I've never been someone who enjoys selling stuff, or getting rid of it, but today I just had to sell one of my consoles.

Unsurprisingly, it was my Wii.

I got one about a week after the launch date, and all was good for a while, with me playing wii sports a ton. I also got red steel and Zelda: TP, both of which were just terrible to me. Wii sports was the only Wii game I could play over and over again. Even then, it got boring after about a month.

Time went on and there were very few games I wanted for the console. It spent most of it's time being a gamecube, until No more Heroes came out. That game was a fantastic game, if a bit repetitive, but still remains my favourite wii game to this day. More time went on, and the Wii was being used as a gamecube again. I picked up Super Mario Galaxy a good while after it launched, and it was good fun for a while, but I've never been a fan of the 3D Mario games, so I stopped playing it a little bit into it. After this. the Wii was packed up and stored in my cupboard, only ever being taken out to play Gamecube games every now and then.

A few months ago, I noticed that the Wii had some very good games on its virtual console. I'm really mad for retro games, so I would have loved to have tried this out, but after buying a LAN adaptor, the console just refused to go online. I spent countless hours trying to find out what the hell was wrong with it, and I tried countless solutions to fix it, but to no avail. In the end, I put it down to the adaptor being a no name cheap one. I bought an official Nintendo one a few days later, and the problem still persisted. I spent ages trying to fix it, but in the end I gave up, and the Wii was put back into the cupbpoard again. A little while after that I got two new games, one which was moderately enjoyable, but nothing spectacular. Again the Wii was back in the cupboard, until yesterday.

On my way home from college a couple of days ago, I passed a gamestation shop and noticed a sign in their window. It said they were desperately seeking Nintendo Wii's and would pay £120 in cash for one of them. I didn't think too much of it at the time, but I got to thinking about it a little later, and was considering going through with it. I asked my friend for his opinion on it, and he basically said to me: "You've barely played your Wii, and you probably won't play it much in the future. It'd be best to sell it." I agreed with him, and I'd heard rumours of a price drop coming soon, so I might not get another deal like this again, and if I ever wanted a Wii again, I could buy one at the end of the generation for cheap.

So yeah, I sold my Wii today, and got £120 which can be used when I go away for a week in a couple of weeks. It fel kinda weird at the time, but I doubt I'll regret selling it.

On a brighter note, I played Halo: ODST today and it's really good. I had absolutely no interest in this game at all, but it still has that addicting gameplay that the others have, so I pre ordered it. I haven't played my 360 in ages, not since Fable 2, so this will be a good chance to play it again. I might even get Xbox Live back.

First let me start by saying music is my life (Cliche as hell... I know) but it's true. I never did very well in school, but I made a point to do my best when it came to music class. I did well and managed to get a top grade which allowed me to go to college to study music. Again I made a point to do well in this course and so I passed it and got into a higher music class, of which I just had my induction day today and start properly on Monday.

One thing that I really liked about my first year in college was the musical diversity among my classmates. So many people having so many musical tastes. Because of this, the subject was always interesting, but one thing I really liked about the people is that they were all very tolerant of other peoples music tastes. These people were all very serious about music and instead of hating something they hadn't heard, they would be interested in it. There were a few that weren't quite as tolerant as others, but the vast majority of the class were very cool about it. I learned so much from this. I never really hated on music much anyway, but my mind was fairly closed when it came to other genres of music. I didn't hate on them, but I didnt care about them. as the year went on, I started listening to more and more music to a point where I say I have no musical taste nowadays because I can listen to pretty much anything and enjoy it.

The point of this blog is more of a rant about how annoyed the people of these forums make me when it comes to musical taste. So much bashing and hateful comments about other people music tastes, and just bashing of artists in general. I came from that thread where Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy was arrested. The comments in there irritated me so much that I had to write this blog post. It wasn't that the TC referred to him as a rock Legend that got me, it was the hateful ignorant comments made by people calling him "untalented" and other people bashing him. I'm all for opinions, but when people start hating, it annoys me. call him untalented if you want, but your standards of talent must be pretty high if you think a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and music producer is untalented. Sure his songs aren't that technical - the older ones aren't, but newer ones are much more so, but that shouldn't matter. Music is a way of expressing ones self and sometimes simpler songs can express much more than songs that are too technical. I feel this way myself. When I write music, I could go and make a song that is technical, but sometimes I feel like I'm writing a song that is technical for the sake of technical, I feel like I have to prove to people that I can write this stuff, but sometimes choose not to. I find that simpler songs for me can just say much more sometimes. If I'm writing a song to go along with a story, then it will definitely be more progressive, but if I'm writing about my feelings, then I'll keep it short a simple. I'm sure plenty of musicians feel the same.

Ugh.. I've rambled way too much and haven't even gotten to the main reason I blogged this. All of this got me to thinking back a few years when my mind was very closed musically and the only bands I listened to were Green Day, Fall Out Boy, Blink 182 and others like them. I used to get a lot of crap here from other users about how my taste in music was. I used to get insulted a lot aswell. This affected me a lot, to a point where I stay as far away from threads about music as possible. Even outside of the internet like during my induction day today, I was asked to say my fabourite band infront of my new class, and I said it was Green Day. I kept thinking the class would judge my musical ability based on my favourite band. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't.

One thing I really hate about when I write blog posts is that I ramble too much, to a point where I completely forget what the hell I'm talking about. Either way, I needed to get this off my chest. I guess I just hate it when people insult bands because they dislike their music. There are many bands I wouldn't listen to, but I'd never insult them or make ignorant comments about them unless they were genuinely bad people. It's just sad to come from college where people are so tolerant to here, where people are the opposite.

Keep in mind I'm not talking about everybody here, I've just noticed a lot of them over the years.

Also, Please don't think this blog post is condescending or anything, because it's definitely not intended to be that way.

Often when playing certain games, mainly JRPG's, there's a design decision that angers me to no end. I'm talking about having to continue from the last saved game whenever there's a game over. I'm pretty sure anyone who has played a JRPG has has this happen to them. There's nothing worse than playing a game for a few hours, then dying and having to start from your last saved game. If a game has plenty of save points close to each other, then this isn't much of a problem, but one game I'm playing right now is just so bad for this. The game is called Persona 3, and yes, I have just had a game over, and yes, I am extremely annoyed.

In persona 3, one of the things you have to do to progress in the game is to climb a seemingly endless tower called "Tartarus". You go from floor to floor in this tower fighting enemies and opening chests until you reach a checkpoint. Once this checkpoint has been reached, the player can return to the bottom floor to heal, save or go about school life until they are ready to reach the next checkpoint. The player can also use a teleporter to return to a previous checkpoint or bottom floor, however, they lose any progress they've made from the previous checkpoint, and if the player has just climbed 15 floors, then the last thing they want to do is do it again.

I was having fun playing Persona 3. I had just reached a very powerful boss who quickly wiped out my team, and so I figured my team needed some training. I returned to level 49 of the tower and started going from floor to floor levelling my characters. After 2 or so hours, my team have levelled up a good bit, and have lost some of their SP (MP), So I decide that one more battle should before I return to the bottom floor, save, heal and then take on the boss. I smack the enemy about a bit, and the fight goes pretty well. It's 3 lions with a ball and chain around one of their legs. They're pretty easy to beat, and I defeat two of them, so their is only one left. I get him down to so little HP that their is nothing left on his bar of health. It had to be around 1 or 2 HP, when he unleashes this insane move called "Strike" something, which wipes out my entire F****** team!! 2 hours of training, only to be wiped out by some damn lion. Persona 3 has an absolutely horrible difficulty. Enemies aren't too difficult, though it's easy to take a good beating by them.

An even more annoying thing about this game is that you get a game over if the main character dies in battle. Now, their is four characters in battle, and team members die all the time, and can be revived, but for some really, really stupid reason, the main character dying gets a game over. Why the hell can't I just revive him?! It's far too easy for the main character to die. All it takes is some unlucky battle with a powerful enemy or a battle where everything goes for him.

I've had plenty of bad experiences with this in Persona 3. So much so, that I'm considering if I ever want to play it again. I've been playing for about 15 hours, and I've died about 10 times. Each time has been really bad, and just made me so mad, because I'd lost an hour or so, but this one has just annoyed me so much, and I know that if I continue playing, then I'll have to do those two hours of training again, and that as I prgress through this "70+" hour game, that it's going to happen a lot more. I'm just letting the games cinamatic before the menu repeat as I write this.

Like I said, a lot of JRPG's have this way of playing. It might have been alright back in the early days of gaming, but why on earth does exist in 2009? Do the developers not realise how afwul it is to put this in their game? Surely gamers all across the world have had an unlucky incident similair to mine happen. There are a good few games nowadays that have removed this. I just recently finished "The world ends with you" and it had a feature where I could continue if I died in battle without going to the last save point. Final Fantasy 12 aswell, I believe, and RE4.

I just think it's something that should have died a long time ago. It wasn't so bad back when I was younger, as I had plenty of time to game, and it didn't phase me as much as it does now that I'm older and have little time to game. The fact that I'm questioning whether I want to continue playing the game should be enough to tell developers that it's not a very good design choice. It's a shame I think this way, because Persona 3 is a damn fine game, that is so good in nearly every area, but If I stop playing then the developer has just lost a sale on Persona 4 which comes out here next month.