In these tumultuous console wars, I keep hearing people talk about hardware issues. This system is more powerful. This system has more RAM. This system has better buffer memory.

I can understand people talking about things like wireless being included or Blu-Ray, HD support or not, or whatever. But when it comes to things like CPU, if you're not a game designer, you shouldn't care.

If you were a PC Gamer, it's different. You can customize your system. You can add new RAM and then brag to your friend about how much cooler your computer is while playing Dungeons and Dragons and hosting Starcraft LAN parties, hopefully with TossGirl.

But if you're a console gamer, it doesn't matter. The only thing you'll ever see is what a game company puts out, after all the programming is done, after all the graphics are put in, etc. That's what you look at. You

I'm in the vocal minority that loves Dragon Quest and people give me strange looks whenever I say that DQ8 is the best RPG of the PS2 generation. Yes, more so than the Final Fantasies, the Kingdom Hearts, and even the venerable Persona series.

I've also given up on convincing people to play it and give it positive remarks. It's not a game that gets nice reviews and then you go out and enjoy it like everyone else. It requires a different mindset, a new viewpoint. That's not something you get by reading an internet article. How many times have you read a blog post and thought, "Oh, wow, that's a completely new spin on this game, now I can play it and enjoy it!" Mine is somewhere around NEVER.

Anyway, let's run down what I like:

1-The atmosphere
When I play Dragon Quest I get a real feel

First of all, I just wanna say how glad I am I posted the last entry. Having a real girl in Tossgirl takes off the stench of shame of having posted about Tokimeki Memorial.

Anyway, I hate hate HATE HATE HATE the ridiculous auto-aim of MW2. It's gotten so bad that some people think they can aim better on analog sticks than on a mouse and keyboard. Are you kidding me? It's because of your goddamn mega auto-aim assist. Have you not seen the killcam? You have people blasting fullauto on an LMG getting kills at long distance. Yeah man. That's ALL skill.

If you want an idea of how bad aiming with analog sticks is, try playing TF2. How many times do you get sniped? Is anyone even playing sniper? Compare to the PC version and... yeah. TF2 said to console gamers, "LOL GUYZ, LET'S NOT HAVE AUTOAIM."

Halo

Guys always complain that there aren't many girls that are into gaming and are constantly trying new ways to get her into playing.

Let's get one thing straight first.

Deep down inside, no guy really cares if they can play a game with a girl. They just want to be around more girls in their hobby and gain respect for what they do. I bet every guy would rather have girls loving them for how they played Halo 3 than having a female teammate in Halo 3.

Look at the WNBA. Most guys don't care.

With that said, the best way to get girls into gaming? SEX APPEAL.

As part of the actual game, I just need to point to the Final Fantasy series. I'm really convinced that there are way more female fans

Since I'm tired of writing about stories and seriousness and all that crap, let's take a breather.

Lost in the shuffle of today's dating games is the original Tokimeki Memorial. You may not have heard of it. Most gamers haven't, and it's not really a good game anyway. Then again, neither are most dating games.

When I played it, I didn't understand a lick of Japanese. If I did, I would've noticed that the emulator didn't properly render the characters and they were missing half of them. So now you'll get this awesome perspective of the game from a guy who didn't understand anything.

Ultimately you wanna court a girl and make her love you. Then at the end of the game, your true love is supposed to stand under some famous tree and you live happily after. I think. I'm not sure, because I kept

I've been having a lot of fun playing SpecOps in CoD:MW2 with my brother. That's usually an odd thing; I generally hate playing any sort of single player campaign, because I don't like how the difficulty of the game is randomly determined by how well a computer aims at you.

Yet here I was, always wanting to play more SpecOps with my brother, and I'm trying to figure it out.

One thing is for sure: There's no story in SpecOps. None. Just something simple like "Survive 5 waves of troops and trucks." I really enjoy that on so many levels.

I don't have to hear anyone talk, or have to sit through any cutscenes that are prescripted. Both of those mean that they slow the game down... you have to wait and watch and you can put the controller down and go take a dump and the game runs by itself. Let me play the game, not

When GTA3 came out, and I was in awe. I didn't think anything like that would ever come out, with massive improvements over GTA1 and 2.. Yet, despite the new and enhanced sandbox play, I was... kinda bored after a while.

The reason? I played Ultima 7 first.

An old computer RPG released in 1992, this game offered unprecedented freedom at the time. It was real-time and all NPCs had a schedule, offering an immersive world. When it's night time, (most) people go to bed. During the day time, people go to work. You can even follow people to see how their day goes, and in one side quest you follow the mayor and find out that he's having a affair. You know what game hyped up scheduling nearly 14 years later? Yeah, tri-Ace's Radiata Stories.

The interactivity was deep at the time, and maybe even by today's standards. Do you

Back in the days, when I picked up a game, I could care less about the story. There were two main motivating factors that made me want to complete a game.

1: There's an objective in the game that I want to beat.
2: I need to beat my old score/my friend's score.

And those were the driving factors behind old school games. What drove you to play was that something was there and you wanted to prove it wrong. Most of the legendary games on the Nintendo days were like this. You put in Super Mario Bros. and you just moved forward until something tried to stop you. You put in Zelda and all you wanted to do was find the dungeons and beat the boss. You played Tetris because you wanted to get a high score.

Sometimes there were stories, but they were never

I never think about graphics in a game, at least not technically... how many colors, bump mapping, textures, all that crap I really don't care about.

What I care about is character design, interface design, how the graphics work together with sound to create an atmosphere.

I care about a game's style.

Whenever people think of style, they're immediately drawn to cel-shaded or with an apparent stylistic approach--like the above game, "The World Ends with You." It's got a grungy look to everything; the menus, the fights, the enemies, the graffiti, the city... and it has a really funky soundtrack too. All of this makes it pretty trippy to play, which is a good thing. I can think of a number of other games that come to mind too--Wind Waker, Okami, No More Heroes as games with

The year is 1770. The Empire of "Chieftain" kainzero has extended across the entirety of Eurasia, with only primitive America left to conquer.

In the port of "kainzero's bitches," citizens celebrate the departure of the Empire's very first battleship, on its way to America followed by a massive convoy of destroyers and transports full of tanks.

As the battleship arrives at Omaha, the defending Spearmen see it. "OH MY GOD, WHAT IS THAT THING? WHAT THE HELL IS IT MADE OF? IT'S LIKE AN ALIEN!" The general of the battalion says, "Not to worry. They are unfamiliar with the Omaha 13th Spear Corps. We can throw our spears pretty far."

Leading his troops, they dive underwater and attempt to stab the battleship but as you know, stone does

With the release of Tekken 6, I get to read more uninformed and terrible reviews on gaming websites, as well as hear hordes of terrible gamers make sweeping statements like "This game is unbalanced/broken" and "All you do is juggle them for big damage, so this game sucks" and even "I can button mash and beat pros."

Seriously, this has to stop. We have a bunch of idiots who make very severe opinions about a game, without even knowing it in depth! It's about as ridiculous as saying, "Oh, basketball sucks. All you have to do is learn to shoot the 3-pointer and you'll score more points, it's so broken, why even bother to learn to shoot layups. I beat some pros 1v1 like this." That is ridiculous.

In a single-player game, a programmer designs an AI / obstacle that you have to overcome. Once you figure it out,

So because "The Crotch" mentioned something about X-COM being a complex game, I remembered playing it and not beating it. I found my copy and started playing and it was just like I remember it to be: FUCKING HARD.

One of my missions started out like this:
Human Turn 1 - Tank gets off the ship and gets shot up by 3 different aliens on the ramp. Pass turn as I prepare to find my smoke grenade guy on the ship.
Alien Turn 1 - Mind Controls one of the guys in my ship, who proceeds to auto fire and kill 5 of my 10 guys.
Human Turn 2 - End mission and bail out.

Coming from an SRPG background, I'm used to certain things. I'm used to people not dying and creating overpowered characters that use one or two moves and run over all the enemies. I laughed at "Hard" mode for

After writing that impression of FF4: The After Years, I got to thinking about why I don't play very many current-gen games. The last action game I played was Ninja Gaiden for Xbox, and I mostly played it because I wanted to see if it was really "old-school difficult" like they were advertising. (It wasn't. It actually felt pretty dumb how they artificially inflated difficulty.)

You know what I like about games back then? The very, very simple mechanics. You could read the instruction manual back then to really learn things, but you could figure out at least 95% of the game through trial and error on the first 2 stages, usually. Then off you go to play, and even though the play controls don't change, the difficulty gets increasingly harder.

Nowadays you will see tutorials

I've been playing FF4: The After Years for quite a while, putting in a couple hours when I can find the time to.

You know what though? It's not a great game. I'm hard pressed to even call it a good game. Nor am I the type that really appreciates fanservice and jizzing over seeing old characters again. And it's around $35 for all episodes, which seems a bit pricey for what is.

But there's a certain charm that the game has. Maybe it's the really simple levelling and battle system that still manages to throw very challenging fights your way. Maybe it's the shallow, wannabe-epic story that makes you laugh at all the ridiculousness they throw your way. Or maybe I really just am a fanboy that likes to reminisce about old dungeons and not really having to learn anything new.

I don't think I could recommend

I picked up Tekken 6 BR for 360. When I finally got to try the online mode, I was in for a gigantic letdown. If it's not in the matrix like the above video, it takes forever for a move to come out. And good luck blocking a quick low attack. At least Blazblue and SF4 are passable online and you can get a lot of applicable experience that you can use offline. It's not looking like that for Tekken 6, which is a real shame because I really wanted good online play.

I visited Japan for fun 2 weeks ago and man, those arcades are a god send for fighting game players. You could sit at home, bored, and think "Hey, I feel like playing SF4." You hop on a train, transfer 2 lines, and you're there in 15 minutes. You get there and there's a ton of machines to play on, you hardly wait and you can always be playing. And when you're tired, you just go home whenever you feel