Hello my dear GS friends!

I'm sorry that I did not spend a lot time here during the past weeks. I missed most of your blogs and also today I feel too tired to stay for a long time. I'm sure that condition will improve once I got used to my new life.

Like I told you I finished my studies on Media IT and am now a Master of Science. Three days after my final exam I started to work in my new job. I'm a software developer (C and Java) now. My company earns money with software for big German gas companies. Not the most exciting branch of trade but it is well paid and the C code is funny

I had to travel to Berlin a lot to get some lessons on the code. Those who travel have stories to tell and I have this one for you:
I went by train in the first cIass and played some N+ on my DS. That's when the stewardess stepped in and asked me "Bist du erste Klasse?" which means "Are you first cIass" in the informal colloquial form you may use for friends and children. I was wondering about the form she used to address me. I'm 23. She probably thought I was younger, maybe 17? It was still not very polite.
I said that I am first cIass and she left.
A couple of minutes later she came back to sell food and drinks. And then she asked me "Did your parents give you money, so you can buy yourself something to eat or drink?" What??! That's a question you can ask a twelve year old!! But not somebody over fourteen. And surely no one at the age of 23! I don't look that young! I did not have to show my passport for years! My only explanation for this is the DS. It is probably still seen as a pure children's toy by many adults.

In gaming news I played through R&C: Quest for Booty - it's good but since it is the same as all the other R&C games before I still felt kinda bored.
I bought the Orange Box to play Portal. I have to say I expected more from the hype but I'm only half way through. Maybe it will get more exciting.
And we (EiRoGGe and me) do now own Guitar Hero. We waited a long time for a cheap offer but it was worth it.

Thank you for reading! I'll visit your blogs soon!
Mog

In the time shortly after the GC newspapers and magazines are filled with related content. I have three selected quotes for you (all translated).

"It is terrifying how many freaks are walking around here. Most of them are nice and only want a picture. But sometimes they are making strange body noises."
~ Booth Babe Linda at the GC in an Interview for GC Today
Aren't you paid for being nice to your guests? I mean the only readers of this are the GC guests.

"The distribution costs of a game are not determinant for its price. The development costs are."
~Uwe Bassendowski, Sony Computer Entertainment Germany
And now explain again why the European prices are so much higher compared to the US prices?

"We are not leaving because the GC in Leipzig is doing bad but because it is too successful for Leipzig."
~Lorber, Speaker for EA on the movement of the fair to Cologne
Well, thanks.

Today was the last day of the Leipzig Games Convention and again I had a lot of fun. We played the new Viva Pinata, Banjo-Kazooie, Spore, Mirror's Edge and some more Little Big Planet and Streetfighter (I'm still proud on my crazy finishing move that filled the whole screen with purple energy). We got Guild Wars t-shirts and witnessed an NCsoft costume contest with a lot of high quality GW and Tabula Rasa costumes. We also paid more attention to the hall with educational expositions and retro games. I played an extremely old game made by MB which worked on a white-on-black vector screen. The game was basically Geometry Wars and was already fun back then.

If you have read my older blog post or the news you know that this was supposed to be the last Games Convention in Leipzig. It will be moved to Cologne. Sony made me almost cry when they placed a huge crying sack boy (real water from a spring) on the Augustus square on a box with the text "Der Abschied fällt schwer" (meaning "It's hard to say goodbye"). Thank you Sony, that's kind! ;_;
Not so kind: Someone made posters with the text "Game Over - GamesCOM 2009 in Cologne" and placed them over our GC posters.

However since the GC was so successful this year (10% growth) it seems like there will be another GC here in 2009! According to market research only 10% of the exhibitors want that the fair leaves Leipzig. Unfortunately they are the big ones (EA). I can imagine that the fair in Cologne will be more expensive (for exhibitors and visitors - current tickets are 12 euro for a day) and that smaller publishers don't want to pay more.

Currently the GC is a cooperation between the Leipzig trade fair and an association of 12 publishers (out of hundred who attended this year's GC). The association decided this year to move the trade fair to Cologne. Everyone else isn't that happy and now it looks like there are going to be two events next years. The games convention in Leipzig and the GamesCOM in Cologne. Will that be a good thing? And how will the fight end? I don't know but my position is clear. Of course it is good for the people around Cologne to have the event there and I can understand that they are happy about it but we invented and established the convention and don't want it to be taken away for no real reason.

You know after almost 20 years German unity East and West Germany are still split. We get a lot lower wages here and many West Germans still have prejudices that the East Germans are lazy and don't do anything right. But once we establish something here it is taken away. No need to say that the GC with over 200 000 visitors has an impact on our economy. So I hope the best. Viva Games Convention!

And now I have finally time to read your posts.

als ob die daGood evening friends! This was the first out of 4 GC days that are open for normal visitors. It was a very good day to be there. I know that you can hardly walk there on Saturdays but today we only had to wait a couple of minutes to play the games we wanted to check out.

• Little Big Planet! Yay! I was worried that the game was overhyped but it was awesome. The perfect coop game. A lot of fun even with a stranger.
• Motorstorm Pacific Rift. Spitscreeeeen! But still as random as the first game. In the first race I was 1st out of 8 and the next race 8th out of 8. The game just doesn't recognize talent! Anyway splitscreeeen!
• Pure. I watched EiRoGGe play it and it looked good. Even better than Motorstorm. Smooth controls and beautiful plants. But I don't know if it has a splitscreen option.
• Tomb Raider Underworld. Well, it looked good but played difficult. I couldn't solve the puzzles but maybe you grow into it better when you play from the beginning. Also you have to be very accurate where you are tilting the stick while climbing and jumping. I foresee frustration if they don't improve this.
• Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party. Very funny. We played a dancing mini game which is probably better than Boogie on it's own. Gotta have it!
• Skate it! on the Balance Board. Needs a lot of practice! I was pretty much unable to control the direction but I think I know what I did wrong. Also every time I tried to jump by going down a little and than up again the board wanted to reconfigure my weight. It does that when you leave the board step on it again but I did not leave it. I just might have lifted my heels a little.
• Sonic Unleashed. Another game with very beautiful graphics. Very smooth and colorful. I ran through the first level which was very easy. The controls seem to be good and some parts of the level are just like in the 2D games. My only worry about them is that the camera is pretty close and you don't see alot of the things to come.
• Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood. Also played good. I will buy it though I still think that there cannot be a good RPG story with the Sonic characters.
• Street Fighter IV. I suck at this one. I did not think that it feels so much different than a 3D fighter. I guess SCIV will be my favorite fighter for a while but if EiRoGGe buys SF we will have some fun with it, too.
• Fallout. Ok, we didn't play it ourselves and only watched a guy playing it but we got a nice T-Shirt and a bottle of "purified" Fallout water. They picked a T-Shirt in size S for me which is of course still way to big but EiRoGGe can wear it instead of his M sized one.

We watched some more games including The Force Unleashed, Starcraft and Home but we were not interested enough to wait and play them. Music and rhythm games were dominating this GC. Everywhere were stages for wannabe bands. Rock Band, the Guitar Hero Rock Band version, the Konami Rock Band version, the Wiimote Rock Band version, SingStar, Dancing Stage and so on and so on.

Yesterday night we went to the Video Games Live show I told you about earlier. The musicians were superb. Everything sounded perfect and the choice of melodies was nice. We heard music from old cIassics, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, Mario, Sonic, Kingdom Hearts, Crysis, Halo, Castlevania and more.

But I have to say that I'd rather have had a pure concert (like the years before) without the video wall and the spot lights that were blinding the audience every few minutes. Also the audience was encouraged to cheer whenever they liked something and thus they cheered every time they had remotely heard of a game name. The music kinda did not get the attention it deserved and the show around it was not worth the distraction. Because of the video wall they did not even play in our real concert hall where the sound would have been better. But enough complained. It was still a good evening and I'm thankful for EiRoGGes invitation!

That's it from the game city Leipzig, folks!

Today I had sth. to do near our trade fair where the Games Convention will start tomorrow. In the tram I overheard a conversation of three booth babes that just finished their training. Here is the translation:

BB1: You really had to play during the job interview? Blatant!
BB2: Yes I had!
BB3: I had to rent a console over the weekend and practice and then they told me they had other plans for me. And now I already played the whole weekend!!!
BB2: They send me a DS for training a month ago.
BB1: !!
BB2: But I think that's ok. That way I might eventually learn it.
BB1: But I don't want to learn it!

Oh boy...

This weekend our GS friend Papa_Mo from London visited EiRoGGe and me in our hometown Leipzig. This was by far the most polite visitor I've ever had. He had very good manners, always let me go first, complimented us, bought cake for breakfast and didn't allow us to pay anything. You should all invite him. You will love it^^

He arrived on Friday. Because it was too late to start any big actions we just cooked something in EiRoGGe's flat and played some games. Unfortunately we couldn't convince him to play SingStar with us. Nobody ever wants to play SingStar. Dumb party game!

Mo and me in front of the Goethe monument (famous for Faust)

On Saturday we showed him around in the inner city and climbed the Monument of the Battle of the Nations. I was there before as a child but I didn't remember that it had this many stairs! My knees felt really weak afterwards but the sight was great. In the evening (after a Schnitzel feast) we decided to witness the final concert of the CIassic Opens (free cIassical music on the market place). We expected an orchestra but our guess was completely off. Instead there was a band that covered the greatest hits from the 70s, 80s and 90s. The band won us and everybody over after some songs. The whole market place was dancing.

In the zoo

Sunday was our nature day. We went to the zoo and spent 5 hours looking at and photographing animals. They were lazy because it was pretty warm but we still enjoyed the tour. Mo's and our ways parted in the evening after a BBQ in my mother's garden.

One lazy tiger

It was a great weekend! We had much fun, saw a lot of stuff and learned many new facts about the sights of our city.

Hope you had a good weekend as well!

Phew, the last days were stressful. I finished my master's thesis and had to deal with incredible stupid bugs in the program I wrote. They only occurred on faster machines than mine and I had a hard time testing. Today I could finally hand the thesis with the CD over to my university. I hope I can defend the thesis by the end of August. Else I would have to pay for the next semester. Well that doesn't mean that my work on the program is done already. It's good enough for my professor but not good enough for the company I made it for. I still have to build in a whole lot of features for better user friendliness. And this is just a prototype. I don't feel relaxed after all *sigh*.

For finishing the thesis my friend EiRoGGe had an awesome gift for me: tickets for the Video Games Life show. This better be good since one ticket costs almost 50 Euro. I'll report about it!

In the past weeks I played Secret Agent Clank. This game is mediocre. Remember when GS rated Tools of Destruction low because the game was too varied? I didn't agree back than but this game really feels to varied. You jump from character to character and task to task without getting into the flow. I reached the end boss today and I'm not sad that the game is over (or almost over - the boss is hard).

I also bought Soulcalibur 4. It looks good on EiRoGGe's HDTV^^ On my TV it looks just like SC3. I still have to practise a lot to be able to compete online. Does anyone of you have it for PS3?

I hope all of you are alright!

Mog

Great GS, great... you could have guessed that many gamers from around the globe want to see the press conferences. You could have been prepared for the huge amount of traffic. Still I'm getting nothing but a slide show. Worse than that actually with hardly a picture every minute. The sound is worthless, too.
But I want to be fair. I'm sure you tried hard, GameSpot and at least there is the ticker.

So what can we say about Nintendo's conference? Probably "YAWN" or something.^^
Here are some pictures I had to watch for several minutes because of the streaming problems.

UPDATE on Sony's conference:

This was a better one. But will the movie service come to Europe, too? The European store still sucks compared to the American one. It offers less content and is worse sorted.

Gamer Cards... nice.

So that's why the ending of Ratched and Clank was such a cliff hanger -.-

Just a short comment about the Microsoft Press Conference before I go to bed.

MS showed no shame when they proudly "introduced the concept of the avatar". Honestly, who didn't think of Miis at that point? Also Xbox gamers will get their version of Singstar with Lips, their Buzz with Scene it! (not new, I know) and their Eye Toy game with We're in the Movies. They are also getting their version of Final Fantasy XIII, well actually not only a version.

Xbox users get everything (the Lips microphones do even have motion sensing!). And Sony fans can't help to feel at least a little bit ripped off. But I can only compliment MS for this. They find out what the customers like and give it to them. Everyone is copying from one or another sometimes. I own no 360 but it's probably a good time to own one. Sony can talk and make big announcements but in the end they keep us waiting and waiting. And I really like the online party function MS showed.

Let's wait and see the other conferences!

Ok, Neon Ninja can probably be more proud on his blog post about the completion of Ninja Gaiden II since Dragon Sword was easy but if you are still interested in my review here is the link

Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword Review

My score for the normal difficulty setting is 6025825 which must be really bad since everyone else in the ladder has 999999999 points -.-
Without the mask Ryu looks like a girl. He looks better in DOA^^ And his father's name is Joe? Joe Hayabusa? Now that sounds like Ninja... Joe...Hehe

I also finished Crisis Core FFVII. I don't understand the hype for this game. It scored a 9? Ok, it looks good, at least the cut scenes and the characters do. I cannot complain about the sound either but the most important thing is still the game play. Square Enix must think we've gotten dumber since FFVII. Only one character to control and 6 skills to choose from in battle. Limit breaks, summons and bonuses are random. That doesn't leave much of the greatness of the FFVII system. The only interesting part is to power up your equipment but to do that you have to play many of the 300 missions that mostly work the same: You start in one of a few different dungeons and have to fight your way to a certain monster and beat it. *YAWN*.
The story was not bad but not really reasoned either. But enough of the rant. I still liked the game (but not that much that I'd give it a 8 or 9) - mainly because of Zack who is a great character. Oh the ending was so sad ;_; I knew it had to happen but they managed to make it even sadder than I imagined.

I played both games mainly at home even though they are portable games. How about you? Do you play portable games mainly when you are on the road? Or can't you stop when you are at home like me?

Fare will pink banner and Garfield icon! I found this Duellist X picture among the wallpapers GS offers and liked it. You know, Duellist X is a huge hero and well known amongst the Moogles. But otherwise I, Mog, have nothing to do with this mysterious, good looking guy. Completely nothing! I don't know who he is! I don't even know him in person! ... But he sure is great!

Other stuff:

Sadly the German soccer team failed to win the final match. Congratulations to Spain. It was a well earned victory! And now we are going to kill the Euro mascots in our fury!

Yeah! We did it! Germany made it to the semi finals of the EURO 2008! I honestly had my doubts that we could beat Portugal after the last two weak games but the team got its energy back and scored three beautiful goals. Portugal wasn't bad either and with a little more luck they could have won, too. I love the German team. Every player is sympathetic and non is a conceited star. If we win it is because of good team play (or weak opponents).

Poldi gave his shorts to the fans after the game.

In other news I finished MGS4 yesterday. It was a flawless experience. Every portion of the game was well made and fun to play. I'll go and buy the strategy guide and play it again trying to find all the easter eggs. The whole MGS story is so weird. If they just had talked to each other and explained their goals instead of using all the weapons possible against each other... but that would have been boring. And the last boss fight - I don't know why they were fighting at all. Probably just because an MGS game needs a proper boss fight against a main character. Anyway best game on PS3 so far.

I also put my hands on the free Spore creature lab and created this little Wurli:

The editor is really easy to use and it comes with a video capture tool and an avatar creator option. You can share creatures very easy, too. They did a good job here. The creator is a bit limited though. Can you even create assymmetric beings? Also you cannot paint your creation freely. The parts you can use are limited in this free version but I guess there will be tons of parts in the game. Have you tried the creator yet?

That's it for today. Read you soon! (I'll try to read more of your posts than in the last weeks.)

Mog

Hey party people!

I wanted to build a home page for quite some time. I thought it might be a good possibility to show my programming projects to a potential future employer. But in the end I didn't feel like making a businesslike, stark thing. I like to use colloquial language. So it became a site primary designed for me to keep track of what I've done in the past and what games I played. And I show it to you because it's no fun to have a homepage that nobody ever visits.

Unfortunately it is written in German (mixed with the usual English names for technical stuff and games). I would be glad if you'd take a look anyway! Thanks!

http://mog.eirogge.de/ (kindly hosted by EiRoGGe)

Have you visited the revamped Playstation store yet? It's nice but the font is hella small for my little SDTV and why do the icons take 10 minutes to load? I hope the latter issue will improve with time. Anyway it's better than the old store!
I downloaded the Patapon demo for PSP. Patapon costs almost 40 Euro here. Else I would have just bought it. Keeping the beat is harder than it looks and I wonder if the whole game will consist only of entering one of three button combinations. Graphics and interfaces look really good.

How do you like the new store and my homepage?

Over here the first April is going to end in one hour and it was awesome! I didn't expect all these great jokes. It feels like I'm experiencing this day the first time in my life. The past April Fool's Days felt so cheap compared with this!

Some examples:

• The GameSpot title site
• Blog posts like Gabu's, 31160618's and U1's
• Assassines Gear Solid
• The Zelda Film
• WoW Molten Core
• Super Pii Pii Brothers

What was your favorite and what other great jokes did you see or make?

Also watch the Algorithm March WITH NINJAS!

Misfit119 tagged me the other day and you all know what that means for us! So be strong and read another issue of

5 Things You Did Not Know About Me

1. I don't know my father. Never knew, never asked. I was always happy without a dad. He ain't dead (at least I think so). My mom just didn't want to live together with him.

2. I hate physical work and sports. Especially ball sports. I just can't catch and throw. However I love mental excercise like in Professor Layton My grandfather was another kind. He was a great Racewalker and won the national championships of East Germany many times. He also attended the Olympic Games as athlete and trainer.

3. Although I don't do sports I can eat what I want without growing fat. God bless my genes.

4. In school I was a huge Anime and Manga fan. Sailor Moon, Dragonball, Captain Tsubasa, City Hunter, you name it. Then in one issue of my anime magazine there was a preview for the Playstation 2 and a Final Fantasy 8 review and from that moment on I saved all my pocket money to become a gamer!

5. I'm running out of good facts. So to shock you all I'll make the last one that I'm using the AOL software. Daily. Always. For surfing, radio, chatting and email. And no, I'm not an idiot. I have my bachelor's degree in media computer science.

I'm tagging U1. Hope I did not overlook that you already made such a post.
Papa_Mo and PipeBigboss (still around?), feel tagged, too, please!

Since Misfit119 waited for this Review I'll alarm him with this blog post. And everyone else that is interested, too. It became pretty long but I wrapped things up in a pro and con list. Hope it helps.

Final Fantasy Chrystal Chronicles Ring of Fates Review

No, no, this blog ain't dead. I've just been a little busy doing nothing lately.^^
In an earlier post I complained about our winter weather with no snow at all. Easter tried to correct the failure of Christmas and we saw the first snow on these days. I kinda still want to complain!

As mentioned above I'm pretty much doing nothing at the moment. I applied for a topic for my upcoming master thesis at a local company. They have a topic but still need to ge the OK from their client, who would finance the work. That's why I'm currently just waiting for an answer. If the answer is negative I would have to start a new search for a topic. Then I'll be pretty late...

In the meanwhile I'm playing games. Of course. What else? Together with EiRoGGe I finished Prof. Layton. I love this game! The atmosphere is so nice and the difficulty of the puzzles is just right. Some are easy, some are hard but there are always good hints.

I also started to play Persona 3. The game is amazing... how do they make me play so many hours with such a small amount of content? There is one dungeon and not much to explore on the outside either. But it's still very engaging.

But since Persona is supposed to last 70 hours I took a break to play Final Fantasy Chrystal Chronicles Ring of Fates. The story is so awefully cheesy... I hardly could take it. Honestly! Urks! Fortunately the game play is good and the dungeons are fun. I made it through single player mode in maybe 17 hours. Yes, it is a very short FF but I hope coop will be good, too. I'll try it next weekend and write my review after that experience.

Now you're up to date. I hope I didn't miss too much in your blogs.

Cologne is stealing our beloved Games Convention and because Leipzig doesn't sell the name "Games Convention" it will probably be named "Games Con" in future. This sucks! The reason: There are more 5 star hotels in Cologne and the transport connections are supposed to be better (Hey Leipzig has 2 Airports soon and the largest German trainstation in terms of area!). The real reason: EA is located in Cologne and West Germany gets sick when there is something successfull in East Germany that they don't have. I'm in a bad mood.

Source

This year's GC will be the last in Leipzig.

I haven't written a blog post about specific games in a long time. Basically because I mostly play games some month after they were interesting or games that don't interest the majority at all^^ But Ratchet and Clank: ToD and Uncharted aren't that old and MGS is already old enough to be dug out again.

Last week I finished the challenge mode of Ratchet and today I wrote a review about it. It was just an awesome game while it lasted. Unfortunately it was pretty short again and this time the challenge mode was just too easy to be any good. It was in fact a lot easier than the normal mode! What's that? I was totally overpowered. In the end I had most weapons on their max level and 999HP without leveling or money grinding. All I did was to search all the collectables which didn't take too long.

To illustrate this post I started to draw Ratched... it was supposed to be a scratch but in the end it became a full colored image^^ Still a pretty lazy image without hands or difficult poses.

Next on my list was Uncharted. I wanted to buy the game earlier but all the stores in the city sold it for 65 to 75 Euro which goes against my principles of paying not more than 60 Euro for a single game. Actually I paid the same price 8 years ago and its normal that all things get more expensive. But in this case it doesn't feel right. Like Ratchet Uncharted doesn't have more than 10 to 15 hours play time (some say 6 to 8 but I'm bad - this was my very first shooter). From a developer's point of view however I can see the point for the high price tag. Judging from the graphics and the animations this game took huge efforts. It is just beautiful. The characters are very likable and the story is interesting. Some chapters had a little too much shootig in it for my taste but nevertheless I couldn't stop playing. There is just one chapter I really hate. The game suddenly turns into Resident Evil at some point and I hate ugly cellars with monster so much!! I'd like to replay the game but not this chapter!

Uncharted didn't take me too long and so I started MGS1 yesterday. I played MGS2 and 3 and really liked those games. So I bought a used copy of MGS1. But ewwwwww!! The graphics are worse than I imagined - I realized that the only PSX games I've played so far were JRPGs with prerendered backgrounds. SNES games look beautiful compared to full 3D PSX titles. But ok I can probably live with bad graphics. What really annoys me are the voices. They are German what was surprising because in 2 and 3 they are English. Ok I like German but those voice actors are horrible! Truly awful! Terrible! Mei Ling is the worst of them. I hate her and I think she is actually supposed to be cute. I don't know if I'm really going to play this. Seems kinda hard, too. EiRoGGe told me Metal Gear Acid 1 & 2 are sold really cheaply in a department store at the moment. So I'll probably play them instead.

What do you play? Any recommendations for PS3 games?

This is a tram. I use it every day to get to university, work and so on. Do trams need television? Probably not but we have monitors in those trams and get to see cinema previews, newspaper headlines and commercials and now e-sport news, too! Yay finally something that really makes sense and totally justifies these monitors!
Which famous CS team switches from traditional CS to Source? Who is leaving the Four Kings? When does the national CS-championship start? You don't know? Me neither BUT I could if I'd care and remember. Hey, at least I can read those player names. I guess most tram users cannot.

Related Link: ESL Europe

And because I don't want this topic to fall silent a link from bojocon40's blog to a very interesting and broad article about Gamespot and Gerstmann-gate: GameSpot's Sad State of Affairs