How about this…

I’m not making any promises about post frequency, post quality, or the like. I’m gonna post on this thing when I feel like it and that’s that. Sound good? I guess it doesn’t matter considering noone is reading this.

Anyway, a freakin lot has happened since the end of March. No, I’m not talking about the American Presidential race you fool! I’m talking about video games of course!

Well let’s start this post of right and talk about my new web-home.

It’s A Website!

Yes, I am a GiantBomber, and proud of it. I’ve been following the progress of Giantbomb since before I even knew there was any progress, back when Jeff kept talking about exciting changes and other vague things. GiantBomb is great because I know that they are doing what they want to with it. I know they are having a great time and they are having a great time because they’re giving me a website! So, you should freaking check out www.giantbomb.com and tune in ever Tuesday night at around 11pm est for the weekly GiantBombcast! It is absolutely Bombcastic and full of laughs as well as relevant commentary on video game news.

The next thing I’ll mention is the amazing things that Steam can do. It can power a locomotive. It can burn your face off. But, most importantly, it can sell you GAMES!

Yes, ladies and gentleman, I have been introduced to the wide world of Steam, the online video game store. Steam is awesome because games you buy through it can be accessed from any PC that has Steam(free to download). Also, there are many games from all generations for sale, and at discounted prices of course. There are also several orginal games available nowhere else but on Steam, such as Audiosurf.

The way I came about using Steam was when I decided the time was right to buy The Orange Box for my PC. When it first came out I was also looking at Call of Duty 4 and had to get that over Orange Box. I played through Portal first. It was just as awesome an experience as everyone hyped it to be. The makers of that game gave you just barely enough reason to not trust GLaDoS until the end of the game where it was apparent. From that point the game was adrenaline driven all the way to the end credits which allowed you to let all your nervous laughter out while listening to a brilliant end credits song.

From there I moved on to Half Life 2. I beat that game in a few days and enjoyed it immensely, I love the way Valve used no cinematics to tell the story but relied on their life like characters and great dialogue to bring this game’s story to life. I quickly played through the equally great Episode One and Episode Two and now eagerly await Episode Three.

Team Fortress 2 is not really my taste in class based multiplayer games but is an interesting game for sure with top notch graphics and overall game design.

Well, at this point the game’s I’m looking forward to playing are already out. Mass Effect is the main title I’m looking at right now, I’ll look at some of the upcoming games and give some impressions later.

Final Fantasy XIII Impressions, Feelings, Biases, etc.

 

Surprisingly, I haven’t written anything about one of my most anticipated games yet. Final Fantasy XIII will, as you might have guessed, be the 13th installment of the final fantasy series(not counting all the spinoffs and sequels to already established final fantasy games). It will have three titles at it’s center, called Fabula Novala Crystalis Final Fantasy XIII. Do I know what this means? No. I will translate it now to my liking. Fabulous and Novel Crystals: Final Fantasy XIII. Ah…it all makes sense now…

But seriously, these games look great. Two of the three titles will be PS3 titles and one will be for Mobile phones. The 2nd PS3 title, Final Fantasy Versus XIII is the one I am looking forward to the most.

So far the story seems to be about these powerful crystals that have been warred over for centuries. The main character is the last heir to a dynasty who possessed the ancient crystals. These crystals are greatly envied by the surrounding countries, it is not specified why. The protagonist’s country seems fairly advanced technologically while surrounding countries are much less advanced and seem to be in an age like the Middle Ages. This is most-likely the reason the surrounding countries envy the Prince’s country so greatly.

Since the protagonist’s country has the last Crystal a debate arises on what use it should be put to. Naturally one of the first suggestions is to use it for their military. A peace treaty is discussed but marauders invade the city and attack the main character at his castle before the treaty is settled on.

What really excites me about Versus XIII(Versus means “change in direction” in latin by the way) is the sort of dark gloomy look of the game. My reasoning is, it reminds me of Final Fantasy VII, my favorite RPG. Also, Tetsuya Nomura, the man responsible for creating the characters in FFVII and directing the Kingdom Hearts series, is making this game.

Well, that’s enough for now, look for this game in the future.

Indiana Jones Widget

I’m a sell out!

Indiana Jones Widget

Back And Ready.

Whatever that means..

Well, knowing I don’t have an audience to my blog yet I will write to the future audience *hopeful*.High School was pretty rough for me last semester, it kicked my butt. Between taking some college courses at a community college in my area and Algebra 2 at High School, I was spent. I also lost a little bit of the fire for writing about games. But, realizing the new games coming up and seeing a couple of legends in gaming editorial excellence get canned or leave(GameSpot.com) I felt I needed to write and not quit because of laziness if it’s something I enjoy a lot and feel strongly about. Anyways without further adieu I’ll kick off my “return”. 

So, as I’ve said before, since this is my blog I’ll be writing about things I’m interested in and want to talk about. This means I won’t be covering everything under the sun regarding games.

So a lot has come out while I’ve been gone. Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii was one huge thing for me since I own a Wii. I guess I’ll give some quick comments about it.

Mario games just about always come with many praising remarks and glory to be given. Super Mario Sunshine felt like a let down to me when measured against just about any other Super Mario game out there. I was skeptical about Galaxy, at first. I remember thinking “What is going to make me want to go back to playing a platformer?”. Well, some videos, and great reviews from respected gaming website editors peaked my interest. Anyway, I got it and let me tell you they were not mistaken in their praise. This game starts off charming enough, as any Mario game. But after a few stars you think, “Is this as hard is it gets?”. You’ll want to bite off your tongue just a few galaxies later. Each Galaxy has multiple stars and the further you get the harder the stars are to collect. There is another feature of comets that, when in orbit of said galaxy, change the rules of that galaxy. Which is really brilliant as it gives replay value to a game that has a pretty standard game length otherwise and Galaxy is a game worth playing much more than the 60 stars it takes to beat. After getting the 60, if you brave the other 60 you are rewarded with a new playable character. Luigi of course! Luigi jumps higher and runs faster with a penalty of taking longer to stop. If you go through and get every star again with Luigi you are rewarded with one final star. This game won game of the year on GameSpot.com. A worthy champion in my opinion.

Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare came out too. This gam really is something amazing. I bought the original Call of Duty for the PC back in like 2003 or something because the clan I was playing WW2Online with bought it and loved it. Since then I haven’t missed a CoD game(with the exception of CoD3 which was not on the PC. The only reason I can forgive this is it allowed Infinity Ward to have much more time on CoD4 ).

Call of Duty in my opinion was a game that kept the genre of WW2 Shooter alive long after it would have been otherwise. These games gave an intensity and a newness to the WW2 Shooter experience every time a new one was released. I think everyone can agree though that they were ready for the jump to Modern Warfare by the 4th installment. While the game has a surprisingly shorter campaign than expected, it is a very clean, intense, well-written campaign that throws you into about 9 hours of non-stop action and somehow doesn’t lose it’s story in the fray. There are these short cinematic moments in the game that you get to be a part of. They really make you feel a part of the story. One is after the first mission you play. The President of a fictional Middle-Eastern country has been kidnapped and you watch, through his eyes, as he is dragged into a car, driven to a stadium, and then executed.

It’s a good thing Infinity Ward had their Multiplayer team focused on Multiplayer for the full time they worked on the project because we all knew after playing the Single Player that only a piece of the meaty goodness that is Call of Duty 4 had been uncovered. The immense amount of effort put into the Multiplayer really shows. The intuitive class and ranking systems are done so the game doesn’t feel too much like an RPG but rewards you for playing the game more and getting better. The multiplayer gameplay, however, is good enough to stand on it’s own.

Call of Duty 4 is another great addition to the series. Infinity Ward really timed the transition to modern times perfectly. Not only that, but they delivered a game that more than manages to live up to its series’ past pattern of fast-paced, intense action with a story that pushes you through to care about what you’re doing as more than “killing bad guys”. Not only this but it raises the bar on the First Person Shooter genre and the Call of Duty series itself to knew heights that must be played and experienced to comprehend.

That’s good for now. I have some other things to talk about but I’ll give your eyes a break. Thanks for staying with me..sheesh.

Final Fantasy VII gets bigger

So in the past few years it seems like Final Fantasy VII is everywhere..and I’m not complaining. A few years back when Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children came out I remember thinking “Sweet, guess I jumped on the wagon at a good time…hmm…wagons rock.”(at the time I had JUST become a FF7 fan, late bloomer I know..). Then Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus came out and I was like, “Sweet, another FF7 game..and this time it will give a lot of back story on Vincent Valentine!”. But, I started to get curious as to why all this FF7 craziness was coming out all of a sudden. I got Advent Children when it came out on DVD in America and watched a featurette talking about something called “Compilation of Final Fantasy VII”. I was amazed to find the expanse of games planned for release. Then I saw that there must be more to come because Square Enix President Yoichi Wada said that the compilation would finish on Final Fantasy VII’s “20th Anniversary”. That means we have 10 more years of Final Fantasy VII to look forward to, and I can’t wait. Who knows what may come in the next 10 years? Many hope for a remake of FF7 for the PS3; others are just glad for whatever does come. Crisis Core comes out very soon for the PSP and from what I’ve seen..I may have to get one…

Metroid Prime 3: Impressions

Metroid Prime 3: Corruption…

If you’ve had a chance to play any of the Metroid games available, you have experienced the excitement of getting new abilities enabling you to do things such as: freeze an enemy in mid-air and use him as a platform to jump off of. You’ve also enjoyed the new power suits your main character acquires on her journeys. Upgrading/Getting new weapons is something a game player looks for as they play a new title. As you play through a game, generally there is an overarching mission above the rest, but in-between the time you start a new file and finish that final battle there must be incentive to keep the gamer satisfied enough, no matter where they are in the story – to keep them playing to the end. Metroid has been no exception in the past and clearly won’t be any exception in Corruption.

In a Spider-Man 3-esque story, the intergalactic bounty hunter, Samus Aran, has been infected with Metroid-like DNA. It gives her new abilities that instantly help the gamer but overtime corrupt her further and further. It’s still not clear if becoming fully corrupt is a bad thing because the game trailers make it look really fun. But in the trailer it does have a women’s voice saying that she is “becoming corrupted, and what scares her the most is, she likes it,” and it looks like for good reason. From some hands-on demos from sources like GameSpot.com we see that one of the fun advantages to being corrupted is called “hyper-mode” in which Samus infuses a capsule of metroid DNA into her suit. This makes her weapons extremely devastating and also speeds up her movements. It seems that while in hyper mode you have some vision impairment. Something that looks like tunnel vision begins edging into the screen. I suppose that’s a way of letting you know you’re becoming too corrupted.

One other new addition I will mention is the appearance of other hunters in the game. I haven’t played all the earlier Metroid games but one of the well-known things of the series is that you are sort of dropped right into the game without knowing much of what you are there to do and you are practically alone for the entire game . The atmosphere of the game seems designed many times to give you that feeling that you are the only “good guy” in the game. The addition I’m seeing in various trailers and gameplay videos is that other hunters will appear in the game. Now, I realize there is a Metroid game called “Metroid Prime: Hunters.” I haven’t played Hunters, but I can only assume you encounter other Hunters in the game. However, I believe this is a relatively new addition to the Metroid series and doesn’t look to be a bad one at all. Once in a while it’s nice to have a break from the intense combat of a game’s many anti-social enemies and have a “civilized” conversation with someone who can empathize with you.

Without regurgitating everything I have heard or seen about Metroid Prime 3 : Corruption, I’ll say this: it looks to be, possibly, one of the best Metroid games ever and certainly looks like the best Metroid Prime game of the series. Abilities such as the spider ball make a return, along with some awesome new suits. Meeting other hunters in the game looks like a nice, refreshing addition to the game. I believe this will be a big game for Wii fans and an important release for Nintendo. It comes out the 28th for the Wii. If you have one, and love action/adventure games, pick up a copy, and enjoy.

A New Gamer Blog Coming To a Monitor near you!

So…”We Need New Batteries”, what is it?

Basically, it is a blog directed toward gamers of any kind. The main focus of this blog is to give updates on games. We are not a big, well-known gaming website, so we don’t feel an obligation to report on every game that might exist. We’ll report on games that we look forward to and then some. Don’t worry, though – we’re not looking for the Nintendogs sequel or anything like that. Our gaming interests, for the most part, align with the standard. For an example, some of my favorite games to play right now are: Halo 3, Call of Duty 4, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy, and Mass Effect.

But, since there are a million other sites that are receiving direct news as it is released, we realize we aren’t going to be a primary source for information. Beyond giving game updates, our focus is impressions from “your average gamer.” We don’t have any partnerships with companies or an advertising department to check with, so you won’t get a view that is coerced in any way.

Here, you’ll get impressions, reviews, information, links to more privileged gaming websites (with necessary credit attached) and just, basically, another resource to help you with your gaming inquiries.