A poem.

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix is not rad. I am sad. I had high hopes for it but it is kind of bad. Back to Puzzle Quest because that made me glad. Unlike Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, which is not rad.

YOU SEE, THE SYSTEM...

I wonder if Metal Gear Solid 4 won any Oscars? Oh, apparently not.

Incoming customer complaints, oh baby!

Noby Noby Boy, that one game that no-one had any clue about for like, forever, finally finished downloading this morning. I rather liked what I played of it (half an hour, before I had to go for my Chinese tuition). And after playing it, I'm left with... still left with the little I knew about it before it was released. The press release said things like, "we don't offer refunds for this game", "we will not listen to customer complaints", "we cannot tell you about the nature of the game" and "depending on your mood, you may become addicted". Ominous.

You play as BOY, who kind of looks like the mascot from Taiko no Tatsujin, except he doesn't look too happy. But BOY looks content enough to be stretched to potentially endless lengths by the player, which is done with the left and right analog sticks. There's no real set goal, but by stretching BOY, the omnipresent entity, GIRL, grows. GIRL grows with every player's (everyone in the world playing the game, that is) effort. It's multiplayer, but it's not. According to the in-game manual, the larger GIRL gets, the more planets she can visit, and the more reunited the universe becomes. It's lovely and happy and fluffy. It's Noby Noby Boy.

It's got the same style as Katamari in terms of graphics and, well, identity as a whole. Like, you know, the 'very charming, very quirky, very odd' identity. At the beginning of the game, it told me to guess the controls in the form of a quiz. And then I got a Trophy for it! Hooray. And like Katamari, it's some kind of breeding ground for sadists. Getting rolled up by a Katamari would probably be the worst death ever. You'd be maimed and crushed. In the end, you would either be disintegrated by eye-lasers or turned into a lovely planet. Eventually, you get to ruin whole cities and continents with a giant rolling ball. In Noby Noby Boy, you can eat cats. I totally ruined a small town by knocking the roof off someone's house and pushing the house over the edge. I fucked up a robot. I ate all the flowers. Surely this is criminal. But it's the kind of game you want to come home from work to sit down to and just relax with for an hour or so.

Do you have seven dollars? Do you have a PS3? Surely if you have a PS3, you have seven dollars. GREAT! Now go and buy Noby Noby Boy. I enjoy it very much.

[8/10]

Retail loopholes, oh baby!

Street Fighter IV technically came out today (and I managed to stop myself from buying the Collector's Edition). EB and JB, the only retailers which actually mattered, kinda, both broke street date a few days ago. There may or may not be a pun there. Hahaha.

So after tossing up whether to buy it now or wait until later, I ended up getting linked to an article over at Ecogamer about how much retailers were charging for it, as well as a slew of comments about how much people were paying for it. So Jordaan and I decided to head out today and see what kind of deal we could get.

For reference (Standard Edition):
EB: $119.95
JB: $99

Hmm... not too pretty. JB chopping $30 off EB's price was pretty good, but could we get it for cheaper?

See, JB also had a little 'TRADE IN THREE GAMES AND GET SFIV FREE!' deal, which is what J and I were relying on to help us get a great price. This of course meant that we had to find three reasonably cheap PS3 games, which was probably not going to be easy, given the list of limitations on JB's website. So after checking EB and Target (with potential candidates being $30, and one at $25), we headed over to JB to see if they had any cheap preowned games.

They did. Several. But we ended up finding three copies of a single game, one that I don't think anyone gave a damn about, because they were only $24 each!

J suggested that we exploit this to the point that we should bring the three copies up to the counter as well as a SFIV display box. Eventually I had to persuade him to do all the talking because I was laughing too hard. After confirming the 'purchase' of the games, the clerk sent us back to the games department so that they could complete the trade-in. While we were up there, another guy was attempting to do the same thing and was turned away for having duplicate copies, which made me panic. However, the dude we got was a nice guy and was totally ok with us having three of the same game, which we had just bought. So hooray! SFIV for $72, $18 off the normal JB price and almost $50 off EB's. So, like, to recap, because I am actually really proud of what we managed to do:

Do the math.

Noby Noby Boy also arrived early on the 20th, which was silly of them since it was clearly supposed to be a 19th Feb worldwide simultaneous release. Indeed, I spent the whole of the 19th running outside and checking the Playstation Store. Dicks. So that's here and I'm excited, but I'm currently STILL downloading it because my internet capped. Which means that SFIV doesn't want to download its required system update. Which means I probably won't get to play either game until 12AM. Naptime now then, I suppose.

Puzzle Quest

Puzzle Quest has been fucking my shit up since I started playing it on Sunday. Last night I couldn't get to sleep until 1AM because whenever I closed my eyes, I saw Puzzle Quest. "Oh look, you can get four skulls in a row there! That will show that Giant Rat!"

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix comes out in a couple of weeks.

DON'T BE A PUSSY

Found this on BTDO's Livejournal because I haven't visited it since Christmas and I had to go check it because goddamn we need a good translation of Diamond is Unbreakable.

Pick from any of my fandoms and ask me to answer the following:

Favorite character:
Least Favorite Character:
Character with the best hair:
Character with the best eyes:
Character I'd most want to kiss:
Character I'd most likely screw:
Character I'd make lunch:
Character I'd go singing in the rain with:
Character I'd go shopping with:
Character I'd go dancing with:
Character I'd take over the world with:
Character I'd most want to cosplay as:
Favorite Pairing:
Favorite Yaoi pairing:
Favorite Yuri pairing:

ALSO BTDO I'M LINKING YOU NOW BECAUSE I WAS TOO LAZY TO DO IT BEFORE. SORRY BRO.