpectedly, to the point where the characters are walking down the road one way, realize, in story, how stupid it would be for them to go that way, and turn around, setting off a chain of events I'd never seen coming.

It's about zombies. It had to be. But not what Smalls suggested, me getting my "traditional" zombie story out of the way so I could focus on interesting new takes on the form. Instead I thought long and hard about the fact that I want to write, I've been putting it off for far too long, but everything I've been writing lately sounds so stilted and lame. What am I good at writing, I wondered. I think I'm pretty funny. I remember getting big, big laughs at a story I wrote in second grade, three years before I even contemplated that I wanted to be a writer (thank you very much, Mrs. Novicky). What would make a funny story?

ZombieCo.

It's a doodle I whipped up in school one day, bored in math class, I think. It's a zombie head with a tie. I always envisioned the corporation behind it as one that was very proud of bringing fresh brains at low, low prices.

The rest just kinda fell outta me.

I'm writing it all out longhand (beginning with the notebook in which I made the above doodle, and with all my extensive notes on zombie neurobiology (no, seriously)), although I've got a few chapters transcribed onto my computer that I'll post soon. Not too much, because it's still early and I've got at least 50 pages worth of material to add in to the first "book" (I originally envisioned the story as a diad, two separate novels, but the story's actually a little too big for two books, if that makes any sense. For any real sense of conclusion it has to be one).

So that's what I'm doing. Oh, and playing Pokemon every day. And Alien Syndrome for the Wii (I love it but I only get to play it in 30 minute chunks every other day). And Pokemon Ranger, the game I said no one should ever have to play but pokemon completists have to. And Odin Sphere, which is so fucking pretty it's unbelievable (whoever said 2D is dead needs to look at this game). And Metroid Prime 3, showing FPS how to do it.
8.30.07 @ 19.12.

Done.

Wow.
7.22.07 @ 03.55.

Mash up a can of pinto beans. Boil it until most of the water burns off and it's thick and drippy. Chop up an onion, a tomato, lots of garlic, and several jalepenos. Throw most of it in there.

Cook some ground turkey. Turkey, leaner than beef but having no real taste or textural differences, does not get brown like beef, only a paler grey/pink. Break open a larger piece to see if it's done. Still pink, cook it some more. Throw the rest of the veggies in there.

When both bits are done, combine them. Mix 'em up. The mixier the better. Throw some cheese in there. Now throw some salsa in there. Now cover the whole concoction in cheese. Now cover it again in salsa. Now again in cheese.

Nuke that fucker when you're ready to eat it.

Eat that fucker when you're reading the new Harry Potter book until 4 am.
7.19.07 @ 17.55.

Oh yeah. I learned how to roll a coin across my knuckles to stave off boredom.

I've been obsessed with the new Pokemon for the last month now, and I'm glad I never posted my initial review of it, not so much because I'm wrong or anything, but because there's more game there than there appears at first.

After you beat the Elite Four and become the Pokemon League Champion, somewhere around the 40-hour mark, you open up (at least) two important things. The first is another high-level island for battling and collecting. The second is the "National Pokedex", which expands your Pokedex from the measly 150 pokemon in the early game to all 480-odd pokemon there are in existence.

This is where it gets interesting.

Now you're revisiting old areas which are suddenly bursting with new pokemon to collect and, I don't know about you, but I always found the collecting part to be the most fun part of any pokemon game.

This is also where the game starts requiring homework. If you want to have an honest shot at completing your Pokedex (and everyone knows that means possesing, at least for a moment, every single Pokemon, including exclusives and ultra-rares), be prepared to spend a lot of time scouring sites like Selebii.net and printing out weakness/strength charts and a complete Pokedex listing (how would you know which ones to hunt if you don't know which ones you have?). Make a note of which ones are exclusive to which game, which ones are only available when you have a GBA Pokemon game inserted, which GBA game they show up with. If you want S#151 (that'd be number 151 in the Sinnoh Pokedex, as opposed to the National), you're going to have to beat yet ANOTHER game, one that no one in their right mind should EVER play, just to get the code to transfer it to your game.

They took the game I loved, already an obsession of mine since...1997 or so, and refined it, enhanced it.

Is it any wonder that when the "Trading Figure Game" comes out, I'm going to be a quivering wreck before its great majesty?
5.1.07 @ 15.19.

There's been loads of hand-squeezing (more on that later), as well as the stark realization that we are just not gamblers, and can't quite figure out why it is that people spend their entire vacations here. But it's fun for a night, and we got surprisingly good tickets to Penn & Teller. So after a power nap (been up since six in the morning and going hard on about four hours sleep for twelve hours, I just had to crash before the show), we're hitting the strip and trying to convince ourselves to put five bucks down on blackjack or the ponies or something, in order to get the full "Vegas experience."

One day down, six (?) more to go. Look out New England. We're coming back. 1.21.07 @ 23.23.

So when I recently finished Season 2.5 of Battlestar Galactica it occurred to me that the show was in the midst of its third season, and I could get up to speed and maybe start watching it every Friday, like a normal nerd. Unlike CBS, which let us watch all of this season's episodes of Lost so Jamie and I could be caught up for the mid-season finale, Sci-Fi only lets me watch the latest episode, plus a bunch of behind the scenes stuff which, while cool, are total spoilers and I won't watch them.

BitTorrent was no help (never really is, I've noticed). But there was iTunes. I restrained myself from buying the $35 season pass and simply bought the first two episodes of Season 3. I've only watched the first one so far, and after a middling second half of Season 2 (really, a whole episode about the black market? And what the fuck was up with Apollo?), the writers kicked the audience's ass with an explosive season finale (now the title of this post is making more sense...), and a positively gripping first episode back.

As if more BSG didn't already make this the best day ever, peep this shit: HBO bought the rights to turn A Song of Ice and Fire into a series. It's the way it had to be. I've been trying to convince Jamie to read the books, but I haven't been very surprised that she hasn't. However, based on my descriptions she has said, "If that were a TV show, I would watch it."

Cloud fucking Nine, people.

For the Young Wolf! For Winterfell!

Hurrahs!

In the interim between this post and the previous one I have played a ton of Wii Sports, beaten Twilight Princess (Wind Waker is leagues better, tacked-on Triforce hunting at the end or no), packed up 8/10ths of the house in preparation for the move back east.

Oh, did I mention we're moving back to New England? We're moving back to New England. I think I freaked Jamie out because I refused to get excited about my imminent graduation, and the subsequent move east. My reasoning was CSUN (and school in general for me) loves to pull the rug out from under me at the very last minute, so who knows what could have gone wrong? So I just focused on school and didn't think about the move. Which is probably why I didn't mention it.

So we'll be leaving in about a week, and we'll be driving. Through Texas. And Missouri. So look forward to a picture journal of the horrible hair and fashions we encounter along the way. The Snarker's Guide to the United States.

You know what I've been playing most, lately? (Because everything comes back to video games.) WWE Smackdown vs. Raw '07. I loved wrestling as a kid, and I loved the oft-maligned cat-fighting game Rumble Roses, and both games are made by the same people. Once you get used to the fighting system (i.e. stop trying to play it like a fighting game, work on building "momentum," etc.), and if you can get past the inherent cheesiness of pro wrestling, it's a lot of fun. I even found myself going, "Ooh, nice reversal!"

C'mon, any game that allows you to suplex your opponent off the top of a ladder can't be all bad.

I've also finally started on the sequel to the wonderful Ico, Shadow of the Colossus. Basically it's tiny little you and your trusty horse going up against screen-filling giants. The frame rate can barely manage to stay at a modest 30 fps, chugging whenever you move the camera, and most of the time it looks barely better than a really pretty PS1, but when you're swinging from the back of a colossus, rearing back to jam your sword into the monster's weak point, the music has swelled, and you can see where all of the resources in this game went -- making these giants look awesome and real. 1.11.07 @ 20.37.

Just so I don't shock ya. 10.21.06 @ 19.30

Gotcha an article here, one I hope to update for a little bit, detailing my journey through The Legend of Zelda: the Ocarnia of Time.

Oh, what's this? I've got another one for you, only this time it's a total fan-boy slog on why Zelda is better than Mario. 10.12.06 @ 13.28

Going home soon, gonna get some Quiznos, gonna play a little Lego Star Wars II (already have 50% unlocked), then I have tomorrow completely off -- no work, no school, no nothing -- and Jamie is making Indian food tomorrorw night. Woo-hoo!

Also, if you haven't seen Little Miss Sunshine Yet, do yourself a favor and go see it. No hyperbole: best movie I've seen all year. 9.14.06 @ 13.55

So here it is. 8.11.06 @ 09.16

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