Mathurin47

A new year, and a fresh start. My streak of 28 consecutive monthly blogs came to a sudden end. While my internet has been more consistent, knock on particle board (Is anything made of solid wood anymore?), it was far to sporadic to try writing an entire entry online. Lesson learned; write offline, edit online.

As I noted in my year-end entry, the last few months have been a little rough. I’m pretty much back to 40 hours (51 last week thanks to a massive snowstorm), and my shoulder is almost pain free, though there is some lingering numbness on occasion. I’ve been to the doctor once before for this, though last time there was more numbness and less pain with no sleeping issues beyond just not lying on the affected shoulder. It’s always been my left shoulder, so I’ve been wondering now if there is some long forgotten injury since I’m right-handed.

One of my unfulfilled wishes was to get some Winter pictures of the Detroit Zoo covered in snow. Then I went to midnights and doing things during the day became the equivalent of staying up all night. So with 3 days off in row just before New Years and a new camera in the mail, I decided to give my Kodak Z712 a proper send off. The results are posted here. If the weather is decent my new Panasonic Lumix FZ40 will get its test run with a Toledo trip in early May. The new camera has twice the optical zoom of the Kodak (12x to 24x). This should keep me from having to dip into the digital zoom (i.e. crop and enlarge) for many of the long-range close-ups.

Fiscal conservatism continues into 2011. I foresee about two more years of reduced spending being needed. This looks like a good time to really work on my backlog. So for 2011 I have started the 52-Weeks-52-Games Challenge. I have drawn up a list of 60 games and I intend to beat one for every week of the year. I’m off to a terrible start (Thanks New Vegas!) with only 2 games beaten through the first week of February, but I know I can knock off three in the next week and a half. With Dragon Age II, Twilight Princess, Mass Effect 3, and worst of all, Skyrim, looming in the future, I’m not sure if I can pull this off.

Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep

Monster Hunter Tri

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn

January Gain +765 – 39 Achievements unlocked

March Gain – Level + 0 Trophies + 0

Backlog decreased by 2 in January

Game spending vs. ‘10: Monthly -70% | Yearly -70%

If it wasn’t for an expiring Buy-2-Get-1-Free coupon this would have been the first month since August 2004 in which no games were purchased.

Nearly ten years late to the Halo party, but I finally decided to give it a try. And it’s actually not that bad. My only real complaint is the repetition in the stages. Perhaps it was hardware limitations, or just the rush to hit the xbox launch, but many stages just seem to drag on with scenery changing very little (or not at all, Library!) in each section. The later stages were largely repeats of earlier ones. Very solid game, I can certainly see why it has gained such popularity. Still not my cup of tea though. I prefer the slower-paced cover mechanics of Gears and Uncharted.

Elite Beat Agents is certainly one of the more unique games I’ve played. I suck at rhythm games, but I had a good time with it even as I repeatedly failed out thanks to the humorous scenes that accompany each song. I barely got through the last song on the easiest difficulty level.

Trace Memory is a bit on the short side and almost too easy. The story was interesting and kept me interested in continuing forward to the conclusion, even if it was fairly easy to see how it was going to play out. The developers made pretty good use of the unique features the DS offers.

I was a little slow to get into New Vegas, but once I did, I didn’t want to put it down (until it froze). #1 reason why I’m so behind on my 52 game challenge. The bugs I encountered were mostly minor graphics glitches and random game freezes. I once got stuck in a cave wall and plummeted to my death. Annoying, but hardly game breaking. Though I was unable to get one of the endings as the script refused to execute past a certain point in the ending scene. It’s on par with Fallout 3, but it could have been so much more.

Not bad for a collection of minigames. The game kind of plays as a puzzle as you try to win and find the items you need to proceed deeper into the theme park the game takes place in. Since this is Bomberman, pretty much all the mini-games involve bombs in some manner. Normal mode moves fairly smoothly, though some of the later challenges took quite a few tries and pushed the time limit to the max.

The final battle theme to Mana Khemia. Someday I hope to actually hear it in game. The vocalist is Noriko Mitose, who pops up in quite a few Gust games as well as one of my favorite ending themes, Radical Dreamers ~Unstolen Jewel from Chrono Cross.

0 Pickups, 0 Additions

Atlus & NIS America

Hyperdimension Neptunia

Ar Tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel

Radiant Historia

Others

Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Dragon Age II

Mass Effect 3

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Eyes on the Future

Thank you Namco! I’d almost given up on Tales leaving Japan, so it was a pleasant surprise to see a sudden teaser for Graces ƒ. No release date beyond a coming soon. I did spend a little time with the Japanese demo and found they’ve played with the combat quite a bit, though it still looks and feels like a Tales game. My Japanese is getting very rusty, so I need to go back and force myself to try and read more of the text.