I find humor in a lot of things, but I also try to remember that GS has young and umm, experienced, as well as male and female (maybe even other, I've heard rumors of vampires, werewolves, and zombies), and from all over the world.

• 24Nov 09

  Personal update

  FINALLY, after much, MUCH more time than I had hoped, I am able to make an appearance...sadly it is a brief one. My surgery went well and my physical recovery is progressing. My economic recovery may take longer than I had hoped. It seems that another financial institution gets closed every month still, which means that there are many more people going to be looking for the same type of position as I will be when I am able to return to the workforce.

  I haven't even been able to visit my local friend as much as I'd hoped, but maybe I will be able to drive again soon.

  Anyway, I still miss you guys and I hope to return as soon as possible. I will visit as many people as I can today, but please don't think that I overlooked you if I don't visit your page. My time is limited, and since I haven't been able to help my friend keep his computer clean it is working very slow...or maybe I am just really impatient.

  Happy holidays to everyone! I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving or if you are not having a holiday I hope you are doing well anyway. I miss you all!

  • Posted Nov 24, 2009 6:35 am PT
  • Category: General
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• 5Jun 09

  Farewell...for now.

  I have been hit with the struggling economy. For the first time ina long timeI don't have a job. What this means is that I will be absent from GS for a while due to financial factors which make it necessary to eliminate the cable expense...thus no more internet. There are extenuating circumstances that eliminate the obvious solution of finding a new job. That is all I want to say about those circumstances here, sorry. I will be here for a week or so, until my cable is turned off.

  I am going to miss all of my friends, which is the best part of GS. I do plan to return as soon as possible, but I expect that to be at least 6 months from now. I may be able to visit a few times during that 6 months from a friends house, but the visitswill be rare if at all. I have been on GS nearly every day of the last 500 plus days so this is not easy for me. I will try to catch up with everyone when I am able to return. Good luck and best wishes to everyone! I hope to see you when I return.

  • Posted Jun 5, 2009 7:09 am PT
  • Category: General
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• 27May 09

  Suikoden Tierkreis

  I just finished the DS game Suikoden Tierkreis. If you are not familiar with the Suikoden series, the basic idea is to try to obtain all 108 characters while playing this RPG. Tierkreis is no different in that respect, the goal is to obtain the 108 characters in this quest driven game with turn-based battles.

  This blog is not intended to be a review of the game, but more to introduce you to the series or to let you know about this particular game. I am an old-school gamer, and I will define old-school as I am using the term. I am an explorer in an RPG and I check out every nook and cranny to see if there is something there. I try to talk to everybody and I talk to them more than once. The big thing I am referring to as old-school is that I am accustom to playing a game without a guide or faq and I try doing things in a different way to see if something different happens.

  As I stated, this is a quest driven game for the most part. There are a lot of the 107 other characters that join automatically as part of the story. There are also a lot of characters that join as part of a quest. Still there are those characters that require certain things to happen at a certain time before you can gain their support. Since I am thorough and always checking out different things, I actually stumbled into about 6 or 8 of the characters that way. Two of them were very near to the end of the game and I only got them because I was trying to get everyone of the characters at about the same level. That is another aspect of being an old-school gamer, I feel like I have to level the characters.

  I'm writing more than I planned to so let me just give you a quick overview.It is a good game, but there are a number of things that even I did not like. The camera had a bad habit of being in the wrong place for me to see what I wanted to see at that time. The random encounters were frequent, but the dungeons were short for the most part. Many of the characters had no real purpose in the game and could easily have been recruited and forgotten. The last 15 or 20 characters are recruited very, very near to the end of the game. I actually gave up on one of the characters and started the "final battle" sequence when the irritating little character finally joined.

  Those things aside, I did enjoy the game and would say that it is a good game. This game should probably not be the first Suikoden game that you play because there are some really good games in the Suikoden series. It is worth playing once, but it is also a fairly linear game that doesn't give you a lot of reasons to play it again...unless you get through the game without some of the characters.

  • Posted May 27, 2009 2:02 pm PT
  • Category: Games
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