March 17th to 22nd
Gamerscore: 8010(+100)
Games Played: Halo Wars (X360), The World Ends With You (NDS)

I got Halo Wars, and it's awesome! I played a bit of the campaign (about four missions), and it's... okay. But the multiplayer is awesome! I played some skirmishes with my friends, and just now we went online for a 3v3 battle, which we won. We built a huge army and launched a coordinated attack, which is key to victory. We wiped out all the enemy bases with one wave. There was a tight spot near the end where one player (using Professor Anders) launched a counter offenses with HAWKs and two Vultures, but my Scarabs and Vampires repelled it.

Oops. Didn't mean to give you a play-by-play of our match. Anyways, great game, ignore GameSpot. Beautiful graphics and sounds, controls are solid, and excellent multiplayer, although I wish there were more modes to play.

I also beat TWEWY on my trip. What a great game. The last boss was brutal, but I finally beat him after several attempts. I think the stuff you unlock after beating the game is great, the ability to replay earlier chapters and the bonus story were a nice touch.

Two games that should be played by everyone.

Oh, and I got into the school I went to !

Short one today, guys. I just got back from the ski hill and am heading right off again, down to Vancouver/Victoria to visit cousins and do an interview at a school I'm looking at.

Anyways.

March 1st to March 17th
Gamerscore: 7910(+50)
Games Played: Halo 3 (X360), Rock Band 2 (X360), Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (NDS), The World Ends With You (NDS)

• Got the Vidmaster Challenge: Annual achievement in Halo 3 (completing last level on Legendary, iron on, in Ghosts, 4 person co-op). Damn, that's a b****
• Fire Emblem DS is meh, not nearly as good as the GBA ones
• World Ends I'm on Week 3, Day 4. Made some good progress this weekend, and am redicovering my love for that game. It needs it. When I popped it in on Friday it said I hadn't played it for 202 days (!)

• Check out this video, I saw this performed live at the Festival last weekend and it was amazing. Bobby McFerrin - Drive
• My Fire Emble: Shadow Dragon review is up on GameFocus. Check it out.
• Speaking of GameFocus, we've got something cool coming up: a chance to play Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts with some guys from Rare. Details.
• I haven't even turned on my Xbox in a week or so. Way too busy with school and GameFocus stuff. Hopefully I'll get to play some soon.
• I really like this "bullet-point blogging"

Months of January and February 2009
Gamerscore: 7860(+1730)
Games Played: Eternal Sonata (X360), Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (NDS), NHL 09 (X360), Gears of War 2 (X360)

Hey, guys. It's been a while. Amazingly, this is my first "weekly" blog of 2009.

Obviously I played many games these past two months, but the ones above were my main addictions. Eternal Sonata was my mainstay on the Xbox, and I'm really enjoying it. I picked it up for $20 a few months back, and that was a really sweet deal. The game is absolutely gorgeous. The battle system does some interesting things that, for the most part, pan out. I'm going to do a review for this one when I finish it.

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon is something I received last Monday from GameFocus.ca. I didn't get to play it as much as I would have liked this weekend (I have to do a review by tommorrow), but I've got enough to go off of. I'll play a bit more today, review it, and get you a link tommorrow or Tuesday.

I got back in to NHL 09. In Be A Pro I FINALLY made it to the NHL! You would think that netting 91 points in your Rookie season would warrent a call-up to the big leagues, but apparently not. Maybe I'm playing on too high a difficulty.

Finally, there's Gears 2. I beat the campaign on hardcore a while back and shelved it after experiencing the broken multiplayer. Recently a good friend of mine got the game and encouraged me to hit him up with some Horde mode. I blew off the dust and gave it another go. Surprise, surprise: I really enjoyed it! We're playing quite a bit of Horde now, and it's a blast. The online has had a lot of its problems fixed, which is excellent. It's much more enjoyable now, and I'm definitely seeing some improvement in my play.

Just a short onje today. I have some homework to catch up on, since I missed a couple days of school last week for the jazz festival. We saw Wally Gator Watson, a really cool drummer, but the highlight was Bobby McFerrin, whom you probably know as the singer of the song "Don't Worry, Be Happy".

The festival was okay. It wasn't as good as last year, though.

Four weeks ago I acquired a buckle fracture on my radius while carving down a mountain on a smooth, black plank. In layman's terms, I broke my wrist snowboarding. I had a cast on for three-and-a-half weeks, but now it's gone! I'm free! I can type more than 30 wpm, which means I feel confident enough to get back to updating my blog! Lucky you guys!

My gaming remained largely unaffected throughout my healing. I played Fallout 3, NHL 09, and Halo 3 mostly. Fallout 3 is much, much better than I posted in my first impressions. I'm level 17 and am really embracing the experience, doing lots of side-quests, exploration, and leveling up my stats thoughtfully, not randomly. Combat is still "eh, whatev" for me, but overall the game is very good and one that everyone should play.

I've also played a considerable amount of NHL 09, balancing my time between Be A Pro, Dynasty mode, and online. When I got the game back in September, I didn't play it a whole lot (Rock Band 2 took up most of my time), so I'm glad that I was able to get back into it. Be A Pro is a lot of fun, but I'm having a hard time getting into the NHL (despite ending my Rookie season 15 points ahead of everybody else in the league). Ah well; I shall persevere.

Halo 3 is still as fun as ever. There are so many things you can do. I've had fun Forging with my friends, playing online, and doing my favourite sections of the campaign in co-op (double Scarab battle, anyone?). Great game.

What else... ah! I've started doing some work at GameFocus for real now. My first review went up shortly after I broke my wrist (see it here). I'm going to get another game soon, so things are going well. I hope to review Halo Wars, but we'll see how that goes.

As far as school goes, semester one has ended. This week was exams, and I'm feeling pretty confident about the ones I did. All were relatively easy, which is always a good thing. This semester I start English, Social Studies, Mathematics, and P.E. It's going to be a bit tougher, I think, but I'm glad to be finished Science. Not because I don't like the course, I just had a horrible teacher.

My wrist is still kind of sore. Not because it hasn't healed fully, but because it's stiff. It's been held in the same position for more than three weeks: my joints are still getting warmed up.

For this reason (not because I'm lazy or anything), I'm going to stop here for the night. Tommorrow I'll do my awards for 2008 and my Most Anticipated Games of '09.

To take a page out of Three Dog's book, "Thanks for listening, children!"