(I got a request to bring back my blog. I always thought it was terrible. Well, I guess I have one fan.)

May 2nd was a momentous day, as the government-sanctioned arm of Korean E-Sports, KeSPA, announced that they would be changing their current league from Brood War over to Starcraft 2.

And quite frankly, I think it's a stupid move.

I became a fan of professional Korean BW in 2008, nearly 10 years after the game was released. When I started watching, thanks to modern technology, I was able to really understand the game. I could watch live streams of games from Korea. There was a wealth of articles and interviews translated from Korean on Teamliquid, and I could familiarize myself with the players and their playstyles and get engrossed in the issues and conflicts that made it so interesting to watch. For example, there's Bisu,

First of all, I just want to mention that the hardcoregaming article is superbly written and details everything perfectly. I even jacked this image from that site. I recommend that you provide them patronage.

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/yuno/yuno.htm


Spoilers ahead so be warned, though I doubt any of you have the patience to sit through this game anyway. I barely had it.

Yu-No is a visual novel. Or I can be honest and call it an eroge, the Japanese bastardization of erotic game.
At first I was skeptical of the whole visual novel/eroge genre, simply because I thought they were just games for people to get their rocks off. Certainly you can't get good storytelling out of them. Furthermore, they were in that anime style, and modern anime is terrible.

But... then I played 999: 9 Doors/People/Hours

When the first Mortal Kombat came out, my brother and I bought the Sega Genesis and the corresponding version so we could play with blood and do fatalities. Yeah! We were cool! Who wanted a SNES version with "sweat" and nerfed fatalities? Definitely not me!

Times have definitely changed. Looking at the fatalities now makes me cringe, and I have no idea why this happened; but I do feel like the violence and blood in games has definitely amped up and is making me less and less comfortable.

One of the starts was with Deus Ex HR. The cinematic takedowns were a bit cheesy and tacky, but hey it was all good. Then they taught me how to do a violent cinematic takedown. Err... wow. For sure I'd just stick to the regular one. Now, for whatever reason, Skyrim thought it'd be a good idea to add cinematic take downs too, and now features

For me, Halo 3 was one of the best team experiences I've had in an FPS. I don't know if it was the way the game was constructed or the advances in UI that happened at the time with voice chat and matchmaking, but everything came together correctly and it was a blast to play with friends who know what they were doing. It was so fun that I couldn't play at all with random pickups... it didn't have the same feeling and I became a lot worse than I really was.

There were so many satisfying feelings that could only be the product of working as a team. Catching a team in a crossfire, spotting for a teammate halfway across the map, controlling weapon spawns perfectly, getting a good flank and working strategically to get 2v1 situations, manipulating the enemy through tactics to funnel them into a trap, etc. The best part is when you got

I purchased Zelda Skyward Sword, but I only played it for 10 minutes. In that 10 minutes, I had to slog through the awful WiiMotion Plus video, then spent a fair amount of time rolling jars in the hallway before saving and quitting.

There was a brief scene in which they show Zelda writing a letter, and that's when I realized, in one of the biggest gaming series ever... Princess Zelda was never really that attractive.

Go on, do an image search for "female videogame character." You'll get pictures of modern games all with their attractive female characters in scantily clad outfits, as well as some real girls who slut themselves out holding on to the "sexy nerd" ideal. (You'll also get Nikki from Chrono Cross, which is actually kind of creepy.) I think it's kinda amazing that Zelda has endured for so long

I was on the fence whether to buy Skyrim or not. I found Oblivion to be pretty boring and dry, didn't really get into Morrowind, and Daggerfall was just a mess.

But the hype prevailed and I bought it for PC... except the game has been nothing but headaches for me. Random return to desktops, blue screens, buggy quests, etc. When I get it to work it is pretty decent, though. It's a lot less dry than Oblivion and the environment seems to have more... vitality to it, I guess. I don't think anything else has really changed.

However, I have to save every 2 minutes just in case a blue screen comes up (and in some cases, the crash happens while I save, which means I have to go 2 saves back...) and it's just been a mess.
UI wise it just sucks for PC users... but that's another story.

I think there's a certain irony if it wins GOTY, which is

I had to work an anime convention last weekend. No, it wasn't Anime Expo, and yes, it was an awful experience because I had no budget and because it was competing with Anime Expo, but that is another post for another time.

Anyway, I'm just shocked and appalled at how people shamelessly use internet jokes and phrases. I literally cringe every time I hear someone say "Fail!" in real life. I'm used to it on the internet, but... ugh, in real life, it's like trying to show off your e-peen to people who don't care because IT'S NOT THE INTERNET.

Even "trolling" when applied to a real life situation is weird. If you talk to me in real life, you'll know I love sarcastic jokes and horrible puns. Apparently someone referred to that as "trolling." What the heck? Dude, I had to come

This weekend I completed 999: 9 hours, 9 persons, 9 doors. Excellent story but as a game it was kinda shoddy.

But I'm not reviewing the game.
I'm here to complain, because complaining is what I do best.

And one of my gripes is h o w s l o w t h e t e x t i s.

This is one of my prime gripes with the Phoenix Wright series, in that you can't fast forward the text unless you beat the case.

Why? Why won't they let me read at a pace that I can read? As a kid I've had enormous reading aptitude and as such I can read faster than most people. If i play something with a lot of reading, I prefer it to show up all at once, and I always choose the fastest text setting.

So... playing 999 was really annoying. The game is 99%

That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.

As a fighting game veteran, the best thing I ever did to improve my skills and enjoy the game was to actually go out and play with real people. Everyone's pretty friendly. Show that you put in your own work and that you can't legitimately solve a problem, and even the top level players will be glad to sit down and help and analyze with you. I'd carry out discussions with other players and we all got better. To be honest, I was completely oblivious to the online community; I only used shoryuken.com to meet up with

AKB48 member Sashihara Rino undertook a challenge yesterday to make 200 blog posts in 24 hours... as an anniversary celebration for making 100 blog posts in 24 hours on the same day last year.



When I think about it, from a content generation perspective, that's pretty sick. I mean granted some of her entries suck and she has idol nerds on her side no matter what, but I feel like as far as blogging, to write 200 posts in 24 hours would at least put your blog on the map and pack it with content.

That does sound like a cool project though. I've actually noticed a decrease in blogging here, it feels like all the legendary blogs like Shimrra and even that guy who likes dolls have stopped, leaving us with a bunch of generic blogs of "What should I play next" and "Game Review xxx."

Hmm, I wonder

I wonder... am I REALLY interested in a game's story?

My first experience with struggling to finish a game came when I was a wee lad playing Final Fantasy VI. I absolutely blazed through the game in a week. Espers were discovered. airships crashed, and everyone reunited. However, I then came to the end, the final tower. Instead, I set the game down and didn't pick up until a week later and finally finished it.

Lately I've stalled on two games. I read that Valkyria Chronicles III was getting good reviews, before realizing I didn't even play VC2. So I ordered both, and I got pretty far in VC2... then I just stopped. I don't know why. Maybe the missions were too boring and repetitive? I have no idea. But now I'm on the last or second to last chapter, and I really don't feel like picking it up... with that, my interest in VC3 also dried up,

Smash Bros. Melee was filled with all sorts of intricate tricks, the likes of which were probably never envisioned from the start. Crazy stuff like wavedashing, SHFFLs and all sorts of weird crap like that. It was awesome. It was like learning a new trick with a yo-yo. Some people complained that it was "glitching" the game but honestly, it made the game more fun, made the game deeper. (I don't even know why these people complained. They were the type to play timed FFA, items on, all stages, where such techniques really didn't help at all because of the random factor, and in real life the casual players hardly ever collided with the hardcore players.)

Then came Brawl. Most of the fancy techniques were taken out. Hardcore Melee fans were aghast, because the game lost a lot of what made it fast and exciting; it was really slow, it wasn't

I've been following the Korean Broodwar scene for quite a while now, almost 3 years. It's such an awesome game to watch. Some games might be snoozers, with ugly mistakes everywhere, but overall the game is exciting. There's always action going on somewhere, there's always great player control, and even in the background there are always storylines between players.


For those who aren't into Broodwar, there are all the jokes about Korea and BW. Things like "LOL, I bet the day Starcraft 2 is released will be a national holiday." "Girls get wet watching mutalisk micro." etc. etc. But even then, unless you're a weirdo like me, you never really knew what the scene was about. Many RTS fans waited with bated breath to use Starcraft 2 as a way to come back on to the scene.

Dear Commissioner Goodell:

I've played football for a week amongst my friends and watched about an hour of professional football. There are definitely features that need to be nerfed and patched up, because it's obvious that it's unfair for most competitors.

1: Nerf the long bomb

I'm pretty sure that when football was invented, the creators didn't think that athletes would be able to throw the ball extremely far. It's unfair. You could be down by a touchdown for the entire game, and then all of a sudden they can use this broken, lucky play to score a touchdown in 5 seconds? Seriously? It doesn't even require any skill. All you have to do is throw the ball down the field and catch it. Anybody can catch it. Long bombs just exploit the

As I was trying to play Dragon Warrior a few months ago and falling asleep on the couch because of its Grindy McGrinderson style of gameplay, I wondered why it was so boring. I wondered what made an old game, which used to be so innovative and interesting back in the day, become merely a page of history that was no longer worth going back to.

On the other hand, we have Final Fantasy. Granted, there are a few annoying mechanics, but overall, the game still presents a worthy challenge given today's gaming environment.

I've broken it down to a few points.

1: The advance of player skill

With the advance of RPGs and MMOs, there are a few expectations from an experience-based system, one

I'm fascinated with gaming. I'm also very fascinated with differences between how different countries view gaming, what technologies are adopted in different countries and what's not, how gaming communities develop and even general differences in gaming mechanics.

As a child, I mostly grew up on games developed in Japan in the form of the NES/Genesis/SNES. I did not play Atari, nor was I around for that stage when Arcades were dominated by American games. PC gaming was not as big as a system compared to the consoles for me, although I do have a lot of memories in Ultima, Lucasarts (both flight sims and adventures), and simulation games like Transport Tycoon/Pizza Tycoon/SimCity, what have you. Sure, there were also American games that I've played, like Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, and the EA sports lineup. But I'd say that a lot of my

I love Dynasty Warriors, and to some extent Samurai Warriors. To me, it's an awesome gateway to Asian history. Yes, it's ridiculous and stylized and inaccurate, but it got me curious to know what really happened. I haven't read Romance of the 3 Kingdoms and probably won't, but the setting for Dynasty Warriors has always been the selling point for me. You have large armies, civil wars, romanticized generals from the genius Zhuge Liang to the cold and cutthroat Cao Cao, and it's not really hard to understand the source material either.

DW sells like hotcakes in Asia. Not so much here. In fact, talk to someone about Dynasty Warriors here. "LOL it's the game where you get lots of kills and kill lots of people."

NO!

That's the most bass ackwards view of DW! The historical basis and the ability to assume the