Hey guys, here is a new segment that I am going to start doing with my channel. This is a very informal, pseudo-review of Ni No Kuni: Wrath Of The White Witch. I recently finished up my playthrough of the game, and I wanted to talk about my thoughts on what it does right and wrong. I would love to hear from anyone that has played it, too, and see how they feel about anything I mentioned. Thanks for watching/reading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSKd1YXtMWY

Do you, my reader, ever feel any degree of guilt for living a comfortable lifestyle? Anyone that knows anything about me knows that I am a video game collector--especially steelbooks. I spend quite a fair bit of money on maintaining my large collection. There are, after all, an almost alarmingly huge amount of steelbooks being released for many games these days. It's nothing for me to drop at least $30 per steelbook; that's not even including the cost of the game, and heaven forbid if there is a collector's edition, as well. This spending clearly goes well above and beyond a need for entertainment. I find myself quite preoccupied with, but also quite pleased with the collection I have managed to amass. This is all well and good, but it also brings me to the point of this entry: guilt.

I was driving to school a couple of days ago, and it was really quite rainy outside. There are four or five different homeless people that I pass nearly every day on the way to school. They...

I am currently playing through Crysis 3 on the Xbox 360. This is a brand new game that was just released yesterday (2/19). This game was developed by Crytek and published by EA. This is not a small, niche game. This is a AAA shooter from a very talented developer and a giant publisher. As we all know, AAA games have a very large budget--I was unable to find the exact number, but it seems Crytek usually have a budget of between 10-30 million--and usually have a large number of people working on them. They're a 'big deal', and they're made as such. Herein lies the paradox, though. Even with all this money and manpower thrown at them, AAA games are still often extremely vapid, or they are riddled with annoying bugs and problems. This blog will be speaking to the latter.

This game is buggy, dudes; that's all there is to it. Right from the very first level there are very annoying sound issues. The sound cuts out frequently. This seems to be worse in cut scenes, but it is certainly...

Do games have an influence on how we perceive reality? Can they change the way we observe and react to a situation? This is something that I have thought about from time to time for quite a while. It was just last week, though, when I finally noticed a prime example that has been right in front of me for quite some time.

I was taking my nice, and somewhat leisurely, walk from the far parking lot of my university up the hill towards the science building. I was walking up in that oft-abhorred ten minute break between classes. As I was making my way towards my destination, I was surrounded by professors hustling and bustling off towards their classes--some were moving from one to another, others had just arrived and were merely starting their day. It was at this point when I noticed that I had seen everything that was going on around me before. This was not a sudden bout with severe deja vu, but rather a realization. I watched these people run this same routine every Monday,...

This year is turning into a nightmare for steelbooks, but almost in a good way! Futureshop is going crazy this year with all of their exclusive steelbooks. The problem is, though, they only ship to Canada. This leaves us American folks stuck grabbing them off ebay for obviously inflated prices. It's really cool how many game steelbooks are coming out, and many of them look gorgeous, but having to pay $20-30 extra for each game I buy (to get the accompanying steelbook) really takes its toll on 'ye old budget'.

Aside from what has already come out this year, which has already been some great SB's, I am still looking forward to:

Borderlands 2
Dishonored
Halo 4
BLOPS 2
Hitman Absolution
Assassin's Creed 3 (This one is HMV - UK)
New Super Mario Bros U


Which ones are you guys looking forward to dolling out too much cash to get?

Today, I am excited to announce that I purchased my 800th game! It was Record of Agarest War 2 Limited Edition. It seems absolutely crazy that my collection has grown this much. It has doubled in the past 2 years, and shows no signs of slowing down! I am, however, running into a very real problem. I am completely out of room!

Half of my PS1 games and all my Dreamcast games are in a box. PS2 games are stacked sky high because their shelf is full. PS3 games are stacked on top of them because they don't have a shelf of their own. I have stacks of GCN and XBOX games hiding around the room, and my 360/PSP sections are well over capacity. All of my Game Boy and N64 boxes are also all banished to storage. I literally have no more room for any other shelves or anything. This is becoming a large problem. I think it might just 'maybe' have something to do with the title of the blog... :/ lol

It is cool to have this many games, though. I know there are a lot of 'collectors'...

I was going to make this some long drawn out retrospective on the last 10 years in gaming, but I'm tired, and I've done plenty of writing for school already. I'll keep it short and sweet

I just tried to go back through and re-play the Onimusha series. I stated with the first one of course (The Genma Xbox version to be precise). Wow, that is nearly un-playable. The constantly shifting, UNCONTROLLABLE, camera is atrocious. This D-pad controls are bad enough, but add in that "up" is the direction he is facing, not up on the screen, oh my. These stupid issues make the game infuriatingly difficult too.

I'm sure if I gave it a fair amount of time I could get somewhat proficient with controls and be able to finish it again, but I don't want to. I played the first 2 games back when they came out and loved them. I recently re-bought the entire series, and was excited to play through it. I now realize that will probably never happen >_>
...