It is beyond strange when gay men look at you the same way that you look at an attractive woman.

I spent too much on sushi and sake.

I think I am going to watch The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly now.

So this was grabbed by a friend of mine from a forum about Beggar Prince:

“However (and the instruction manual makes note of this), the save option is incompatible with the 32X and SegaCD. You must remove the 32X and / or SegaCD from your system before attempting to save/load a game. This means that Sega CDX owners can’t access the save/load functions normally. Unfortunately this was hard-coded into the game and we were unable to change it. But then again, it is a Megadrive game, not a Mega CD game…”

Yes, I am a CDX owner, and it is the sexiest system ever made. So this makes no sense twice. First, what difference would these make on the game? I want to know this. Second, the last sentence “not a Mega CD game”: I AM NOT TRYING TO PLAY IT ON MY CD DRIVE YOU FUCKS.

Let me continue to make fun of the terrible art for the game.

Click for full image. I am just going to say that this is probably the stupidest purchase I have made in a long time. Thanks Super Fighter: you failed when I put my faith in an independent company. I don’t know. The game has all these weird glitches in it from what I played and I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the first town. After playing for about 90 min and having talked with literally every damn person in town I gave up (because I couldn’t save!). Also the text auto scrolls, so the entire introduction is like attempting to read boxed subtitles that scroll a little too fast and appears at random places on screen. Overall so far not a pleasant experience.

So I had to take down any information relating to Odin Sphere and any discussion. Even though I specifically asked about taking a picture and it was said it was ok… but oh well. I am sure you all know to keep your eyes peeled about it, so no need for me to talk about it again.

So, a really long time ago, on a system far far dead, I preordered a game called Beggar Prince. You may have heard of this and what is going on with it. Basically it is an old Chinese game that was released towards the end of the systems life (perhaps after it). I am pretty sure I pre-ordered this last year.

Anyways, so I pre-ordered it. I was reminded of it about 4 or so months ago with a forum post. Then I quickly forgot about it again. So, it came today. I was really confused as to what it was I was getting then when I saw the return address (Super Fighter) I remembered.

I was not expecting much mind you. But what I got was pretty bad. I mean, yes what is on the ROM CART is what counts, I know. But.. I mean this art is TRAGICALLY BAD. Click on the image to see how bad it can get.

This stuff is 5-year-old-GamePro-fan-letter-art bad. Luckily the in game screens don’t reflect this, but the package is still a disapointment. I may/maynot play this tonight. I accomplished getting Steambot Chronicles and !NEW! Super Mario Bros. last night and I like them way too much.

I have an unhealthy obsession with Bumpy Trot Steambot Chronicles (aka Bumpy Trot, or Relaxing Nonlinear Adventure: Be a Bad Guy If You Want).

Where does this come from? Well, I can pinpoint it for you, but I should mention that I have always been interested in the game since people started importing Bumpy Trot from Japan due to Next-Gen’s William Rogers recommendation (hell, even before that too).

So let me pin-point it: We got a review copy of the game right before E3, and then at E3 I gave it to Mr. Andrew Toups to review. I called him up one night shortly after returning from E3 and over hear something like: “We will return with Mecha-Elephant Mk4! Bwahahaha!”

Andrew: “Whoaaaa…”
Me: “What?!”
“This is great, I just lost, but the guy has so much respect for me he is letting me go.”
“Really?”
“Yea, it is great.”
“So how is it.”
“Amazing, but I guess I have hardly gotten anywhere in the game yet.”
“How far in are you?”
“I don’t know, I am not paying attention.”
“Tell me about the game some.”
“It’s good.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Damnit Andrew, tell me what is good about it.”
“Well basically it is like Megaman Legends, or rather it has the soul of MML.”
“Really?!”
“Yea, it’s pretty great.”

So then a few days ago I ran across J. Parish’s 1up review of the game and stating that it is the “closest we will ever see to Megaman Legends 3.”

I wanted to pick the game up yesterday, but the only game store I can get to closes at 5:30pm… if not slightly earlier (I got there at 5:31pm one day and they would not let me just buy the damn game I came for). Anyways, I didn’t get it. I am going to try today and hopefully succeed. But… yea.

I don’t really have too much time to play.

See a lot of shit is going down right now. I have to figure out what I am going to do between the dates of June 30th to July 15th because my housing that I am staying at (the hotel in New Orleans) will no longer be available, but I can’t leave to go back to St. Louis just yet. This doesn’t even include time to make the 10 hour drive each way to St. Louis to move my things. I may have to resort to an ultimatum or sorts. I also have the magazine coming to crunch month, which is no where near as bad as crunch week, but still busy, but crunch week is only 3 weeks away. On top of all this I still need to do my taxes (finally got all the info together) and I need to donate a car to charity.

I can only blame myself on some of this due to procrastination. Damn my slacker attitude! Anyways, busy busy! The same thing kind of happen with Dragon Quest 8 last year and Issue 4 of TGQ. It was damn addicting and I had a very hard time putting it down, but since I did I have not returned to it and I am mildly sad that I haven’t.

I finish so damn few RPGs anymore.

I have always thought/written about games more than playing them for the past like … 5 years, but this is getting out of control. I need a break or something. Every time I take one I just get further behind, so I guess that I just need to catch up and quit letting slack build until the tension is tight enough to break.

This entry was originally going to be about Ozu and a comparison of A Story of Floating Weeds, and the remake Floating Weeds… then other things happen. So, hopefully tomorrow.

I just spent almost 700 words talking about Snatcher and feel like I said nothing.

I am getting worse at this.

So I am going to give up on predicting/caring about Blu-Ray Disc or HD DVD. Seriously.

Both have advantages over one another, but neither really has the advantage needed for “a new era.” On paper BD looks better. Both are far too expensive right now. I don’t have a TV that would really take advantage of either.

The competition for studios is really neck and neck, which is a bad thing. You have Hollywood split down the middle and they are going to lose because of it. This reminds me of the PS2 vs. Xbox… only with movies, which video consumers aren’t use to. They just wait for one to die and pick the survivor like a twisted knife fight. It is really a lose, lose situation for everyone but the long term winner, but even then… there will be casualties because of it.

I just did a bit of research to quench my hunger for information on Wikipedia and it leads me to head aches and confusion. I will just wait for the HVD to get finished and go with that. 3.9 terabytes is a lot. If anything I will probably go with the PS3 as the Fisher Price “my first HD era movie viewer” when I finally/eventually have a HD TV.

I honestly don’t think up-converted standard DVDs look that bad on HD TVs.

So, I got off work early. I have a plan of action:

1: Turn off the interwebs
2: Do some editing
3: Watch a movie
4: Write some stuff

This will hopefully be a success!

PS: Sorry interwebs.

I don’t know why I subject myself to something like Gaming-Age, I really don’t. I don’t share an opinion with a good 90% of the people there. I guess it is all just part of “playing the game.” I was talking with Toups about this last night and he said that he goes there for a sort of gamer reality check. This makes sense, I mean, sometimes I really think that everyone likes Metroid II.

But I really don’t understand some gamers. Recently my opinion of gamers changed a lot. E3 showed me that I am not going to find out that I am similar to most gamers, because I am not. Out of all the media that I met at E3 I really only liked the ones that were from real newspapers (Houston Free-Press guy was pretty awesome). I am of course talking about people who I did not know from the interwebs beforehand.

The “Mecca” like status of E3 was also shattered for me. You can ask Dave of A Lesson is Learned: had the whole thing gone like Wednesday did I would have felt like the whole thing was in vain. But it turned out differently, I started to do the interviews I set up, and I really, really fell in love with that. I also formed that opinion that most gamers suck at games. They like games now because they are “wacky and confusing” most likely, then when they get good at them they stop playing. I say this because every damn line I waited in, every single game looked difficult or bad. This is because no one knew how to play games, I realized when I took the controller that everyone else that was making this game look difficult had a learning disability.

(there was one exception: Gundam PS3. That game played even worse than it looked like it should have.)

I am, of course, stereotyping. This is never a good thing, but I mean, I have always said that stereo types exist for a reason. I wish that I would have meet up with more people that I knew were going, but I was really only there for 3 days and my schedule was quite full. Next year I need to get in a couple days earlier for the press conferences and too meet people.

RIGHT! Totally forgot that I had a point here and that I did not just start this rand randomly.

At E3 I got to see the video for FFVII Crisis Core the PSP game. It looks decent enough for pre-rendered cut scenes with no gameplay footage. So these scans pop-up courtesy of Duckroll: 1 2 3. I don’t disagree that they look good.

Now–on a forum that calls Killer 7 a “last-gen” game–they are kind of gushing over the graphics. Not just that they look good, but that they look “as good [Kingdom Hearts 1].” Yes, that game that; can only be loved by true fans, which looks like it low-res pixel art slapped on the inside of boxes, and generally poor for even a PS2 game.

How is it that a group of people can so blindly dismiss logic (these were not in game engine most likely, if they were they would not have looked that good on a large screen) and accept just-over-PS1-quality graphics because of the platform it is on, yet bash/dismiss graphics that accomplish a retro look perfectly? Or even graphics that are not the best for the system, but stylized to the point of looking gorgeous.

I don’t know why I do this to myself really, or even what good can/has come of this rant. I guess thanks for sitting through it.

Ok, so I need help. I am attempting to make room on my PC and I can’t seem to find where everything is at to clear it off.

Is there any type of program that will allow you to scan your hard drive and show you how much data is in a folder? I mean, the way XP makes it I can’t even seem to find everything on here.

I would format my drive if I could get back all the programs that I have on it now, but that is not really possible.

Any help?