Commander Khan is making a fool of himself! Why is he dancing around like a cheerleader!

So yes in case you haven't figured it out I finally conquered Elite Beat Agents on Hard Rock difficulty! This is the highest difficulty setting and has you dancing as the "Elite Beat Divas", female cheerleaders. The mode is very hectic because the hit markers are smaller and the timing to hit them is also decreased, and they appear much faster.

It seems SOOO impossible, but after multiple retries and much crying you'll finally pass it and feel like you've just done the impossible! It took me literally over 10 tries to beat the final stage on Hard Rock mode.

After that you unlock a very cool extra. It's not a new difficulty setting but if you hit the Commander Khan button that appears on the difficutly select menu screen it'll add Commander Khan as the middle dancer! This is hilarious because you've never seen Commander Khan actually dance, or do anything outside of the view cut-scemes that he appears in. GO COMMANDER GO!

If you want to check out my review of Elite Beat Agents, give it a look here.

Elite Beat Agents is pretty much the start of previous games that I had started playing but never either beat or finished. With Elite Beat Agents I of course had beaten the game to write my review, but I never completed it. Now it is conquered! All that's left is to raise my ranking by beating my previous scores on levels. Right now my rank is "Hero's Hero" and I have "44,101,497" points needed to raise to the next rank!

I also finally beat Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition. I had beaten the GameCube version of RE4 before but not the Wii version, so I finally beat that and wrote a review for it, which you can you read on VGB here.

For my review I beat the game on normal and also beat all the extra modes: Assignment Ada, Seperate Ways and the Mercenaries mode. Seperate Ways was an awesome mode. It adds so much to the story with the additional chapters and it's a very long mode, it took me like six hours to beat it! I still want to go through the mode a few times, with the unlockable outfits and guns I've already gotten and then beat it on the Professional difficulty setting.

I do still have a few games that I need to finish though.

I also started playing Lost Planet: Extreme Condition for Xbox 360 which is the first Xbox 360 game that I've played and we've had the system since Thanksgiving or so (Black Friday) and I have yet to really play anything! We also have Assassin's Creed and I can't wait to play that. As well as Conan, which my brother who bought the 360 bought it as a gift for me and i still haven't played it. lol. Which I didn't do on purpose it's just that I've been busy playing other stuff.

I really like Lost Planet so far, it's a very fun game and it's a lot better than I was thinking. Also a lot different, it's more of a shooter and kind of has the feel of a first-person shooter but in third-person, and much different than the aforementioned Resident Evil 4. Strangely, I also find the whole winter/ice/tundra environment to be refreshing. Since it's not an environment you are used to seeing. And then of course you have the massive boss fights which are incredible! My main beef with the game though just comes from personal taste, and that is: I don't care so much for using the mech-like robots. I prefer the on-foot shooting . . .

And last, but definitely not least, I have been playing . . .

Yup! I got Super Smash Bros. Brawl as a gift from a friend who's web-site I am working on (www.playersinformed.com) so I can review it.

The game is AMAZING. The graphics are so much better than what I had expected, it's literally like going from Street Fighter to Street Fighter Alph. The intricate and very busy backgrounds do wonders! It really makes your jaw drop. The single player Adventure Mode is also insane! I've barely touched the service of it as I'm only at like 6%, but my friends boyfriend has been playing it and she says that he played it for over 6 hours and still isn't finished! That boggles my mind.

I also already played an online match with my aforementioned friend (some of you may know her as Angelbabe531) and while it was awesome to finally get to play an online game with her, it really sucked for me because it was SUPER laggy. The lag was so bad that it almost broke the game because you could not do all the timed-based combos and attacks that you would in a normal Smash match. Smash is all about timeing after all.

But hopefully that just depends on the connection and it's not always like that.

I actually wouldn't know because I've avoided ALL reviews and articles on the game as to avoid any and all spoilers. I literally know NONE of the secret characters. But it's time to get busy and down to work to unlock them!

Oh yeah and I almost forgot something else in my excitiment! The other newest game added to my collection it this:

Devil May Cry 4 for Xbox 360! I got this game from Capcom to review for VGB. I've only played the first few missions and my early impression is . . . It's Devil May Cry! Really, surprisingly nothing has changed outside of the visuals. The addition of the Devil Arm is interesting, and it really adds a cool element for battles, but outside of that it's all what you'd expect and doesn't seem to try anything new. But we'll see if that changes later on. I have a feeling it won't though. It's actually kind of funny too considering how much Nero even LOOKS like Dante.

The opening moments of Devil May Cry 4 are AWESOME btw. I mean amazingly awesome. Oh and I do have a major beef. The voices in this game are EXTREMELY low, so low that it's hard to make them out and nearly impossible if there are other sounds/music going on in the background. Thank God for subtitles, but it does surprise me how badly the audio has been mixed. It's very annoying. Might as well not even talk!

And with that I'm off to play some Smash! Take care everyone!

Oh and by the way, if you wanted to read my Turok 2: Seeds of Evil N64 review, which is what I was talking about in my last post, you can give that a look here.

If you have problems connecting to the site btw it's because the server load is insanely high do to so many visitors (over 200) reading the site at once, mainly the Super Smash Bros. Brawl articles! So try again later.

Turok 2: Seeds of Evil. You may know the name, but probably haven't played the game.

It is the sequel to the best-selling Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on N64 (You can also find both games for the PC) and I'm playing through the game right now on my good ol' N64. I've had it since the year it came out way back in 1998.

Maybe you've heard, but there is a reason this game is called "Seeds of Evil". And what is that reason? Because it is the spawn of Satan! No really, this game is punishing in it's difficulty. And it's not the enemies or bosses that make the game hard . . . It is the level design!

You can clearly picture the developers sitting there laughing their asses off as you fall of a chasm to your doom (the game contains what are essentially "holes", just like the first Turok. At least here they aren't in long platforming sections though). And it's not just cliffs that make Turok 2 perilous. The levels in Turok 2 are absolutely enormous. I'm talking gigantic. And unlike the levels in something like Halo, where they sprawl into the distance, here you are required to search every little nook and cranny, and if you don't you can easily miss something.

In the second level, The River of Souls, I had made it all the way through the entire level (probably took 4 hours, and I know the first three levels nearly by heart) only to find that I had missed one of my objectives! What did this mean? It meant I had to backtrack through the entire level again! The game drops absolutely zero hints as to where you must go or where the objectives are located. Do you know where it was? I'm betting that if you played the game and got stuck on this stage, that this particular objective was to blame.

It was hidden behind an explosive barrel! You find explosive barrels (that can contain health, life forces or ammo) all over the world in Turok 2. So many times you won't shoot it because you don't need what it contains, sometimes you might even "strategically" save it! But that's a no, no in Turok 2. Because behind every barrel could be a breakable wall. Now typically you can tell when a wall will be blown up because of the barrel (you can see the outline) but this one was hidden in a dark crevice! Evil. Simply evil.

To top the whole wicked thing off, the game hasn't aged well as far as controls, framerate and overall smoothness go. I can't tell if it's the framerate or just the sensitivity of the control stick when looking around (which I've adjusted) but it is difficult to do incremental adjustments, making fighting the bad guys twice as hard as it should be. Many times if you try to do an incremental adjustment for say, a head shot, then you can expect to lose health as you stand there trying to maneuver the crosshair while the enemies rushes you, shoots you or lobs a grenade in your direction. It's quite maddening, and as such I hope the game gets an updated release on Xbox Live/PS Store cause that would be awesome and if that one flaw was fixed I think the game would be twice as good as it is. I still hope the original is released on the Wii Virtual Console as well, it'd be interesting to see if the problems I mentioned above translate over even though you'd be using a GameCube or Classic game pad.

Well, thought I'd just type some impressions of the game out. Now it's back to Lair of the Blind Ones, the underground level that's nothing but tunnels . . . thankfully I just past the underwater section, one that back in the day I had to draw a map of to pass it. Thankfully my memory served me quite well and I didn't have to do that this time. Evil I say.

Happy New Year to everyone! I hope you all had a Merry Christmas as well and have started 2008 off on the right foot.

I just got done reading the Best of 2007 Awards from GameSpot and when I reached the Game of the Year Award, I would've bet money that Super Mario Galaxy was NOT going to get the award. I was positive it was going to be The Orange Box, Call of Duty 4 or Cyrsis. And yet they gave it to Super Mario Galaxy! Imagine my utter and total shock.

Although I haven't played any of the other games on the list (I've seen Assassin's Creed though) I have been playing through Super Mario Galaxy and I think it was an excellent choice for Game of the Year. It is simply a phenominally fun game that I think blew apart everyone's expectations of it, and it really did change up the platformer in ways I couldn't imagine and that do not come across in screenshots. It's also a very smart, quite long and challening game with great, colorful graphics, great music, inventive game mechanics, terrific level design, insanely fun gameplay and tons of nostalgic appeal, a fact that I love about it.

I do think that the awards were flawed in some ways based on the nominees (and the fact that they only select games that scored over 9.0) as someone pointed out in a thread on the Best of 2007 board, but I couldn't be happier with GameSpot's choice.

And you know what I think is absolutely crazy? The fact that Halo 3 has been so completely and utterly overshadowed in the awards this year. It didn't even pick up ANY awards from GameSpot! In any other year you know it would've conquered because it's Halo and a great game in it's own right, but man what a year it is for gamers when Halo 3 is overlooked. Madness!