I'm not around enough to do much of anything and I apologize for that, I've been speaking to Aldrasio, who would like to replace me as the punching bag for questions such as, "Why isn't Aldrasio stepping right now?" He does plan on coming back at one point or another, possibly soon, but needs to readjust to the making of step patterns as he has apparently been spending his time making string patterns for Guitar Hero. "From focussing on one specific aspect of a song to focussing on everything again." As he put it.

I've been having a bit of a downfall on new gaming... I love Rock Band, but I've finally played Crackdown, and even though I was delighted at its simplicity and how easy it was to have pure, unadulterated fun at the behest of few or no brain cells. But I've returned from the coil as the game became purely about completing the list of achievements which I actually have no care for. The realization that I'm coming to is that I'm so very tired of the lack of creativity in games as of late, or hell honestly, for a long time. I went into my thought vault trying to piece together some days of olde in the world of video gaming, picking out some things that I remembered to be incredibly creative, which led first and foremost to the Cerebral Bore of Turok 2 or the (forgot the name) black hole generating 'ultimate weapon' of the third game. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the games themselves are amazing, Turok 2 was average at best as was the first one, while the third title was outright obnoxious. What I'm trying to point out is the more creative side of those titles and the fact is that other than the fact that FPS had certainly been done before, everything was original from the ground up as far as I can remember. And at least things like that kept it a bit interesting as far as I was concerned... but you don't see that type of thing anymore, you see the same blarg over and over again. Not really sure where I was headed with that, but there you go, summary: I miss creativity in games.

It is currently 3:09am and I've got a friend over who is currently playing Rock Band behind me, so I'm a bit distracted from my usually quite scrambled thought pattern, so now it's even further scattered. Not a problem since Rock Band is actually the next topic of choice. I've gone on a bit of a download frenzy once before and we came up with some good material for the game. For instance Last Train to Clarksville is incredibly fun, Sprode is very interesting (and bizare on bass), Still Alive (free download, by the way) falls under that category as well. But tonight was rather special as far as download entertainment is concerned because we downloaded an album by The Cars and a pack of songs by Oasis... both are ORGASMICLY fun. Also highly recommended is "...And Justice for All" by Metalica. I can't really say that I would recommend the other two Metalica songs in that pack, or the Earache Thrash set (or whatever the hell it's called).

Given that it is very past midnight, it is technically Thursday right now, which means A-Kon will be starting tomorrow. I'll be attending but there will be no strong VirInPro presence this year, and by not strong I mean it'll probably only be me and I won't be doing anything VirInPro related that I can think of at this particular time. There was an idea about metal pads and the putting together of a StepMania setup and such but I'm not up for it nor can I currently afford it. I'll be looking for whatever NGNT4 action I can find, which will probably be the only vs. video game activity I'll be up for as the "competitive" side of video gaming in Texas is actually the "talk as much shit as possible" side of Texas. I'd love to find a certain type of video game in which being "owned" is not synonymous with being "a pig fucking bitch", which brings me back to NGNT4, in which I've been called nothing worse than "a button masher" which was the obvious desparate infraction of a beaten player. I simply don't understand why the grouping in this area, or maybe it's a widespread thing and I'm not knowledgeable about the rest of the world in this regard, but I do not get the concept that being defeated in a video game is comparable to the end of the world or beating someone else as being the start of a new one. AS SUCH, I'll be avoiding any Tekken, as that is the very bane of all that is shit talkery, I may or may not involve myself in the playing of Rock Band or GH3 (we'll see).

"Listen... when you're playing these games, have fun. Just don't be a dick, okay?" ~Wil Wheaton