Dragons O Plenty

I've had some time to sink my teeth into Blue Dragon and I have a few observations about it. First off let me say its great, if you are in the market for that classic style J-RPG this is your game. While the first Xbox had 0 turn based RPG's it looks like this round the 360 has hit critical mass in being the market for RPGs, pretty much all the devs are saying PS3 suck our balls.

The game feels like Chrono Trigger. The play style, the music, the overall atmosphere. Considering Hironobu Sakaguchi was co-founder of Square, and had his hand in Chrono Trigger it's easy to see why. While the story isn't as powerful as the ol CT it's solid. The Dragon/combat system is solid, the customizability of your characters via skill sets is impressive. Since Hironobu has left Square and is now developing for the 360, it's likely that future Final Fantasy games simply won't have the same flair they used too (not that the past few have either, though he had less and less to do with them as well). The game feels like classic square because at it's soul it is. Character Design is by the guy that did Chrono and Dragon ball, it almost feels like playing some 3d anime. Combat is nice, you can see your enemies before you attack ala Chrono. If you sneak up behind them you can perform a back dash attack and get the jump on them. The game touts 50 hours of gameplay, and likley more than that if you want to nab all the achievements. Thats ROI on your gaming buck for sheer entertainment value.

The music, while new, again has that midiretropop feel like classic square. Again the music was done by the original music composer of the classic Final Fantasy games. For all intents and purposes this game is Squaresoft reborn.

There is some sort of obsession with poop. First frackin monster you fight is a frackin Poo Monster, and they come in droves after that. Literally a swirling pile of purple poop. There are even achievements dedicated to defeating these pooply mobs. While not the oddest creatures I've seen in a RPG it's still perplexing to say the least. Some sort of subliminal poop is bad message I don't know?

The boss battles feature some un-named 80s big hair style rock. Absolutely does not fit with the game. I don't know if Hironobu Sakaguchi was smoking crack and watching Fast Times or what but defiantly is some of the strangest music I've seen in an RPG.

And that's the rest of the story.

Nova Nova City

EV Nova, the board card sci-fi game came. Now I need people to play it with, one guy at work actually knows what Escape Velocity is so maybe I can sucker him in. Apparently in a fit of sickened internet rage I ordered the booster packs with it. Hoping tommorow after saturday cleaning to hammer a few hours of Blue Dragon.

Is anyone else as excited about Battlestar Galactica Razor as I am, the little clips of previews that have been on Sci-fi send a chill up my spine. I think next week they are starting some 2 minute clip things of the first Cylon War.

Cats have been xtra cute lately, check out the latest shots of them over at our Flickr Page. Nemo is looking handsome as ever.

I'm talkin marty mcsupa fly

I see there is a new TNG Complete series set out now for a discounted price with all new bonus features. That's gotta grind all those folks that dropped $120+ on each season when they first came out. That's the way of the media company's, and the commercial world I suppose. I'd like to see them sell the new features on a disk for those who already own the items. Lotta them would probably be willing to pay 10-20 bucks for them. The new set is a sliver over 300 bones at amazon, I'd like to see it at 250 or less to interest me though. At that price I'd consider it, being a TNG fan. I've been considering picking up DS9 at some point since it's dropped below 300 for the whole shebang so I'm hoping now they will release a DS9 complete set. DS9 is probably some of the best TV ever, full of drama and action. I can watch that shit every night. Something I'd actually get my money's worth out of owning.

I see now there is also a Stargate SG-1 complete series set which seems to be more reasonably priced at around 230 bones, and that's for 10 seasons vs. 7 in the trek set. Defiantly a lotta entertainment in that bundle. After Deep Space Nine, Stargate is probably third best TV after Battlestar Galactica. Speaking of BSG, Razer is coming up. A two hour tv movie to bring us into the 4th season, well actually it's set in a separate time period but will flesh out some of the Pegasus story. Battlestar Galactica Season 1 is releasing on HD-DVD this December and I'll be first in line to pick one of those up, and by line I mean pre-ordered on Amazon since they tend to have the best prices and free super awesome shipping. But man, BSG in HD is drool worthy. Rumor is if Razer does well, they are going to green light a 2 hour pilot movie for Caprica, a prequel show to Battlestar.

Is anyone else stoked about the Orange Box like I am, I have Half-Life 1 for PS2, and rented 2 for the Xbox but never finished it. For 55 bones get updated Half-Life 2, and episodes 1 and 2, and Portal, and Team Fortress 2. That's a hell of a lot of entertainment for very few bones. 1UP says the new 360 version is the definitive version of Half-Life 2, looks fantastic, plays smooth as butta on the muffin. Again, I know you suckers like playin FPS games all cramped up on your desks but I'll take it on the big screen any day kickin back on the comfie couch. Tuned well, console FPS games are just as accurate as with the carpal tunnel inducing Keyboard and Mouse set up and a hell of a lot more fun. Sorry kids, that's how it rollskatcity.

T-minus under a month for trip to Universal Studioskatcity.

I caught the death, damn kids comin from all over the world to Grinnell, prolly brought back SARS again from cuba or something. Since I'm in almost every building during the week, I get exposed to all the fanwuboulous germs theys spreadin around.

Go Mike Gravel.

More than Meets the Eye

Some of you may remember the hawt Michael Bay movie from this summer, Transformers. It's coming out on HD-DVD, and that's a movie that is meant to be watched in HD. It's a movie I might watch a few times so I pre-ordered it from amazon. I see Transformers 2 is slated for 2009, crank thems sequels out quickins. I suspect the second won't have the same "bang" as the first.

Send me 10 more hours in the day, I need to play Blue Dragon and Eternal Sonata yet and they's is both biggins long games.

Escape Velocity Nova

Picked up the EV Nova Card game. See how it is. If I like it mebby I'll grab some of the xpacs. I've been watching it for a couple years now. I'm sure it was a niche seller, since the game was pretty much a niche game. Figured better grab it before this piece of gaming is gone for good. Check out the Computer Games by Ambrosia Software too. They are top notch.

LameStop City

Well Gamestop is running a Tiered promo right now, just of it is trade in 5 or more games and get 30% bonus credit. Stacks with EDGE for another 10%. I normally throw most my games up on Goozex but I had quite a few games that had dozens of copies available on Goozex without many requests so I figured was a good time to unload. Anyway, went to the local un-lame Gamestop (still freaks me out every time I go in). The nice, knowledgeable manager lady/girl/woman was there we talked Wii for a bit. Oh man I unloaded the Spongebob game for Wii, that game was shit, looked like a PS1 game. Odd since the cube games were decent. Developers have been thinking oh the Wii is a free pass to make shit, well guess what suckers, it isn't. Make a good game it will sell, Metroid, Resident Evil, Elebits, etc...

Shit right, back to the story. I unloaded a few games with 40% bonus credit and netted about 100 bucks in credit. Pre-ordered Mario Galaxy (i know I normally don't pre order at lame stop but I had the credit) and still had 45 bones or so in credit left. Mebby will come in handy when Mass Effect or Ace Combat comes out. Phuck, too many really awesome games in such a short period of tyme.

On my list of games to play, well the first ones that come to mind anyway. There's a stack of 30 or 40 on the shelf yet.......

Blue Dragon (have)
Eternal Sonata (have)
Metroid Prime 3 (getting)
Mass Effect (getting) - Also need to read the book which I have.
Lost Odyssey (getting)
Ace Combat 6 (getting)
Galactic Civilizations II (have)
Command and Conquer 3 Mac (have)
Avernum 2-4 and Geneforge 2-4 (have)

Intense Flavor

Beat BioShock tonight, Phuck Fontaine is kinda hard. I had to go back a bit and nab some more money for First Aid's, actually once I was stocked on those he was easy pickins. Couple security bot plasmids and a few propane tank things to the face made short work of him. Apparently since I was harvesting Lil Sisters for ADAM I got the "bad" ending, I won't spoil the surprise for those who haven't beaten it yet but I'll say this, it's one hell of a twist. Gunna trade it in for Mario Galaxy I suppose.

Thats service baby

Well Rakdette's keyboard and mouse suddenly stopped working last night. I figured something came loose, after work today I made a concierge appointment online for 8:30ish and we headed to Des Moines. Thats hot right there, make a genius bar appointment from home. Anyway we ate at famous daves, went to the apple store around 8, milled around for a while. They took a look said I know what's wrong it's not loose it's broken we can fix it right now if you can wait a bit. BAM waited, hashed with employees, they were imaging for the night as the store was closing up. Talked to the lady for a while said bam, we want Nanos. Picked up 2 nanos, a red and a blue one for me and Rakdette respectively. My nano will get sent to her sister, hand me down ipod city. Here's a terrible shot from photo booth.

The end is finally near.

I'm on the final level of Bioshock. Just need to hamphuck Fontaine and I'll be done. lotta crazy twists and turns in the plot. I stand by my opinion that this game is for sure best game this year, possibly best game this decade. I'm in love with the art deco style, and I'll be sad when it's done but cripes it's one hell of a ride for 15-20 hours of your life. Must play game, pretty much your life is meaningless having not played this game.

Road, where we're going we don't need roads

Well we r taking a big ol trip next month. Greece is under a state of emergency right now so not heading there, but if we don't spend that wedding cash on a honeymoon it'll get spent on something else. We're heading to Orlando to go to Universal Studios and some other events. We've booked 4 days on site as well as 10 days of a car rental so we can take our sweet ass time visiting various locals on the way down and back. Staying on site at partner hotel Doubletree at the entrance to the facilities. We are attending the Halloween bash where we'll get some face time with the greats of horror, Jason, Leatherface, Freddy, and more. Got a couple meal tickets that provide all day meals for a couple days so we don't have to mr wong burger dick around getting meals. Probably head to City walk for a night get a nice meal there. Who knows where else we'll go. Expect thousands of pictures on flickr apon our return

Pink is the new um...Pink

The wife says she wants one of the upcoming pink Xbox 360 controllers, I could use a couple more so I'll pick one up when amazon has them for 15 bucks off.



In other news, our pink pan set from Amazon came smashed all to phuck, lids shattered, solid steel pans twisted like they were rubber. Amazon is sending new ones but did UPS drive a truck over this shit?

Command & Conquer 3

We went to Jordan Creek Mall and Target tonight to get a few halloween decorations. Got some LED orange and purple lights, as well as some indoor things. We lost most of our halloween decs to mold via a broken snowglobe in the fall decorations tote. Swung by the apple store to grab C&C3. Bought a couple copies of it and some ipod in ear headphones. It's crazy now, no checkouts. You just find a guy and he scans your shit n pulls a bag out of his butt. Literally. Emailed me the receipt. Crazy. C&C is copying right now, 6 friggin gigs, must be all thems videos. Nemo just dropped a bomb mega style. Oh lord, the whole apartment Nemo has stunk up. Enjoy a shot of my new C&C3.

HD-DVD

I took the plunge and picked up and

HD-DVD drive

for my 360. Most of the stuff I'm wanting to watch in HD is coming out on the HD-DVD side, namely BSG and Star Trek. For a couple hundred bucks its not a huge price for the next gen device, and my cable is sorely lacking in HD content. Til the end of the month you get 5 free HD-DVD disks so that brings the price down pretty low. I picked it up at the local Gamestop, there's a nice fella in there who doesn't try to shill shit on me. The other girl is pretty nice too. Maybe it's because it's not in a mall but they aren't douches in there. I'll post later on how it works for me. Also got the

mass effect book

, it's a prequel to the game coming out in a couple months.

DragonCon

I'm about halfway through BioShock, it's just such an engrossing, visceral experience. Simply an amazing game. Hard to understand how the minority of folks think its not a good game. Clearly they haven't actually played it. When I'm done with it I might play it through again to rescue the lil sisters and get the "good" ending.

Picked up

Blue Dragon

,

Harry Potter

, and

Galactic Civilizations

today at the local Lamestop. In this one's defense the guy and gal in there never harass me about anything, and are usually pretty up to day on their gaming news. The one in Marshalltown is typical LameStop push push push. Blue Dragon is a classic J-RPG from the masters of the Genre. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the original creator of Final Fantasy has crafted this tale. Should be good.

Harry Potter is for Rakdette, no interest in it myself.

Galactic Civilizations, well I've swooned over it for some time but I tend not to buy Windows games so I never picked it up. In light of the recent BioShock RootKit/DRM fiasco I took it apon myself to reward a company (Stardock) that not only made a great game but threw conformity to the wind and released it like it used to be, just a simple serial code and you don't even have to have the disk in. I also dropped them a letter praising them for their pro-consumer stance and also requested Mac support in future endeavors. They wrote back quickly thanking me for my letter and hoped I would enjoy the game. Of note, the 360 version of the game is the superior version, no DRM, and controls smooth as butta. And I can trade off the game when I'm done vs. the DRM fatality of the Windows version. Which I will be trading it off on

Goozex

fer

Metroid Prime 3

.

Bill Brasky Part Deux.

Full report on trip to Omaha. We left aprox. 2ish for Newton where we signed our lease for the next year and were off onto Hwy. 80 for the several hour trip to Omaha. Lodging was booked at a nearby Howard Johnson @ 55 dollars a night. Should have known that was too cheap. Like the Olympia Resort, on the outside it looks nice, the convention center facilities are very nice too. Take the elevator up and you get to a very rundown hallway to our room. Maybe our section was more run down than others I don't know, our "budget" room overlooked the roof and some satellite dishes. At least there was free wireless net, well who doesn't have free wireless net these days. Starbucks thats whoo, 9 bucks a day for net! Give me a break, Taco Johns has free wireless net. No Joke.

We settled in and scoped out some delivery fliers, apparently a lot of places delivered via this third party service called

u8yet

, which had a website you could order on. More on that l8ter. We decided to checkout the hotel bar and have a brew, 1.75 pints so not bad at all. We ordered a Nacho plate and 2 beers which somehow came out to 6.50 even though the nachos were listed at $ 5.95. I wasn't complaining. After a while we wandered back to the room thought we should get some final supper and go swimming, so we ordered a couple gyros on the

U8YET

website. After 20 minutes I called up the service, what's that old lady on the phone. You don't actually check the website orders? Why do you have website for ordering then. All over your advertising materials. Whatever woman get me a Gyro and Chicken Gyro and get them here 20 minutes ago. Eventually and old guy delivered the goods from who knows what greek hut, there seemed to be an abundance of them. While the meats were flavorfully spiced, the

tzatziki

sauce tasted more like a ranch sauce than anything. Anyway swimming was had, pool was 9 feet deep, pretty deep for a hotel pool. Hot tub wasn't as warm as I would have liked.

The next day we got up, wandered down to the breakfast room for the infamous Howard Johnson "Rise n Dine" breakfast, well there was a couple of bagels and the obligatory waffle machine. What's that? Why no there wasn't coffee or juice, just a note saying No coffee or juice today sorry the management. Also we didn't get our USA today delivered to our door as stated on the website, but whatever. They can't afford coffee how can they afford newspapers.

A Denny's was scoped out a mere 3 minute drive down the 10 lane road of death and soon we were feasting on juice and Moons over some sort of Hammys. Anyway we made it to the zoo, bypassed the main entrance because we are members of the Des Moines Zoo which means we get a half priced reciprocal entrance. And off we went. This place is huge. Also had the hugest grandaddy seal of them all. They have a 70 foot walk through aquarium which we spent a good 15 minutes in watching the sharks, and fish, and rays, and sharks, and small children getting eaten by sharks. Amazing. There's some shots at the

flickr

page but the lighting and environment were less than ideal for getting a good shot. Certainly one that portrays the grand awesomeness of this aquarium. The desert Biodome was pretty neat too.

Needless to say we were there for many hours, and apon leaving were famished and feet were tired as hell. Went back to the hotel for a quick dip in the pool and to scope out dinner plans. We located a place called

Spagettii Works

on Google Maps and were off on another whirlwind adventure. Place was good, had a good salad bar with your meal and reasonable prices. Wanting to walk off some of our pasta escapades we sought out and found a mall to wander a bit, eventually purchasing some food and goods for Nemo's birthday at a nearby Petco or Petsmart....one of those two, who knows.

Alas the vacation was coming to all to short of an end. It was now Sunday, the day of departure back home. But not without a few more adventurous stops. We had heard of a place called

Dave and Busters

many times on the TV, but alas had never been near one til now. There was one a mere 10 minute drive away. They didn't open til 11:30 and it was only 10:30, no fear back to that mall area there was a Borders that we could browse and have a sip o non Starbucks coffee. Right was we went in there was a book, that had a cat on the front.

Intrigued I swooped in for a closer look. Alas could it be? A book, no a series of books about the secret lives of cats with wars and clans and mystical legends? Neat, yoink, grabbed. Patches always sneaks behind the couch through the end table and I often comment that she saw the Cat Signal and is going to the Cat Cave, her secret high tech crime fighting lair.

We should have grabbed coffee right then and there but noooo we had to venture forth in search of Star Trek Deep Space Nine books as we are amidst collecting and reading the DS9 Relaunch books. What's that over there, on the end of the shelves display by the Sci-Fi section. Neil Gaiman, you wrote more books than Stardust? Interesting. SWOOPED. Another book in the bag.

That's enough books for one day you say, well but we haven't even made it to the star trek section yet! My lord, they had the hugest trek section I'd ever seen usually it's just a row maybe two of books but here it was column after column. The wife quickly pointed out that we had Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine Book 3 but not 1 or 2, which they had both of them here. Well that won't do, how can we read book 3 with out 1 and 2. Grab Grab.

At this point our hands were starting to get full of books. But then a BIG HUGE FAT one caught my eye. Is it, no, really? The omnibus edition of the first 5 books in the relaunch, even though I had the first 3 I still needed the other two which are sorta hard to come by these days especially the last novella. Well it's settled Twist of Faith was to be grabbed and the books I had would be thrown up on

Book Mooch.

At this point we were over burgeoned with books and headed toward a register, but not before my damn wandering eye caught the Jim Butcher section, more specifically Fool Moon, the second Dresden Files book which I needed as I had books 1, 3, and 4. POW, you've been booked.

Finally we made it to the register, swiped our Borders Rewards card and took our bounty to the coffee shop to get tanked on mochas and discuss our latest book acquisitions.

(For more information on my tastes in books check out my library @

Library Thing

)

Soon after we left and swong by a place called

Gamers

. There is one in Des Moines over by the Zoo that I always see but never had stopped. So here we did. Pretty nice place, reasonable prices and they carried shluff back to the NES. Lots of games and goodies and pretty helpful staff. Games were in far better condition than Gamestop and the staff was far less pushy. I might have picked something up but having just spent 70 bucks on books and coffee I refrained. As quick as we came off we were to finally hit

Dave n Busterbots.

We got there and looked around, the place was big, bigger than I had expected and the dining area was classier than I thought too. What's this sign, no kids with out an adult, awwwww yea teh adult gamer's place to play. They had a great deal called eat and play. Choose one of 8 entrees and get a 10 dollar game play card for 15.99 or double your fun get an entree and 20 dollars game play for 23.99. We got a couple of the 23.99 deals because we were gunna game anyway, and eat anyway. Might as well do both. I had a chicken parmesan with chunky sauce. Huge plate of food, just because it was a deal package didn't mean they were going to skimp on the plate size I guess. We ate, talked with our waiter, who was fantastically attentive keeping my iced tea full and letting us know about the midway games, arcade games, TVs, and other entertainment items available. The midway games gave tickets, you know the carnies tickets only you could get neat stuff. We played a few arcade games and several rounds of skeeball. We ended up playing this coin drop game that somehow we had gotten the timing down to get it to drop coins. Which in turn shot out 8 tickets per coin pushed off. We ended up with over 2500 tickets (and more in my pocket apparently as I am home now and found some in my pocket) and headed to claim our bounty. We grabbed two actually glass pint glasses and two shot glasses, leaving us with 1500 tickets yet. They store them on your game card so I guess we'll have to go back to Omaha sometime.

Finally came home, petted the cats, gave them their gifts, and passed out from a loooonnnng, but fun weekend.

Back from Bill Brasky

We just returned from Nebraska, Omaha style. Lots was seen, lots was done, places were shopped at. I'll have a full report later. Right now I'm posting 500 or so photos to

flickr

.