I am now officially registered on the Playstation Network. My name isn't actually Goliath though (although it might have been, had I thought of it earlyer), it's really Blaine. I've been pondering for months now trying to come up with coolest name but, when the time came, I was left dumbfounded. My first choice would have been Roland (from the Dark Tower series of books... go read it now!), but it was taken, so I just wrote the second name I could think of from the books. Blaine the Mono 's the full name, and he doesn't play foolish games!

It's funny story time folks: here's why it took me so long to get online. Last weekend I tried to connect my PS3 to my router, but whenever I would connect the wire, either the PS3 or my computer would tell me it could not detect a connection. Finally I gave up and didn't try again until today. I found the problem quickly enough. Long story short, the wires behind my computer are mostly hidden and are in a big mess, and it turns out both the wires from my computer to the router and from my PS3 to the router are the same color! So, whenever I thought my PS3 was plugged in, the other end was lying on the floor, and when I unplugged my "PS3" from the router, I was really unplugging my computer! Well, now both my computer and my baby --uhh, my PS3 I mean!-- are plugged-in and online. I've been playing resistance online and, although I am far from being the worse one on there, I have a lot of catching up to do!

Ya, I got a PS3 last wednesday, and I've been so busy playing I haven't written about it yet. I got it with Resistance, and the game is awesome! The graphics are surreal, the gameplay is smooth, and the arsenal is possibly the most diverse, original and useful I've ever played with. Wait... What's that? You want me to tell you how I got my PS3? Well, ok!
In truth, it's not really how I got it that's interesting, but how I almost didn't get it! That day, the Universe was conspiring against me!
My story begins on wednesday, november 22, 2006, 3 pm. I received a text message from my gf asking me if I still want a PS3, to which I reply "Of course, why?" Turns out EB had just received 2 PS3s that afternoon and one of our friends could hold it for me. So I jumped out of bed, got in my car (2000 Nissan Xterra, yellow), and made my way to EB.
When I got there, my friend got the PS3 out of the back for me and put Resistance on the counter, at my request. The total came up to 706.92, and I made to pay with my Interac card. This is where the trouble starts: the little debit machine emmitted a negative beep and read "Limit Exceeded". F***! I told my friend to hold on as I called my bank to ask if I could raise my limit on the phone. Turns out that because I don't have "easy phone" account set up, I can't do it now, but I could have if I had had it set it up before. F***! Now I have to drive to my nearest bank and do it in person, and my friend chooses this time to tell me he can only hold my PS3 until 4, at which point he will have to sell it to someone else. Right now, its 3:25! F***!
So I ran out of EB, got back into my truck and made to drive to my bank. I got lucky and found a bank right around the block, this should save me a lot of time. Thank the lord (score: me 1, Universe 3)! So I am about to turn into the bank's parking lot but the entrance is blocked off. F***. I know there's another one around the block, so I drive around (and wait at 4 red lights), only to find I can't enter from this side of the street, I have to be going the opposite dirrection. Now I'm back where I started, and I have just wasted 10 minutes (25 left to go). I drive straight and pull an illegal Uee (thats a U-turn!), then head back and finally enter the parking lot (Universe 5, me 2). I then enter the bank. Both tellers are busy but there's no lineup , so I wait a few seconds. Skip the technicalities, I talk to the teller for a few minutes and we conclude I can't raise my limit... but I can withdraw the ammount! So I walk out with 800$ in pocket and drive back to EB. It's now 3:45, and unless something catastrophic happens to me, that PS3 is mine!
Well, nothing catastrophic happened, I bought my PS3 cash and became the object of all my friends jealousy! By the time I wrote this, I finished Resistance on medium difficulty and am halfway through hard! Now I need to go back to EB to buy a memory card adapter so I can finish FFXII.
Oh, I almost forgot, I also got Taladega Nights on BD for free with my PS3! I never saw that movie before and I watched it and enjoyed it very much!

I stopped by best buy at 9 tonight to check up on the line and I was already too late... I checked out a few other stores and, sad to say, I won't be getting a PS3 anytime soon... Resistance will have to wait... I'm really abusing these suspension points...
On the bright side, I get to play FFXII on my friend's borrowed PStwo, and it is possibly the best game I have ever played. FFXII is the reason I've been absent from gamespot for over a week, its just so good I don't need to read about other games right now! Honestly, it is simply amazing.
It would make me the happyest guy alive to be playing Resistance tomorrow, but I won't, so I'll enjoy FFXII in the mean time.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I finally got Final Fantasy XII! I have been waiting for this game for over a year now, and it finally came out yesterday. I picked it up in the afternoon, collector's edition of course! But wait, here comes the plot twister: I can't play the game because my PS2 has been broken for about 3 months now! So, my collector's edition of FFXII is just sitting on my shelf, in an upright position so I can better gaze at it admiringly, and basically all it's doing is looking pretty!
*I feel kinda stupid wrting these blogs to nonexistent readers... maybe people will actually read my interesting blogs someday!...

  
     I look at PS3 preview videos, and I am breathless at how good almost all of them look. This is a good thing, but it can also aplay against us. I look at games like Motorstorm and Fatal Inertia and I am taken away by how good both these titles look, but I also wonder how well they will sell. Somehow, I don't see them being major hits and with such high-budget visuals I can't help but to wonder if some studios are in for big time losses in the next gen. Studios will obviously need to think long and hard before making a new game now because, considering the potentially higher production costs, a flop could hurt badly... a next gen hurt!

     This could cause one of three things (that I can think of). The first is that some studios will continue making bad high-budget games and go bankrupt. The second option is that some studios will stop being daring and inovative and play it safe, making games that will guarantee some profit rather than trying somehting new that could fail. The last possibility, and possibly the better one, would imply greater involvement of the gaming public. Studios may have to get closer to their target audience and learn first-hand what the gamers want.

     With next-gen media and processing capabilities, the possibilities are becoming ever-more endless, so studios can really pull out the stops and make games we never would have dreamed possible. They'll just have to be careful which stops they pull out, and they could use our help in doing that, or (financial) consequences could ensue.

Given that I suck balls with Photoshop... or maybe it's just the fact that I don't have Photoshop, I made this using MS Paint! I don't think it's too bad of an outcome. I used Nero for the background, and a slogan I thought was cool and says exactly what I think, although the end of it is kinda hard to read with all the saving in different formats, then multiple uploads (from CPU to imageshack to gamespot...). In the end, It's far better than nothing!

After months of worse news after bad news (losing exclusivities, hardware downgrades, bad rumors), I finally found this article on IGN, about Resistance, which has brought my hope back. I always knew the PS3 had something more, and the last questions in this article certainly proved it. One of those questions flat-out says it all: "Would it have been possible to create Resistance on anything but the PlayStation 3, like the PS2, Xbox 360 or PC..." And the answer was, in short, "no"! Here is the article: http://ps3.ign.com/articles/729/729630p4.html.

TRUCE (however it's spelled)!
I'm tired of this X360 vs PS3 (Wii, who said that? Wii, you're kidding right! Forget Wii, bash Wii, Wii is a joke!).
I get it, GOW looks good, I admit I would like to get it, but I also know there are a helluva lot of games I would like to have on PS3. And I'm tired of going into forums and have people bark at me at every comment I make. Hmm, this game doesn't look quite good... "FANBOY, FANBOY, TROLL, GET OUT OF HERE AND DIE YOU STUPID F***". Please, stop, that hurts! I really don't care if you don't want me to enjoy my PS3, because I will, and you enjoy your X360, and maybe we could all get along.
Somewhere in the distance, I see the light at the end of the tunnel. That light is November 17, it is the PS3 release. Yes, there will be peace... Let there be Peace, no more fighting... GOD, LET THERE BE PEACE!
--------------------------------------------
**I created a thread with this as the opening message and it earned me 5 days suspension, I don't know why, and I was/am very mad at the mod who suspended me.

An idea struck me like lightning again, and within five feverish minutes of intense drawing, I came up with THIS:


*This has not been stolen, I created a myspace account to upload it to the net so I could paste the URL because that was the only way I could think of getting this here!

I got the trackball idea from bodielobus, who designed a controller for the PS2, but I didn't like the layout, or losing the 2nd analog stick, so I drew this; the perfect shooter game controller! I really hope someone important sees this, and it eventually becomes official PS3 issue, that would be awesome!
*Here are links to bigger versions of the images, so you can read the text:
-Front view: http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=102329489&imageID=1061279998&MyToken=a447bd33-daa6-4e0b-b9a0-4767d8170fbb
-Side view: http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=102329489&imageID=1061280461&MyToken=a447bd33-daa6-4e0b-b9a0-4767d8170fbb

I am sick and tired of reading about analyst firms that are predicting sony's PS3 to come out loser in the next-gen console war. Arguments like "Sony has done very little to justify why the system is worth a premium
price for consumers that don't care about raw hardware performance" enrage me. Who do these people think they are, do they really believe that crap they are saying? "Though Sony has touted the machine as inexpensive relative to the
hardware contained within it, DFC doesn't think consumers will see it
that way." You know what I think, these firms are telling naive people to get rid of their sony stock so they can get a lot of them for a bargain then they're gonna make a fortune reselling it all once sony is back on top. F*ing analysts.

Hey Jack: nobody likes you. Stop pissing everyone off. In your unrelenting endeavor to gain mass public appeal and, it would seem, become president -what with your failed political foray-, you have messed with the wrong groups of people on numerous occasions.
Gamers just want to play games, and games don't make us go around killing our classmates, its prohibiting games that would make us do that! So do not attempt to undermine gamers' interests in an attempt to further your own pathetic political agenda. Oh, also, Jack, here's a fun fact: those games that you blame for Columbine and incidents of the sort, they are available everywhere in the world; in Canada, Europe, Asia, and even down under. So, why is it that these incidents only occur in the U.S.? The correlation is somewhat strikingly lacking is it not?
To conclude this, I say just give up. Nobody likes you, and nobody ever will, so don't bring our games down with yourself.
*The views and opinions expressed in this post are in no way the responsibility of gamespot.com, Take Two interactive or its subsidiary Rockstar Games. SEW ME.

I just want to take this opportunity to state that I am (and probably always will be) a fervent Sony follower. To me, there is nothing Microsoft or Nintendo could ever do to dislodge Sony from its king of gaming throne. I grew up with playstation, have been a proud owner of PS2 for 6 years, and will be a very happy owner of a PS3 (60gb of course; 20gb, pff!). I also believe the PS3 is nowhere near overpriced, it could cost 900$ and the hardware still would be worth it. X360 was rushed, and Wii is Wiitarded. That's all folks.

I had just finished watching Final Fantasy: Advent Children, a movie I had anticipated for a long time (and truly enjoyed) because I had been a devoted fan of the game and the Final Fantasy saga, then I got to thinking: "You know which game I would like to see be made into a movie? Grand Theft Auto. They could use the story from the third, stick to the plot and the genre, and that would make a great movie." But then I thought some more, and I realised that Grand Theft Auto would be a great movie. In fact, I realised it already is. Our games convey emotions, and thrills, and stories as movies do, but in a much more deep, involved, and immersive way. So, really, there is no need to readapt our games into movies, because we've already gotten so much out of them. In a way, as gamers, game movies really rob us of something that only we had, by vulgarising and exposing them to everyone out there. We have earned these stories. And these movies, though they may be entertaining, may be just the last thing we should want. So, the next time your favourite game gets butchered -or valoured- on the big screen, ask yourselves: is this glorification, or exploitation?

Ok, I am a little harsh on the Wii. Sure, it has pathetic hardware specs, and it won't do anything more than play games, and it's controller is the stupidest thing I've ever seen, but beneath it all, Nintendo understood something. Maybe the next generation of gaming consoles souldn't only be about better graphics, or physics, or anything an unbelieveable GPU and CPU and Graphics card could contribute, maybe theres more. Yes, the next generation should be about the connection to the games, not just how they are presented. Gamers should interract with the game more, not just with their thumbs and index fingers, there should be more. This said however, a motion sensing tv looking remote control is not the answer.

What the hell does Nintendo think they're going to accomplish? They seem to be putting more effort into talk than putting their talk into action. What really p*sses me *ff though is, I quote: "Wii will break down that wall that separates game players from everybody else." Why? We gamers are special people, who share something amongst ourselves, why break down that wall and make us like everyone else, or everyone else like us? Everyone cannnot, and should not, be able to be like us. Games should not be for everyone. The only reason for games to be for everyone, is for Nintendo to make more money, is that what they care about? Because that's what it seems like. Do you people really want to devote yourselves to a company that only cares about getting as broad a market as possible? I sure wouldn't.
Also, I can't remember who at nintendo said this: "I believe games should
be played with one button", but that's the stuppidest thing I've ever heard.

I didn't realize I could post my thoughts up here, and I was writing them down in word just to keep them somewhere until I found a proper place to put them. I don't want to post these in forums because there's way too many threads there for mine to be read. And besides, I don't want to debate my opinion in a forum, I want to tell you my opinion because I don't care about yours!