Anyhow, we’re at the end of my birthday here, going into the day after, and now on my last year before 30. While the day started out honestly feeling like it would be plain and dull like any other, doing things like responsibly cleaning up and doing laundry, it became much better as the day went on.

First up is something I’m starting, mostly as an exercise in attempted self-discipline, and a bit of vanity. I’m starting one of those 365 photo projects, taking pictures of myself each day for the upcoming year. To give it some purpose/excuse, I’m going to attempt to do it as a chronicle of my last year before I turn 30. I’m sure most any of you actually reading this will find it rather dull, and I may save some sanity by mostly keeping it over on flicker with, say, weekly roundups of the shots here. Day One(nevermind the post-midnight posting, its been a long evening and was online way earlier):

That was as I headed out in today’s gorgeous weather to have a 3-in-the-afternoon birthday brunch, nice and low key at the nearest Denny’s, and on the trip back, picking up some delicious Izzy’s Ice Cream (Creme Coffee Crunch with a Guiness Izzy, and a pint of Strawberry) and some cupcakes from the shop a couple doors down from there. Come home to find Pokemon: Heart Gold (as much as I’m enjoying it, poor Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey finds itself immediately sidelined) waiting for me along with lots of time on the phone with friends and family wishing me a happy birthday.

Then it was off to the main event of the evening (and new Pokewalker in tow), Video Games Live, an orchestral concert featuring music from a range of beloved video game series, and their first time in Minnesota. While I figured it was going to be a pretty fun thing, I wasn’t at all prepared for how awesome it turned out to be. Doubly so considering it was to be hosted by Tommy Tallarico, one of my least favorite G4TV hosts from when I still had the channel available to me.

But no, they had to go and get things going on the right foot, playing some pretty funny videos and bringing up the finalists from a pre-show costume contest (naturally Link won, like he always does in any popularity contest). Then it was time to get the show proper underway. They started things off with a giant medly paying homage to the arcade/Atari era with everything from Pong to Defender to Battle Tank to Donkey Kong and Tetris.

Then it was on to modern times, with a great Metal Gear Solid medly (and video intro from Hideo Kojima himself) that also saw a certain cardboard box wandering across the stage while a guard looked about all !-like. A pre-recorded David Jaffe takes us into God of War, where we get bits of several of the better pieces (sadly no Pot of Tea) that brings about a mental fist pump from me, as I’ve been playing through the trilogy (again) for the better part of the week getting the remaining trophies, and will be back to it after getting this written up.

Springing from the box, Tommy pops out of the cardboard box and calls out for an audience member to come to the stage to play a game. The girl he picks out comes up, gets handed a t-shirt to put on, and we’re all informed that she’s going to be playing Space Invaders, winning a fancy MAME box if she can beat the first stage in 2 minutes or less. The catch? Her ship’s to be controlled by the shirt she put on via the magic of motion tracking. How’d she do? Well, I’ll leave the video to speak for itself:

Following this, Tommy dug out from somewhere an old, old, old video of Ralph Baer, one of the orignal video game creators, giving a demonstration of Table Tennis, something that I’d never run across before. And not only did we get this little bit of video game history, but he then connected us to Mr. Baer live through the magic of Skype, where we all duly, and rather loudly, made our thanks known for helping to birth one of our favorite entertainment mediums.

Medleys from Zelda (intro’d by Koji Kondo) and Warcraft, along with a fantastic eyes-closed piano solo by one Martin Yeung playing a mash of Final Fantasy pieces, rounded out the front half of the evening and getting us to intermission, For those of us that stayed in our seats, a loading bar alternated with various short clips from a TON of old NES/SNES/Genesis games, each bringing cheers and hollers from various parts of the audience.

Post-intermission, Tommy (with a Tri-Force emblazoned guitar) and conductor Jack Wall (with a plain old acoustic) get in on the act as Chrono Trigger/Cross has its turn in the evening’s spotlight before they moved into the other interactive event of the night, a Guitar Hero (Van Halen) performance from a pre-show contest winner. Challenging him to earn 200,000 points playing Jump on Hard, the audience member scoffed and said he’d do it on Expert. And with Tommy and the orchestra playing alongside him, he readily proved to be up to the challenge, going to far as to actually jump in all the right places without missing a beat, and coming out of it with a score of 231,000+, then hopping off the stage with a nice pile of swag. Somewhere around here, we’re treated to another Koji Kondo introduced medly, this time for Super Mario and his hundreds of games.

After Tommy grabbed another guitar, they launched into an absolutely outstanding Halo performance (and this from someone who’s not a huge fan of the series) that got an absolutely huge round of applause from the audience as he and the conductor ran off stage and the lights dimmed. With the applause not stopping, they came back out and asked if we’d like an encore. Of Course We Would You Silly Billy.

But before that, Tommy decides he needs to embarrass one of tonight’s audience members, he’s friends with so and so, a longtime supporter of Video Games Live… a longtime resident of the area… the renowned writer of such works as Sandman and Coraline… Neil Gaiman! Holy. Fucking. Awesome.

After Neil gets a monster round of applause just for showing up, we get down to business and as close as I would get to having my Metroid wish fulfilled, we got a pretty good Castlevania medley, followed a jaw-dropping live demonstration of the thing that made the aforementioned Marting Yeung Youtube-famous, a blindfolded Super Mario Bros solo. But two extra pieces weren’t enough, Tommy offered to give us one more and we gladly accepted.

“The company is Square.”

Wild Cheers.

“The game is Final Fantasy.”

Shouts from everyone giving number to their favorite entry.

“Seven.”

Crazed Cheers, myself included.

“One. Winged. Angel.”

The Audience Explodes.

By the time they were done, everyone was on their feet cheering or in a puddle of blissful ooze on the floor. I don’t care how overhyped/played it is at this point, and how sick of it anyone else might be, but Oh My God, that was the best possible way to end the show. I’ve a newfound respect for Tommy, and would have loved to stick around for the meet-and-greet afterwards, but one look at the monstrous line told me I was going to have difficulty getting home if I stuck around, ah well, there’s always next time(and given that they sold out, there likely will be a next time).

Being downtown and on Nicollet, I took the opportunity to do a little bit of photography, but only the following shot came out (really fucking) well:

Wells Fargo tower, downtown Minneapolis

A short trip home with some more inital Pokemon-ing and enjoying my cupcakes sees me to the end of the day proper, but now before I go to bed, I’m off to finish up Titan Mode on God of War III, possibly doing the challenges as well.

iPhone:
- Constantly playing Hanafuda, Cribbage, and Canabalt

Nintendo DS:
- Finished Trace Memory, Hotel Dusk, Final Fantasy III, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, Izuna 2, and Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor
- Currently trying not to throw Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon through the wall

PC:
- Played through Left 4 Dead 2 a couple times(Single Player only so far) and Torchlight
- Played some Team Fortress 2
- Playing through Borderlands
- Haven’t had time for Batman: Arkham Asylum, The Witcher, Mass Effect, a mess of older Star Wars titles, Zeno Clash, Tomb Raider Underworld, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Assassin’s Creed, and Lost Planet.

PS2/PS3:
- Finished Ninja Gaiden Sigma 1 and Valkyria Chronicles
- Played through Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, Uncharted 2, Brutal Legend, God of War I & II PS3 Collection, and Ico
- Played some Godhand, BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, and Pixel Junk Eden
- Currently enthralled by The Saboteur

XBox/XBox360:
- Finished the supremely entertaining Earth Defense Force 2017
- Played through Halo II
- Played a ways through Marvel Ultimate Alliance II, Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers, Dead or Alive 4, and Dead Rising
- Tried starting Halo III and watched the 360 crap itself into being essentially useless

And the PSP and Wii have sat almost entirely idle, hrm. Don’t know when I’ll get back to the PSP (Persona and Phantasy Star Universe are tempting), but No More Heroes 2, Tatsunoko vs Capcom, and Shiren the Wanderer will be bringing me back to the Wii in January.

Just a little busy on this front, yes. Most of these deserve some attention, but Uncharted 2, Torchlight, and BlazBlue would be my must-play picks of the bunch, closely followed by Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor and EDF 2017.

With the mail today, I’ve also just gotten my first ever arcade stick (the normal version that Capcom and MadCatz put out for Street Fighter IV), as I really would like to be able to properly use them. A little bit of history… Outside of Smash Bros, Soul Calibur (both Dreamcast and Arcade versions), the vast, vast, vast majority of my time spent playing fighting games has been done with a DualShock in hand. The buttons are all in a nice, tight formation, uniformly shaped and spaced, and on flat planes so you aren’t warping your fingers trying to switch between them. It all works quite sensibly, and so that’s always been the way things are supposed to be.

Thanks to this, the bulk of my muscle memory is in the thumbs, and looking for the square-triangle-circle-cross diamond formation, but the stick puts square and triangle side by side over cross and circle in a top row/bottom row configuration that’s pretty standard with arcade cabinets and other fighting sticks, which is driving my brain nuts. I can’t easily reconfigure it to match, and on top of that, instead of the intended square-triangle-L1-R1 finger placement for the top row, I’m finding myself settling into cross-square-triangle-L1, which just borks getting at the other buttons. Throw in fingers unused to being spread out like that and being hopeless with the stick itself, things are looking pretty painful. I’m hoping that learning BlazBlue (and King of Fighters XII in the coming weeks) on the stick without ever touching the DualShock will help me get the hang of it more quickly though, as it’ll minimize the preconceptions about where things belong (though keeping countless hours of Guilty Gear out of mind is gonna be tough).

But back to the game. The second 2D fighter out of the gate in HD (SSFIITHR being the other, I don’t really count SFIV as it isn’t sprite-based) for our beastly modern consoles, the game is freaking gorgeous, even if it does top out at 1080i. Mostly. The character sprites (and designs in general) are absolutely top notch, and I’d expect nothing less from the guys that made fighting games pretty again with Guilty Gear X, but they’ve gone with 3D backgrounds that just don’t compare. Granted, I generally have the same opinion every time this is done, but hey, they’ve not done anything to prove me wrong.

Arcade Mode’s nice and big, a 10 round affair that looks to have a nice progression in difficulty. Story Mode is in full display, with multiple paths for each character to complete in order to get the various endings but messes with it the formula a bit, allowing you to save between fights and requiring 100% completion of a character’s story to unlock their Insta-Kill equivalent (or yes, beating Arcade Mode with a character will unlock it as well). Rounding out the options, you’ve got your standard Versus, Training, Score Attack (which I presume will play out similarly to the Survival Mode found in most other fighters), Gallery, and an online mode that I think I want to get into once I get the hang of things.

All in all, quite pleased with what I’ve seen so far, its just as fast, furious, beautiful, and over the top as Guilty Gear, which means it has everything I wanted out of it, really. Truly learning the game is going to be an uphill battle, but I’m looking forward to the challenge and can’t wait to see what other random bits of insanity the game has to throw at me as I spend more time with it. Unfortunately CONvergence means that I won’t really get to sink my teeth into it this weekend, but I’m sure I’ll be playing nightly, and next weekend I should be able to go nuts with it. Hold on, stop everything. It has Remote Play too Fuuuuck Yeah! (this’ll mess with my stick-only plans, but I don’t care, I’ll be able to play at work!)

WANTFUCKINGNOW.

Books
Finally finished up Steven Erikson’s Midnight Tides the end of last week or so, fantastic as usual, though the characters perhaps outshone the story this time, particularly Tehol and Bugg, one of the best duos ever. Kicking myself for putting it down for 4 months. Argh.

Plowed through Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein immediately afterward. Very, very good book, but be warned, its a twisted book, full of deviance that may disturb you deeply if you aren’t already aware of how messed up both America and sexual fetishes have gotten. I had almost as much fun imagining the reactions of the less hardened as I did in actually reading the book, but then again, I can be quite twisted myself. If you pay attention, there’s also some strong insight to both where things are headed and where things are at(for better or for worse), something Ellis has always been thinking about, as evidenced by Transmetropolitan and Doktor Sleepless, among others.

Followed that up the last couple days with the Welcome to the NHK novel, and I’m of mixed feelings on it due to watching the anime first. On the one hand, the book absolutely moves, and is definitely more manic than the show, but due to this, the characters weren’t nearly as endearing and the plots weren’t as fleshed out as in the anime(the lead’s high school crush doesn’t even get named in the book vs having a fairly prominent role in the show). As such, its still good, but not nearly as much as the show. I’m still working on the manga, and it seems closer to the goings on of the show, but the show is what I absolutely recommend as far as the title goes. Part of that, though, is that I can draw strong parallels to so much of what goes on in the show with my own life, and as such, I wanted the lead to succeed and get through the painful state of his existance.

I’ve just started Stanislaw Lem’s Hospital of the Transfiguration, and despite being similar in size to the prior two books, it should take me more than a couple days of reading on the bus to get through(~20 pages coming in this morning vs ~50 one way with the other two), but that’s a given with how dense his work is. Those 20 pages have already resonated pretty strongly though, as our lead, awkward and an outsider among his own family, is forced to stand in for his ill father at the funeral for his uncle, and we get to ride along with those outsider thoughts. Of course, I haven’t even gotten to the meat of the book yet, but given this and taking place in WWII Europe, I have a feeling I’ll be as deeply enamoured with it as I am Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.

Following that will be either Erickson’s Bonehunters(whose release prompted me to pick up Midnight Tides again) or Goodkind’s Phantom, haven’t quite decided which bit of meaty book I want next. Assuming I don’t go back to focusing on the handhelds…

Gaming
November is both an awesome time to be a gamer and a nightmare of a time to be a gamer, particularly in the last few years. This month alone sees so many games coming out that I want to play, from Soulcalibur Legends and Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 on the Wii, to King of Fighters XI on the PS2, to Final Fantasy XII:Revenant Wings and Geometry Wars: Galaxies on the DS, to Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops+ and Disgaea on the PSP, to name but a few! It’s a good thing that Super Smash Brothers Brawl got shunted to early February, means a few more dollars to spread around. Picking which ones I can afford to pick up will still be very tough, and I may have to try and hit up the Black Friday sales for Toys R Us or KB Toys, as they both seem to have Buy One Get One Free on all their video games, though I don’t quite know if it’s worth the hassle.

As to what I’m actually playing, despite flirting with Soul Calibur III a little bit in the last few weeks, most of my attention at home has been on Hellgate: London, which despite its best efforts at giving me good reasons not to play, is proving just as addictive as Diablo II. If I can actually manage steady online play by the end of the month, I think I’ll probably be diving in for their Founders offer, lifetime access to subscriber content for about a year’s worth of subscriber fees, though that’ll put a dent in getting other games for a while.

On the go, Disgaea’s been getting the nod, what with Tetris-level gaming crack now in portable form and with nearly no load time. though I’ve not coughed up the $40 that they want for it(I’ll probably pick it up if the price ever goes down, but I’m not paying for it in full twice, despite how much time and enjoyment I got out of the PS2 release).

Phoenix Wright 3 has also been seeing some playtime, and the dialogue is just as awesome as ever, but its been more of a cool down at night than anything(though that’s somewhat dangerous as its hard to put down).

I also had to put in for the Magic:The Gathering Online release for Lorwyn, and amazingly managed to win enough packs to make it worthwhile. Though I’d been somewhat concerned with the set earlier, I’m really starting to enjoy it, especially as we finally get some great faeries to play with. I may even have to go in for a decent investment in the actual cards, if I can find the cash for it :|

Comics
As stated in the last post, I just dropped a ton of that hard to find cash catching up on (the bulk of) the comics I missed in the last month or so, World War Hulk, Iron Fist, Moon Knight, and DMZ continue to be outstanding monthly purchases, Mouse Guard’s gotten going again with the Winter 1152 storyline, I’m starting in on DC with Green Arrow Year One finishing up and Green Arrow-Black Canary getting started(<3 Black Canary), Strange Girl’s just wrapped up in excellent fashion, and more!

I’m also getting more entrenched in reading the DC universe, recently catching up on post-Infinite Crisis Batman and Wonder Woman stuff, as well as going back now to read the Cataclysm-No Man’s Land arcs and starting in on Catwoman v2, on top of most of the whole spread of Countdown and most of the other current releases(of which I’m now really only neglecting the Flash and Superman books).

Anime
On the fansub front, Seirei no Moribito and Oh! Edo Rocket finished in excellent form, Bokura no closing out pretty solid as well, and I look forward to seeing them come out over here. Baccano and Dennou Coil continue to be absolutely amazing shows that get even better with each episode. I’ve stalled on Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, with almost as many unwatched as watched now. Angel Heart slowly is finally into the final quarter of the show, and I’m still enjoying it enough to ponder City Hunter proper at some point. Genshiken Season 2 is just as good as the first go around. You’re Under Arrest Full Throttle has also been in line with its prior incarnations. Sketchbook ~full color’S has been showing itself to be an excellent substitue for ARIA(the President even makes a cameo!). Dragonaut is looking like it will go the way of Divergence Eve or Witchblade, with a decent story/concepting buried under excessively endowed women. Despite the hype, I haven’t been able to get aboard CLANNAD, even though there’s some really nice animation to be found within. And lastly, the sleeper surprise of the season, Bamboo Blade has been proving itself to be quite an entertaining show and one of the only ones I’m actively keeping up with as episodes come out.

DVD-wise, I’ve finished up Noein and have just lined up the rest of BECK, one more to go on Ergo Proxy and Black Lagoon. Welcome to the NHK and FLAG have both started to hit DVD now, and I desperately need to pick them up. I’m also looking to get started on Mai-Otome and possibly Tide-Line Blue, though I’ll probably wait on a cheaper bundle on the latter. I’m still on the fence with Gunbuster 2, as even the discounted $27×3 for ~2-3 hours of show is a bit ridiculous.

Other
Haven’t watched any television since moving, so I’m completely out of the loop on the fall schedule, so the writer’s strike doesn’t leave me hanging on anything. I still need to finish the last few episodes of Eureka though :|

Movie-wise, the last I’ve gone to see was The Darjeeling Limited, which was just as awkward and entertaining as The Life Aquatic, though I think I still prefer Life Aquatic, as it was completely out there. Up shortly is Beowulf, and I’m seriously considering trying to find it in 3D as it sounds like they’ve finally nailed that aspect of it. Outside of those though, hasn’t been too much that I absolutely needed to see in theaters, until Blade Runner: The Final Cut on Dec 1st, that is. Yeah, that’s going to be Fricking Awesome(despite not owning a Blu-Ray player or HDTV, I’m even considering the Blu-Ray uberbox that comes out shortly after, I love Blade Runner that much).

And lastly, I managed to go to a concert on Wednesday. Not just any concert though, a Dethklok concert. Despite a horrible choice for an opening act and a no-moshing rule, the show was a blast, as our eardrums were assaulted with an hour or so of nonstop music by the most metal fictional band around. I think I may have even had just about as much fun as I did with all of Ozzfest. The best part might be that none of my Metalocalypse-loving friends got to go, so I get to brag about it even more. That, or sharing one of my favorite photos ever with the entire crowd:

And on that note, I’ll wrap this up. I’m sure there’s more I missed that’s worth pointing out, but maybe you’ll hear about it in a couple months or somesuch :|