Return of the Blog!

Well a lot has happened since my last post... My laptop is pretty much dead, I've built a new PC and we've moved back to Manila!

It's much more convenient to be in Manila. I can buy games and not have to wait 2 months for them to be delivered from Europe. Speaking of games, I've finished quite a few since my last post. Kingdom Hearts HD (including Chain of Memories which sucked quite hard), Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and Far Cry 3. I'm currently playing Final Fantasy X HD, but sadly I'm at the boring phase of grinding fortune spheres for luck maxing.

I'm also writing my first trophy guide, and planning to add a 'Donate' button to the site. Your donations will be used to ensure some higher quality and consistent content for this site, as well as moving the domain away from Blogger and allowing the use of Squarespace to provide a better website experience.

The plans for my RPG resource site are all drawn up and finished and the coding has begun, however it may be a few months until it is even remotely ready for launch.

I'm still looking for article suggestions and also any anime series you would recommend. I've finished watching A Certain Magical Index (Toaru Majutsu no Index) and I'm currently watching A Certain Scientific Railgun S. These are possibly two of my favourite series ever.

Anyways, I'll post another article tomorrow providing some more detail on the last nine months. It's good to be back!

Take care!

Links:

A Certain Magical Index/Toaru Majutsu no Index (MyAnimeList.net)
A Certain Scientific Railgun (Toaru Kagaku no Railgun) (MyAnimeList.net)

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29/09/2013 - Bamboo Blade & Badges of Fury

Well tomorrow will officially be the end of the first month of my blog, and I have to say, I'm quite happy with how it's going.

In my first month I've managed to get over 900 views (no over 9000 jokes today, sorry) and AdSense is working quite well too. I've also just been approved as an Amazon Affiliate, just to try it out and see if it's a service worth dedicating time to.

I managed to finish watching Bamboo Blade today, since the final six or so episodes are the best part of the story, and seeing Tamaki do throat strikes screaming 'TSUKI~!' doesn't get old. I much preferred the Japanese dub to the English dub I watched back in 2011 and I'm wondering if this will be a consistent factor as I replace my other English dubbed anime. I'm sure that once my other reviews are all done and I've caught up, I'll review Bamboo Blade as well.

Reviews are actually becoming much harder to publish, heck, even these posts are. My laptop is on the verge of dying and I think the LCD Screen will be kicking the bucket within the next week or so, now that the infamous 'green lines' have appeared all over. Sadly, the difficulty isn't just my laptop dying. It's a mixture of that and the fact that I'm not very comfortable typing for extended periods of time on a laptop, and I don't have a desk/office chair to sit at currently, so it gets worse. This should all change in the future when my new system is built and I can dedicate much more time to my blog and my upcoming website.

I've watched three movies today, since I'm not much in the mood for video games at the moment. I started off by watching Sunshine Cleaning, which is about two sisters who start a business doing bio hazard and postmortem clean ups for the good cash it rewards. It was kind of funny, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Secondly was The Squid and the Whale, a movie featuring Jesse Eisenberg playing a sixteen year-old boy with a twelve year-old brother obsessed with drinking and masturbating... Like a lot of twelve year-old boys in the UK these days actually. It had an interesting storyline, but the ending was bollocks. The movie could have been much longer than 80 minutes.

The movie I just finished watching was Badges of Glory, an action-comedy film based in Hong Kong. I only wanted to watch it originally because I'm a huge Jet Li fan, but it's one of the funniest movies I've watched for a long time. The comedic fight scenes and amusing situations made me laugh all the way through, plus there were some awesome fight scenes featuring Jet Li, so it was win-win. Honestly, if you can find a copy, watch it!

Tomorrow I intend on getting started with Cowboy Bebop and Far Cry 3. I'll post a daily update from my iPad if my laptop dies, which seems likely.

Take care and urge my laptop to stay alive, please?

Links:

Bamboo Blade - My Anime List
Sunshine Cleaning - IMDb
The Squid and the Whale - IMDb
Badges of Fury - IMDb

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28/09/2013 - Bamboo Blade, AMD R9 Series GPUs and Cookie Clicker

It's been another one of those days. I was actually looking forward to playing Far Cry 3, but it's still downloading right now. The file size is approximately 6.5gb, but my connection seems to suck more than usual today, so it has yet to finish... Sigh.

The good news is that I got to watch a few more episodes of Bamboo Blade and I'm now up to episode 21! Rin Suzuki has just been introduced as a rival/friend of Tamaki and the Kanto tournament is coming up, so we get to see Tamaki lose, at last.

I'm not trying to bring her down or anything, but the one part of her character design is that she's kind of smug. The aura she gives off is meant to display her modesty and make the fans fall in love with her, but it actually gives off an air of arrogance in my opinion. It's refreshing to have an almost entirely female lineup, but the author is responsible for another series in which a female character 'stole the show'. Maybe some variation is needed.

Next on a topic focusing more on the real world (you know, the scary place with uber-high resolution graphics). The new AMD R9 series have been premiered at the GPU 14 event.

GPU14 was hosted in Hawaii meant as a play on words of the new GPU architecture that AMD is using, also known as Hawaii. The cards have boasted some pretty significant benchmark figures and are meant to be capable of taking the crown from nVidia's almighty GTX Titan. To be honest, if they can provide even close to the performance of a GTX Titan for the price they're saying, they will sell out in minutes anyway.

I only have two concerns really, one is whether they will fix the god-awful CrossFireX scaling that the 7xxx series suffers with and two is whether AMD will get distracted from the task at end with their new approach on 'gaming audio'.

In normal circumstances, the release of a new generation of cards would be a whole new ball game when it came to CrossFireX and SLI compatibility, but the majority of the cards that AMD is releasing (with exception to the new audio capable cards) are just remodelled 7xxx series cards. This pisses me off because it's just cryptic marketing, especially when they never managed to fix the issues with the previous generation.

Sure, AMD got the 7970 performance from rivalling a GTX 660ti to being able to compete with a  GTX 770, but if you run more than one card (and a lot of hardcore gamers do), you're suffering due to lack of effort from the card developers.

If I consider buying an R9 series card, I'll wait until the aftermarket models are released, since buying from the first batch is asking for problems and AMD's stock coolers always run on the toasty side. Lastly for this post, the new king in the 'bane of my social life' category, Cookie Clicker...

I actually have my girlfriend to blame for this one, since I caught her playing it after teaching one of her students. The game has no meaning, no end goal and no actual game play. I'd actually say it holds a trophy of it's own for having less game play than most of these shockingly-bad Facebook games.

All you do, is click the big Cookie... I bet you couldn't have guessed that, right? Once you have enough money, you buy properties that automatically make cookies. Not just normal buildings like factories or farms, but time machines and antimatter converters. There are achievements and upgrades you can buy, but mostly it's a giant waste of time.

Cookie Clicker - In a few hours this will be you. It's inevitable, don't fight it.

That said, most people enjoy wasting their time on the Internet these days, so why not give it a try?

Turns out I missed the entire 'Online' section of my Demon's Souls review so I'm in the process of writing it now.

PS: My Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD STILL ISN'T HERE! ARGH~!

Links:

AMD R9 Official Release
LinusTechTips Video - GPU14 Footage and R9 Hands On
Cookie Clicker

With regards to Cookie Clicker: Open at your own risk. Your partner will leave you, your children and pets will die of neglect, and all you'll care about will be clicking that big... useless cookie. Anyways, back to clicking my cookie!

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27/09/2013 - God of War III Platinum, Ghost of Sparta Platinum and Bamboo Blade

Today has been a day of much swearing... After facerolling my way through the entirety of Titan mode, I got a nasty wake up call at the Three Judges in the infamous flaming cerberus + 3 satyr fight... Oh boy, that one hurt.

The first stage of the fight is pretty easy, considering all you day is spam-fire your Bow of Apollo and kick the dogs the cerberus vomits out back at his face. The latter part is really fun, in a sadistic kind of way.

The second phase is also pretty easy, though some how the cerberus still manages to spit three fireballs from only two heads, go figure. The satyr can be a pain, but the 'Claws of Hades' and there 'Gorgon Soul' ability turn him to stone and make him easy prey. The last phase is when *&@# goes down...

You have to fight the now one-headed cerberus and two satyrs at once. The cerberus doesn't do anything different except spam more fireballs, but the satyrs make the bow+dog kicking strategy redundant and unless you're incredibly lucky or have a godlike aim, you can only hit one satyr with the stone gaze. I died here more times than I can count, until on my successful attempt I went into a Kratos-like rage and went apeshit on the cerberus with Rage of Sparta.

I thought it was smooth sailing after that, but Zeus can kill you in one combo on Titan mode, so that peed on my fireworks a little. Sigh... Anyway, here's the platinum! Oh, and the delayed one from Ghost of Sparta.

God of War III - Platinum Trophy - Probably the second hardest after GoW I

God of War: Ghost of Sparta - Platinum Trophy - One of the easier ones to be honest.

I kind of wish I had God of War: Ascension here as well, but after playing five of them in a row, I think it might be time to take a break! Besides, I have Kingdom Hearts (soon, grrrrr) and Skyrim to play.

I really wish Kingdom Hearts would arrive, the postal service here is bollocks, it almost makes me regret my past insults of Royal Mail... Almost. On the topic of Kingdom Hearts, I believe the following picture summarises my anger, behold the pr0 meme generator skills!

Seriously, y u no?

I managed to watch a few episodes of Bamboo Blade today, seeing Tamaki do a throat strike is epic, they make it look so brutal. Although, I imagine having a shinai jammed in to your throat is probably brutal enough without additional glorification.

Up to episode 19 and the motivation to watch is returning, mainly because I want to start Cowboy Bebop, but shh!

Well, that's all for today. Demon's Souls review is actually finished, but I don't want to spam post so I'll release it early tomorrow.

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26/09/2013 - God of War III, Ghost of Sparta and Far Cry 3

I know, I know, I've been slacking off on these updates recently, but in all honesty I haven't actually done anything worth writing about for the past few days. Now I'm playing God of War III and Far Cry 3 (yay free PlayStation Plus goodies)!

Anyways, God of War: Ghost of Sparta is now platinumed, I remember mentioning that I enjoyed the final boss, but not much else. The combat is the same as every other God of War and there aren't many bosses. Even the bosses that are present are nothing notable, easy to defeat even on Hard mode and the generous checkpoint system wouldn't make them difficult fights even if they were a bit more tactical.

God of War III has been the most enjoyable one so far, the Challenges of Olympus were a bit easy compared to the earlier titles, but I'd rather not have to go through Challenge of the Gods 10 on God of War ever again. I'm currently on my Titan difficulty playthrough and I've just reached the Hermes encounter, so it shouldn't take me long to finish it.

I'm still waiting for my copy of Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD, it was due to arrive on the 25th, but my Skyrim copy was 10 days late so I'm not surprised at all. It does kind of suck though, I really want to play it!

I've watched a few movies over the last few days: City Island, It's Kind of a Funny Story and Lars and the real Girl, none of which warrant talking about much. City Island was funny, but kind of predictable. It's Kind of a Funny Story was hard to watch because the main character is a clone of my best friend from high school and I have no idea how Lars and the Real Girl is labelled as a comedy when the entire feature focus is Lars' mental illness... If the whole basis for the genre is the sex doll, then the movie obviously didn't have much else to go on.

I'm trying to work my way through Kara no Kyoukai as well, but the movies are pretty weird so I only watch them like once a week. I'm still on episode 16 of Bamboo Blade, so not much progress unfortunately.

The Demon's Souls platinum review is nearly finished, so I'll be sure to post that tomorrow during the day as well as a daily update.

I hope you enjoyed the update and I'll speak to you again soon!

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Weekend Update - God of War: Ghost of Sparta, God of War III, Bamboo Blade and The Wolf Children: Ame and Yuki

Well that's quite a long title...

I decided to do a weekend update instead of two daily updates since it would have been much of the same. I managed to finish God of War: Ghost of Sparta in just over one day and I've now moved on to God of War III.

I definitely found Ghost of Sparta more enjoyable than Chains of Olympus, although the Keres' Wraiths are the most annoying creatures in any of the GoW games. The only way to counter them on Hard and Very Hard difficulties is to spam the parry button and counterattack, if you get caught by their ranged attack they just chain attack you to death and it's infuriating.

The final boss is a fun fight, if not a bit easy and the plot of the game isn't as boring as chasing after Helios. The only really enjoyable part of Chains of Olympus is the QTE with Atlas, the rest of it is pretty mundane.

I had a bit of a fanboy moment when I heard Helios speak and found out it was Crispin Freeman, probably my favourite English voice actor, along with Laura Bailey. I really enjoyed him playing Kyon in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya as well as Alucard in Hellsing, but I haven't heard him since Diablo III, due to converting to Japanese dub.

I'll aim to platinum God of War III this week in preparation for Kingdom Hearts, but there's no promises on that as I have some other stuff to do - stay tuned for the 'other stuff''.

I've also continued watching Bamboo Blade, and it's making me want to try Kendo... again. I attempted it once, but after trying to contact the club via phone, email and postal mail and receiving no reply, I gave up. It turns out that Iloilo has quite an active Kendo club though, so I might ask them if I can come and observe a class.

Bamboo Blade is pretty good and it's introducing even more characters, I'm looking forward to the moment when Tamaki loses her match, because it was very well done in the manga. I really want to get started with Cowboy Bebop and I'm fairly certain that my girlfriend wants to watch the Haruhi Suzumiya series... I guess I better hurry up.

Now I'm off to go and watch the rest of The Wolf Children, so far it's really good. We'll see if it makes me weep like One Piece did. I hope not.

20/09/2013 - Demon's Souls Platinum and God of War: Ghost of Sparta

Yeah... I finally did it. After two-and-a-half hours of farming, I got the Pure Bladestone from the Dual-Katana Black Skeleton with Pure Black World Tendency from 4-2. That was such a boring grind it's insane. It's not quite up there with my Insane in the Membrane achievement in WoW or the battle trophies in Star Ocean IV, but it's still stupid.

Pure Bladestone at last... That's right, I got you. #@*%ing thing.

Honestly, the developer that thought it was a good idea to make every ore easily obtainable from Crystal Lizards or looting and then make one ore that's a bitch to get needs slapping. I think if I play Dark Souls, I might wait a while. Whining aside, I enjoyed getting the platinum for Demon's Souls, except that last farm. Here's a pic of the trophy and my character (stupid sunlight, who put that there?)

Demon's Souls Platinum and a mugshot of Nireth. Cheese?

I was planning to watch a lot of Bamboo Blade today, but I felt like gaming a bit more so I only watched one episode. I started playing God of War: Ghost of Sparta, the fourth one I've played from my collection. I enjoyed it more than Chains of Olympus, but less than one and two. The Challenges of the Gods are a lot easier than the other games, but still make you think.

I've nearly got the platinum in Ghost of Sparta as well, I just need to finish the game on Spartan mode and that will be it. Maybe my quickest platinum ever, who knows.

My copy of Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD should be here next week, I ordered the limited edition hardback walkthrough as well, but apparently the publication date isn't until October 13th (??). Might have made more sense to release it with the game, but there must be a valid reason.

Well, I'm off to bed. My girlfriend wants to play games tomorrow, so I might not get to finish God of War, but I guess a day off is a good thing every now and then.