After listening to this week's Good Grief podcast, I firgured that I'd humor the blogosphere with my impressions of Scott Sharkey's recession gaming recommendation. This week, the game was Scarygirl, an in-browser flash game by Nathan Jurevicius. For those who would like to play along (and I encourage you to do so), the game can be played at scarygirl.com. Throughout the course of this week, I'll be playing the game one level at a time and I'll regurgitate my experiences every evening if I can.

For my first session, I was greeted with a lovely intro sequence reminiscient of Tim Burton films and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. The one-minute video looked amazing, but I honestly had no idea what the hell was going on. There were some weird looking bunnies, an octopus thing and some sort of shapeshifting head from a white guy. I really hope this intro is like something out of a Persona game, where I'll know exactly what the whole thing meant during a second playthrough. The music was excellent too, and it was well timed at the end when Scarygirl wakes up.

The whole intro video was a dream, and the first task was to find out what's haunting Scarygirl's dreams. It's a standard plot device, but I guess I'll roll with it. After numerous tutorial pop-ups, I headed out of Scarygirl's house and set myself on a quest to find Bunniguru. The epic journey was short, since Bunniguru was directly underneath Scarygirl's home. I hopped into the little grotto and asked the tea-loving bunny about the disembodied white man's head

The story and dialogue were presented in interesting ways, since there were neither text nor voiceovers. Instead, the dialogue is told through word bubbles with simplistic drawings (pictured below). The style reminded me a lot of LittleBigPlanet's popit menu system. Even after the brief exchange, I still had no idea what Scarygirl's dream was all about.

I won't dwell too much on the gameplay since it's pretty much a standard platformer. The arrow keys move Scarygirl and the spacebar activates objects and initiates a twirl attack. I do find it annoying how the spacebar or Enter key won't advance the in-game text boxes. I'm not lazy to the point where I hate moving my hand the few inches to the mouse, but the game's flow would be nicer if I didn't have to switch between the mouse and keyboard.

One of the things I liked was the unlocking of console games. Just like Retro Game Challenge, these bite-sized games are complete clones of classics. The first one I unlocked was a space shooter called F2042. There's not much going for it, but it has an oddly addictive quality to it despite not being able to upload the highest score to an online server. I think these small games are a great additions since they provide a small distraction that's different from the main game.

After a couple more hops and twirls, I completed the first level much quicker than I expected. I wasn't expecting much in terms of length--Scarygirl seems content with quality over quantity--but the first portion was ridiculously short (about ten to fifteen minutes). It's a good thing I'm playing a level per day, otherwise I'm sure I'd finish this game in one sitting.

Right now, I love the art style and despite the name Scarygirl, the main character seems cuter than the image I had floating in my head. Not cute as in, "I'd go out with her", but cute as in, "I'd love to have a plush doll of her". Anyway, check my blog tomorrow as I dive into the second level, Submersible!

In an attempt to get my PlayStation 3 trophy count up, I borrowed Fallout 3 from a friend of mine and quickly set myself on the same epic journey that I took five months ago on the PC. After making my character (a female whose name is "Player Name"), I blazed through a majority of the main storyline with absolutely no problems whatsoever. That is, until I hit level 14 and saved over my most recent file, preventing me from going back and getting the karma-related trophies. Begrudgingly, I started up a file I saved five hours ago and saved over my level 14 file. Then, I missed an avoidable bobblehead and I ended up starting my entire game over.

I didn't mind as much, since I didn't even bother to raise my intelligence right at the beginning of the game (highly recommended) so it was nice to rectify any mistakes I may have made. For my third playthrough, I'm almost caught up and I ended up doing way more things in a shorter amount of time. For one, I got Dogmeat, the trusty canine companion and I have to say he's not as great as people make him out to be. Sometimes I'll wander around only to see "Dogmeat has died." flash across the screen. Quite frankly, I think Dogmeat's annoying to have around.

What I should've done was tell him to wait at Vault 101, but I kept him around for the sake of having someone else wander the wastelands with me. Coincidentally, I didn't know that having a follower during the Waters of Life quest would cause a bug to surface. The PlayStation 3 version has been plagued with a large quantity of bugs, and I've encountered some of them myself. Any of the bugs I encountered previously (the G.O.A.T. not starting, skinless characters, various freezes) were all fixed with a simple restart.

However, what I'm experiencing right now may throw me over the edge into insanity.

I'm in the middle of an escort during which one of the characters should have talked to me and asked for medical assistance. When I got to the area that would prompt the conversation, the character with the inquiry just stayed in one spot. Furthermore, there are no dialogue options to progress the quest. So, I'm stuck in a room with absolutely no hope of getting the people where they need to be. I've tried killing them, pushing them and forcing them to flee in terror, but nothing's getting them out of the room. I even exited the area, went through all the other quests and returned only to find them in the same position.

I think I might take a break from Fallout 3. Then again, the weekend's just starting up.

After getting some screen protectors for my DSi and preparing myself mentally, I fished out my copy of The World Ends With You and set myself loose in the fictional take on Shibuya. In my previous playthrough, I got as far as the second week with Joshua and quickly disliked how his combat handled. I don't know if it was just me, but I felt like the difficulty became an insurmountable wall. I'm thinking it's just me, since my little sister was able to beat the game (and it's the only game I know of that she beat before me). Not that she's a bad player or anything like that, she just doesn't play games as often as me; still, I was of her in that gamer sort of way.

Anyway, I got acclimated to the world once again, and almost everything came back to me. I say almost because it took me a long time to cast a simple fire spell; and when the game threw Shiki into the mix, I quickly became a dilapidated fool scrambling for some semblance of coordination. Most of my previous playthrough was spent mashing buttons and scribbling, but I think I'm getting the hang of that whole green puck passing thing.

I should note once more that I'm playing on the DSi. There aren't any hardware changes that affect the gameplay, but the larger screens definitely help the text become more visible. There were some letters that crunched together, and that always bothered me (I hate it when font looks disjointed or weird). The graphics seem a bit sharper, although the world map character sprites seem somewhat jaggy. Hopefully I'll have time to compare how looks between my DSi and my little sister's DS Lite. Also, I think the whole experience feels smoother than I remember; it's either a placebo effect or me trying to justify my DSi purchase (which I'm still regretting).

Right now, I'm at the beginning of the third day. The first two days were fairly easy and I'm surprised how much of the plot I remembered even one year later. Knowing what will happen at the end of the week definitely buffers the plot's impact (especially what happens at the end of the second day) but the motion comic cutscenes are still nice to look at. Plus, I really like how the dynamic between Neku and Shiki works out; it's a stereotypical odd couple yet it feels right.

I didn't realize that the PP bonus sticker wasn't available from the get-go, so the two days I didn't play between sessions resulted in absolutely nothing; and I consciously avoided playing for that sole reason. I'm also miss how I could chain battles with one another. Having to scan and tap noise clusters one by one is starting to get on my nerves. I spent most of last night grinding before I decided it'd just be best to move on until I got the ability to fight more than one cluster of noise.

So far, I'm liking it as much as when I first popped it in a year ago. The first week will be a slow burn for me, since I think Shiki is a better partner than Joshua; I'll be relishing in Shiki's simplicity for as long as I can. That, and the fact that I'm still trying to find the perfect combo of pins to use with specific groupings of enemies. If you're actively following my blog, please stay tuned for more impressions as I try to beat this game to the end!

Over the long Labor Day weekend a general theme has been circulating around my head and it's been stuck there ever since listening to GFW Radio's August 27th, 2008 podcast. That theme is girls and their participation in the gaming community. To start off, this isn't an entire post dedicated to immature rants and generalizations about how girls suck at gaming and whatnot. Instead this is a careful analysis as to how I, an 18 year old Asian American from Chicago, perceives girls in the gaming blog community. I've played video games with girls and I can unashamedly say I've lost to them as well. I hope that you, the reader, can take my comments as maturely as I assume you can and please feel free to leave a comment should anything in this post strike a chord with you, good or bad.

Anyway, when my sister picked me up from campus, I whipped out my PSP and scrolled over to my RSS saves for GFW Radio. It had been a fairly long week and I was eagerly awaiting the contents of their most recent episode. A few minutes into the podcast (2:48, in case you want to listen in), 1UP Editor Shawn Elliot stated the following:

"Anything to do with women has been highly suspect on 1UP.com and this is because of, like... you know we have our most popular user blog section and it's always when you look down there, nine times out of ten it's a pretty smiling girl who just happens to be the most popular blog and you look and the blog's like, 'Hey guys!' and that's all it says, but there's three pictures. So, to make a point about that, people have started making fake accounts; they'd find someone's MySpace page where they can find three photos of the same girl then they would make a 1UP account thing and then watch how immediately they could get more friends within ten minutes than they did in their entire two years of posting and participating in the community."

I'm not usually one to take a sweeping generalization to heart, but I was curious and went to 1UP's Popular Blogs Section (see first image). Surely enough, the first blog on the list was of one A. Sullivan, a female user of 1UP.com. I noticed, as far as comments go, that her blog's twenty comments were a huge step up from the others' paltry three or four. A huge coincidence? I think not. But, as I clicked through A. Sullivan's previous blog entries, there was substance to most of them and there was at least some correlation to gaming. There wasn't anything I'd consider hard-hitting or controversial to popular gaming topics, but her posts were a lot better than high school drama and one sentence updates about how awesome the Warhammer beta is. I guess her photo gallery updates about PAX do warrant twelve comments, since they do depict some very lively moments... Wait a second, is that another PAX blog from David Ngo I see? It is!

When I clicked on it, I was greeted to another gallery of photos much like A. Sullivan's. The big difference between the two blogs was that David Ngo's pictures included detailed captions for each of them where A. Sullivan merely posted her pictures. In my honest opinion, I was much more enthralled by David Ngo's experience at PAX than A. Sullivan's; surely Mr. Ngo would have more people cheering his experiences through the comment box, right? Much to my dismay, I scrolled down to see only one comment greeting the extremely active 1UP community member. How is it that the better post, in my opinion, gets less recognition? I hypothesize that it's because A. Sullivan just happens to be a girl and that males are clingy to any doll-faced human with a uterus. Am I right? Maybe.

Bound not to leave my assumptions unchecked, I proceeded to other sites where blogs are recognized by their respective communities. So, off I went to Destructoid.com where the site programmers were gracious enough to put a "most popular" button on the side of the home page. Behind that button, Shawn Elliot's comments came true as the first thing on the list was a post titled "Introduction, Opps." by blogger NadjaRiot. I can't be all too assuming of male behavior, but as soon as I saw a portion of her cleavage loading at the top of the page, the thought that ran through my mind was a unified, "Dear God, so this is why the blog post got 239 comments!". I read the entirety of the post and could pretty much gather that my assumptions were partially right.

After reading the post, I naturally went to the comments to see what the users (mostly male) had to say. One user even called her out as a camwhore to which she surprisingly responded:

"camwhore? hmm okay. I could see lashing out at me if I was not into games and using this just to have men drool all over me however I am not. I have pics of me posted because I am proud to not be a total troll."

Her defense was completely true though; her collection effectively proves her dedication to gaming and previous posts even demonstrate her being upset that a game box's spine logo was printed upside-down. This made for an interesting conundrum. Both A. Sullivan and NadjaRiot were clearly dedicated to their gaming lifestyles, but so are many male gamers. From what I've seen, comments, for the most part, have been completely civil and encouraging of their gaming tastes. There honestly isn't a problem with having hardcore female gamers around. What truly concerns me is that many male gamers share the same views, but they're constantly brushed under the carpet because they don't have breasts or a cute face.

It's probably some psychological thing that's way over my head but whenever I read what someone has to write about a game, I'm reading a gamer's perspective, not one of a sexy model nor one of a prepubescent teenager. I don't really know how to close this rant, but the next time you're on a female gamer's blog, ask yourself why you're there. Are you there because you honestly care about what they have to say? Or are you there just to whack off to their profile picture?

P.S. Sorry to any female readers (if any) if I've offended you. My apologies will accompanied by a virtual cookie.

There was a day when I actively defended Nintendo's stance and while I understand their position is good for the future of the industry, it's hard to take an "I told you so" from Sony and Microsoft fanboys. I mean, I skipped school to reserve the damn thing; I remember hopping over the fence around my high school gleefully grinning over the fact that I'd be guaranteed a Wii on day one.

When I got the system, nothing could explain the intense amount joy I had when I popped in Trauma Center: Second Opinion and the even greater times I had playing Wii Sports with my friends and family. Those moments may be few and far in between, but it's those memories just happen to be much more memorable than killing some strangers in Call of Duty 4 or harvesting a Little Sister in Bioshock. This may sound sappy and a likely story, but it's the heartfelt truth.

I have a huge backlog of games dating back to two years ago, and I'm still picking up Tales of Vesperia and Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice later on this week. People can complain about the lack of game all they want, but personally I'm kind of thankful that Nintendo is, while unintentional, giving me some slight breathing room. Sure, we always want more hardcore games, but the question is do we really need them?

I'm not wholefully regretting my purchase of the console in the slightest sense, but I do regret buying into games such as Mario Kart Wii or Wii Fit. I've yet to pick up certain games like Boom Blox or No More Heroes, but as it stands, I'll be lending the console to my brother when he goes to college and will most likely be missing out on those. I like the direction Nintendo's going in with their inclusive scheme, I just wish it didn't consume the entirety of their being. But, if it'll take two to three years to get the games that I actually want, I'll gladly wait. So yes, I'm allowing Nintendo the chance to "pan" it out.