I thought I'd check back in with how my adventures in Terraria are going so far. After 6 hours of playing I've had the chance to explore quite a bit of the world and I've found several deep caves with lots of ore and pots and monsters. 
Unfortunately I did not know that you needed a hammer to break the heart containers so I've ran by quite a few of them before making myself a hammer. 
What I've been focusing on mostly is collecting stone and making grey bricks so that I have lots of material to build a big house/castle. I also today learned that you need to build houses for merchants so that they will move in and you can buy stuff from them (this was mentioned in the Quick Look but I forgot). 
 

After hearing a bit about this game and watching the Quick Look earlier today I decided to give this game a try. I had heard that it was similar to Minecraft and I have not played that game since it seemed so crazy and expansive, but a 2D version of a similar concept was much more appealing to me. 
 
So after creating my guy I was dropped into an open empty world with a guide there to greet me. What he had to say wasn't very helpful at all and was stuff that I more or less already knew from watching the Quick Look. 
So I start chopping down some trees and I make a workbench. Since I need to build a house I go through the crafting menu and find wooden wall or whatever it was called. I though great, walls are what I need to make a house with. So I create a ton of those and make two walls with a bit of space in between. I then make a door since I would need a way to get into my house. I quickly realize that the monsters go right through my walls and I can't place the door on the edge of the wall no matter how hard I try. 
 
After dying numerous times I realize that what they call wall in the game isn't a wall at all, it's the indoors background tile, and that I need to place the actual raw blocks of whatever material I have to make walls. Gee how about mentioning that Mr. guide person? So after having placed background tiles all over the place in feeble attempts to make walls I decide to scrap this world and start a new one. I quickly mine some stone and make a proper house with a door on each side and a roof and bench and furnace. It is now night time and flying eyeballs and zombies start gathering outside my house. 
Since I can't chop my way through all these zombies I realize that I pretty much have to just sit there doing nothing until morning comes, which isn't exactly fun or exciting in any way. 
 
I don't have time to play any more of it right now and I'll come back to it when I get home after the weekend, but the first impression of it wasn't exactly stellar. I know that these types of games likely require a significant investment of time in order for you to get anything out of it and I certainly haven't written it off yet.

After a long hiatus I am going back into Dragon Quest IX and the game is still as fun as it was last time I played it. 
 

Gyromancer is a game I had not heard about until about a week or two ago. However, having been totally addicted to Puzzle Quest on the DS the premise of the game sounded like something that would appeal to me. 
 
I bought the game Steam after having tried out the demo. The first thing that hits you when you play the game is that this is not Puzzle Quest, for better or worse. The gem matching uses a different mechanic that at first seems restrictive and unwieldy but you can quickly adapt if you are used to other puzzle games. It has the Dragon Quest Monsters/Pokemon aspect of collecting different monsters with different strengths and weaknesses. Every monster has a certain set of abilities as well, but so far they seem to be mostly flavor with a bit of strategy that you can utilize at times. 
 
Something that came as quite a surprise to me was the story and dialog. I wasn't expecting an epic deep story and I don't want one either since I do not play RPGs or any other type of game for that matter for story. The dialog however is so atrociously bad that I burst out laughing several times. I don't know who is responsible for localizing the dialog but half the time it reads as something you would find on engrish.com, which is entertaining in itself, and since the story is a throwaway I don't really mind it even though it seems strange that they did not put more effort into it. 
 
So far it's a solid game and I found myself getting into that same Puzzle Quest/Peggle zone of "just one more!" when fighting monsters and unlocking new areas of each level. I will definitely spend more time with it and maybe write a review after I've played through it.

For the last couple of years I have played a lot of MMOs. A lot. 
Ever since I grew bored of Champions Online and its non-existant endgame content I have been trying to stay away from MMOs.  I want to broaden my horizons and go back to the time where I played a game, had lots of fun, and then moved on to the next thing. 
Maybe this is just a symptom of a realization that I cannot spend as much time as I do playing video games in general, and that my lifestyle is catching up to me now. 
 
I used to play World of Warcraft, from release, for something like 14 hours a day, back when I could do that. I kept playing WoW on and off up until this summer, with a big break last year when I played Warhammer Online. I started playing Champions Online when it came out, and then after that played Aion a bit. In hindsight I cannot really say why I spent so much time with these games. Sure they were fun but are they really that fun that they are worth spending so many hours on? 
 
Sure you could argue that there is no difference between playing MMOs for X hours and playing any video game (or doing anything else recreational) for X hours, but for me personally I feel that there is a difference. 
 
I do have an ambition of working within the video game world as a writer/reviewer and that also motivates me to stop focusing all my time on playing one MMO and instead have more varied experiences. 
 
Also this is something that is very apparent when listening to video game podcasts, most of the people that work as writers and reviewers never get a chance to really engross themselves into one game that much. When you listen to them talking about a game that you yourself is really into they often do not know that much about the details of it, or they get stuff wrong etc. That can be annoying but I do realize that they are probably having more fun moving through the whole strata of the video game market at a breakneck pace than I have when obsessing over my MMO for 12 hours a day. 
 
So, what do you think? Is quality over quantity always a good thing, or is it detrimental to stay in the same place for too long? And this does not only apply to MMOs of course but to any type of game.

I bought this game when it was relatively new. I had just finished my 90 hour play through of Dragon Quest VIII, which was the best console RPG experience I have ever had. 
Since this game is made by Level 5 just like DQ8 was, it looked interesting and it had a different setting than most jRPGs, in that it was a sort of sci-fi/Star Wars theme. 
I originally sank about 6 hours into the game but it was a struggle. I have never been much for the story in RPGs, that is not the main reason I play them. I do however realize that most people seem to enjoy story in video games in general so I'm not saying they should have left it out. That's what the majority wants and that's what they get. 
The battles are my main gripe with this title. They are setup to be semi-real time in that the battle takes place in real time just like it would in an action game, but you can at any time pause the game and give commands to the other members of your party. This works out pretty similar to western games like Baldur's Gate and the more recent Dragon Age: Origins. 
While this is a neat idea in theory it makes the combat hard to handle at times and the encounters are more or less divided into two types: The ones where you can just hammer on X to swing your sword at whatever is close and let your other party members do their thing on auto pilot, and the ones where you can die in 3 seconds if you do not pause constantly to give commands and use health potions etc. 
 Since there is no way of knowing if an upcoming fight is gonna fall into the first or second category you can often feel like the game is constantly trying to trick you and catch you off guard and it creates a form of antagonistic feeling towards the game itself, and you are often left wondering if the programmers were sadistic bastards who wanted to lull the players into a feeling that everything is smooth sailing, only to then pounce on the unsuspecting player with a very hard encounter. 
 
There is a character progression system in the game that feels similar to the one in Final Fantasy X (I believe it was X atleast, I couldn't stand that game myself so I'm not entirely sure). This works out fairly okay, even if it is rather convoluted and feels clunky at times. 
 
The graphics are very good and the voice acting is almost on par with Dragon Quest VIII. 
 
I have now played it for almost 9 hours total and I am going to try and devote a couple more hours to it. Maybe it will pick up and I will get used to the chaotic battles and unnecessarily large number of characters. I have never understood why modern RPGs gives you more characters to choose from than what fits into your party at any given time. It only serves to force people into reading FAQs to not make mistakes like level up the wrong dude and be screwed at some later point in the game etc.  
 
One thing I must give Rogue Galaxy huge credit for is that when you load up a save game you will get a screen of text that recaps the story so far. This really helps you out if you haven't played the game in a long time like me. Every RPG should have this. 
 
So, what do you think of Rogue Galaxy? Do you like the total chaos that ensues whenever you get into battle? Do you think the story is worthwhile? Would you rather have it be turn based combat like the Dragon Quest or Persona games? I know I sure as hell would!
 
I am going to go back and look at some other games in my collection in upcoming blog posts. Maybe some semi-obscure stuff like Bujingai Swordmaster, Giga Wing Generations and Homura.

Over the weekend I went to visit my sister who has a PS3. 
My only previous encounter with this console consisted of playing Resident Evil 5 for 20 minutes or so, and since I am very interested in buying one for myself I ceased the opportunity to try it out as much as possible. 
 
The first game I played was Pixel Junk Eden. Great looking game, abysmally bad controls. This game could have been fun and interesting had the controls been anywhere near intuitive and consistent. Sometimes you swung around from a rope when hitting the button once, sometimes not. Sometimes you jumped when hitting the button twice, sometimes not. It was nothing but a huge source of frustration and did not really give me any entertainment at all. 
 
The second game was Pixel Junk Monsters. I have played a few flash based tower defense games before and they were okay, but I didn't expect much from this one. 
The game play itself worked great and it looked very nice as well. However it was so brutally hard that the fun you had in the first level soon faded away. I beat the first two levels easily and spent about 2 hours trying to beat the third level before I gave up and played it on the easy difficulty instead. On the easier difficulty setting it was much more fluid and entertaining.  The game works, it's just that the difficulty curve is too punishing for it to be any fun after the first levels. 
 
I also played the demo for Brutal Legend and Wipeout and they seemed like good games although the demos are of course not in depth enough for any further analysis.  
 
The console itself worked fine and now that there is a 250GB slim version available I am even more tempted to get one for myself, although I think getting a better TV is top priority, playing games on a 20" CRT is not ideal to say the least, and a PS3 really deserves some sort of HD setup.
 
I will be getting Muramasa The Demon Blade for the Wii and Dragon Quest 5 for DS soon, and I will post a review of atleast one of them in my profile, so stay tuned for that.