So...I decided to put down Legaia 2: Duel Saga for a bit, and instead, play some MLB 09: The Show. I'll be blogging about my MLB 09 Road to the Show career, already in progress as a centerfielder in the White Sox organization, currently at AA Birmingham. Fun! Right now I'm hitting .400 with 1 HR, 9 RBI and a slugging percentage of .520, and I've just been named the starting CF for my team.

Well, I played some of this game, got to level 3. The game is...not great. Animations are a little cheesy...a lot cheesy...straight-up dumb. Combat is pretty simple, turn-based, and you use your art blocks to input directions for combat. Different combos of right,left,up,down produce different moves, or "arts". Some arts add AP, which are used for "Super Arts", more powerful moves that drain AP. You could probably figure out some of the Normal Arts just by guessing, like I did, though they teach you one Normal Art and one Super Art. So far, story has not developed much, my char (TheRza) is a new member of the Vigilance Corps, which patrols the forest (Hunter's Wood) near your home village, Nohl. Nohl is supported by this magic stone thing that provides water, which I bet is important. So far, it is a lackluster game, but maybe it gets better.

So...after watching Vinny and Jeff play Persona 4 and Devil Summoner 2, I thought, hey, I should play a RPG too. So I look through my PS2 games, and the only true RPG I find is Legaia 2: Duel Saga. Now..I barely remember buying this game (on the cheap at Best Buy), and I barely remember playing parts of it. But, what I do remember, is that it had AP and Art blocks in combat, which, in my mind, makes it great. So I just started the game, and I'll update my playthrough occasionally. Also...has anyone here played this game? Any hot pro tips before I go screw everything up?

Quick update from 1 min of playtime: It is an RPG, it has dialog trees.

SECOND UPDATE: Dude has a chest tattoo.

So, I've been busy, but I still have whole seasons to catch up before I get to where I am currently in the game. So, to recap, I take my high-flying uptempo offense to Pepperdine. The first season I am there, I have 5 scholarships to dish out. However, I am in Cali, so I have great access to a wide range of quality players. I was thinking at first I would just target 4 and 3 stars and go for a solid class to build on. However, things began to break well for me, and I somehow ended up recruiting 2 5-stars, 2 4-stars and a solid 3-star player. Monster recruiting class, ended up being a top-20 class. We manage to string together another 20 win season and make the dance, but we flame out quick. The next year we welcome our talented class to replace our seniors. They're developing, but we put together another 20 win season and a March Madness trip, pulling in a solid 4 person recruiting class full of 4-star players. After the season, the job carousel opens up, and Duke comes calling! It's hard to refuse one of the most prestigious basketball colleges in the country, so I say adios to Pepperdine (I left it with a solid foundation, they were a top 10 team for the next two years) and take my show to Tobacco Road in North Carolina.

College Hoops 2k8, good times to be had. So I decided, hey, I like fun-time basketball, who doesn't. What's fun-time basketball? For me, fun-time basketball is fast-paced action, 24/7 full court press, tight D, fast breaks, athleticism galore, and a healthy dose of the 3-ball. The real-world manifestation of fun-time basketball is the Virginia Military Institute, holders of the highest-scoring offense in the nation and the philosophy of shooting the ball before they turn it over. Luckily, this applies in the game too! So I take control of VMI in Career mode, give my coach, Paris Yarbrough, a nice snazzy black suit with a team-color tie. Keep it classy, right? (On a tangential note,  last week at the big rivalry game at our college, the opposing coach was wearing khakis with a blazer, and a shirt that wasn't even tucked in. We didn't let him hear the end of it.) Dump all my initial points into recruiting, because, ya know, gotta bring in the talent. Start off my season, adjust the schedule to put in a little more fluff, and start on simming and recruiting. I usually always sim the small-school seasons because it really is just a stepping stone to a bigger job. The high-energy, high-flying tactics produce lots of points and a good amount of wins, and we manage to win the conference and pull in 20 wins. This is important, because we get points in the offseason for accomplishing these goals, and we can improve our coach with them. Get trashed in the NCAAs, so no big deal. We can't leave our job yet for greener pastures, since you have to be there for two years before looking at the coaching carousel. Next year, only graduate one player, so we roll again, 20 wins again, NCAA tournament again, get smacked down again. But, we have some job offers. It looks like we are headed for Boise St., but Connecticut pulls in a mid-major coach and we get to step in to head the Pepperdine Waves. This is absolutely as good of a situation as possible, we step into a situation where we don't lose too much, have a lot of rising seniors, so we get to bring in a full recruiting class of players who fit our system (Fast, athletic players, or sweet-shooting players, or better, a combination of the two. Lots of SFs). Furthermore, Pepperdine is in California, and with UCLA mostly occupied with the very best national recruits, we only have to fight off USC and Stanford for the good local recruits. More to come next post!

Right now, I'm playing student, which is fun. Specifically, playing history student, which is just wonderful. But besides that, the games I'm playing really can be expressed as the game I'm playing, and that is College Hoops 2k8. Let's just lay it out there: I love college basketball. L-O-V-E like the sculpture in Philly. As 50 said eloquently once, I love you like a fat kid loves cake, college basketball. I lud it. So, given this torrid love affair I have with the sport, its only logical that knee deep into college basketball season, I'm playing a college basketball game exclusively. The allure of College Hoops 2k8 is the super-deep Dynasty mode. So deep, it's almost too much. So in it, there are two modes, Open, where you pick any team you want to and play out a career, or Career, where you have to start out on a small-conference team and with shitty attributes as a coach, and work your way up the ladder, earning jobs at bigger schools and improving your coaching stats. Pretty cool, right? So what makes it almost too much? The recruiting. Oh, the recruiting, how I hate/love you. On one hand, it is incredibly deep, 5 years' worth of recruits in the system, from Freshmen to Junior College players. You have points to spend to try to attract the players you want to your school, and as you go to bigger schools, you have more points. There are scouting reports for each of the players, and also the game attached numerical rankings, such as the #20 overall player/#5 shooting guard, and also star classification, from 1 to 5 stars. So, the challenge is recruiting players who you actually have a chance to pull in, while trying to get the best possible players who fit your system. It just sometimes becomes too much to keep track of, especially when you are trying to fill 4 scholarships while targetting the junior class to set yourself up for the next year. That being said, it is absolutely satisfying to pull in highly-rated recruits, or to find diamonds in the rough that come out way better than they were rated. Location also plays a factor in the recruiting, as often, recruits like to stay near to home. So places that are recruiting hotspots (California, New York City, Texas) can have an advantage sometimes, though the very best recruits often don't care how far they have to go, they like to play for the best programs. And then ontop of that, you have the actual gameplay, which is cheesey gooey delicious college basketball at its finest, at least as good as it has ever been. And yes, I've compared this to EA's March Madness, and March Madness is neither compelling gameplay-wise or simulation-wise. So, I think, in the next few posts I will relate to you my experiences in my latest dynasty in the game.

It is very heartening to see from the comments that for every one person who went "wut, dead space got a 5 and this is only a 4? Disappointed", there are 4 or 5 people who made it clear in their comments that they actually read the review closely, irregardless of their opinion on it.

I'm sure this has been discussed to death somewhere, but what is with the fixation on scores for reviews? Does a game you like only getting 4 stars out 5 instead of 5 make it worse for you? You like the game, as far as I am concerned, that is good enough for you. What is so much more important is the actual review, what is written about the game, which is WAY more telling than some number. So please, for goodness sake, read the review, ignore the score. Otherwise, please don't let the number cause indignation, each reviewer is different, and reviews are in nature subjective.

Edit: Furthermore, if you react with "I disagree with your review", it would be good if you referred to the part of the review you disagreed with, if you really disagreed with. Otherwise, I would be compelled to conclude that you disagree with the score on a superficial level.

This is mostly for myself, since I can't imagine many people would be too interested, but here's what I hope to be doing regarding Giant Bomb. I want to take care of the games that I have that I think I can add to. The Dynasty Warriors franchise, Smash Court Tennis, some other ones that aren't mainstream games necessarily, but need info on them anyway.  I haven't attempted any big full-page edits so far, but hopefully my writing skills will kick in somewhere and I can put some coherent pages together.

I love the design of this site, seems to me to be very clean. I love that there is such a dedication to providing as much information to the user as possible.