Neglected... Posted by TurboPhoenix , Friday, February 11, 2011 at 12:20 PM, in Labels: Updates

I'm sorry! *cries* This blog has been unintentionally neglected! I say unintentionally because I've been meaning to write a blog on something, but every time I try to think of a subject, my mind just blanks. My bad! So um... this blog should probably have some actual content to it, hey? I know! An update on my boring life. In point form!

- My manga collection is currently at 227 volumes! I know this is an obvious thing to say, but I am quite proud of it. I have no idea how much I've spent on it all, but it's easily over $2,000. It seems like so much more when you think of it like that...
- I recently bought a PS3! Finally! I got a 160gb console, HDMI cable and 4 games (Infamous, Uncharted, LBP and MGS4). Unfortunately I bought them all online (the games are all US imports, the rest from GAME online) so I have to wait for them to arrive... The wait is killing me!
- Speaking of waiting for things to arrive, I have so many things coming in the mail! DVDs, Blu Rays, even more manga, anime figurines... many many things, the waiting is killing me! However it is also exciting. I get so impatient though, and usually I check the mail at least 3 times a day, even if something has already been delivered! It's a good thing I do though, because they sometimes leave something and then come back later!

I think that's about it. I'll try to do another blog soonish... If I remember to that is >_< I know, I'll do a special PS3 blog after I've had the chance to play all the games I bought. It'll probably cover many things, like the games themselves, my thoughts on the system (eg interface) and possibly a DVD comparison with the 360's DVD player.

Oh, and here is a picture of puppies to apologise for the neglect.

125 volumes of manga! + Updates Posted by TurboPhoenix , Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 1:26 PM, in Labels: Manga, Updates

Some explanation of the above image is probably required. This is my manga archive, the spreadsheet I use to keep track of all my manga. I'm trying to keep it simple, so the columns should explain themselves, but there are 2 that might not be so straightforward. Firstly the "Last Volume" column is there so I can see what the last volume I own of each series is. The "In Between" column is in case I skip a volume - either accidentally or because the store doesn't have that particular volume. It's pretty clean right now, and I'm actually proud of that, though those 5 volumes that I've missed are digging at me! Also the rows in red are the series I intend to get in the future, despite having plenty of ongoing series in the list already.

Seem a little boring? Here's the whole collection in photograph format!





Enough of that for now though. This is the first blog in a while, mainly because I haven't really had anything to blog about. I can assure you though that there will be more blogs coming... eventually. My schedule is pretty blank until Halo: Reach comes out - I'll be pre-ordering the Special Edition for that, and I'll probably do an impressions or review blog for that. After that comes the biggest release of the year for me: Fallout New Vegas! It's going to be quite epic, and I've already decided what my first play style will be (tank/heavy weapons). Besides those two, I have basically nothing going on until November. How boring.

Updates (14/05/10) Posted by TurboPhoenix , Friday, May 14, 2010 at 12:19 PM, in Labels: Updates

Alrighty, here's what I've been up to!

Finished Assassin's Creed 2. One word: Awesome. Three words: Give me more! Having finished the 2nd one 100% (Including all achievements!) I can now say that Assassin's Creed is one of my top game series, in the top 10 at least. The story is so compelling and the gameplay is a delight too. The repetition that many, including myself, complained about in the first one is totally gone. Sure, there are repetitive things in the second one too, such as courier missions and races, but the best part is that these are completely optional (bar a few essential ones at the very start of the game). The whole money system works surprisingly well; after reading reviews saying that the villa was pointless I didn't expect to enjoy it so much! Sure it's not very hard to get money, but I loved upgrading the town and collecting all the paintings for the villa. I just wish the town was bigger and that you could upgrade the actual villa itself (beyond the paintings). I hope it makes a return in the inevitable third installment. One of the best parts about the game was the glyphs! They are non-essential, but provide so much backstory, and some great puzzles too. In all it was a brilliant game, and I can't wait for the next one!

Finished Fracture. This was pretty fun. Unlike Assassin's Creed 2 it was neither long or all that interesting story-wise, but the terraforming aspect is a new and welcome change. The gameplay was solid, if a little bland. Story was uninspired. But the music was great! Orchestral quality. It really reminded me that I was playing a Lucasarts game, because you can tell that they had a hand in it. It's Star Wars scale music. Overall I'm glad I didn't pay full price when it came out, but it's a good addition to my game library.

New games. I picked up Lost Planet on the day after my previous blog, and just yesterday I grabbed the XBLA Unplugged Volume 1 collection for just 4 bucks at EB. I used to laugh at those collections, but it's actually pretty good value. I only wanted one game in the collection, Bejeweled 2, which would have set me back 400 MSP. Considering 500 MSP is about $8.25, I consider that a bargain. Best of all, the disk is in near mint condition. I don't think the previous owners knew how to use it...

Manga. I got all 12 volumes of manga I had ordered from Borders. I have only read 1 so far, but I plan to start on the rest tonight. This brings my total manga volumes to 106! If anybody wants to know what they all are, leave a comment and I'll do a blog about it, maybe with pictures too!

The boring stuff. Tafe is going well for me, though I'm not very motivated about most of the classes, the exception being Flash where we have moved on to making simple Flash games. I am making one where you gotta kill demon sheep, while sparing the regular ones. I might put it online once it's done. A word of warning though: It will be really basic, it will be really easy, and my artwork will be crap.

That's all for now, hope you are all well!

Just an update Posted by TurboPhoenix , Friday, March 12, 2010 at 4:18 PM, in Labels: Updates

Hey,

So I've been out of blogging action for a while. No specific reason for this... I just haven't had anything to blog about. The next blog I do will be a Pokemon Heart Gold impressions blog though, I pre-ordered that last night from GAME's online store. Gold version was my favourite game for a long time... actually I think it only got beaten when Ruby came out. So yeah, safe to say that I'm super excited for it. I'll do that blog on the first day I get the game, and after I finish most of it I'll do a proper review.

That's all for now, hope you've all been well.

Week 1 wrapup Posted by TurboPhoenix , Friday, February 12, 2010 at 11:45 AM, in Labels: Updates

Okay, so after a long period of unemployment and sitting around at home playing games, last year I decided to do something productive with my time. Not that accumulating gamerscore isn't productive, but something that "normal" people would consider productive. So I enrolled for a Tafe course, Certificate IV in Multimedia.

This week was my first week of said course, and I'm having mixed feelings about it. The course isn't at all what I expected... I thought we would be working with mainly sound/video/graphics editing tools, because last time I looked it up in detail (back in '07) that's more or less what the course was.

The course has changed since then, it's now basically a gaming course. Not programming (whew!) but the art side of it. Now, I didn't really want to do this. Sure I like games, but I never want to work in the industry. That said however, this course does cover things that I would like to learn more about just for my own personal interest, not professionally. I've decided to stick with it - unless I manage to find a job in like... 2-3 weeks, I'm going to keep doing the course (because after that time you can't get a refund on your course fees).

The main things I was looking forward to was Art and Design, where we use Photoshop and stuff like that, 2D Animation, self explanatory, and Game Design, which from what I can tell is more the theory of games rather than the technical and visual aspects. Surprisingly, something that I wasn't really looking forward to that much, 3D Modeling, was one of my favourite classes this week, along with 2D Animation. We also have a Project class, where we are going to build a working game (working with the Diploma Multimedia and Diploma Programming students) so that should be interesting.

At the moment I don't really care too much if I pass or fail the course. Passing would be nice, but that's not my main goal. My main goal is simply to learn, and if I pass the course while learning, that's an extra. Having said that, it's not like I'm going to slack off on assessments or anything like that! No way!

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In other, unrelated news, I started a 'cleanup' playthrough of Mass Effect 2 last week, after finishing the game with only 4 achievements left. Finishing this playthrough will leave me with 1 left - the one for completing the game on Insane difficulty. I was planning on doing this playthrough on Insane, but after dying about 7 times on the first group of mechs after the story mode, I decided to give Insane a pass for now, and attempt it after finishing this one.

Now this isn't just for achievements, nope. This playthrough is with a different character, imported from Mass Effect 1, with basically every decision in the original game the opposite of my first playthrough. I wanted to see just how much the story is affected by these choices. Also I wanted to be good instead of evil, see what benefits, if any, it brings.

Updates (12/01/10) Posted by TurboPhoenix , Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 9:29 AM, in Labels: Updates

Oops! I know I said I'd do a blog around the 29th but I totally forgot... But better late than never, eh? The reason I left it so late is because as you probably know Jessica, my girlfriend, came to visit from the Gold Coast. And now she is gone :(. But life goes on, and I am now eagerly awaiting her next visit... sadly it will be in 5-6 months though. However, in that time I have more than a few games to keep me occupied! They are:

• Batman: Arkham Asylum
• Borderlands
• Braid
• Castle Crashers
• Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2
• Mass Effect 2 (pre-ordered the special edition)
• Prototype
• World In Conflict + Soviet Assault expansion

That's not including the few games in my collection that I have yet to finish from a while back (Prince of Persia, Stranglehold, GRAW, Banjo Tooie, etc)

That's it for this blog really... yeah, not very big. See you soon.

Updates (11/12/09) and a mini-review Posted by TurboPhoenix , Friday, December 11, 2009 at 5:26 PM, in Labels: Review, Updates

Hey guys,

So, some updates eh. Um... Oh! I played and finished Ballad of Gay Tony recently. Fun stuff. Impressions:

Overall it's a great expansion. Better than TLAD? Yes. But not by much. Luis isn't a much better character than Johnny, and neither of them are as good as Niko. The story itself isn't so good... It's basically "Tony screws shit up, you go fix it." Seriously... that's how the last mission could be described. But the missions are stand outs. Pretty much every mission includes a shoot out or something else that is fun. None of this riding in formation until you get somewhere and then doing nothing. It's good too see more of Bulgarin in Gay Tony too... in the main story of GTA IV I had more or less forgotten about him. When he showed up to try to get the diamonds back I was like "Who is this dude again?". But he's a bigger player in Gay Tony. Which leads me to Gay Tony himself... he's a pretty pathetic character actually. Never does anything right, hangs out with douchebags and fills himself full of drugs.

Which leads me again to something else - the nightclubs. The story was meant to be based around the club scene in Liberty City... instead you only get to visit 3, and one of those is only open for one mission. Luckily you can replay missions after you have finished the main story, but it would be better to go in there without having a set objective. The clubs themselves are impressive - I really must take my proverbial hat off to Rockstar for creating such an impressive atmosphere. The pounding bass of the music, the lights flashing, people bumping into you... they really outdid themselves. I just with Bahama Mamas was open for more than one mission, because it is probably the most impressive of the 3. Hercules, the gay club, is rather small and boring. Maisonette 9, the main club, closely follows Bahama Mamas, in that it is much more like a real club. You can even enter the restrooms and listen to other patrons getting it on in the stalls. The music is great, as long as you are into club music - that is Dance, House, Electronica and the like. It's pretty memorable, though the additions to Vladiovstok FM don't feel like they belong there. I was playing Episodes from Liberty City ('borrowed' from my brother), so I didn't get the regular GTA IV soundtrack too, but up-beat dance hardly fits in with Eastern European music. I was glad to see Vice City FM added in there though, with our good friend Fernando Martinez as the DJ.

Finally, the new weapons and vehicles rock. I found myself constantly using the new SMG, shotgun (with exploding shells) and assault rifle, without bothering with any of the older weapons. The exploding shells shotgun is particularly fun. There's nothing like shooting a car and putting a dent the size of a fat dude in the driver's side door. The Buzzard attack chopper is fun as anything, though I do have one complaint. The missiles have no heat seeking on them, which is a real pain when you are tasked with taking out other choppers. Not to mention the minigun doesn't move - you have to move the whole chopper to aim. This is especially annoying in the first mission you use it in, where you have to blow up the boat you stole it from. So many times I almost plunged into the water. And finally, the N.O.O.S.E. APC. Especially fun. Just cruise around and blow anything away. But don't expect it to be smooth sailing... cause enough carnage and the frame rate will start to lag like a bitch. This isn't really a problem if you are driving the whole time, but if you decide to stop and take people out, or get forced into a corner, it's going to bother you.

TL;DR? Get it now!

In other news, uh... I don't really have much other news. Though I do have some upcoming blogs - I'll be doing more mini reviews, probably 2 at the same time for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 and Prototype which I'll be getting for Christmas, maybe a blog on what I did with Jessica when she visits here (though that'll probably be boring, I don't think we will do too many interesting things) and possibly something about what I got for Christmas (I am expecting mostly money)

That's all for now... next blog will be before the 29th. See you then!

Oh, and I also added a new poll. Vote on it.