Any Questions?

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Allot has happened since my previous update last year. From a professional standpoint I have just been promoted to Project Superintendent for a $65 Million dollar public works College project. the Largest of its type in Los Angeles, so from that standpoint I have hit the big times figuratively speaking, my goal to oversee the construction of the largest man made building in the world is very real and with every year seems to become more of a reality being in a major management position for Internationally the 5th Largest Construction company on the Planet.

I have also in some ways come to grips with my entire perceived viewpoint on the gaming industry. Every time I think I've made my mind up on what my favorite genre is a new game comes along and shatters my preconceived perceptions. I am extremely excited to see the sudden support and movement of the fighting genre and its newly infused life after nearly ten years of what seems like borderline underground support, examples: Street Fighter 4, King of Fighters XII, Soul Caliber 4, Super Smash Bros, the upcoming Tekken and Myriads of recent best of SNK compilations. I couldn't be happier!

I threw my hand at MMORPS, I built two level seventy characters in World of Warcraft, if you have played this game you know it's no small feat to obtain Tier 6 raid gear, not only did I deck my hunter in that top level gear I also recently cleared Black Temple officially beating the game, well as close to beating that paticular game is possible in its current state. Time to move on!

I have purchased every cutting edge game currently for every major system on the market. Some very brief examples: PS3 - Metal Gear Solid 4, Grand Theft Auto 4, etc. Xbox 360 - Assassins Creed, Bio Shock, Halo 3, Mass Effect, Call of Duty 4, and Devil May Cry 4. Wii - No More Heros, Metroid Prime 3, Super Mario Galaxies. PC - The Witcher, Crysis etc, etc, etc, etc. My madness extends as well to the PSP and DS systems, the bottom line is if it's a reputable game with any type of potential I have it and usually before anyone else. My biggest problem is finding time to play them all obviously.

In any case just wanted to update you all on what I've been up to and please let me know how you have all been! I'd love to hear how you all are and what you are playing as well as what your thoughts are on recent gaming advances in general. What games are you most excited about at the moment!

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Games Radar is reporting from the Capcom Gamer's Day in London that the 4th game in the series has been officially confirmed. A stylized trailer of Ken and Ryu fighting was shown, but no actual gameplay footage, and while development has started the game is still more than a year away for whatever platform it ends up coming out on, Still, we can all rest easy that it is indeed on the way

To view trailer:

CLICK HERE!

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I consider myself to be one of the more hardcore portable video game system enthusiast's you will likely ever come across, I have owned (starting from Nintendo's "Watch & Game") every major portable video game system released on the North American continent over the last 30 years and as such have watched with delight the once modest niche market grow into a dominate postion outselling in most cases their home console counterparts.

Let me make it clear right here and now that I am a big supporter of both Nintendo and Sony's respected portable systems, and as such purchased the DS and PSP on their initial release dates. With all that said it's important to point out that I do not typically take side's with recommending one system over another and will usually be the first to point out that each system has it's own share of strength's and weaknesses, so to the greatest reasonable expectation possible consider this an unbiased viewpoint of an individual with a massive amount of time spent with both previous systems.

With all that said regarding the newly released PSP Slim I was extremely impressed as I unwrapped my newly purchased system this afternoon, the first thing I noticed was that the system literally felt like a normal PSP with the gut's removed and could hardly believe how much lighter the unit felt, other notable first impressions revolved mostly around the overall shaped contour, gone are the bulging sections on the back that once made up the makeshift grips, instead you're left with a streamlined unit that is much more comfortable. Balancing the two units you'll actually start equating the older system to a brick in both weight and overall comparative size!

There has been at least for me one MAJOR downfall to the original PSP that I could never understand, that is to say the utterly horrible controls, I had flashback's of my original PSP purchase along with the 2D Fighter "Darkstalkers"(Darkstalkers is very similar to the more commonly known Street Fighter 2 games) the day the system was released, an utterly horrid combination as you simply could not control your character with any type of efficiency due to the lacking button sensitivity. The new model I am happy to report has completely fixed this issue, I played the same game today on the new system and it controls like a dream, I also noticed greatly improved load times and a screen that is much brighter and actually visible in outside natural light!

Is the new system worth purchasing for someone who owns the original model? To me the answer is a resounding yes, if for no other reason than the system is simply more portable, add to that a brighter screen, fixed button controls, longer battery life and faster loading times and you start diminishing some of its toughest critics' most valid arguments.

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So I decided to change my avatar today, due to the fact that I am currently spending nearly every extra gaming moment I have in my newly aquired World of Warcraft online game it seemed fitting to choose a world of warcraft based avatar. I actually avoided the game for several years as I previously didnt care for Massive Multiplayer Online RPG's, however WOW (WOW = World of Warcraft to the Hardcore dorks) is a simple, easy to jump into immersive game that is completely addicting.

After just a few short days I already have a level 18 fire ball throwing human mage, it's amazing to me to talk to people who have been playing it for years and still day after day play it religiously and say it never gets old! In any case if you haven't played it and you own a computer I recommend you go out immediatly and snatch a copy, just be sure and let your friends and family know that they will not be seeing you again for awhile!

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Much to my shock when I opened my profile today I noticed my shiny new "Top 500" Emblem, Apparently you are awarded this emblem by being hand picked by the Game Spot staff due to the quality of your game reviews. Also, you can recommend talented writers based on their reviews for consideration of this emblem as well, Here's the Link if you know some deserving individuals!

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[ Watch Video ]

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Following up on my last blog, after playing the Halo 3 Multiplayer beta I have found it to be just a slightly upgraded version of Halo 2, in a nutshell I am disapointed especially after playing Gears of War and Rainbow Six Vegas as it simply pales in comparison and looks like a standard Xbox game.

I am still playing Crackdown and it's still shockinly fun, it reminds of a cross between the old Playstation one, Jumping Flash game crossed with a shallower version of Grand Theft Auto, in fact I heard the designer of the original Grand Theft was involved with the making of this game, the other thing worth noting is that not only is the game fun it's an Xbox Live Achievment GOLDMINE!, with little effort I've gained over 300 points in just a few nights of play with allot more to come!

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Alright, just a quick update, the Halo 3 Beta just became available as of a few minutes ago of this blog, in fact I'm downloading it right now, for those of you who don't know the only way to download it is if you purchased Crackdown and have an Xbox Live Gold Membership account, I purchased Crackdown today and I'm suprised at how extremelly fun the game is! In any case I'll give you an update after playing the Halo 3 Beta! 

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The Old School games keep on comin to the next gen systems and I am starting to wonder when Nintendo's going to release a downloadable version of "Super Metroid" as I'm sure it will be a massive hit! Also Capcom recently announced that it will be releasing a completely updated downloadable version of Super Street Fighter 2 in High Definition with completely new character and background art, this is the biggest developoment in the Street Fighter Franchise in years, you can get a glimpse of Ryu's new character art in the image above!

In other news I am nearly finished with the shooting nirvana that is Rainbow Six Vegas for the Xbox 360 and will be featuring it in an upcoming greatest shooters of our generation blog later this week, you'll find out first hand how in some ways it completely decimates the incredible Gears of War which I had the pleasure of playing through and beating earlier this year!!

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Over a decade and a half ago I watched wide eyed in a dazed amazement my first Japanese anime, Akira, a  buddy of mine at the time who happened to be a few years older than me seemed to know allot about what series where good back then. I remember asking him what his favorite anime was and he quickly responded "Guyver" with somewhat of an evil look in his eye.

For those of you who haven't yet experienced the anime series (new or older version) of Guyver I'll fill you in on some of the intricacies of the main protagonist. Sho Fukamachi, he's your average high school student who stumbles across an alien device that upon closer inspection fuses an alien bio boosting armor suit to his body thus granting him access to some of the most insanely awesome weapons ever created in manga/anime culture. He has everything from a cannon that shoots from his chest which can level entire forest to lasers, black hole gravity bombs, sonic wave blasts and blades that extend from his elbows that slash through nearly anything.

Our Heroes only problem is that he is pursued by an evil organization of men who can shape shift into massive limb ripping, laser shooting, acid spitting monsters.

I'll be honest; I tend to prefer the more borderline action based anime's such as Ninja Scroll and Ghost in the Shell but when I learned recently that the Guyver series was being re-drawn and brought to more modern day standards I was floored! Well I've gotten through the first 3 DVD's and I am in heaven, although the animation isn't the smoothest the character designs are allot sharper and much more modern than you will remember from the previous installments and the fighting scenes are great!

In any case if you like ultra violence in your anime check out Guyver, one of my all time favorite anime series!

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Still other people tend to change their avatars on a regular basis. So tell me what made you choose the avatar you are currently sporting? Is there a deeper meaning to your choice or do we simply take it at face value? I personally LOVE the Metal Gear Solid series thus my choice of the cyber ninja, a character that profoundly left an impression on me in the original Playstation Metal Gear Solid Game. Other than a slight color modification I have not changed my Avatar and will probably keep it that way for a long time to come!

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Ironically with the Online Services available from Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony the older legendary titles are coming back in a big way! I decided to hook up my newer systems to the internet yesterday and subscribed to each systems respetive service, truly the best one is Xbox live at this point but I'm sure the other services such as the Sony Store and Nintendo's service will evolve in time. What I'm really excited about are three of the games I purchased last night on Xbox Live, I'm referring to first and foremost my second favorite 2D platform of all time, Castlevania Symphony of the Night, not only is it a perfect port it's been enhanced, it's amazing to me that to purchase the original on sites like eBay and Amazon you'll pay upwards of $60-$200 but now you can download it onto your system for a fraction of the cost! Words cannot describe the joy of playing the greatest Castlevania ever created, you simply must play this game!

For the Fighters out there for the first time ever Xbox Live offers a perfect port of Mortal Kombat 3 on Xbox live and it's online service is incredible, in just a few moments you'll be playing people all over the world and I experienced no visible lag to speak off! Also available is a perfect copy of Hyper Street Fighter 2 my all time favorite video game! In a few months Mortal Kombat 2 will be available for Download for the Playstation 3 wich will help to start level the playing field!

The fact that you can purchase and download in moments some of the greatest old school games ever created onto your new school systems to me is one of the most amazing feats of this generation, as the title of this blog proclaimed, the New School is Resurrecting the Old School and what an amazing time this is!

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Let's start with Nintendo's original NES system versus Sega's Master System, from what I remember the Master System was technically superior yet the NES is far and away the system most people remember impacting their lives the most, the system simply had more and better games, examples: Super Mario Brothers 1-3, Mike Tyson's Punch-out, The Legend Of Zelda, Mega Man Series, Castlevania Series,  I could go on for a long time, on the flip side the Master System had only a handful of memorable games yet it was "technically superior".

Next we'll move onto the Super Nintendo vs. the Sega Genesis, this war was not very clearly won and was in my opinion the most interesting of the rivals, it seemed that both systems were technically proficient for their times and the competition between these rivals was amazingly fierce especially with the all important "Mascot Race" and what an amazing race it was, those of you old enough to remember will most likely think about the Commercials for Super Mario World and the trendy Sega Sonic the Hedgehog commercials literally making fun of Mario, it was brutal, blunt and really quite brilliant. I cannot clearly distinguish a winner with that particular race and almost everyone I knew bought both systems and obviously felt the same, If I remember correctly the Super Nintendo had better graphics, more color and the infamous mode 7 (the ability to manipulate sprites in and out and rotation wise to good effect), whereas I think the Genesis had a faster processor thus games like Sonic worked well, the other selling point was that Sega quickly condoned more violent games such as Mortal Combat in all its bloody glory. In the end this race was in my opinion a tie due to the huge amount of brilliant competition and an excess of quality games on both fronts.

Sony Destroys Sega in the next few years, it was quite amazing, we saw a dramatic paradigm change in the video game Monopolies, Sony released the Playstation which quickly toppled the battling Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn systems,  It was very strange to see this shift as the N64 had phenomenal games such as Mario 64 and Zelda Ocarina of Time, on the flip side Sega was showcasing power house games for its Dreamcast such as Soul Caliber, I think the reason Sony was so successful was due to their use of third party licensers, Sega and Nintendo it appeared just couldn't produce enough games of quality in a timely manner to compete and thus were left by the wayside, Sony already being a media giant also seemed to make better use of marketing and flexed that tool to the limit, this combined with a system that was easy to develop games for and you start to see why it toppled the worlds video game superpowers and so quickly!

Touch , that's what comes to mind when Bill Gates decided that he wanted a piece of the pie, thus the Microsoft Xbox was born, Nintendo had been replaced by Sony, Sega replaced with Microsoft and we the general public started seeing the next gaming paradigm which was the crossover of third party developers developing games for multiple systems much more frequently, this leveled the playing field to a large degree, Sony now pushing the Playstation 2 had a serious fight on their hands as the Xbox was not only more powerful but it was backed by a company with equal marketing skills and worse yet had equal if not better media presence and experience (probably due to that little Windows program a few people seemed to be using).

When I think about the future of gaming I am very excited as I know that the winner is not really going to be the system platforms at any given point, the winners are going to be the gamers, due to the fact that as 3rd party games continue to cross hardware platforms the game developers are forced to develop games of greater ingenuity this is especially true due to mass media game sites and video game magazines, if someone produces a crappy game the informed consumer knows it ahead of time usually before the game is even released, in the end you will always see the hardware platform giants pushing their hardware, due to technological limits the systems will usually be relatively close at any given time relatively speaking.

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Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower

Darkstalkers was a launch title for the PSP and was widely praised for its amazing 2D graphical power showcased on the PSP system, not only is it an excellent fighter but it has all of the charachter favorites from Capcom's other fighting series, you will not go wrong by locating this fantastic monster ridden fighter. The special moves look fantastic, the music is excellent and the game is just a ton of fun!

Street Fighter Alpha Max 3

One of the reasons I appreciate this game so much is that it's probably the best port of Street Fighter Alpha 3. Allot of people consider Alpha 3 to be the best Street Fighter in the famous series, I can tell you that this game is absolutely spot on, the graphics are gorgeous, the animation is excellent, the amount of fighters to choose from is very large and the game as a whole is of extremely good quality. If you can find it get it!

Guilty Gear Judgment

Although not widely well known in the United States and somewhat of a sleeper underground hit, Guilty Gears is the modern day 2D fighting king, the game moves at a lightning speed and showcases the deepest most involving fighting engine of any 2D fighter currently on the market. Guilty Gears X2 is now available for the PSP and for the Hardcore fighting game enthusiast your time has come!

Tekken Dark Ressurection

Tekken Dark Ressurection is not only the best 3D fighting game available on the PSP it's the most graphically amazing portable fighter ever developed! You will be completely floored by this game, boasting graphics rivaling the PS2 with sounds and music to match, the moves work perfectly on the PSP and the load times are minimal. For fans of the Tekken series you will find one of the best versions available here!

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• Games - Well if you've taken a look at my currently playing list or my last blog you'll notice i'm going through a phase, a fighting game phase that is and happily so, I have discovered and purchased the finest fighting games ever created in the last week and they are old school based, the list includes: Street Fighter 3 3rd Strike (Off of the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection PS2), Capcom vs Snk 2 (PS2), and Guilty Gear X2 one of if not the deepest fighting games ever concieved (PS2). I'm also playing Tekken Dark Ressurection and Street Fighter Alpha Max 3 on the PSP which are bolth excellent!

• Other news - I'll be reaching level 20 in a few days. Portable System Wars reached the thousand member mark this morning and with over 40,000 views is in the top 20 most viewed unions in Gamespot history after only 2 months. I have a new blog header, let me know what you think of it! I also reserved tickets ahead of time for my most highly anticipated movie this year, entitled 300, it's going to be AWESOME, click on the link for the trailer!

               Blog is Bowser Approved    

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I have waited 10 years now since the release of Street Fighter 3 (a game I also really enjoyed although not as much as Street Fighter 2) for the elusive Street Fighter 4, I demand that Capcom releases Street Fighter 4 to it's loyal fanbase as our generation has been forsaken and forgotten for far to long!

I've done a lot of research and in 2005 Capcom alluded to the fact that this game has been in development since the release of Street Fighter 3, I also came across information noting that Street Fighter 4 would be released in 2007, also the original Street Fighter was released in 1987, Street Fighter 3 was released in 1997, if capcom holds true to their 10 year time frame frame pattern then our time has come! I hope it's true and it better be worth the waite!

Street Fighter

Street Fighter 2

Super Street Fighter 2

Street Fighter Alpha (Series)

Street Fighter 3

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Well I'm not sure if the emblem disappearing problem has been solved but mine havent disapeared for some time now! The man to thank is Adam_B as he mentioned he'd be working on the glitches, if you'd like to see the blog and thank him yourself here is the link! CLICK HERE TO THANK ADAM! In any case the glitch may still be there but at least some one is trying for us .

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