I attempted to watch the original movie. I never watched the show back in the 80s, so I didn't expect to get anything out of it.

It is awful!!! OH MAN! It is unwatchably bad. I know a lot of people liked it, but I guess without appreciating the original show, it's not worthwhile. I hate this movie and cannot possibly watch the entire thing. At least I don't need to ever worry about seeing the second film.

My mom had never heard of those personality tests that give you a 4 letter personality code that tells you all about yourself. I made her take one and she is ENFJ. Alex is ISFJ, so I guess they are compatible. She was soooo amazed by how accurate the test was. She's still going on about it today and wants to make everyone she knows take the test. I took it for work but I've always gotten the same result.

I finished Brave Story last weekend. While not a terrific game, it is quite pretty with decent graphics in combat. The story is blah. The characters are blah. I will probably forget everything about the game in a few weeks, so it wasn't anything special. It did have a "wtf am I supposed to be doing right now?" button, which makes one of your characters yell at your or remind you nicely. The cast consists of your mute kid hero with a lame hat, his catgirl friend, their lizardman who claims to be an adult but acts like a moron, a badass chick with two swords, and an extremely annoying wizard who likes to say "and/or" all the time. Actually, there are 6 characters. The last one is a superserious knight dude with horns & red eyes who is trying to cure his wife's amnesia. There are many sidequests, but I only did a few. In order to accomplish many of these, or to create awesome accessories, you have to grind for the correct type of monster and cross your fingers that it drops the rare item you need. BAH to that. There is a retarded bird fighting minigame but it is pointless. You have no control over your birds and are just a spectator while little colored birds run around smashing into each other. The matches can take quite a while if your birds are not very accurate. Horrible, horrible idea.

Recent acquisitions: Suikoden Tierkries (DS), Black Sigil (DS), Folklore (PS3), Persona 3 FES (PS2). Why I buy more games is a mystery to everybody, given how many I still haven't opened/played. Does anyone have a copy of FF6 GBA they would like to sell me? The battery in my FF3 SNES appears to be dead and I haven't the patience for PS1 load times right now.

Next up is FF7 Crisis Core. I seriously knew nothing going into this one besides the fact that it's FF7 prequel featuring Zack, Cloud's lookalike buddy. As it turns out, it's not even an RPG, it's an action game with RPG elements. It is also on crack. I may have played FF7 a billion years ago, but there are enough familiar names/faces/scenery/music to stir up something from the depths of my memory. Anyway, the game is without a doubt made for FF7 fans that shit themselves at the thought of more Sephiroth. He shows up almost right away, along with some stupid old man named Angela who is carrying around Cloud's famously retarded looking sword. Zack is, shockingly, an idiot, but at least he's not totally whinypants yet (getting there, his friend just went randomly nuts and killed his own mom). There is even some other guy who magically sprouts wings and flies off for no apparent reason. The entire thing is just a FF7 fanperson orgy inducer.

The game is all "blah blah SOLDIER blah blah materia blah blah blah blah blah. Shinra blah blah Turks!" which doesn't mean anything to me, given how incoherent the original game was. This prequel is off to a preposterous and incoherent start so I doubt it'll make any sense. However, the game is graphically AWESOME. It looks so fucking impressive. RPGs usually aren't anything to write home about, but Square is good at their graphics, and the game looks absolutely terrific.

I recall being mystified about how to use summons/magic in FF12. This game is WAY more confusing. There aren't experience points or anything. During battle, a little slot machine in the corner freaks out and constantly spins faces and numbers, which you apparently have no control over(???). If two faces match, it brings up a giant slot machine over the entire screen. If you can match the 3rd face, Zack gets a limit break. The limit break is a random level (high level = more damage) as far as I can tell. If you have esper materia, you can sometimes get that to appear on your slot machine somehow. Sometimes there are little pictures that show up but do not appear to do anything. Anyway, regardless of if you get the pictures lined up or not, each picture gets a random number. If two of the numbers match, one of your materia levels up. If all three numbers are 7s, Zack gets a level. It all appears very arbitrary.

I have no fucking clue how to interpret this leveling system.

Death at the Omni Fort Worth:
http://www.star-telegram.com/804/story/1445632.html

I left just before things got interesting, apparently.

Stealth = best spell ever

It's like Clean Water from Lufia, or any of a myriad of enemy encounter reducing items. But BETTER. Once it's used, enemies that are considered "low level" compared to your current level will not attack at all. It's great for running back through old dungeons to find stuff you missed the first time through, without having to fight any battles at all. The game informs you when Stealth has run out, and you can simply re-cast it.

Oh man, it's so great. I'm so overleveled that I don't have to fight anything but boss battles.

Right now I'm just running around getting the special weapons/armor and doing a few side quests here and there before the final dungeon.

Of course I'm not. I had to spend time in the pool today, had to move some furniture, had to unpack some stuff, etc etc.

There is also this stupid show called Degrassi. It's a dumb Canadian high school soap opera thing but it's one of my many guilty pleasures. I've seen entirely too many seasons of the show, including the Next Generation, and I'm totally psyched about Degrassi goes Hollywood. I think the earliest episodes are junior high, then high school, then college. In case you've never heard of it, it's on for at least 6 hours a day on the N. I've been watching it since about 5pm today, and these are all episodes I've seen before. Being a retarded teen drama, the show has the entire cast dating and breaking up with the entire cast, people deciding they are gay/bi/etc every episode, teen pregnancy, teen violence, suicide, drugs, sex, death, etc. It is SO stupid but somehow addicting. I also hate the entire cast of characters, which makes it even more fun to watch. Well, I sorta liked Rick but he didn't last long...

I've made huge progress in Brave Story and I'm on chapter 9, with 4/5 gems. One of the mystifyingly bad plot points is how all the characters are like "WHOA! Travelers are so rare and awesome, we are so psyched to meet the hero!" but then there are FOUR FUCKING TRAVELERS AT ONCE. Hello there, plot hole.

There is nothing particularly awesome about this game but I'm sure that I'm getting towards the end. I do like Meladee although I hate her name. She kicks all sorts of butt. As soon as I got her, I booted my catgirl out of the party and haven't looked back. My third character is the knight with the lance. He has crazy horns and red eyes, so he's cool.

I am totally getting my hair cut this morning.

This afternoon I will be stopping by the new place to get enrolled in their computer system or something. I have orientation on Monday, but apparently coming in today will help facilitate the process.

So the TV has HD and we want to have two inputs- the cable box & the PS3. Alex had a thing that you plug both outputs into and then plug it into the TV, but it freaks out when we do that. Are HD input splitters/selectors expensive? I have totally used normal splitters to plug 5 video game systems into one TV so I don't understand why the HD splitter would be any different.

OK, so my birthday was actually yesterday, but it was a busy day and I did not use the computer. Most of my stuff is moved out and I'm officially done with Omni. WHOO HOO!!!! I am so excited. I will never have to go back to that poorly managed hellhole and deal with those fucking halfwits.

I would like to take a moment to discuss two games I am playing now- both of which are better than Tales of the World. Not like that's hard to do but...

Valkyria Chronicles I mentioned that my mom got a PS3 for her blu-ray needs. I figured that I will buy the one and only game that is PS3 exclusive which people claim is fucking amazing. I didn't know anything about it since I don't keep up on gaming news any more, but I heard it was OMG AMAZING, so I figured, why not. I don't read boxes or instruction manuals, so I just looked at the cover, saw a blue haired chick and figured it'd be a generic anime-style RPG. It turns out, I was wrong. It's actually a wartime strategy RPG, taking place in eastern Europe in the 1930s. I guess it's World War 1.5? The homeland of the characters, fictional Gallia, appears to be Latvia/Lithuania/Estonia or something. One of those goofy little countries bordering Russia.

Anyway, Russia is the Evil Empire of Something, and they are invading Gallia for its machine powering resource (a mineral I think). I guess this is kind of like taking over middle eastern countries for oil. This all sounds very serious, and at the beginning of the game, the heroes' hometown is destroyed by evil Russians. Then your dopey hero (a nature-loving scientist/artist aspiring to be a teacher) and his new girlfriend (a baker) get a tank and get command of their own unit in the army. I just got to the capital city to set up my platoon so I don't know where it goes from there, but there is a ton of shit you can do at your HQ. A lot more than you do during an administrative phase in Dragon Force, which is the only thing I can really equate it to.

The part of this game that really screws with me is the fact that when you select a unit to move in battle, your control of them is more like a third person shooter, like Tom Clancy or something. Admittedly I have never played Tom Clancy, but it's what I think Tom Clancy would be like. You have a person with a gun, running around the battlefield, hiding behind trenches and tanks, getting shot at by enemies (seriously, they shoot at you while you are moving in real time), etc. The only time this reverts back to something I can handle is, oddly enough, when you choose your weapon and bring up the targeting screen. Although tanks and enemies with guns can shoot you as you move, once the targeting screen comes up, everything stops so you can aim carefully and blow someone's head off.

Despite all this game has going against it (tanks, guns, real time combat), I'm enjoying it so far. I commented early on how the character interaction reminded me of Phantasy Star with comic-book style boxes that appear with the portrait of the character or the focus of their attention. The game is also lovely. It's cartoony but looks like a watercolor most of the time, and has some very nice textures that I never saw on the PS2. BUT! I was floored when I looked through my list of potential recruits and saw Vyse & Aika. Which means... this Sega title was made by the same freaks that did Skies of Arcadia & Phantasy Star!! WOW! Seriously, with that crew behind it, it's just got to be good.

Brave Story New Traveler has the stupidest title I've seen in a while. However, it's not quite as retarded as the name implies. Just like FFTA (terrible game), your hero starts in the real world, playing his PSP. Then his girlfriend falls into a mysterious coma and he heads into a fantasy world to find a way to save her. Also like FFTA, there are lots of weird colorful races including lizardmen and birdpeople and.. catgirls, sigh. Your first party member is a cute blonde catgirl with a miniminiminiminiskirt. Although she is the dream come true for pedophiles and furries everywhere, she's actually not that bad.

The combat is straightforward turn-based, but there are a lot of unite moves like Suikoden. Your BP (aka MP) regenerates every time you attack, so you can constantly use special & unite moves. There is a tiny bit of item creation for making accessories. Basically, you find a pattern in a chest, you collect materials from enemies, and tada! Each person can equip 3 accessories, including 3 of the same one, so it works out nicely. There is also a minigame involving bird catching and bird battling. There is bird mania everywhere and you constantly encounter members of SNOB, the society of bird lovers or whatever.

This game does not appear to take itself seriously. Everything in it has stupid names, like SNOB, for example. The magical land that your hero travels to is called Vision. It's like they just pulled names from a hat instead of trying. I clued into the game's silliness in the first battle I encountered. Every time you attack, or get attacked, a giant comic book style sound effect appears. So your catgirl shoots an arrow at a giant bug- KKKSSSSHHHTT! An enemy swings an axe at you- WWWWHHHAAAAKKK! Yea. (actually Valkyria Chronicles also felt the need to have WHHRRRRRRRRRR constantly written all over the engines of the tanks. maybe this is a bizarre new trend in RPGs. huh.)

I'm on chapter 6 or 7 right now, and party members are constantly jumping in and out of my party, so at least I'm not bored of the same 3 guys yet. I met an angry Harry Potter clone who hated my hero but decided to join anyway. He left really fast, which made me sad, since he was the first decent magic user I've seen thus far.

I promise to get back to work on my top 10 games. I was almost there!! Only 10 more to go.

I finally finished Tales of Whatever on the PSP. I hate this game, but I'd already wasted so much time on it that I had to complete it. My stupid guy was a lv 58 thief with the radiant set. I didn't get any of the skills max, but I did have smith and cooking at 100.

Now the game is like "omg we got you New Game+ so you can keep playing!" HELL NO.

I hate this game, and now I can move on to something else.

What the hell is going on with this sky? It's blue and orange!

I think I might get my hair cut.