"People take their lives too seriously, they forget life is short so, all we need to do is enjoy our lifes and have fun"

Just read that off a friends monthly blog, jesus_knight, great blog btw, go check it out. Though as much as I will love to believe that, harsh reality hits me like a hammer on an eggshell no matter how hard I try. Though I only had two years of undergrad and one more by this spring, I'm applying to med school. Maybe in July, I will have a month or so to finally enjoy that big backlog of games I accumulated during sales and specials throughout this year, but until then its studying for the MCATs (a really tough national test used to get into med school). Which brings me to a quote that seems to make little sense but instills great hope nonetheless if you can understand the twisted meaning.

"There is dignity in suffering; nobility in pain; but failure is a salted wound, that burns and burns again"

Ok, not really twisted, but sad really. I may return on some random day, till then, game on.

Sometimes people say I'm funny, sometimes they just ignore me. Especially now that I'm not participating in any of the unions I am in, well besides the rare ocassion for the PS3 union and I'm not leveling up as fast as I can. Am I wanted? I know there are a few that still talks to me but less than a fifth of my friends talk to me and my list is small, smaller than some other of my friends.

On my last post, I posted a vid that looked awesome and will boost Sony's system, they thought they needed cool comercials too, so here they are, straight from the corporation itself

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2007/10/31/new-ps3-tv-ad-campaign/

The new generation is a quirky one, but it doesn't mean I won't join, I'll just join later. Right now I'm just stocking up on the cheap 360 games I want, mostly Tom Clancy as they always seem better and semi-exclusiveon the 360 like the GRAW and Splinter Cell. I'll pick up cheap PS3 games if they come by like if Resistance falls under $30 this holiday, I'll pick it up for later. This is the best way I guess as I save money. Not only that, but the 360 can have the bugs fixed (the situation is improved but can get better) and the PS3 seems to have a chance to get better permutations (the 40GB SKUlooks really nice, but you never know). As for the Wii games... everyone knows that Nintendo keep their first party games at full price for two to three years, so I guess none will be cheap this year, and I can big up a wii any time as I know the first party titles will always be there. So I'll probably get those systems next year and have a great library to enjoy it.

P.S. Watch the vid below, it shows an actual Sony ad vs. a fan-made one. True the fan-made one would cost Sony more, but it looks way better than anything Sony pumps out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRECuzgxRy0&eurl=http://forums.maxconsole.net/showthread.php?t=86076

Normally, I know that a lot of things on the internet is a load of bull, but apparently, some rumors are substantiated through experience, like the $399.99 40gb PS3 rumor that became true, a similiar rumor came in for the 360. A HD-DVD drive built-in, now one may say no big deal at first thought, but then I saw that large games might need the HD-dvd drive to play, that ticks me off. And I was only planning to get one, what about the others who bought one? Usually I would ignore this rumor, but given the recent history of Sony and MS constantly pumping out new SKUs, this idea doesn't sound to farfetched, if anything, it's logical which disturbs the hell out of me.

Here is the Article, read it and be mad:

http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Gaming/Console/P4G5C3U2?page=1

I gonna get a 360 by the end of this year, along with a good batch of games, I'm just waiting for Toys r us or some other retailer to give $50-100giftcards this holiday for purchasing a 360 like last year. But that is not the problem,my dilemna is, I'm considering buying another system along with that. Its either gonna the 40 gb ps3 for $400 dollars or the wii, or i'll postpone it till next year. See the PS3 has no nice games that aren't multiplatform yet IMO but there a few proming one coming soon, but the wii has four killer apps coming out this season, but next year will leave my wii dusty since I only buy first party games for Nintendo consoles, and the last alternative is to postpone till next year and plan it from there. Money isn't a problem since i can handle any of these choices, but I'm on the fence about the wii and the PS3, these investments look very iffy compared to the 360. What to choose...

The last post leaked a full 10 minutes of the TGS NinjaGaiden 2demo and no one left a comment. This is the ending of Halo 3, so obviously is the biggest spoiler.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_vW6RHy8FM&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fforums%2Emaxconsole%2Enet%2Fshowthread%2Ephp%3Ft%3D79621

Its a youtube link this time, but poor quality. And please comment on if you liked it, or didn't watch for a reason... any feedback is cool. Also check out my last post, its frickin Ninja Gaiden 2 gameplay, what more can you ask for.

I just footage Ninja Gaiden 2 and its fast. Its requires a reaction time of F-Zero (Gamecube version on the highest difficulty) to be good. And the new blood and gore effects are insane. Blink for a second and you can miss as much as five hit combo.

http://www.gamersyde.com/stream_4521_en.html

Its really looks promising and currently 360 exclusive.

Recent internet rumors suggest controls for Lair have been far improved as a result of the new PS3 firmware v1.92. As we all know, Lair was slated by reviewers especiall for its poor controls, so this improvement makes sense especially as the title has been hyped so much previously.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXhdraEvShk&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Emaxconsole%2Enet%2F%3Fmode%3Dnews%26newsid%3D20442

Journalists were reporting that the all new PS3 firmware featured loads of new options including flash XMB wallpaper support, faster loading times and various other tweaks and improvements. HOWEVER, the official changelog has surfaced at Playstation.com with the only update being listed under Playability - "Playability status with the PS3 system has changed for some PS3 format titles" - it looks as if reports that the update contained much more were just a form of the placebo effect. More likely the firmware just fixes some issues that Warhawk owners were experiencing.

Hate the motion controls? Try using the psp, it USES THE ANALOG NUB!! Tight controls and better gameplay, shown in the video in the link below. Now if you hate the analog nub for some reason, refuse to use a usb controller, and just flame Sony for the crappy controls, you are a troll. These solutions make the game great, if you refuse to try them, it means you never intended to play the game in the first place and you are some loser fan boy.

http://www.maxconsole.net/?mode=news&newsid=20385

Stop whining and get in the action. Unless you don't have PS3 yet like me... then umm... try the game when you get a PS3. Maybe by then, the poor sales might drop the games price and we get a game and can master it secretly and laugh at those who are stuck with the sixaxis.

Hey!! Hey!! Lookie here, first I find some hacker playingHalo with a controller, now Lair with a Sega Saturn controller. NO HACKING REQUIRED. It may not be perfect, but its way better than the six axis.

http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/08/hate-lairs-moti.html

It would be funny if you can use a 360 controller to play Lair even better since the wired one or pc one uses USB. Lair just got hope in a weird way

Games are to be fun and well, entertaining, so why do some games drag or pad things out. Playing an RPG? Some RPGsgames require minimal effort on levelingand needs little leveling like Kingdom Hearts and its sequel, Dragon Quest VIII, and FFXwere its easy enough with out power levelingand getting a hundred percent was pretty much fun. Then there are games like FFXII were you are punished for weakness requiring hours of leveling and farming for gil. It wastes a ton of time doing boring tasks. Then there are those in the middle like the Elder Scrolls. Also as I pointed out, farming, why do the drop rates punish me so, I kow rarity makes you treasure it more, but killing 500 or so monsters and you only get two?! An Xpercentage should mean that for every hundred, you will get X amount of items. And money shouldn't be easy, but make it really hard to get topped of with insane prices really is annoying.

There are also what I like to call trophy weapons. These weapons are so powerful and cool, but you only get it after killing all the strong bosses first by regular means or really power leveling so that by the time you get this weapon, its absolutely useless. Killing fodder was over kill already at the state you were inright before you earned the weapon, so what was the point again besides showing that of your accomplishments, nothing really. The next is item hunting. It can be fun but it gets annoying when you scour a whole level only to find it the stupidest places. In games like Mario, Rathet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, its fine but Ninja Gaiden, Killzone: Liberation, Gears of War?I mean Ninja Gaiden may not had overdone it but Gears of War?! Whats up with that? Its something that makes no sense or isn't very fun.

Another is padding. Examples are farming,required power leveling, killing thousands by just button mashing,and doing unnecessary min-games or sidequests. An example is Saints Row where you must up your rep so you can get new missions by doing things from a list that doesn't change. Sure its fun the first few times, but after the 50th time, I tired and bored. Hacking mini-games are also notorious, a shooter or action game is suddenly slowed down because you have to do some puzzle or mini-game to progress. Sure if itsvaries and is occasional, but if you're doing it the same thing all the time, its annoying. The intergration has to fit. Splinter Cell was able to do this wellwith the lockpicking by spacing it out and make it make sense, but other games make it a chore. I mean especially the minigames where you hit all the buttons in a specificorder and it doesn't really match the feel of what the character is doing onscreen. I mean I sometimes ask myself, why is hittingX Y UA D R A B X L LX B Y, doing that stuff on the screen? Don't you wish they did it likeGod of War where it makes sense, when dodging, different butttons, yanking means button mashing, for Splinter Cell rotating the thumb stick the right waypushes atumbler. Do it enough times to unlock the door.

Now about that hack and slashers, I find them fun sometimes where cutting down 50 guys in a few minutes is an ego booster, but after a while, it gets boring. You know whothe biggest culprit is, Dynasty Warriors. I mean all you do is hack and slash which is great the first few hours, after awhile, you start wondering, why am I doing this again. And it doesn't really help them either that you have over 50 character to level up. Yeah, padding is a really long chore.This also goesfor shooters with no story, specifically WWII shooters. They just slap some history together and call it a day and let you shoot a ton of Nazis before another load screen, you reach a point where killing feels like a really long chore. Medal of Honor is guilty as charged.

The worst chore is of all is sadistic difficulty due to AIcheapness. People complain DMC, Ninja Gaiden, DMC 3, Hitman 2, some Megaman ZXand such as difficult, but thats because of the lack of skill. But these games are good fun, wasn't really hard if you have a level head. I'm not talking about those, but what I'm talking about is games like Shinobi on the PS2. These games doesn't really require intelligence, just repetition of perfection. The whole point of Shinobi on the PS2 is to shadow dash behind every enemy and slash them over and over. no new tactics, just run along the long linear and bland backgrounds trying to outspeed a computer which knows exactly what you are doing. Its like fighting Psycho mantis in Metal Gear Solid without switching the remote to a different port. He knows all your moves the second you push the button, except in this case, the AI is as dumb as rocks when you are not trying to kill them, they are only cheap if you engage. There are few games like this, especially a lot of the old school games. Old school Shinobi was difficult but finishable with skill, but his 3-d game is cheap.

If developerscan prevent these, games would be much more fluid and more enjoyable.Many studios aim for this and then there are others who does the exact opposite. In an interview with the FFXII developers, they purposely made some drops really rare, some things easily missable, and require some power leveling to get more peope talking about the game giving free publicity. Nevermind the boards at gamefaqs are overflowing with questions or problemswith the game, but a fullactive boardshows others that the game is interesting and thusentices new customers and more publicity.Padding also gives a game more length, so in reviews the game seems longer than what the developers worked on.

Wow thanks for reading my first blog rant. Next one will be on unions.

Notice how loose aiming is on the wii because of the bounding box, wouldn't you love tight controls. Well some guy who though so, made that come true. It takes a lot of know how but the set up looks pretty sweet, if only Metroid had controls this accurate, it would be uncontested, but as of now, it seems this guy programed the controls ofHalo well. Yes the holding of the A button is a problem for some people, but I think that was his preference, which can remidied to free aim. Here's my source and the video of the whole thing.

http://www.maxconsole.net/?mode=news&newsid=19565

cool stuff

Summer classes are over! Do I need to say more?

Umm... how do I fix this? anyone uses photobucket.com? For all I know, I think its because my icon is used so much (its used on every post I make) that it caused the bandwidth problem. But how do I solve it then without laying down the cash?

Edit: I seemed to have resolved the problem, for now at least.

Ok, I've got many things on my hands as of now. I got a Calc 2 course, Philosophy, and Final Fantasy XII. Calc 2 will require some studying and philosophy will burn my time with absolutely on some dead guy's belief and I will eventually have to write a pair of 4 pageessays on these beliefs that I read. The book is about 1.62 metric tonnes of reading. FFXII, I just started this weekend and I am at the tomb for some shard storywise, I'm ata average at level 28 for the whole party exept Balthier who is level26,apparently I am having a tough time with the white mousse, the first encounter showed me the gameover screen for the first time.

So what does this mean? I took out time to explain why I will NOT be and haveNOTbeen accepting any new requests to join a union or been posting rgularly if at all. So please don't demote me from any of my positions, send a request to join a union, or ask what is wrong with me.

Peace Out,

BlueFlameDino

P.S. I will return in August, I will still accept friend reuests and make the occassional post on the unions I belong to.

Enjoy

For some time now, I can't play videos from websites that uses WMP 11 like gamespot while in Internet explorer. In Mozilla, some play perfectly fine, but some sites like Gamespot doesn't have any audio. Does any one know a solution to this?

Edit: The new player on Gamespot solves my problem

Look at that amateur picture I made using Paint.  Not so hot but the amateur touches is what makes it look cool.

The internet is in danger and the first step to prevention or protection is to spread the truth.

Enjoy sniping some other Spartans or wondering around a magic forest with others after a hard days work, posting on Gamespot, or just surfing the net in general. These freedoms are in danger. Read the PDF and visit the site for more info. Save the internet. 

http://www.freepress.net/docs/nn_fact_v_fiction_final.pdf

http://www.savetheinternet.com/

And remember, spread the word, the future of videogames can devolve (reverse evolution) and gaming communities may fall or even rise in price if internet neutrality ends.

What will you do about it? More importantly, do you care?