Hey there, I haven't put anything in this here blog for a while, so I thought I might do that just now. I've been thinking I'ma gonna start writing reviews for games I beat from now on, not because I need something to do, it's just that I seem to spend more time lurking on the intarwebs than I intend. I feel that if i'm gonna be on here, I might as well spend the time doing something constructive, to make something that someday - somewhere - might help the wee folks of the land. It's for the chillins, dammit. Chillins that play games like RE4... and F.E.A.R.... and Bloody Gore Scary Mess: Age of Piss Your Pants. Naw..... I pLaY oThEr GaMeS tOo.... good'uns IMHO.

Currently just got addicted to drooling over VC games, and wishing that Wii Points lay around on sidewalks like pennies. Haven't really bought anything on it until just this week cuz I pretty much already had all the good stuff in touchy-feely form prior to the Wii dropping the bomb. PLZ EARTHBOUND ON VC PLZPLZPLZ zOMG NINTENDII!!!!plz!!

Edit: WOO! Actually just got Earthbound in cartridge form yesterday with store credit at McVan's (mcvan's kikz). And my gamertag is Ninja Tendo. LAWLZ eat it xbox community, i still love the big-N.

I felt inspired to do this just cause I like documenting lists. Don't know why, but when I start listing things in my head, I can't finish them until I see them written down. I might change these lists sometime down the road when I think about them more, cause like I said, right now, these are coming off the top of my head.

Top Games of 2005 (i've got no real order for these, just noting the best ones of the year. 'cept for RE4. that was definetely the best.):

Resident Evil 4 (GCN)

Devil May Cry 3 (PS2)

Shadow of the Colossus (PS2)

Killer 7 (GCN)

Dragon Quest VIII (PS2)

Zelda: The Minish Cap (GBA)

Metal Gear Acid (PSP)

Bunch o' DS games (Castlevania: DoS, Advance Wars DS, Kirby: CC, Mario Kart, Animal Crossing, Trace Memory, Trauma Center)

Those were the most notable ones from last year. Just callin'em as I see'em. Shadow of the Colossus was close to the top. I loved that game so much, as did I Killer 7, Dragon Quest and DMC3.

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These were the top five movies released last year in my opinion. I'm only basing this list on the movies I saw, and that were in theatres, cause there were some other good ones that weren't in theatres (mostly some international movies). 'Cept for Advent Children, cause that's one of the best movies I've ever seen. Here's the list:

5. Steamboy

4. Howl's Moving Castle

3. Serenity

2. Sin City

1. Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children

Advent Children was at the top, and not because I'm fan-boying all over it, it's because it was an incredible movie. It had amazing production values, incredible fight scenes, thought proving images and symbols, and it oozed with story and emotion. It also proved one of the things that I had believed for a long time now. Video games have the potential to connect you to a story, to a world, and to certain characters more than any other form of media in our culture right now. Advent Children proved this fact beyond doubt. Because I personally went through the same hardships, joys, experiences of the characters in FFVII when I played it, that game experience connected me to each one of those people and events and each one of their stories more than any movie or TV show would have done. And because I did play the game first, I felt so much more during Advent Children than I would have if there was no game at all. It was a good movie along with the game, but not only because of the game. It my have concluded some of the events from the game, but it also opened a whole new chapter for the characters. At the core, the game was about Cloud confronting his past and identity, and AC was about him moving on to find his future. They both also had amazing stories involving the events in the imaginative world outside of the conflicts surrounding Cloud. Kinda like Evangelion. The story was really about the characters and their paths to identity, but the physical events involved in the story were steller as well. Advent Children proves that some of the most emotionally driven stories can be best delivered and conveyed through video games, because they connect to the audience on a completely different level than anything out there. I hope more creators take notice of this and start helping video games live up to their true potientials, as a few creative pioneers have already started to do in the past 15 years. .................................. Aside from what I just said, some honorable mentions for movies were High Tension; Good Night, and Good Luck; and Aeon Flux. Also, this movie came out in a small number of theatres December 2004, and I caught it on DVD last year, so I'm going to count it in there. The movie's called A Tale of Two Sisters, and it's a Korean horror film, but its one of the best movies I've seen in a long while also. Check it out on the Tartan Asian Extreme DVD version and you won't be dissapointed. It's got great horror, amazing psychological themes, and some incredible images and symbols that tie into Asian mythology if you're keen on that stuff and can look farther into things than just face value. It's also just a damn good movie. Also check out Audtion if you like Japanese horror (lotta thinking outside the box for that movie, along with the creative Japanese take on horror). Alright, I'm done. Send a comment over this way if you care to agree or disagree with me, or not if you don't want to. Just had to get this out of my head and down somewhere else.

it seems that all i'm driven to do in these stupid journal posts is complain, and i'm sorry about this fact, but this has to be said. this is my epic saga of the PSP and me. i hated sony before this whole fiasco, but this whole thing increased this initial feeling ten-fold. so i got a PSP about 3 weeks after launch, and to my knowledge, sony had only sold 500,000 - 600,000 units by that time, promising the first million PSPs would come with a UMD of spider-man 2. i asked the clerk if it was in the box, and he said that it was definietly in there. turns out it wasn't. he must have been talking about the crappy disc of "hot hip-hop mp3s" and 20-second video demos of games i don't want to play. oh well, i'll give them that one, seeing as how i didn't care about watching the movie on my PSP, because watching a movie on a small handheld screen with tiny speakers definitly DOES NOT beat the s**t out of paying less to watch the same movie on DVD with a big screen and better sound. so i say screw the UMD movies, and let's get to the "acclaimed multi-media functions" in this "handheld powerhouse". i think of putting a coupla cds on the memory card, so i can put the headphones (which are totally rip-offs of the ipod headphones btw) in my ears at work and not have to listen to the mind-numbing drone of copiers and printers while i'm folding or filing for hours on end. so i grab a USB cable in my computer room, and find that it doesn't fit. I look in the PSP manual, and it says i need a special variation of the USB cable to connect to the computer, called a mini-B type. how f***ing "universal." I call Staples, they say they have one for $20, and they're closing in a half an hour. I scrounge around my house for change, seeing as how i'm broke-ass cause i had just spent $350 on a thing that i'm going to spend another $20 bucks to actually use, cursing sony for not including this in the $250 bundle. I rush over to Staples, and buy the cable, explaining my current woes to the unfortunate check-out attendant who had to count $20 in change. I know he secretely hates sony now as well. I get back, connect the PSP to my computer, and when i try to load the music, i now have found that windows media player has secretely been importing all of my music as .wma files, a special file that only works in windows media player and nothing else. i was under the impression they were being imported as .mp3 files, which the PSP and everything else but windows media player uses. I scan the options, and find that you have to manually go in and set the "rip music" settings to import as .mp3s and not .wma's. no program online converts .wma's to .mp3s unless you want to shell out money for some software. That's when i find (after an hour of searching and researching) that iTunes has a simple function that converts any file to .mp3s. Thanks Mac for being awesome, and no f***ing thanks to Microsoft for being annoying, inconvenient, and generally a**holes. (oh and btw, the lowest quality mp3 file sounds 10x better than the lowest quality .wma file, even though the mp3 file takes up less memory. f*** you Microsoft.) so i finally try to put a cd on the PSP, but to no avail. it seems the pissy little 32mb memory card that came in the $250 bundle can't even hold one of my cds. i could almost fit one of my cds on if i deleted my game save files, but then i decided that would be dumb as hell. i could buy a bigger memory card if i shell out more money, say $80 dollars for a 512mb card, or maybe even another $130 dollars for a 1GB memory card, but f*** that. so i say screw the music, and try out loading pictures on the damn thing. I attempt to load every comic strip on vgcats.com (go there only if you want to laugh alot) but many of the early ones were .mpg, and the PSP only takes .jpg files. so i search for another convertor file, finding one that only converts 5 files at a time unless you buy it, being the opposite of user friendly, and leaves alot of empty memory on the file, so i couldn't fit them on the tiny memory card. then i remember EGM had a note in one of their magazines about a cool free program to upload photos on the PSP called PSPhoto. I download it, having to download a microsoft service pack with new .dll files to use it (dammit Microsoft), and it works great. you drag the pictures or file, no matter what format, into it, and it automatically uploads them to your memory card with the perfect size and resolution, and very very small memory space. my props got to the creators of that program (people who find ways to get around a**hole corporations rock.) so something finally indirectly worked. now on to the games. i bought metal gear acid and darkstalkers cronicle with my PSP (that hurt watching $350 ring up on the register). i beat metal gear acid with 36 hours on the clock at the end, and that game rocked very much. i love metal gear. darkstalkers cronicle was a very good compilation of a great fighting series with many unlockables for fans such as me. both those games kicked. now it is august and i still have only 2 games for my PSP. every other game on the system sucks. I want 2, maybe 3, more games for the PSP over the next year from now. what impressive library are people talking about? i've had way more fun with 10+ games on the DS then having to deal with that piece of crap PSP. the hardware sucks btw. the battery life is short, the square button feels like crap, i had 4 dead pixels on the screen when i bought it, and i feel like it is going to break if i sneeze. oh, and i forgot to mention the entire problem that prompted me to write this whole thing. I turn on my PSP last week, happily ready to update my memory card with the latest VGcats comic, when i notice something is wrong with my screen. by wrong i mean that there is a giant vertical band of randomly colored pixels about an inch wide going down the middle of the screen. it's unplayable now, and i have to deal with sending it in to get it replaced (if they'll even replace it). i don't want to deal with that thing anymore, but i've already spent so much f***ing money on it, i can't. you can't even use the damn thing's other features unless you shell out more money to sony, but you need to ask yourself, would i even want to? i hate f***ing corporations for what they do, like what microsoft and sony are doing to the gaming industry. They are giant corporations that make games as a side thought, just using games to fill their pockets. They don't care about the products or satisfying the gamer, as long as you buy it and they get your money. They can make the crappiest hardware out there (which sony does) and they don't care, because they'll still sell it, and if people catch on and stop buying it, they won't care also, because they'll make money in another department of their empire. They're just taking advantage of the gamer's willingness to play good games. think about how sh*tty the hardware was for the ps1 and the ps2, disc-read errors and having to stand consoles on their sides to get them to work. the xbox power cords catch on fire, and the laser stop reading discs after a while. they don't care, because they know that they'll keep selling and keep fattening their wallets. that's why i admire nintendo, and as well as sega once. gaming is all they do, so if they make a mistake, they willl suffer. they won't make up their money somewhere else, because gaming is all they are. why do you think nintendo products are so freakin' durable and user-friendly? i don't understand how people put up with being treated like backwards whores. sony and microsoft screw us, then take our money. so f*ck you microsoft and f*ck you sony. i'll post updates of how my endeavors proceed with the rest of the PSP disaster, because i know it won't get better. not until people start seeing the truth.