In the Gaming Life of…

November 3rd, 2007

Hey Guys, I am pleased to announced that the time has come. With the exclusion of one Chinese exam I am on Christmas holidays. So I have 4 months without University life slowing down the site’s progress. I am so pleased, you see although the site has been running nicely over the past few months, deep down I have been yearning to do better. And nows my chance.

The other thing that has been stuck in the back of my mind is how to prepare for such a holiday. I mean 4 months is a fantastically long holiday and I haven’t been playing a lot of games this year. So its finally my time to relive my childhood and play games like there is no tomorrow. Ah the summer time. So over the past month I have been utilizing every scrap of my spare time in order to prepare for this glorious time and this is how I did it.

New High Definition Monitor

Now lets get one thing straight here, I’m not a materialistic guy, I bank about half of what I earn and only ever buy ANYTHING once I know that its perfect for me. But every now and then I treat myself and this is what I did here.

dell high definition monitor

A few weeks ago I bought myself a Dell 24″ LCD monitor to play games and do some design work on. My twin brother has been eyeing down this model for the past 4 months now. Its gotten some rave reviews and has a pile of useful features, including:

Its pretty much the best in its range and is extremely well priced. The week that I bought it Dell had $100 off and then when I called up with some questions they offered a further $100 off. The only issue with the monitor is that I needed to pick up a separate sound bar(speaker) to play audio. I’m not a big sound buff, so this didn’t really bother me. And hey I can to get some long deserved use out of my Sony headies.

So far I have had a few gripes with the monitor but nothing due to the machine itself. I quickly discovered that I couldn’t use it as a screen(or second screen) for my laptop. My working environment is just not set up for that. So (as in the picture before) I have it on that sturdy bench.

Also using two screen of such resolutions would be too taxing on my weak little laptop. Nevermind that I can’t get the resolution past 1280 X 800. Although I gotta said high def images and video look incredible when displayed on the screen(I used my brothers notebook, its a Dell so it was plug and play 1920 x 1200 res).

gaming bean bag and pillow

Now because the monitor is not on my work desk that means that I need comfortable seating to play games. All I currently have is a bleh bean bag and a large cushion. I use the bean bag and leave my brother with the cushion. Its not all bad though, these things can be easily fixed. It also means that I get to finally plant my ass in a bean bag while playing games. I’ve always been envious of those bean bag gamers.

My final gripe is how damn shitty non high definition content looks. This has taken a while for me to grow accustomed to. I have finally adjusted though, I’d need to adjust anyways as I’ll be playing plenty of old games on it (I’ll get to that later).

The Launch of Metal Gear Ebay

Lame title? Yeah I agree. I was very pleased with this one though. As you know, I have recently been on a crusade to hunt down not so easy to find games. I’m not talking Radiant Silvergun here but rather old discontinued rare PAL games. Being PAL its that much harder.

Now you see, despite my fanboyness towards the Metal Gear franchise, I haven’t actually finished MGS2. All because I kept delaying my PS2 purchase(for about 2 years). Its all about that non-materialistic stuff, it just had to be cheaper, God I’m such a stinge.metal gear solid 2 artowork solid snake

After continued frustration with my copy of MGS2: Substance for the PC I decided that I needed the PS2 version. So I went searching with little luck. Until I decided to give eBay a go. Now I had never used eBay before, for some reason I had some rather negative stereotypes about the service. I desperately need this game, so I’d get it by any means possible. So I did some searching and in a few minutes I’d already found a limited edition copy of the game(with Documents of MGS2) going for a great price. So I snapped it up right away.

I had the game for about 3 days before I started playing it. I wasn’t sure if I was going to wait until I had finished my Uni assignments before I started or not. My mind was quickly made up once I got that week’s work hours, to discover a free day or two. And incidently all of my Uni work had eased off then. So I used this time to capitalize on the game. After getting up to the Big Shell from a few previous play sessions I decided that I needed to go all out. So I spent about 19hrs on and off playing the game until it was beat.

The List

So I had began my eBay journey. Now due to my success, my brother decided to follow suit and he started buying games left right and center. In fact eBay really has opened up a whole new slew of possibilities for us and hence my brother and I have decided use eBay to perfect our already great gaming collection.

We’ve had all of your consoles from Commodore 64, Atari, NES through to the today’s consoles. And for each console we have had a neat collection of games to accompany it. But like everyone whom has a passion for collecting, we have some empty spots on the shelf that we want to fill up, of games that we might have missed the first time around. So with the help of eBay we are now going back and filling in those spots.

A long time ago I wrote a poorly written article about how to Play Console Catch ups. My brother and I used this idea to write a monstrously comprehensive list of titles that we wanted to purchase in order to finish off the collection. So we wrote this list of everything that we are after of games on every console released up until now. That includes Wii VC and games for consoles we didn’t quite have just yet.

The other big downer is the NES. Unfortunately we tradgically sold our NES and its 13 or so games years ago. The only console that we have sold. So we are buying it all back and more. What makes it even worse is that we had a 3 in 1 cart featuring Super Mario Bros/Tetris/World Cup 88(has similar sprites to River City Ransom).

When the dust settled our list was a staggering 132 games long. Don’t forget that this includes all games released in the past few months as well. Not just retro games.

In anycase, I have totally forgotten to mention the games that we have picked up so far:

The joy in this exciting venture is that some games are ridiculously cheap, some of the game on that list were just $1. I think that the worse part about this whole thing is that a few of these games I’ve owned/played heaps.

Conclusion

Although it took a while I’m glad that I got all of that off my chest. I thought that it’d be a change of pace from the usual news and editorial based content. Tell me what you think of these sorts of posts as am not sure what to think. I’ll be sure to keep you all up to date on how our little venture goes.

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Avcon 07 Adventures

July 22nd, 2007

avcon 2007 adelaide

What is Avcon

Avcon is Adelaide’s Anime and Gaming convention. Next question, what is Adelaide Adelaide is the capital city of South Australia, an important Australian state. This is an annual convention situated at the Adelaide University. The events lasts for a weekend including the Friday night launch.

Introduction

I’ve been so busy lately with training for my new job that I didn’t have much anticipation for this year’s Avcon. Which is somewhat unfortunate as the event was quite a significant improvement over the previous year. I can whole heartedly say that I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Despite only going on the Saturday due to other commitments, I still had an awesome time. Judging by the timetable Saturday had most of the hows meat. I’m just gonna now run thru my personal highlights of the event.

Major Improvements

Are something that stood out this year. Throughout the day I noticed some great changes, big and small that improved on some of last years issues. For starters they let people in a bit earlier in order to avoid the long wait. Last year the wait was over half an hour, this time we got in in about 3 minutes. The overall layout was much easier to navigate through and also more spaced out over several areas. The staff levels, range of activities and the BBQ where improved greatly from last year(yay, bread!).

Initial Screenings

This time around I didn’t spend most of my time watching anime screenings. I had a good variety of anime, games and shopping. The best events in the morning where the screenings, so I watched the early stuff being: .hack//Roots and Devil May Cry. .hack//Roots was alright, I’ve seen some of the series before and got the same impression. It’s just a bit bland overall, although it was a premiere which was cool.

Devil May Cry should be renamed to Alucard May Cry. This series looks so similar to to Hellsing its not funny. The style, camera angles, voice acting and even the sound seemed to be almost identical. But it’s got one thing that Hellsing will never lay hands upon; Dante. Dante is a cooler dude than Alucard anyways. Plus he uses his fists more. It’s worth mentioning that it surprised me too that there was a DMC anime, never knew about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ3iSUDS0c4

Watch a trailer for DMC

Vendors

If posible I like to reserve my purchases relevent to the show for the show because of all the savings. Although there where considerably less vendors than last year the quality was better and more relevent to the show. Personally I’m not interested in goth wear or oddball dress up people no matter how interesting their personalities may be.

This year I most enjoyed the new stalls; namely EzyGames, but I’ll get to that a little later on. The usuals had a good show, Shin Tokyo, Pulp Fiction Comics and Madman. Madman had their own computer survey set up, by filling in their survey you received a free DVD with 3 full length episodes and 60+ trailers, nice.

There was a small stand with some guy selling dating software with young ,attractive anime babes. When I talked to him it seemed a little awkward and he wasn’t quite sure on how to pitch it to people. Interesting. There was also a stand from a second hand games shop that I have seen out the bus window a few times on the way to Uni. They had a notable collection of games, including an almost perfect SNES + Mario All Stars package. I spent a considerable amount of time chatting to him about the store and games in general. There where a few games that would have been great for the collection. I saw Street Fighter Alpha 3(GBA) for $29 which was a major pain. I decided to hunt around for this game and couldn’t find it so I bought SF Alpha Anthology for the PS2 after the Connection Tour.

EzyGames

Ezygames had a stall this year which was quite surprising and also useful. You see I recently ordered some rare games through the site and haven’t recieved them for almost two weeks now. Concerning I know Only a few days ago I had sent an email in to query this, so I went to the stand to ask what was going on.

The first guy that I talked to was the owner of the business, he pretty much runs the whole thing himself. He knew who I was straight away and explained the situation. We then spent a bit of time talking about games, the business and his business ethos. The guy was straight out genuine and shares the same strong but level headed passion for games that I have.

ezygames.com online games reseller

Later that day I returned and bought some stuff with my brother. He provided us with some excellent deals and was a true champ. I promised that I’d link out to him because he won us over with his genuine passion to deliver great games with great service and prices. So check out his site, its relatively new but already has made a good dent in the Australian online games market.

Competitions

Throughout the day a number of tournaments where hosted, I myself only took part in two of them being the Tetris DS and Smash Bros Melee. I wasn’t too keen on playing Smash Bros. as well it’s Smash Bros. it just sucks playing a game that is seen as being so superior to everything else when its not. Plus it’s not a skill based game either, ugh. I played against a group of campers which wasn’t much fun. I came 3rd because they all ran away and I managed to slip and lose a life amidsts the excitement and having not played it for a while.

The Tetris tourney was much better, I came 5th out of about 20 people which is really impressive as I only play the game with mates and I’ll often lose to my brother(whom was knocked out of the first round :p) during thse times.

Games

The overall gameplay set up was more spaced out the previous year. There where 3 main areas for gaming if you don’t include the hallways littered by people with their pastal coloured DS Lite. Two areas where general gaming and one for mature gaming. Mature gaming had games like Gears of War, Golden Eye an Halo. I also demoed the first level of Timesplitters Future Perfect for the Gamecube(I didn’t even think that a GCN version was made!). It felt like a much more interactive game than TS2, I guess that I gotta hunt this game down now as well. :)

The smaller gaming area had two tvs and some Mario Strikers. I think that the Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo tournament was there as well. I was impresed by the idea of playing the movie; The Wizzard on a project in the centre of the room. Shows a lot of character.

The larger room held the Smash Bros competition. I was pleasantly surprised to see a large TV an couch dedicated to King of Fighters XI. Awesomeness, I sat down and played this game with a Chinese student from ShangHai. He was really good, a pure master of the button mashing technique. Unfortunately we had to take turns as there was only one controller and it wasn’t even a dual shock pad. In the same room DDR, Donkey Konga and Tekken where being played to death.

Conclusion

Avcon has seen a large improvement over the previous year. This can be seen in the presentation, organisation and personality that this event holds. Even the small things such as whats includinged in the goodies bag when entering. The reference guide is a great example of how professional this event has become, with its ultra trendy design and clever layout. Avcon was a lot of fun, had a good vibe and I overall had a great time. Can’t wait until next year.

Unfortunately no pictures have really surfaced yet. :( I forgot to take my camera too, so I’ll post some up in the following days, if they become available.

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The Playstation 2 Story

June 20th, 2007

slim line playstation 2 australia

How it (tradgically) went down

I haven’t posted about this yet and I really should. Basically I’d been meaning to buy a PS2 for probably 2/3 years now and I finally got around to it the other week. I have been keenly looking for one for about 3 months and found and pretty good deal at Harvey Norman. That was:

-Playstation 2 console
-Extra Controller
-8mb memory card
-2x Platnium titles Total price – $299

So I worked that out to be about $170 or so just for the console by itself. Which was close enough to my target goal. The deal had everything that I needed to get started so and I was getting a bit anxious of just watching a few decent sales go by. So I decided to get it.I was assuming that they may have a few other titles that I might want to pick up down at my local Harvey Norman so I was prepared to maybe buy a few more games. Unfortunately their range of games were pretty average infact I was more impressed by their PSP bargain bin. Out of the limited range I chose Burnout Revenge and Tekken 5 as my 2 platnium titles, they also had the Prince of Persia Trilogy for $50 which was too good to pass up. Especially having played the original on the old C64. :D

All was well until I had to actually pay for the lot. This is where Harvey Normans payment procedure collapsed into itself. Chris(my brother if you haven’t caught on) and I went to the checkout and had the girl scan all of the items, we pointed out that it was a part of the deal and showed it to her in their catalogue. She didn’t seem aware of the promotion and spent several minutes staring blankly at the page. She then scanned up all of the items and looked back at the catalogue for a few minutes. Chris and I had a bus to catch, unfortunately Chris had been slowing me down(as always) before hand so we didn’t have much time on our hands. So we explained the deal to her again and kindly tried to hurry it along.

She then said that she would need to do an invoice for the package which seemed a bit bizarre. So we grabbed our goods and followed her around the store until she could find a spare staff member to do the invoice. She found one quickly enough and we sat down and this other guy went thru the products, once again looked at the catalogue for a while and then proceded to discount each item on the computer. He then wrote the discounts down on a piece of paper and led us back to the front of the store so that the other chick could finish off(or is that start?) the sale. After another customer went thru we got our goods put thru and our ‘invoice’ was printed out an overally large reciept printed from a printed that wouldn’t look out of place in the 80s.

This whole ordeal took about 25 minutes and as you may have already guessed we missed our bus. Now I can’t help but feel sorry for those poor sales people. I mean I don’t blame them for any of this as its not their fault. Except for not knowing that you have a major special in your catalogue that has been running for 4 days or not knowing how to take a few %s off a few products.(why would you employ someone that couldn’t do that?) You see its the POS(point of sale) procedure where the fault lies. There are many many Harvey Norman stores around Australia and yet they don’t have a database system in which they can scan an item an it will come up as a reduced price. What we noticed was that any price reduction has to be entered manually. Now what happens in the ‘invoice’ case is that each item must be marked down individually by a certain amount(%) and those calculations would be sent to the checkout staff to process. This is a ridiculus system of time wasting for the customer and makes no common sense.

I spose its no surprise really I very rarely(infact I don’t believe that I have even bought something from their before the PS2) shop at HN. Infact bfore I bought the PS2 I despised them for their -ve comments on the Nintendo Wii, seemingly morotic staff and well…they just plan annoyed me. But (thankfully) I have a real reason to hate them now. Ain’t gonna shop there again.

I haven’t had a retail bitch for sometime. So thank you for letting it get off me chest.

What else I snapped up

I bought the console a few weeks ago and hence in the time of me wiritng this to back then I have had the time to buy some games for it. Luckily for me its been a great time to buy games. Being the end of the finanical year numerous retailers are having great deals on some stellar games. Everything that I’ve bought has been reduced. ^_^ Here’s the list of games:

-Tekken 5
-Burnout Revenge
-Prince of Persia Trilogy
-Super Monkey Ball DX
-Soul Calibur 3
-God of War
-Final Fantasy X
-Final Fantasy X-2
-Kingdom Hearts 2
-GTA: LCS
-GTA: VCS
-Sega MegaDrive Collection

I’ve been trying to stay focused on certain games and here’s my brief impressions:

Burnout Revenge

This game is totally apt, fantastic production values, gameplay thats fined tuned to perfection. Its just too good. I love playing this game as its such a rush. I found it a wee bit tricky to settle in but now that I have its totally awesome. Soundtracks great too, go Junkie XL.

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time

Some people think that this series is the series of last gen, but I have to disagree. The games reek of Ubisoft quality but I can’t help but feel that its not as refined as it could be. Specifically the combat, I often find myself become more and more frustrated with it. The acrobatics are definetly very impressive. The game is the perfect 3D conversion of the old 2D PoP games in terms of design. Which is very reminiscent of the older games, I can’t help but dig the nostalgic value from my old C64 version.

Soul Calibur 3

I haven’t played any single player of this game yet. Chris and I have been furiously duking it out in the Vs mode. This game is a true step up from SC2 which I wasn’t expecting. The gameplay flows more beautifully than the silk that drapes the walls of some levels. This game makes Tekken 5 feel like something from the stone age.

Sega MegaDrive Collection

I wasn’t expecting to buy this game for a while but it was price at EB($25) which was too good to pass up. The best part about this collection is that it does justice to the old MegaDrive. That is the emulations are faultless, presentation is slick and the additional options such as saving anywhere are just downright handy. Oh and nothing beats playing some co-op Golden Axe. :) Once again this one brings back those oh so lovely nostalgic memories, from playing this console at my cousins place every weekend when I was a young chap.

Conclusion

Its about time that I bought a PS2. I’m glad that I’ve decided to do it now as its at the perfect time in terms of software range availability and price. I’m also pleased that I bought it now instead of holding off. Thanks for reading. ^_^

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