A quick apology for not posting at all this entire week. Too busy backing up files and preparing to euthanize my computer. After that's done, I have to reinstall all those new games that I just got...
this isn't going to be fun.

Ooo! Look! A new podcast logo! I'm actually planning to keep this one! I like it!

Weird things happen this episode:

• Random person appears at the beginning of the show. Seriously, I have no idea who he is, but he was pretty funny!
• Pat's laptop sounds like it may explode! We don't know why it made such a weird noise, but I know that I was genuinely scared.
  
• We get hyped on Cory Doctorow and his new book "For the Win"!
• We learn about a kid who has no idea what Halo is!
• We get hyped ON MOSKAU!
• Kaillif raves about Halo: Legends!
• And after about a 10 minute rave on Halo...I rave about more Halo! Halo: Reach impressions!
• Talk about movies based of comics!
• I expect to say something I'm hated for...but I'm actually quite supported!
• Taylor and I try to convince Pat to watch Ouran...but then we learn that Pat is lacking feelings...and we try to convince Pat that Ouran is not mushy and it's hilarious and Patrick, you need to watch it! Here, I'll give you a post to start you up with the show!
• We also talk about I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1 and Bible Reader X.
• And we talk about a mysterious topic I don't even know.

Download Now!

This is the song we were listening to after the end of the first break:

HOSTED BY KAILLIF AMMEN (Gamertag: Gloqwi), STANLEY NG (Gamertag: Battlestorm132), PATRICK HERMANN, AARON ECKHART FRANK, MALIC, TAYLOR BAYLESS, AND RANDOM GUEST PERSON TO ENTER: JORDAN!

Intro, Outro, and Break music: "No Escape" by Civalias.

Yeah, you see that? NOT NINE INCH NAILS. Not saying I don't like them, just saying that we need to differentiate with the music!

And the official new logo for the podcast as of now:

Don't usually expect posts during the weekends, but I just have to present a small piece of news (also, I'm waiting for Tropico 3 to download on Steam). As I brought up two days ago, I kinda took advantage of the Fry's sales and purchased Serenity and Command and Conquer 4. ($7 & $25, original price $26 and $50. Over 50% off!) Well, this weekend, Steam was also having an amazing deal. There was a game that I really wanted to buy a while back called Tropico 3 which I was willing to buy for $30 back then. Now it was on sale for $7.50 (75% off!). I HAD TO GET IT!

Now I feel a lot like my mom. I think I'm inheriting her taking-advantage-of-sales skill of buying.

------------------------------------

Footnote: This usually isn't something I get into (I actually try very hard to avoid it), but have you guys heard about this Greyson Chance kid? 12 year old singing prodigy? Probably going to overthrow Justin Bieber? Yeah, see why I stay away from that stuff? Well, anyway, it's your choice whether or not you want to see it, but it's ANOTHER underage talented singer. I caved and had to see this video. OH MY GOD JESUS CHRIST HE GENIUNELY SOUNDS LIKE A GIRL. No, not the Justin Bieber kind of girl, but a SERIOUS girl. I'm not denying the kid has talent, but seriously?

I can't really explain to you how awesome today was...

without explaining to you how much the beginning of the week really sucked.

I had a theatre project that I was apparently supposed to be working on over the weekend, but of course, I didn't. You know why? Because I enjoy life, and time away from school is time that needs to be nourished like a baby. So HELL NO was I going to work on it over the weekend.

So then I ended up having to work on it during the week. When I went to school on Monday, apparently everyone thought I was supposed to have it done by today. I was like "WTF, mate?" And so I lied and said that the editing was almost halfway done (it barely began. Okay, fine, I'm going to stop lying to myself. I didn't bother doing shiz). And then I decided to commit the rest of my entire nights and mornings working on the project. I'm not going to go too much into detail, but I'm going to tell you right now,

IT SUCKED.

I thought this was probably going to be one of the worst weeks of school in my life (as I got piles and piles of World Studies homework to do while simultaneously having to read "Things Fall Apart" for Survey Lit. (which I have only skimmed and read a few of the final chapters. It might've been good if I didn't have SO MANY OTHER THINGS TO DO.), but then,

Yesterday happened.

Something that I conveniently left out of my story was that I recorded the tenth episode of the podcast I'm in called the Library of Games Podcast (you can find the newest episodes right here on this website by clicking on the link or visiting the official Library of Games website here!). During one of the breaks that we took during the show, the librarian/mentor supervising the podcast Taylor (I mention her in a couple of posts) asked for volunteers to ask questions at a Cory Doctorow panel happening at the library this Thursday (author of books such as Makers, Little Brother, and his newest book which was the whole reason for the panel, For The Win). Seeing this as a great opportunity, I raise my hand, and I end up getting to sit next to the man himself and ask him any question I want to ask him in front of many jealous fans (even Leo has read more Cory Doctorow then I have, he wishes he was me). Sadly, I ended up having to leave early and I wasn't able to take a picture with the man like Aaron, Patrick, and Taylor were able to. It was really great thought!

And then today happens.

School was S.S.D.D., then I end up going to the library. The library decided to do a favor for everyone that was on that panel by getting them (that means ALSO ME) a SIGNED HARDCOVER COPY of FOR THE WIN (as seen in picture). So now my day happens to become amazing. After I get picked up by my mother, she is driving me with a friend who decides to celebrate my birthday a couple of days late by giving me $20. My mom also ends up asking me if I'm interested in the "Battlefield 2 game". "Of course I am!" says I, and then I find out that Fry's Electronics is doing a "basically 50% off" sale on the game ($35!) and I decide to take advantage of the $20 I just got.

And then my mother pulls up a list of $7 Blu-ray ads and asks me if any of them are interesting to me. I see Serenity, and I know that that movie is based of the show Firefly, which is where Nathan Fillion is from, who stars in Castle, which is a show that I LOVE. (He was also featured in Halo 3: ODST, his voice and his face model) So I decided to get that. After the purchase, I had this huge feeling of excitement. A feeling that said "I'm going to enjoy the next couple of weeks". I also came from a Math II meeting for school that made me feel smart. :P

---------------

Footnote: Thanks for voting, Nicole and Didi. It's seriously probably what inspired me to post such are large post so soon after another one. Who was the third person, please show yourself in the comments so I could thank you too! I promise I will post about Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu tomorrow! I am seriously thankful for the votes, and I would be much more grateful if you guys proved you existed with comments! Not forcing you or anything, just a suggestion! :P

Truly. I got to sit next to a famous author who's writing subjects are very much in my interests. Thanks to my impulse-hand-raising skills when Taylor had asked for two people to volunteer to ask questions for a Cory Doctorow panel during our last podcast. It was seriously a great pleasure to meet the man in person before I actually get to reading his books. I'll start with Little Brother to appease Leo and Patrick, but I really want to get into For The Win as that sounds amazingly interesting and Taylor says is so much better. Maybe I'll post a couple of pictures from the panel if I can soon!

P.S. Also, I can't believe I never posted a single thing about Ouran High School Host Club. It was (and still is) my favorite anime's ever. Maybe I was so excited about the show that I couldn't bring myself to post a single thing about it. Also maybe the fact that I'm about four years late to the excitement kind of brought me down).

Okay, so everything I want to do is not going to happen anytime soon. The good news is that I'm actually going to get a lot of schoolwork done! To do list, time! (Oh, by the way, I'm posting with my phone right before I go to sleep!)

[Finish Editing Theatre Movie]
[Finish Sections 1, 2, and 3 in World Studies]
[Read Chapters 9-16 for Survey Lit]

Second Priorities:
[Edit and post LOGCAST 10: Redux!]
[Work on Heavy Rain review]

Optional/To keep me from going insane:
Stay away from the library until all of these things are done.
Post on my blog
Maybe a couple of minutes of Rock Band 2...NO!

I will tell you right now, those Second Priorities are going to wait a long time! My plan for the next couple of days:

Sleep at 9
Wake up at 4

Gives me about 7 hours of sleep, and 4 hours of a fresh mind. I've always been a morning person, but I never felt school was worth the time. Seriously, the hardest part is getting out of bed. Once you're out, you'll feel soooo much better about it!
There is a specific reason why I seem to be in a very hard-working state right now (other than the fact that my grades will drop severly. I never really cared about that reason.), but it's way to embarrasing for me to actually disclose. This reason happens a lot, though, and I wish it would happen more often. I promise I will say this reason publicly soon, but by the time it comes, I will have realized how much it will have helped me that I should be proud to say that is the reason.
Well, anyway, I better get to sleep......but I won't because I want to talk about more things, but I will save that for tommorow night. Just remember: Supportive, Doctor Who, Podcast.
And once I post enough that I shove a couple of stories out, I might actually start telling my friends about this website! XD

Sup, guys? I have been making this blog my to-do-list lately, and don't worry! Here comes some more lists! Today's list: Things I'm Not Going To Admit To Other People Because I Will Lose My Reputation As A Nerd But Can Openly Admit Here Because No One Reads This Site Anyway: Things I Have Never Seen But Should Have Seen:

• Death Note
• Doctor Who

Both of these, I have seen 1 or more episodes of, and really like, but have never gotten the time to watch. This year, I'm planning to commit to them because I'm realizing how much more and more time I'm wasting because of my need to sleep/sit-down-for-minutes-on-end-without-doing-anything. I will do it! I SWEAR!!!!

Happy Cinco de Mayo, guys! I actually just learned what that was actually celebrating today!

Don't hurt me! :P

Anyway, I just wanna say, Why are people raggin' on Halo Legends? The collection is great! It's great gift to fans of the series, whether or not your a fan or not! There are many Anime tropes in it, but it's something to love! My favorite episode is the package. and the best part is that the person who directed that episode was actually a Legendary Halo player and most of the things that are included in the episodes that reference to the Halo Games, specifically the actual HUDs, were his idea, and weren't forced into the episode by the game developers like you think they might.

Also, I've been hearing great things about Alan Wake even though I did not know or see anything about the game and didn't have a spot of interest in the game originally until now. The plot actually seems very interesting, though loosely reminiscent of Silent Hill. I've also been hearing some mixed reactions of Nier, but enough good enough reactions that I have some interest.

I also feel really bad not knowing a single thing about Red Dead Redemption and L.A. Noire, but school has taken so much of my game time away, I can't keep up like I used to. Also, I need to start doing more things other than gaming. Gaming can pay, yes, just not very well, and I know that thanks to a couple of friends...

Well, I know I've said this many times, but I will post more, smaller, condensed posts soon. Seems like a better idea!

Halo: Legends Impressions
Halo: Reach Beta Impressions
Heavy Rain review (after, oh, so long...)
Delving Into The World of Visual Novels: Death Note
My Experiences With Video Gaming Lately (or lack thereof)
and more....
This blog is coming back to life, damnit!

Trust me, it's hilarious. Especially around 32:00. Malik, you NEED to listen to this.

[Download Now]

HOSTED BY KAILLIF AMMEN (Gamertag: Gloqwi), STANLEY NG (Gamertag: Battlestorm132), AARON ECKHART FRANK, MALIK, AND GUEST MENTOR TAYLOR BAYLESS

Intro, Outro, and Break music: "Demon Seed" by Nine Inch Nails

We talk about Catan, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Adventure Games, Mini Ninjas, GUEST HOST MARCUS LUMPKIN talks about his childhood with video games, First-Person perspective in games, and an incident in YouMedia! Aaron talks about his experiences with C2E2 and about his first experience with Magic, The Gathering! We get pissed about the new Avatar: The Last Airbender Movie! The Drama Awaits!

[Download Now!]

HOSTED BY PATRICK HERMANN, KAILLIF AMMEN (Gamertag: Gloqwi), STANLEY NG (Gamertag: Battlestorm132), AARON ECKHART FRANK, HENRY, MALIK, AND GUEST MENTORS TAYLOR BAYLESS AND MARCUS LUMPKIN

I am writing this as a reminder to myself that if I don't blog about Red String later today at the library or somewhere-ANYWHERE- I will destroy this blog. And I'm not kidding. I'm serioisly not kidding. I hope I'm not. I don't care if it's truly crap, but the fact of the matter is that I fucking loved it. I love Red String because I love any story that can allow me to connect with the characters so much. I also love it because I love it. If you don't like it, fine. But if you bother me about it, fuck you. If I don't want to talk to you about it (and this goes for anything), I don't want to fucking talk about it. I am so damn emotional right now and feel like a girl (truly no offense to girls :P)

I wrote this using my Samsung Android, TWICE because Opera Mini Browser decided to fail on me and I'm not using that piece of crap again, and written in bed right before I was about to go to sleep and right after I finished Red String. If you don't like me liking it, stay away from me.

The Gifford Children's Choir performs "Still Alive" by Jonathan Coulton from the credits of the video game Portal. Soloist is in an el-wire dress. We are hoping to shoot a better video soon. A few choir members had played the game before the concert. The director is a VG addict that fell off the wagon to play Portal. The kids understood the words. The piece was chosen because it is an excellent piece of music with just the right timbre for the choir.

Kids: "...what are we singing?"

Parents: "......what the hell are they singing?"

Teacher: "...I'm going to lose my job for this, but it's -so- worth it."


It's a shame they sang to such a quick tempo, but impressive, nonetheless.

Heavy Rain is a different kind of game. I don't think I've ever played a game quite like it. Not even Indigo Prophecy is close to what this game is. That's the first challenge.

The second challenge is trying to play the game without spoiling anything. And even if I didn't want to spoil anything, the game is so personal that everyone will experience the game differently.

The third challenge is that the mechanics of the game outside of the story telling are very simple is that there isn't more than maybe two paragraphs to be written about them. You also can't talk about the mechanics without going into the story.

If I wanted to talk about my experience with the game and my opinion about the game, that would be easy. But trying to do that without spoiling anything, that is hard. The main statement I would like to say about Heavy Rain is that "Even if you and someone else who had played the game had made almost all the same choices, that game can play out VERY differently."

This review is going to be HARD to write...

I'm only a couple of hours into the greatness that is Heavy Rain. I've heard awesome things about it, and today, one of my friends had just beat the game at the library. The game seems short, but apparently the ending he got was way different from the ending that our resident gamer librarian got. I'm excited to see what kind of ending I get!
If anyone remembers the review I did for Call of Duty 4 I did about two years back, I said it was one of the greatest interactive movies ever. Playing Heavy Rain, this game is so far and beyond CoD as an interactive movie, I look back and I think,"I had some pretty low standards, huh!" I think Indigo Prophecy was a much better interactive movie than Call of Duty was.
I think one of the main appeals to the game and one of the things that make this game so good is how tense it makes you. You have to go into the game thinking and knowing that at any point, your character can die. This game gives you a lot of chances to think that it's over. The game also gives you very small reaction time for quick-time events. You could be doing everything fine and smoothly, but once you make that one mistake, you go from tense to off-of-your seat.
The other most appealing part of the game to me is that small choices DO affect how your story is played. I know that many games claim to do the same thing, but not at the same scale that Heavy Rain does it. Games that claim this usually change the events to the game, but they all lead up to the same last choice which is the only one that seems to matter. In Heavy Rain, anything you do can change how the story flows dramatically. As I told you earlier, one of my friends, Dane, had beaten the game and had gotten a completely different ending from what the librarian, Taylor, got. I haven't beaten the game, but apparently I had already proceeded to do things very differently from how she got through the levels, resulting in the death of an important character who didin't die on her save, probably throwing the game into a completely different direction. I just admire that a lot about this game.
The last thing I want to mention good about the game is how pretty the game looks. All the enviroments and characters seemed to have been worked very hard on, it takes you in. That's practically my main point about this game (and probably something I'll use as the sub-title for my upcoming review), "If you allow it to, Heavy Rain immerses you into a fantastic concept for a new generation of games". Sounds ambitious, right? But that's basically what I think. If you allow yourself to become connected withe characters, you will experience all the emotion and tension that they are feeling, which is something that many games that focus on story should do but fail to do.
I'm going to stop myself right here so I can save all my thoughts for the actual review, which will come out very soon after I finish the game. All I have to say right now though is, this game is a must-play! My contender for Game of the Year so far!

About half a year ago, Flash Flash Revolution mysteriously disappeared from the internets. One of the sites main moderators posted something about the disappearance of the deeply loved flash game on his personal website.

First, I still have no idea what is going on with the site or if it’ll ever be back. I talked to Synth about 5 weeks ago when he reached out to me in regards to a last ditch effort to sell the site. I did some initial inquiries to some old and new contacts, but after 2 days Synth stopped responding to me, so I stopped pursuing it. It was about 10 days after that that the site went down and has been down ever since. I haven’t talked to him since, nor do I really care anymore whether or not the site comes back. (Tasselfoot)