So no, I haven't really been playing much of the Metal Gear Solid collection that I bought a short while ago. I did, however, make a little papercraft of Snake in a box!



I took him to work so he could slink around with the other video games at the store. I figure Snake isn't much of a mingler. More of a slinker. I received my eighth gym badge today in Pokemon Pearl and am on my way to the Pokemon League to take on the Elite Four...though there may be a bit of leveling up before that fateful battle can take place. And even while I'm nearing the end of one of the games I'm trying to get through, tomorrow will see the release of Final Fantasy Tactics A2 for the DS and another one joins the list.

Otakon is just a short month and a half away now, and I'm starting to get psyched up for it again! I've already starting compiling a list of import games to keep an eye out for. With my shiny new PSP, I now have yet another system that thankfully is completely region free, which is pretty awesome.

        

So I've been waiting and waiting to play around with the Spore Creature Creator. I finally downloaded it last night, and it crashes on me! It'll come up with the EA splash screen, then just dump me back to the desktop. Man what a bummer, I was looking forward to making all sorts of hilarious and terrifying abominations. Anyone else having trouble running it, or am I a unique case?

Update! Thanks to a user over at 1up.com, I discovered that if you delete the EA Download Manager that installs with the Creature Creator, the game runs just fine! So here's my first attempt, Flaminguk.

        

Oh man. So many great games out, and I'm am falling way behind. For anyone interested, here's my increasingly large pile of games that I'm trying to get through:

Pokemon Pearl - I just picked this one up again, after getting Darkrai from a recent Toys R Us promotion, and have been having a blast once again. I'm at 7 badges, so I'm getting near the end, and I'm trying to plow ahead to defeating the Elite Four.

The World Ends With You - I've been loving this game so far. Crazy action, lot of fun.

Persona 3 FES - Playing ...<< MORE >>

So I don't know what's caused it, but I finally feel like I'm coming out of my little rut lately! Planning projects! *doing them*! I feel a bit like my old self again, and I hope the streak continues! First off, it's a bit late, but I still plan on going over my Katsucon experience in the near future, especially the import games.

Last week I had the chance to see Jonathan Coulton at the World Cafe in Philly, and it was awesome! Of course, he played Still Alive from the game Portal, and of course, we all started waving our cell phones, DS's, and such in the air instead of lighters as we're all such dorks (I was waving my PSP). He played lots of other great songs too, Future Soon, I Feel Fantastic, Re: Your Brains, Code Monkey. And I got my picture with him afterwards! Lucky!



I've been wanting to get back into making little games, and took the first baby steps today by making a simple Breakout game. It's extremely barebones right now, but it's gotten me a bit more familiar with how to do it so hopefully I can move on to a bit more complicated things in a little while. For now though, I'll most likely try to add some more things to the Breakout game, see if I can make it a bit more fun than it is at the moment.

Lastly, more drawing! I've really been wanting to get back into drawing and painting! So I decided to start off with some fanart. As I'd just finished up Apollo Justice, I thought it'd be fun to go back and do a nice picture of Phoenix Wright, pre-hobo days. I might do a few more portraits, Edgeworth and Godot at least, before moving on from PW fanart. Speaking of art, I'm hoping to start working on video game T-shirt designs again, I really liked doing it but was having a bit of trouble as far as the workspace for doing the silkscreening, but I'm hoping to do something about that soon.

Sorry for the rambling nature of the post!

        

So earlier this month L and I enjoyed three days of anime and games and other things otaku at the Katsucon convention in Washington DC. I plan to go into a bit more detail on the ups and downs of this year's convention a bit later, but for now I wanted to share with you a strange marketing phenomenon that Nintendo has been doing this past month. For some reason, a week after the game's release, there were the craziest forms of advertisements for Professor Layton and the Curious Village all over the convention! Some of you may be familiar with some of them by now, as a short while later they used these same tactics at the Game Developer's Conference, which gave them a bit more of an online presence. I thought it would be fun to run down some of the ways Nintendo was trying to get this game in our geeky heads that weekend.


The LaytonMobile!

This was actually taken on our last day. In fact, L and I were leaving the convention and heading to the train station. I had already packed my camera, figuring that I wouldn't really need it for the two block walk. Needless to say, one look at this and I quickly dug my camera out to snap a photo! A large monitor on the side of the van plays the trailer for the game in a loop, which seems to have one particular cosplayer entranced! Of course, a large-scale Layton transport vehicle can only go so far. What to do when your marketing blitz needs to go toe-to-toe, one on one with the people while still covering as much ground as possible? You hire...


The Layton Patrol!

Sporting the professor's snazzy hat and segways with the game's artwork on it, these guys went around handing out postcards with example puzzles from the game. The major problem stemmed from their primary hangout location, which was the already over-cramped merchant's room, where hundreds of people crowded around booths to buy stuff. The tightly packed aisles were not helped by having a couple of segways rolling down them!


Interactive Floor Displays!

Sitting in the middle of the game room was this Professor Layton floor...thingie. I'm really not sure exactly how interactive it truly was, it seemed to me that it played the trailer in a loop, and an example of the game, and all you could really do was use the motion of your feet or body to make little designs flow across the screen (the designs were the little DS screen logo it seems). Not the most exciting, but when combined with everything else Layton-related we were seeing, taken as a whole it was all pretty impressive.

There was one more part of the Layton ad blitz that I failed to photograph, and that's people walking around with the Layton hats on and big monitors strapped to their chests playing the Professor Layton trailer. They too handed out postcards when you walked by them. It was all very strange to see Nintendo pushing this game so darn hard! The craziness fit right in with the setting of an anime convention, however, where everything feels surreal from the start anyway.

        

The very talented folks over at Loading Ready Run have just put up a video that is too good not to share with everyone, poking fun at the crazy journalistic integrity of Fox News and their sensationalist piece on Mass Effect. Pure awesome.

        

I finally finished Persona 3! It certainly was the longest RPG I've ever dedicated myself to, I clocked in at around 105 hours in the end. My previous record was 94 hours for .Hack volumes 1-4! I will say that if I knew going into it how long the game would take to complete, I probably wouldn't have even started. I am not really a fan of long games. But there's something pretty amazing about this game that was just so compelling. I really think it must be the great characters. All the characters in the game, either in your party or just people at your school or around town, all are really well fleshed-out and interesting. You get certain benefits by continuing your relationships with people, benefits that come into play when making new Personas to fight with you, but beyond that you get the benefit of having known them. By the end, I really felt that the end of the world would be a terrible thing because of all the great people I'd met, and it really helped draw me into wanting to prevent it.

While I'm certainly glad to be moving on to other games now, I know that when Persona 3 FES is released, I'll definitely be going back to that place that we said we'd meet at, back to meet with my friends.

Speaking of other games, I believe L and I are going to try and coordinate some kind of Phantom Hourglass blog as we both trek through Link's latest adventure! Should be fun! I played it for like an hour when it came out, then put it down to continue with Persona. Also, I just picked up No More Heroes today, so if you'll excuse me, I've got some gaming to do...
(Feel free to converse with spoiler-filled Persona posts in the comments! But no discussing the events of FES please, just Persona 3!)

        

Wow, a lot of time has passed! I'm still here, really! Since I'll just keep putting off putting up a nice sized blog if I think about it too much, I decided it would be best to simply list some of the things I've been doing/playing/enjoying, and perhaps elaborate on them in a future post.

Super Mario Galaxy - Okay, I won't really be talking about this one much I don't think, because really, I think enough has been spoken of the greatness of Mario Galaxy. It's awesome.

Persona 3 - Man, this game is long! It's great though, so I keep playing! Unfortunately, if I haven't played Other Awesome Game X yet, it's because I'm determined to beat this game first! At 85 hours in, I'm making good progress, and plan to put in a few more hours tomorrow after work.

Game Center CX - This show is amazing. It's a show that any retro-gaming fan should not miss. I'm hoping to pick up the DVDs and the DS game at the upcoming Katsucon. Speaking of which...

Katsucon - I am so looking forward to another crazy good anime convention time! Expect lots more crazy cosplay photos and blogging when I get back from it (it's in Feb, btw). L and I are discussing the possibility of even doing mini-podcasts after each day to wrap up what we saw, which might be fun.

Scott Pilgrim - L loaned me the first two books, and I immediately went out and bought the next two. I am absolutely in love with these graphic novels. Lots of great video game references sprinkled throughout, and some wonderfully charming art and characters!

So that wasn't so hard. Hopefully this will help me jumpstart back into the blogosphere...

        

Happy Halloween everyone! Dress up, get/give out candy, and play some scary video games! Since I'm pressed for time today, I'll start off by being a cheapskate and linking to last year's article on some fun suggestions for Halloween gaming. But here's a brief listing of a couple more to get you in the Halloween spirit, and they're free indie games to boot!


Cottage of Doom
Cottage of Doom takes an old school gaming approach by offering pixel sprite graphics and a simple, arcade like challenge of seeing how long you can stay alive and getting the high score. You're stuck in a cottage that's quickly being surrounded by zombies, you've got a shotgun and some furniture with which to barricade the doors and that's about it! Grab it here!


Forbidden
If Cottage of Doom is an old school style, Forbidden is more of an art house take on an indie game with impressive results. Once again, the concept is simple; click and drag your avatar through these passageways, but be careful not to touch the walls as your pursuer will run full speed after you! It's kind of like a horror themed Operation game. With only about five levels it's a simple and quick distraction. Go here to get it!

So what games are you playing to celebrate Halloween?

        

Wow, I apologize for the long absence. So let’s get right to some griping, shall we? ^_^

As you may recall from a previous post, I have been pretty enthusiastic about Valve’s puzzle title Portal, which started life as a freeware game made from a group of students titled Narbacular Drop. I’m also a big fan of the Half-Life series. I don’t really like many first person shooters, but Half-Life 2 completely sucked me in, which is a testament to how immersive and enjoyable a game this is. When Valve first released the next installment, Half-Life 2 Episode 1, I was anxious to try it, but the $20 price tag seemed a bit steep to me. Thankfully, CheapAssGamer.com discovered that Circuit City was selling Episode 1 for only $7.99! Now that’s more like it!

So today marks the release of the Orange Box. In case you weren’t aware, the Orange Box contains Half-Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal, all for $60. All in all a good deal. But I already own Half-Life 2 and Episode 1, and while Team Fortress 2 looks really great, I’m not really itching to play it. I only want Episode 2 and Portal. So I went on Steam to see how much they are individually, and I couldn’t believe it. Episode 2 is $30! And Portal is $20! While I’m normally not one to complain about a game’s length in terms of price or what we should expect from it, Portal is only supposed to last about three hours Now that’s a pretty expensive three hours. And it looks like there’s no chance of getting a good deal on Episode 2 the way I did Episode 1, because they’re not being sold individually in stores!

So I guess I’ve got to re-purchase two games that I’ve collectively spent $60 on already! Not cool, Valve. If your games weren’t so freaking brilliant I’d have half a mind not to support it with my hard earned money.