... and why I won't be able to post this tomorrow, for obvious reasons.

This is just a quick message to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Here's to hoping that you have an awesome day, and that you're wishes come true. Though, most importantly, don't forget the reason we're celebrating it!

See you on the other side.

Well I'd never thought I'd play this game, like, ever! T'was my brothers, and he usually never lets me play anything of his. Really.

You should know by now that I've had a Wii for a while and, luckily, I'm missing out on the drought. (At least the one in the UK, I'm not sure how the rest of the western world is coping.) So with school finishing for the Christmas break next week and me only having one exam to revise for, I decided to sneak in my brother's room and 'borrow' Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. Now I played the original Paper Marion on the N64, and seemed to be one of the few who got it, so I was glad to see that the gameplay elements haven't changed all that much. You've still got the turn-based, audience-occupied fight scenarios that make you think before you act and you've still got a few party members to choose from. (Bit of a spoiler here, but the Yoshi - who I named Junior - is pretty darn awesome.) I love the fact that you can wear badges that give you the edge over your opponents, but you then have to guage how much you need to wear against how much you can wear - the former being the most important obviously. You can also still run, jump and do any other wacky things that Mario can do in 2D form. Talking of wacky things, it was pretty sweet how they've now introduced abilities like the aeroplane and the tube roll which - even though they're event-specific - are a pretty neat tool that add some spice to the game.

Graphically Paper Mario is what you'd expect. There's a mixture of 2D and 3D in there, though the latter is still made so that it blends in with the laid-back feel that PM creates. It ain't anthing close to today's standards, which you should expect, though it's still a clean game that doesn't seem to have any graphical hiccups. All the character models are 2D aswell, and it's nice to see slick animation coupled with that. You can still interact with them in the ways you would expect in any other RPG, and the 2D aspect seems to be purely something that fits in with the paper theme.

I'm more than half-way through it (there are seven Crystal Stars and I've got four, go figure) so I should have it done a couples of weeks time. I've just finished Twilight Town which was crap, though Glitzville how to be my favorite so far. I would also like to know: are there more than the four party members in the game? I know there's one you can get by helping her/him out via the message board thingy, though I assumed there were only ever four.

Oh and I'm getting Mass Effect and Super Mario Galaxy for Christmas in case you wanted to know.

Ever heard if it, no? Well, it's interesting, to say the least.

If you've never been one to type blogs and talk about real-life issues, or something that relates to your interests and/or the website that you are posting on, then you may have found the solution - providing you own an Xbox 360. It only takes a couple of days and in that time you X360 will find out what games you play most often, when you play them, how many achievements you picked up and how many points you gained in a particular day. And it doesn't just list them, it actually publishes it in a human-like manner, with punctuation and whatnot.

I was also wondering: does anybody know how this works? Well, aside from that fact that your X360 collects data, how does it actually do it?

You can find my 360 blog here.