I hate the word cultured, but it was the only C word I could think of to make this work. There is one main reason I'm doing this: I'm bored.

WARNING: There will be a lot of nerding out here, and not the video game nerding out to which many of us are accustomed. I tend to be long-winded, so there's Warning #2 for you. Skip down to the picture of the book if you don't care about why I'm writing this.

I'm a recent recipient of a B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and am preparing to go to grad school. How? By working a rather crappy short-term job, so that I'll have enough money by next year to live as an upper lower class citizen and partially pay for school, rather than being simply impoverished. The town in which I live currently (not Chapel Hill...somewhere with much more affordable housing) is quite low in terms of overall intelligence, so I often go crazy when I feel the need to discuss any type of non-sports related...

After deleting one entry today since, to be honest, it was obviously poorly written judging by a comment or two, figured I'd post something with a bit less of a bite to it.

To celebrate it being (roughly) a year since my Game of the Year 2008 launched, I found this old video.

Let the television motif and non-PS2-rendered Teddie calm your nerves. I wish I could just paste it here, but as it appears to take up the entire screen, it's probably for the best.

Happy Holidays from Atlus!



Sunday marked the last game this year in which I was rather interested (Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks) so now I am looking forward to next year.

I'm just going to list one or two games of which many might not be aware, but I'm sure are going to blow me away.

1. Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (DS)

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A friend of mine is writing an article for something or other about unintentionally hilarious video game stuff. Throughout this process, we each reminded one another of a bunch of memories, some one of us had forgotten, some the other, and some memories even came up that both of us had lost to the depths of our minds for quite a while, only to find them surfacing as our attempts to reminisce tore our minds asunder.

So, I'm gonna list a few awesome moments, both funny and not. Feel free to comment or do the same.

(In no particular order)

- Rollercoaster Tycoon's asshole factor. Truly epic when I was very young, I could make elaborate awesomeness - a haunted house surrounded by a moat and numerous fountains - or, and this occured more often, I could be a complete douche to my virtual guests. Once a few thousand of them entered, I decided they were unworthy of my genius. I blocked the only exit with numerous information booths. To further complicate...

Most CAGs that shops at Amazon lives and thrives off some Quick Picks to satiate them whenever Amazon is not running a (sometimes questionable) video game Gold Box, or random deal.

I stumbled upon a thread about three weeks ago (though it was created much earlier). Credit to this thread and Afflicted if you want to find out the basics about Amazon's Quick Picks and how they work. The process definitely works, but I've found a few other things you can do to further ensure this. I can say that this works fairly well, as I really went all-out the past week, aiming for a specific product each day, and the Quick Picks the following day would always include that item.

Now that my long-winded lead-in has concluded, here are some tips I've found that led to me getting my relevant (and desired) Gold Box picks.

1. Know what Amazon recommends you, and know the two big methods they use.

If you click on Recommendations and then on Recommended...

FIGHT OF THE CENTURY...well, I guess it's really not. I guess 2010 is technically in the same decade as 2009, or maybe not. Since there was no year 0, did the first decade just last from 1-9, and the second decade was 10-19, or how do we do it?. . .

I do have to admit that the first few years of this generation worried me a little bit, at least on the console front. I felt like my kind might be getting rarer and rarer: the single player gamer. The (over?)emphasis of online stuff this generation had me worried, but I know that a few developers will always cater to my kind of audience. With that in mind, take this list not solely as a comparison, but me celebrating the fact that single player emphasis still lives on so strongly in these awesome upcoming titles.

Wii
Muramasa: The Demon Blade
New Super Mario Bros Wii

PSP
SMT: Persona

DS
Scribblenauts
Atelier Annie
Nostalgia
Mario and Luigi:...

The realization from months ago that my play time (and definitely my financial investment) on video games may have become a bit too much finally yielded some fruit this summer. I still maintain that the only dangerous amount of gaming is none, but I tried to immerse myself into my other passions, or at least try to spread myself over multiple outlets.

My goal: get re-acquainted with some of my old music and books. I just graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a degree in English, so I love to analyze pretty much everything on more than its apparent level. I tried to apply this same thing to video games recently, seeing how their plots and gameplay intertwined, though gaming seems to still be in a rather infant state of development in those regards (see pretty much any FPS or overly convoluted storyline). However, this isn't about that. This is about some awesome stuff I've been enjoying this summer.


Music

Artist: The Flaming Lips
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I am generally a relaxed person. I live my life lazing listlessly through, being diligent where necessary. There are maybe three things in which I have felt the need to be utterly strict and unrelenting: school, work, and video games.

The first two make sense, but the third is an OCD habit I have fed over the years. I love my game collection to be symmetrical and neat. All the labels and titles of my collection are visible with their original art, except for a few cartridge-based games. I can somewhat stomach Player's Choice/Greatest Hits, though I will avoid it if I can. As any CAG reading this probably knows, GameStop does not differentiate in the price of their used product if it is complete (case/manual) or disc-only, leading to a generic GameStop casing.

I'm not going to advise the traditional difference in price for completeness, but rather something else: If I run across the original case of a game at another GameStop, I should be allowed to switch...