Sad day for LUE. =[

Though I'm sure soon it'll be like none of this ever happened...except that there will be a smaller userbase. How much smaller? Who knows...

Oh man, this is horrible...

Okay, a while ago, it was announced that Mario Kart Wii was going to include "text chat" so you could "chat" with your friends before races. This announcement was met with rejoice and criticism. On one hand, Wii FINALLY gets some form of real communication with other people online. On the other hand, it's text chat, cave man technology. But hey, it's better than some predetermined text to be selected to communicate with others...

But what's this!? UPDATE. Turns out, Mario Kart's "text chat" is actually the ability to select from a pre-determined number of phrases that can be sent along as rudimentary texts before matches. OMFG. XD. Obviously, this was met with more criticism than praise... 'course, the fanboys will defend this. Boo.

Also, Capcom announced its next Resident Evil game for the Wii: a port of Resident Evil Zero. Wait-- what!? Wasn't Resident Evil Zero a Gamecube game? And isn't the Wii backwards compatible with Gamecube games? Surely there must be something new here, right? Like maybe they're remaking it RE4 style? Nah. BUT YOU CAN CONTROL THE GAME WITH JUST THE WIIMOTE. AWESOME. MUST BUY. No, I kid. More failure. Luckily, this is a Japan-only release...for now. Where's my RE2 remake, Capcom?

I want my Macbook to have multi-touch. =[

Edit: Nevermind. Looks like multi-touch is Air and Pro only. WTF?

WHOAMG. I bought Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney today, and I just finished the first case. Usually the first case in these Ace Attorney games are pretty boring tutorials...but this one...WHOA. So many twists...and it's only the first case! You people who don't play Ace Attorney (aka, LAMERS) are really missing out.

You all know I'm not much of an RPG fan anymore. Well, I started playing a REALLY AWESOME one the other day. It's known as "Barkley, Shut up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa."

What's this game about, you ask? It's about Charles Barkley...yes, the basketball player. How is this awesome? C'mon! It's Charles Barkley! Also, Space Jam (yes, the Looney Tunes movie) is canon to this game.

The story to this game is that of a dystopian future. B-Ball has been outlawed, and many great B-Ballers died in "The Great B-Ball Purge." This was the result of Barkley's Chaos Dunk causing mass destruction. Now Barkley must fight to bring B-Ball back to its former glory!

Sound silly, huh? Well, it is, but it is surprisingly very well-written! This could actually pass of as a real JRPG. In typical JRPG fashion, Barkley plays the role of the pessimistic, emo-ish main character (except he doesn't have crazy hair, and instead of a large sword, he wields a basketball). There's also the long, white-haired, swordsman, Balthios James, great grand son of Lebron James.

And the battle system...wow! You'd expect a battle system in a homebrew RPG to be pretty limited, but this one is actually well-thoughout! It's better than a lot of battle systems in actual retail RPGs.

The quality of this game is just amazing, especially for a homebrew game.

Also, the game has a town of furries and makes fun of them and Japanophiles. Awesome.

If you're a fan of RPGs, I suggest you play this game. Download it now. (It's for PC, if you haven't already figured it out.)

Old, but still good news.

Triumph.

So Gamestops all over America are having midnight launches and tournaments for Super Smash Bros. Brawl. You can download a list made up of 45 pages of participating stores. Paris, Texas is not found on any of these pages. Fail fail fail.

I've collected all of the Blue Orbs, so I have a full life bar now. The next attainable achievements for me would be to buy all of Dante's/Nero's abilities and to max out my inventory... but it's gonna take a looooooooong time to get enough Red Orbs and Proud Souls to buy all that stuff. :\

I've just beat it for the 4th time, this time on Human mode. I also completed all the secret missions and got to level 32 of Bloody Palace.

...wait a second...I'm missing four Blue Orb Fragments, and there's still the achievements for acquiring all skills and having a full inventory. Okay, I guess I'm not done yet. ^-^;

Yeah, you read that right. I beat DMC4 for the third time today. I beat it for the second time yesterday.

You see, the first time I beat it, I beat it on Devil Hunter (Normal) mode. Second time, I beat it on Son of Sparda (Hard) mode. Third time, I beat it on Heaven or Hell (one-hit kill) mode. The third one sounds hard, huh? Well, it wasn't. It was incredibly easy. In Heaven or Hell, yeah Dante/Nero dies in one hit, but so does everything else! Even bosses! So all you have to do is shoot an enemy with one shot of your gun from long range and they're dead. Makes the game extremely, and hilariously easy. Not exactly fun, but it's a good way to get revenge on some of those bosses that made my life miserable in previous modes.

So, what's left? I'm gonna try to beat the game on Human (Easy) mode for the achievement...but man, I really don't want to. At least Heaven or Hell had a gimmick. Easy mode...bleh. There's also Dante Must Die (Very Hard) mode, and after that, Hell or Hell (one-hit kill for Dante/Nero, not for enemies) mode. Yeah, those don't sound very fun either. :\

Boooo. You all know I hate Sony. So this sucks in some ways, but is good in other ways. I still hate Sony, though. I'm still gonna stick with DVDs...especially since I don't have regular access to an HDTV.

Oh, God, these are GENIUS. They're informative, depressing, and hilarious all at the same time! What's funny is that these videos have taught me more about Photoshop than any of those lame college courses have taught me.

I've been having a pretty terrible day today. So I'm gonna end it now by going to sleep. 'night.

Damn it. So it's random, huh? What was Sakurai thinking?

I never understood how people could call Smash Bros. a "button masher" if they've played the game. Among fighting game purists (elitists), the topics regarding Smash Bros. are always controversial. But to say that the games take no skill and can be one by button mashing is just silly. A button masher in Smash Bros. will get nowhere. A button masher in Street Fighter could actually beat someone.

In Street Fighter, and most other fighting games, the game makes you automatically face your opponent. So you can just look away from the screen and press buttons, and you'll hit your opponent eventually...maybe even pull off some super combos or special moves with your random button presses.

Do this in Smash Bros., your opponent will just jump over your head and you'll continue to attack the direction he was previously in. So you're just hitting air, and then your opponent smashes you from behind. You're flying off the stage. You're mashing buttons, so you can't recover. Maybe you accidentally use up your third jump through your mashing. Uh-oh. You fell of the stage. You lose.

This blog post was inspired by an IGN Insider podcast, where some guy was dissing both Smash Bros. and Devil May Cry with the "button masher" argument. Oooh, you know that'll piss me off. He bragged about being able to clear a room in DMC4 by just mashing the sword button without even looking at the screen. He claims he never got hit or anything. I find that hard to believe unless he was playing on Easy Automatic, and I wouldn't be surprised if he was. I understand that these guys are not pro gamers, so they can't be expected to master the games they review, but to dis a game like that without acknowledging the higher difficulties is just stupid.

The guy also claimed Smash Bros. is "superficial" fun. Yeah, I don't like this guy. IGN Insider hasn't really been worth the subscription fee. :\

The rest of the IGN guys are still cool...for now.

Being an IGN Insider isn't all that it's cracked up to be. I listened to the IGN podcast, and I thought, "Man, it must be great to be part of the community, 'cause the editors seem like cool guys." 'course, they'd always joke about how the readers would bitch and complain about everything they do... at least, I thought they were joking. Turns out, yeah, they weren't joking.

On the IGN Wii boards, they can't stop talking about how No More Heroes, Fire Emblem, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and so on are PERFECT games and do not deserve 7's, or 8's, or 9's, but maybe around 11's. Oh, and it's also full of "OMG, SPOILERS!!" when it comes to SSBB characters. So...basically, the IGN community is the same as all the other communities out there: full of idiots.

Seriously, this one dude was defending No More Heroes flaws by saying they were intentional: "The texture pop-up and glitches are just throwbacks to retro gaming! The side jobs are supposed to be tedious and boring because they're side jobs!" Yeah. So I guess maybe if you die in the game, you should die in real life 'cause dying is SUPPOSED to kill you. He's also one of those guys who can't see framerate drops...

And there are also the guys who praise Brawl's soundtrack as the best ever. You guys know how I feel about that...

TOO MANY FANBOYS. CAN I NOT ESCAPE THEM!?!? Even LUE has its fair share of fanboys!

This.

Why'd I have to find this after my birthday? Actually, I have money for it...but I also want Brawl and Apollo Justice when they come out...

I just beat Devil May Cry 4. It took me 11 hours. It seemed a lot shorter than DMC3, but I don't remember how long that took me.

Overall, I'd say it's a good game, but DMC3 is better. DMC3 just had a better story, and it had lots more Dante. Nero was just...he was okay, but the silly "OMG, LOVE KYRIE!" thing just pissed me off. He's the opposite of Dante, since he actually cares about stuff. Dante's like, "Lolz, demons", and when you do get to play as him, he's the same, cocky, sarcastic, awesome guy, which is awesome. My favorite cutscene involves Dante cutting a heart out of a hell gate while he describes his sexual performance. It's awesome. But the game still needed more Dante.

And the story...uhh...yeah, it was pretty silly. You got some bad guys and they do bad things. You never find out how Nero got his devil arm. Vergil was only mentioned once, while his sword became a part of the plot. So yeah. Whatever.

The gameplay was great, though. Nero and Dante played different enough, and being able to switch DMC3 styles on the fly with Dante is great. The Devilbringer (Nero's arm) seemed to make the game too easy, though. The game wasn't as hard as DMC3 'cause the bosses took major damage from Nero's Devilbringer once they became vulnerable to it. Then Nero gets a Devil Trigger and they take even more damage. Also, the bosses are recycled multiple times. You fight the four bosse three times: once as Dante, and twice as Nero. But games being not super-duper hard is okay with me. I don't like being frustrated too much. The game wasn't EASY. It was just NORMAL. I'll probably try playing Hard mode some other time, though it's unlikely that I'll be getting all the Achievements for this game, as one of them is beat it on super duper duper hard mode. :\

I've started regularly waking up early now. Normally you'd think this would be a good thing, right? Well, it's not, 'cause I end up starving 'cause I want food that's not breakfast. Too bad fast food places deem it impossible to serve lunch prior to 10 AM. My classes end at 9:30 AM! What am I gonna do in those 30 minutes?! And today I learn Braum's doesn't serve lunch until 10:30. WTF?! WHY CAN'T THIS BE CONSISTENT!?!?

Some places pride themselves in serving breakfast all day. Eff that. I'll be impressed when they serve lunch all day.

Check it.

Yeah, I did not record the videos, but I put them together. It took me around a week to get 'em all up. Now I can rest. ^-^

And Kotaku finally posted it... yet they give someone else credit for the submission. WTF? Oh well.

Now Joystiq joins the fun!

I downloaded the ENTIRE soundtrack to Brawl. I actually like a lot of songs. Obviously, the MIDI ones trying to be orchestra still sound like crap, but there are other songs from games I wouldn't expect which make them really cool. Music from Super Mario Land and the original Mario Kart sounded pretty great.

BUT, the entire Melee soundtrack is also in the download (YES, FOUNTAIN OF DREAMS!!), and listening to it...yeah, it still has the better soundtrack overall. The menu music in Melee is just so epic compared to Brawl's (eh, it's okay, but Melee's gets me pumped to fight an epic battle). I'm hoping with My Music I can do some customization for even the menus.

So many people are praising the Brawl's amazing impressive number of songs... but quality over quantity, dear readers! While Brawl may have around 300 songs, most of the ones I've heard sound like crap.

A lot of the songs are MIDI, that is, they're not performed with real instruments or with real people. For some types of songs, this is fine. Here's a trend I've noticed: if a MIDI song attempts to emulate the sounds of an orchestral instrument, the song will sound like crap.

Example: Pokemon Stadium from Melee (Orchestrated), Pokemon Stadium from Brawl (MIDI)

Which sounds better? If you said the Brawl version, you're silly. Melee sounds infinitely better.

The problem is, the instrument quality on the MIDIs suck. They sound nothing like the real instruments. I dunno how people can't tell the difference. I guess most people don't listen to classical music enough. >=[

If a MIDI song uses other instruments, like the electric guitar, or with techno-ish songs, it ends up sounding pretty good. Take the Metal Mix of Gourmet Race for instance. Quite awesome.

Another thing, is some of the songs are medleys...and the songs within these medleys abruptly change to other songs with little to no transition. So it ends up sounding pretty bad, too. Like, you'll have one upbeat song, then you'll suddenly have a slower song. It just doesn't flow very well. But you probably won't be able to notice while brawling...but that doesn't change the fact that it sucks.

There's one good thing about the music in Brawl, though...the original Melee stage songs are still there, and this time they're at a higher quality due to the disc having a larger capacity, so the songs no longer have to be compressed! Too bad Fountain of Dreams isn't on there, at least I don't think it's on there...

Awesome.

I went to sleep at 8 PM tonight...woke up at 1 AM. It's 4 AM and I'm still awake. This suuuucks!