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Top 200 Photos: #4
The final appearance of these two in this Top 200 photo photo #4: And so these two show up once again with 2579 views as of the time I’m writing this (in March). I’m not quite sure what it is about this particular photo of a Soul Eater Cosplay has garnered it more views than…
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Last.fm Listening Habits 2011 Q3
For this Quarter I continued listening to my music in order as I attempted to go through my entire catalog so that Amarok could auto-rate the songs I liked and I could switch to a dynamic, random playlist. I actually finished going through all my music A-Z (and Japanese characters) – except for songs that…
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Top 200 Photos: #49
Otakon and some familiar faces for this Top 200 Photo photo #49 is: These Soul Eater cosplayers have appeared before on this list and will appear at least once more. I think this photo is unique in showing them from head (or hat) to toe. For the first time, I’ve realized that the woman on…
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First Playthrough of Mass Effect (Part 3)
Last time I blogged about Mass Effect, I had just finished up with a planet where a plant was controlling everyone. After that I did my first real tour of my ship to go talk to all the people who had joined my crew. I got to sneak up on Ash talking to her sister…
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May Video Games
I forgot to check for the May video game play times before it was too deep into June, so I lost my FFX playtime. The others are pretty accurate. Final Fantasy X – finished the game. Review here. Portal 2 (3 hrs) – finished multi-player game with Dan. That game is AWESOME. I was only…
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First Playthough of Mass Effect Part 1
I recently bought Mass Effect in a Steam sale that knocked the price of Bioware’s RPG to $5. Thanks yet again to the guys at the Giant Bombcast (seriously, this is the second or third I’ve bought because of them and fourth or fifth from podcast recommendations), I’d wanted to play the game, but…
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How Video Games Grew Up When I Wasn’t Looking
There was a time when I loved video games. I subscribed to EGM and EGM2. I trolled the nascent World Wide Web looking for video game news. I read IGN religiously. The most powerful systems out there were the Nintendo 64 and the Playstation. Then I discovered girls and dropped the subscriptions. Most of the…
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Top 200 Photos: #123
Otakon and video game characters in today’s Top 200 Photo! photo #123 is: I’ve mentioned my love of Final Fantasy before. And that was the main reason for photographing the girl on the left. I saw the moogle and had to photograph her. Later I found out she is a character from Final Fantasy X.…
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April Video Games
Final Fantasy X (36 hrs) – I started playing this game again to get away from computer games. It was hurting my back to sit at the computer. I could just stand in the guest room, where the PS2 is. I hadn’t played for months or maybe even a year, but I hadn’t gone that…
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Portal 2 Review and Analysis
If I have to sum up Portal 2 in one word: brilliant! I really enjoyed the first Portal a lot. The sense of not knowing what’s going on and GLaDOS’ obvious demented nature made for a dark video game the likes of which I’d never experienced. It was an artform as much as any other…
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Last.fm Listening Habits 2011 Q1
I wanted to take a look at my music listening habits quarterly to see how each quarter’s stats stack up against the final numbers at the end of the year. I started off the year listening to some of the new artists I’d bought, then just switched to random listens for the rest of the…
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The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition
As with my discussion of Recettear, playing The Secret of Monkey Island involved revisiting a gaming genre from my past. Unlike Recettear, TSoMI is not a parodic look back at an old genre, it is an original game from that time period. TSoMI is an adventure game, a genre that is pretty much only kept…
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Recettear – First Impressions
It’s funny, growing up, I loved Square’s RPGs, but I really only played two of them – Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 (originally released as 3 in the US). They just left THAT MUCH of an impression. And not just on me, they profoundly affected Dan as well. Alas, Nintendo losing the license to…
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80s Games vs Today’s Games
During Giant Bomb’s Game of the Year deliberations, one of the panelists was talking about how the difference between Pacman and Pacman Championship Edition DX reflects the difference in video game design over the past thirty years. The original Pacman is a stress-enducing game while Pacman CE DX is an empowering experience. Pacman punishes you…
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Empathy’s Still Around….A stalemate
Last time I spoke about Empathy, I was a little disappointed in the project. I really liked Pidgin and it felt like they were being stabbed in the back, even if everything the Empathy team was doing was koser GPL-wise. At the time I didn’t give it a second look because it was still missing…