Persona 3

Hooray! My favorite impossible dungeon crawling rpg/high school sim where you shoot yourself in the head to use magical powers is being released again but with extra content and for a bargain price. No I'll finally be able to find a copy without spending a million dollars on ebay. Plus it'll add to my ever entertaining of games I own for consoles that I don't.

Why do I like JRPGs?

So in the course of wandering through one of the dungeons in Xenosaga Episode III, I kind of started wondering why I actually enjoy Japanese style RPGs. By that I mean Final Fantasies and their ilk, or pretty much any game where battles involve some variety of your the heroes on side of the screen with enemies on the other while you proceed to take turns attacking each other. I've played a fair share throughout my years including FF VI, IX, X and XII, Chrono Trigger, Skies of Arcadia (/love), Xenosaga 1-3, and Golden Sun.
I'll be the first to admit that the base game mechanics aren't exactly that compelling. Running around dungeons until something attacks you, and then proceeding to battle it using menu commands isn't exactly that exciting. This sentiment has certainly been told to me by a number of my friends that have watched me play these games at one point or another. The only time the battles really get interesting are when you fight bosses, where some actual strategy is needed in what commands you select. But the weird part of this is that I often get really angry at any boss that provides a significant challenge as I call it "unfair" and some such.
Is it the leveling of the characters and the gaining new flashy attacks? Progression of characters and gathering of loot is certainly something that appeals to me, if my two yearish addiction to World of Warcraft proved anything. The flashy attacks are certainly entertaining, but those are generally just a means to the end of being more effective in the ever so exciting battles. And the equipment you get in most JRPGs is generally mostly superficial stat boosting stuff that doesn't change how your character looks at all, and I think the vast difference gear had on character appearance is one of the best things WoW did to encourage gathering equipment.
I guess the thing that most JRPGs have going for them is there stories. Most tell a somewhat entertaining and interesting story, if not somewhat juvenile at points (I'm looking at you Skies of Arcadia, despite my love). Though if I was really just after a story I could watch a movie or more likely an anime, considering most JRPGs are an anime story plus a game.
So in conclusion, I don't really know why I like these games. Maybe it's that they are a more sedentary experience than most games. So I might just be lazy. Awesome.

Soundtrack Awesomeness

As a huge aficionado of videogame music, the soundtrack to Super Smash Bros Brawl is pretty much the greatest thing ever. Coming in at 300+ tracks and more than 16 hours of music it's pretty much a collection of almost every awesome song from games on Nintendo systems. It also includes remixes or orchestrations of a lot of the songs along with plenty in their original form. I highly highly encourage anyone that enjoys game music to track down a torrent of it.
The only bad thing is that it has horribly cluttered up my Itunes library. Since, for the torrent I found, the tracks sorted with a combination of a letter and a number before the title, the track names are horribly ugly. So in order to serve my OCD for this type of thing, I'm going to have to effectively go through all the songs in order to fix the titles and then add the proper artist for each song. The artist part is going to be especially awful since the songs come from a huge variety of games and have a wide wide variety of composers. At least this will give me something to do for the torturous weeks remaining until Brawl is finally released.
Another great soundtrack, just fyi, is the Mario Galaxy soundtrack. Really, it's sweet.

Guitar Hero: Whored Out Edition

The inevitable whoring out of the Guitar Hero franchise has begun. With the announcement of an Aerosmith only game, this is likely the start of Activision making as many versions of this franchise as possible. I've seen in places that they want to have up to four GH games this year. That's so not needed. Plus, does anyone really need that much Aerosmith? At least they are also including songs that from bands that toured with Aerosmith as well.
I can't help but feel that Harmonix approach with Rock Band is a much better way of going about the iteration of a music based franchise. Instead of releasing Rock Band: 80s and Rock Band: Insert Genre, their weekly drop of DLC allows them to cater to many musical tastes all within the same game. Instead of a whole game based on a band they can release a full album from that band. It makes their game a much more cohesive experience then having to pop in a different disc based on what song I want to play.

Valentine

I know it's from last year, but this is still the best cute but disturbing videogame valentine ever. Thanks VG Cats.

Something I missed

So one game I missed last year, due to various reasons was Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for the Wii. Well mainly, I missed it because there were like a million other games out last year. But due to the magic of winter break and the fact that I only brought my Wii home with me I have finally gotten a chance to play through it some more. I just finished up playing for a couple hours and I remembered just how much I enjoy Metroid Prime games. Corruption manages to take the great exploring sections of the first two games and combine it with some fairly engaging action segments thanks to the new control scheme that utilizes the Wii remote. I mean it's certainly not up to the standards of say, a Halo, but the combination lock-on + Wii remote aiming mechanic makes the combat into something unique that you can't really get on any other console.
If you have a Wii and haven't played Metroid you really should pick it up. Sure, that won't help shake the fact that the Wii is essentially a Nintendo player, but it should tide you over till Smash Brothers comes out. Or buy the other Wii game I'm playing, Zack and Wiki, because it really could use all the help it can get. Plus it's a great old style puzzle game that contains surprisingly gruesome cartoon death.

Red Alert 3

http://kotaku.com/355769/red-alert-3-is-so-so-real

Awesomeness. As long as it still has deliciously cheesy FMV ala C&C 3, I'm totally in.