I’m sure everyone had fun this week. I know I did. Despite the Storm of the Century falling over most of my family, they say they had fun. I wouldn’t know, because I wasn’t about to drive through that mess.
I did, however, finish a sort of personal ritual. I spent Christmas Day with three cartons of egg-nog and Popful Mail on my Sega CD.
It sort of felt like going home…
With less swearing though.

Ahem.

Jinpachi was very anxious while he was logging back on for the first time.  I’m told he was second-guessing himself many times a second.  I think I can understand the trepidation.  He kept his hand poised over the keys in case he was ready to cancel his $25 server transfer.
Apparently it went through faster than he thought it would.
So his Warlock Graul popped back into WoW for the first time in almost a year, right where he last logged off.
Which was in Grizzly Hills.
He wasn’t logged into the new server for a ful 10 seconds before he was getting ganked by an alliance paladin.  The more things change the more they stay the same I guess.  Anyway…
Fully prepared to die and be annoyed, he prepared to face this threat that smelled of vinegar, when the most amazing thing happened.  He heard a battle cry.
“Purple Faggot Lasso!!” rang through the forest, as a Death Knight used Death Grip on the paladin.  Jinpachi said it was a full half minute before he could stop laughing enough to help out with the fight.
After all was said and done, he decided that that moment alone was worth the $25.

I recently heard about Ghibli’s new adaptation of Mary Norton’s Borrowers. I haven’t been keeping with current events all that well, so it was a little nice surprise. The comments under the main article were more than amusing as well:
“Never heard of this “Borrowers” before. Anyone care to give a synopsis?”
“Basically when your shit goes missing, you can blame these fuckers.”

Golden.

Jinpachi finally made the move to go back to WoW. I’m not sure what brought it on. In all honesty I may have still played had not the entire world conspired to make me quit. I was fine with that though.
Anyway, the point of all this, is that he transferred his warlock, Lendri to another server to play with another we know. Unfortunately, he was forced to change his name to Graul. For some reason this just irked me a little. Lendri was a staple of the entire experience of that game for me. It was almost always Lendri and Sotai. Graul was the warrior he started out with (and leveled mostly on the side), but its hard for me to even think of that character as anything else. /rant
Regardless, I got to thinking about my time there, and missed it a little.  Granted, there was a lot I didn’t miss, but the good moments were pretty damn fun.

This game was entertaining to say the least. I must admit, I was becoming very unfond of the combat. Especially towards the end. The “Programming” aspect of the team was really under-developed, leading to a lot of frustration. For one thing, there simply weren’t enough lines for use in order to program them efficiently. There were combat skills (4…) that would increase each characters amount of tactics lines, and you needed them desperately, which meant you often had to sacrifice skills they also needed early on. The options you could apply to these lines were somewhat limited as well.
The story was grand in scope. Political intrigue mixed the classic “save the realm”, for the most part, though the individual quests offered a great deal more variety. Bioware did their morality system the best way they could this time around, opting to have your decisions affect how your party views you, in lieu of some abstract numerical system.
The high point of the whole experience is the dialogue. They’ve gone above and beyond in this department, and it made the game for me. My sole reason for considering multiple play-through is to listen to the character dialogue I missed. Character talk amongst themselves in new areas. At certain story sequences. After certain choices. These were the best, and often funniest, moments of the story. Also, they had frickin’ Tim Curry!
It was a good start to what I hope is a continuing series, despite some bugs and hiccups.

DollHouse is simply just an intriguing show for the most part. Then Alpha makes an appearance, and it becomes win. \o/

Had an opportunity to see this with two guys Tuesday. That’s how I’d advise seeing it. With other guys. The movie isn’t terrible, but there’s a good amount of cheese. Having a wise-crack thrown to the left or right of you is the only enjoyable way to watch this movie.
Also: Gore. No, not Al. There is an extreme amount of blood in this show. People tend to get cut to ribbons in the movie. One remark a fellow made was that it was similar to watching Ninja Gaiden 2.  I’d also made a comparison to the first several minutes of Ninja Scroll.  There was also an odd skill level attributed to the masked warriors.  It seemed to vary dramatically based on  how close to the end the movie was.  For all the effort that was gone through to make the “Evil” ninjas seem elite, the protagonist cuts them to pieces, often quite literally, with what seems like ease. Made it hard to take things serious to begin with when there was a double storm-trooper effect.

Every time I see another Mass Effect 2 trailer I get a little more giddy about it.  The first one was one of the better games of the generation, if not a perfect one.  It looks as though a drastic overhaul has been done to this one, so there should be less hiccups.  I know I’m never going to look at space exploration the same way again (read: god-damn Mako).  The on thing I was dissapointed with innitially in the ME2 announcements was the lack of old characters.  The first game was touted as a game of choices with consequences.  Hard for those to carry over if the people who “may or may not have survived” played no part in the next.  Granted, Liara is getting her own little story of a sorts, but still.  I’m gonna miss Wrex…
Thankfully, we have Tali.  Garrus too I suppose.  With those very needed additions as well as the darker cast introduced for part 2, this may be better than I thought it would be.

Touhou Style!
Say what you will about Touhou, but this is a pretty cool little video.