New Game Alert: Speedy Club Nintendo Edition!

My Game & Watch Collection 2 that I ordered from Club Nintendo arrived today - the Mario 3-Poster Series should not be far behind. This collection includes Parachute where you have to line up your boat so that your parachuting buddies will not be shark food, Octopus where you have to avoid nasty tentacles from touching you while you are trying to get to a treasure chest under the sea, and a clever combination of both where you are saving people on the boat at the top of the DS screen and getting treasures from the sea at the boom of the DS screen.I used to own Parachute a long time ago so playing this brings back a lot of good memories for me. These games won't hold people's attention for long anymore but I think Nintendo knows that, which is why they are being made available exclusively as a reward for Club Nintendo members: They serve more as a curiosity than anything else.

Please be more generous next time and include more games in the collection.

Close Gamer Friends: Stranger Frustrations

I have been thinking a lot about finding a local video gaming buddy or two. I have a few good online friends but a number of personal revelations about my own life recently have really made me feel lonely in the simplest sense than the existential definition of it that I wrote on the description of why I call myself "Loner Gamer". Online friends are cool - and I thought that I found one really great friend at one point before everything turned sour all of a sudden - but sometimes, you just want to have someone whom you can interact with in the same room. If I had the choice, I would have liked to be in a romantic relationship with someone who could appreciate video games as much as I do. Romance and video games sometimes just don't mix and at this point in my life, I don't have any immediate need to find someone new to love.

I always ensure that I own an extra controller but I always ended up playing alone.

Finding local people to play games with may not seem to be that difficult of a task to accomplish but here is my dilemma: I have too many video games and there were times in the past when that fact had been taken advantage of by others. This in turn had made me cautious about people in general when it comes to my video games. Outside of my Loner Gamer persona, I share my video gaming life only with a small number of individuals and you can count them with one hand. So for me to open up my video game collection to someone locally, that person must also be pretty well-stocked with games so that the "relationship" would be of equal footing. I have made a number of attempts recently via "friendship" postings on the Internet advertising my need for some video gaming companionship - galaxy, that sounded pretty desperate - and the results have been quite undesirable. I guess the local gaming scene in my area consists of gamers who only play sports games seasonally, gamers who only own one console and a couple of games, and "gamers" who don't own any games but want to find people who own the games that they want to play. My significant other gave me the suggestion that I should just pretend to be a casual gamer and I should turn our living room into a "staged" game room whenever I have these individuals over to play some games. That way, I would be giving off the impression that I only own a console or two with a couple of games on the side. It's a really clever solution but it defeats the original purpose of why I would even want to find a local gaming buddy. I want to be able bask in the glory of gaming openly with these close gamer friends and not reduce myself into someone I am not. It will also be pretty irritating to move my consoles around because everything should stay in my Game Room where they belong. I think I know what my problem is: I long too much for things that I don't have when I should just enjoy the things that are already in my life right now. Life in this world is too short: we always have to constantly evaluate what makes this life worth living and brush aside things that we could live without. I just wish that I was less stubborn of a person because I wouldn't even be writing about this if I was.

New Games Alert: Of Zombies and Plants Edition!

I have been playing League of Legends on the Personal Computer quite heavily of late so I am glad that I received my Collector's Pack today. As I have stated in a previous article, it is not necessary for one to buy this retail packaging of the game because you can experience the whole entire thing for free. I just did so because I want to have at least 20 characters for me to experiment with on the get go. This Collector's Pack also comes with $10 worth of Riot Points and I spent it on a character that required a lot of Influence Points to unlock - which also happens to be my favorite character in the game so far - Karthus the Deathsinger. Another game I got today is Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ - yes, that's surely a mouthful - for the Nintendo DS. It is a top-down shooter where you play as Little Red Riding Hood or Momotaro from the Japanese folklore, fighting off the zombies that have invaded Fairy Tale Land. I have completed two stages thus far and I am loving this game! The boss encounters are totally insane as they feature memorable fairy tale characters into hideous beasts. You can find the game at a very cheap price these days and it is highly recommended. This is one of those games that have the potential to be a sought after title in the future.

I like my Zombies with some BBQ sauce and my Leagues to be legendary.

Okay, the following induction is a little bit creepy so be warned. So, I just got a new plant in my room. For some reason, that reminded me of PopCap Games' Plants vs. Zombies for the PC. (Whisper) I think my plant actually communicated that reminder to me via plant-telekinesis (End Whisper). Now that I am done freaking you out, I have heard so many good things about it but for some reason I never got around into trying out the game's demo. And yes, of course I was kidding about the telekinesis. So I downloaded the 60 minute trial yesterday and I couldn't stop playing the game until my trial time was up. This game is addictive as heck! It is a tower defense game where you have to prevent zombies from getting to your house by planting different types vegetation to attack and destroy those foul invaders. It sounds so simple but it really works! I don't know how I was able to withstand the call to purchase the game for the last 24 hours but I eventually did tonight.

The concept is so ridiculous but it is crazy hilarious.

New Plant Alert: Purple Flower Edition?

Though I would be the first to argue that my Game Room isn't devoid of life, it's actually a fact that it is. The room is filled with video games but beside myself and the occasional visitation from my significant other, it's a cold, robotic world in there. So I made a note to myself that I would have to pick up one of those fancy - and hard to kill - Chinese bamboo plants one of these days but my significant other just beat me to it. I was presented with uh, it looks like a house plant but I don't know what the heck it is because the sticker has been removed from the small vase containing this purple-flowered plant. It is cute and unassuming however... and I like that. I think I am going to get more greenery for this room in the future.

Don't worry. Vault Boy will take really good care of you.

March 2010 Monthly Gaming Analysis

The results shown below are of course based on the combined data from the Daily Game Log which should provide a clear indication of a game's usage frequency. Bear in mind that even if a game is played twice or more during a particular day, it would still register as 1 in the Day Count column below. In a sense, "merits" are given based on how often a particular game can make me play it again throughout the entire period of the month on a daily basis. A game that makes a gamer play it over and over again or at least spend a lot of time with it... Isn't that what we mostly want from a great game? I don't think it's really fair to count all the way down to the number of hours played since some games only require a short amount of time to properly serve their purposes.

OVERALL BREAKDOWN:



Total Games Played: 34

March 2010 was an interesting month because I discovered that it was actually the official Achievement/Trophy Whore Month. I sure hope that it's not going to be an annual occurrence and if so, I may have to take a month long gaming vacation just to get away from it all until the "chie/phie" pheromone dissipates from the early spring air...

The most played game last month was Final Fantasy XIII for the PlayStation 3. The game started off being too unfocused but everything came together perfectly somewhere in the middle of the game. I am almost at the end and I am just delaying the inevitable completion just so that I can explore all the massive amount of things that the game still allows me to do before jumping into the climax.

The Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II count above in a combination of the original release and the Chaos Rising expansion. I don't think that it makes sense to have them listed separately since I mostly play the Last Stand mode anyway. I have complete the Chaos Rising campaign with a friend online and the funny thing about this is that I have never completed the original campaign because my old friend quit on me last year when we were playing the game together. I am only 1 or 2 missions away from completing the original campaign and I do plan on getting that done so that I can start a new Chaos Rising campaign using the original's save file.

Taking third place last month is the masterful Mario Kart clone, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing (with Banjo-Kazooie) for the X-Box 360. I have unlocked all the racers and the racing tracks but whenever I put the disc in for a quick play, I always ended up playing it for hours with the computer and also against others online. I couldn't really get into the game's mission mode where you have to drive the kart around doing a lot of strange things. It just doesn't work for me but I want to get an all-clear there: you never know, there might be a bonus content attached to it.

Best New Game of the Month:
Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing with Banjo-Kazooie (X-Box 360)

Unexpectedly Forgotten New Game of the Month:
Deadly Premonition (X-Box 360)

I Missed You I Want You Game of the Month:
Resonance of Fate (X-Box 360)