May 29th, 2007

Games Played: World of Warcraft (PC), Aegis Wing (XBLA), Lumines (XBLA), Archon (C64, PC, NES), Archon II (PC), Archon Ultra (PC)

Movies Watched: Matrix Reloaded, The Fountain

Games Bought: Bust-A-Grove 2 (PS1), WCW Thunder (PS1), WCW Nitro (PS1), Tenchu (PS1), Tenchu 2 (PS1) [total: $20.00], Odin Sphere (PS2) [$34.99]

Well I haven't bought a lot of games recently as far as I can see. I'll probably be downloading a lot of VC titles to play (not play) on the Wii for the upcoming Classic Gaming Night. The last few VC updates have been pretty amazing. Streets of Rage 2, Blazing Lasers, Actraiser, Ninja Spirit... all top titles from the 8-bit/16-bit era.

The Fountain held up to my high expectations and let them down simultaneously. The movie definitely has it's problems: the plot was far looser than I thought it would be. I wasn't expecting a very cohesive plot, after all, I knew exactly what this movie was about, but it felt like the narrative was shoe-horned in to avoid a totally exposition-free movie. However, thematically, the movie held up extremely well. Aronofsky's passion bled through bright red. If anything, I'd have liked for him to ditch all pretext of a linear story and just shot brief moments to let the audience assemble them. After all, with what he did, he knew he was alienating audiences anyway. Just let it all hang out there and you can do something really great.

World of Warcraft is back all up in here. It's awful that I came crawling back, but it loves me like no other does. Level 44 Druid in about a week and a half. I should hopefully be 60 in two weeks and get get to the BC content again. I'm still playing on my rogue occasionally too.

I was playing a lot of Archon for awhile. I was kicking around the idea of doing a video podcast and was taking footage and information but forgot that I'm a lazy bum and would never actually edit and release a final product. Good thing I remembered before I bought the equipment. But, it did put me back in touch with one of my favorite games. I never played the PC or C64 versions of Archon either, it's very interesting to compare differences from the pretty polished NES version. Archon II is fantastic as well, it take the whole chess idea and ditches it entirely for a unique take.

I may just pick a game like that a month and go and play the hell out of it to learn more about it just for fun. I think next time I'll look at Elite and Starflight since I have such eternal love for Star Control II.