Welcome to hell!!!

-Hey hey everybody. Damn these past couple weeks have been freaking busy. Spare time has been very minimal. Between working full time and going to class half time I also had to go out of town for a few days last week and finally get vehicle's tail light fixed, along with a bunch of other stuff going on I'll get to below, but yeah....life has been hella busy, and at least with that I'm not getting bored.

-However, with everything going on I haven't been able to get much time to get into 4 of the 9 holiday reserve games that came in within 2 weeks of each other. I'm talking about Eternal Sonata, Halo 3, NBA 2K8, and Flatout: Ultimate Carnage. I still didn't finish the fight yet, and am still didn't make progress since my last blog in Halo 3, did get a chance to play just a little bit of multiplayer, and that was about it, which is very similar to Halo 2, but still a lot of fun. Speaking of Halo 2, the last batch of multiplayer maps they released several months ago recently went free, so if any of you still want those make sure hop on Live and get them while you can.

I did play FlatOut for about a half hour before I went to class today and so far it feels exactly the same as last year's game, I gotta hook it up to my HDTV though to see if there is a significant leap in graphics though, which I am very hoping for. Other than playing demos before their releases, I have yet to start up the actual retail copies of NBA 2K8, and Eternal Sonata. Longtime blog readers will recall that I played 2K3 and 2K5 to death with friends, so hopefully this will be a much awaited return to form.

-I finally bought a better mic for podcast recording, the Shure PG48, and the difference is night and day, I just used it in the latest podcast of mine that went up earlier today, which was a baseball videogame retrospective, and found a very knowledgable baseball fan to cohost. We didn't necessarily cover every single baseball game ever made, just the ones we played and have memories of, but we did cover a lot of ground I felt all the way back to Baseball on the Atari and Intellivision to the 16-bit awesomeness of Griffey and World Series Baseball to the latest stuff from Sony and 2K Sports.

-Speaking of the Intellivision, I saw Intellivision Live for the PS2 at the store for $10, and was contemplating picking it up. I remember reading the Intellivision had far better sports games than the 2600, I loved the Real Sports line by Atari and heard the Intellivision games were way better than that, at least for the time anyways. Anyone ever play those and can give a recommendation?

-So I spent most of my days off this week hanging out with Matt. On Wendesday Chris came over and Matt was going to come over to and we were going to record part one of hopefully a several part mega-retrospective on RPGs. Both those guys are huge RPG fans and I just knew they were going to be some awesome shows, and just like the wrestling show it was a long time in the making with lots of show notes researched on my part trying to make sure to cover a lot of games. Unfortunately fate made it not to be, as on the way over Matt's serpentine belt went kapuut, and he had to spend the 2 hours getting it replaced, he still managed to come over for a little while and while we didn't have the time to record the show I wanted anymore, I did just record 12 minutes of them just randomly coversing about some games.

I had to crash early Wendesday night because I met up with Matt and Danielle and a few of their coworkers to help them on their move to Fargo that day. Very busy day as a met up with them at 8:30, got the Uhaul not to long after and spent until about noon loading it up. Matt asked me to drive the Uhaul down which I had no qualms with since I was sort of familiar driving them a couple of times before some years back. Cruising across town in humongous Uhaul = awesomeness. We got to Fargo and started unloading around 2:30, and finally finished up and got the Uhaul back just in time before the one in Fargo closed up for the day at 5. Then we got some grub and checked up some stores, and I stayed and helped unpack to around 10pm...so all in all a very accomplishing day. Matt & Danielle just got a very killer place in Fargo, and I told them I will probably join them down there 2-3 years down the line once I'm done with classes. I am totally down for a change of scenery after being in Forks for all my life.

-Last Friday, Dick and Dave came over to watch the Ring of Honor PPV. Yes, the little indy promotion that could, Ring of Honor is now on a bi-monthly PPV schedule, and man did this one, called Driven, kicked major ass. It was only 2 hours long, but it was filled with the best wrestling in the past several months I have seen on RAW, Smackdown, and ECW combined. The Briscoe Brothers match was amazing, just like all their other ones, so was Matt Sydal/Cladio Castagnoli match, and finally the main event between Nigel McGuiness and Bryan Danielson just tore the roof off, the headbutts of fury finish was one of the most innovative spots I have seen in a while. Damn good PPV, they got kickass DVDs on sale all the time at their site rohwrestling.com, which I highly recommend everyone at least check out a few. After the PPV I defended my amazing foam belt N64 No Mercy Championship against Dave, and Dave dominated for a long time too, but in the end I managed squeek out a victory and have my 2nd successful defense. Then Dave and Dick fought to determine the #1 contender, and Dave earned another future shot. After that we recorded part 2 of the wrestling videogame retrospective which should be going up within a few days.

-So after having a very promising start of 2-0, the Niners have now fell to 2-2 with star Tight End, Vernon Davis out for a few weeks and another Alex Smith out with a separated shoulder for what could be either just a few weeks or the entire season depending on the severity of the shoulder! Damn you Seahawks! Damn you team for filling me with so much false hope! Oh well.......Dilf didn't look too good in his return to action, but other older QBs are having a return to form this year like Jeff Garcia, Brett Favre, and even Kurt Warner, so I'm expecting grand things next week Dilfer! Return to your Super Bowl winning ways!

-So did you hear the great news? Cena got a mega-complete tear of his pectoral muscle against Kennedy on RAW and will be out for 6-12 months! I don't mean this in an offensive way, but about damn time! I wish him the best recovery and all and it was mega guts on his part for finishing the match and taking the beatdown from Orton, but it will give a much needed breath of fresh air to the main event scene, Cena has held the belt for all but 3 months of the past 2 and a half years, and he has caused me some major yawners in many main events. His copout of a match at the Unforgiven PPV is a reason why I'm skipping out on the No Mercy PPV.

In other wrestling happening, Marcus Cor Von (also known as Monty Brown in TNA) was released from WWE last week after needing a lot of time off to take care of family issues at home. Too bad, I think his character was really starting to take off in ECW. I happened to run across his TNA figure the other day, which was on clearence for just $4 and decided to nab it up.

- Wrestling Videogame Retrospective Podcast - right click, save as

I've been meaning to do a podcast on this forever, and I had the group of guys in mind to do this with, but our crazy work schedules just postponed it from happening for months until last weekend. So here it is, part one of our wrestling videogame retrospective. We cover everything from Pro Wrestling on NES through the awesome N64 wrestling games. We will try and get to do part 2 sometime within the next month....hopefully. Please excuse minor audio problems, as by having 4 people gather around 1 mic, one persone ended up sitting kind of a bit aways from the mic and his audio levels aren't all that high, but I usually repeated what he said to make sure it came across. Enjoy!

-Tiz all I got now, latez!