Well, the semifinals are now on us. Predictably, some of the most memorable heroes and heroine in gaming history has arrived up to here.

I am still quite surprised that Gordon Freeman can prevail, even against Ryu, though I did not discount a victory. After all, Ryu does have a lot of unfortunate cultural baggage with him, as mentioned earlier. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that he can prevail against Link, who is taciturn, but otherwise has much, much more character than Gordon Freeman can ever have - if Valve still (& likely would) continues to ignore his character development. In fact, one would think that Gordon only got this far because of hilarious fan-made nonsense that actually gave him character - very off-canon character, mind you, but character nonetheless.

(Click on the pictures to be directed to the YouTube videos of a couple of these infamous fan-made nonsense.)

As for Samus VS Mario, I find it quite unfortunate that one of gaming's best heroines would be put up so early against who is undoubtedly the best-performing video game protagonist ever to date. Hopefully, there would be a third place match.

Now to other matters...

I have just finished Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. I would say that this game has a heck lot more detail on its characters than those of any other game characters that I have seen, such as those in Wolfenstein, of which I am playing now. I would have posted an image of Bound in Blood here, but I appear to have forgotten to do so.

Why have I forgotten? Well, as aesthetically pleasing the game is, I am not one for Wild West stories. I only rented the game as GameSpot actually gave it a good score - and it deserves it. The single player campaign is quite exciting, and Ray and Thomas are both so fun to play that I played the campaign through twice using either in alternating levels. The unique boss fight mechanic is not necessarily very good (as has been lampooned by certain quarters - especially Escapist Magazine), but it does feel quite a lot like what it should be - one-shot-kill duels.

(Though yours truly exploited this one-shot-kill gimmick by simply shooting at the crotch of most opponents. Their groins happen to be the first thing the cursor lands on, so most enemies died by horribly crude neutering.)

On the other hand, the weapons, as authentic as they are, are the reasons why this game - and the Wild West genre - will never be memorable enough for me. After having had used so many more practical, engineering-wise, video game weapons, the ones in Call of Juarez just felt clumsy and slow. But this is just a very personal reason, so you may want to ignore this (and this won't appear in my review of this game either).

The real objective reason why I won't treasure this game is the lousy incentives to replay the game, of which I will describe in detail in the review later.