Attention Deficit Gamer - The Roundup

In my absence from posting I celebrated my 28th birthday, and every year I feel the weight of adult responsibility grow and grow. Its seems harder to justify the time spent playing video games at home when there are a hundred things in the back of your mind; upcoming work commitments, bills, car problems, what have you. Luckily, I still have enough common sense to put all that crap on the back burner and lose myself in some sweet, sweet gaming. And with a whopping haul over the birthday and some good finds locally, it's been a good month. I finally tackled a couple of games that were way overdue to by played and completed within a decent timeframe.

Check out my impressions after the jump:

My triumphant return...

Looking back it's been quite awhile since my last post. I guess it's been an odd combination of laziness and... busy-ness(?). In retrospect that doesn't make a lick of sense. Oh well.

Last night was the midnight release of Gears of War 3. I try not to make a habit of attending these affairs, as they tend to draw out the "cream of the crop" of gamers. Now I've played my share of online deathmatches against the gaming community, and I've since made it policy mute all voice chat to avoid listening to the ridiculous comments uttered by some of the dumbest people on the planet. And for some reason, on this night, heading to a public place where these exact people are gathered at once seemed like a good idea.

Stray Sheep Make Great Threads

Taking some time to get back into an old hobby, I finally made another custom video game t-shirt. Years ago I made a ton of shirts using good ol' Photoshop and iron-on transfers, but the quality of the transfer was never that great. Enough washes and the image loses some color and starts cracking. Kind of like those "retro" shirts you see at every mall kiosk, minus the irony. Luckily my wife came across a simple method for stenciling images on plain t-shirts, which we tested a few months ago. Itching for a new design, I knocked this out last night.

I wasn't sure how familiar the image would be, but I really dug the style behind Catherine for Xbox 360 and PS3. The demo was interesting and the game is definitely on my backlog. Once I found a nice wallpaper of the main character, Vincent, all it took was some photoshopping help (thanks Jen!) and a bit of patience with applying the fabric paint. A couple coats later and my new shirt is already enhancing my clearly Herculean physique. I have some more ideas lined up that I can hopefully have ready to show off soon.

-D

Lost Levels IV - I Ran Out of Clever Names Edition

Hey folks, I'm back with more recent finds from local shops. Nothing too fancy, just a bit of nostalgic gaming.  Although I don't know how much fun these games are considering I have yet to pick up an old Sega Genesis or 32X add-on for that matter. Maybe I should stick to classic Saturn games until then. Check out the pics after the jump.

Package from Nintendo Makes My Friday

In the mailbox this afternoon I received a notice from USPS informing me a package had been left at my leasing office. A short walk later I'm back at home with this monster flat envelope (that's my 3DS for scale, hint hint). I knew what was contained inside the minute I saw the package and the Nintendo of America return sticker, so behold, my first ever unboxing post.

Attention Deficit Gamer - IN FUTURISTIC THREE-DEE!

Well, not really 3D.

Netflix just came out on the Nintendo 3DS last week as part of an update to the eShop. Naturally there is some skepticism about the service running on the system, and rightfully so. This isn't a revolutionary update to the handheld, but considering we're talking about the entire Netflix instant catalog running on a handheld without having to pay for an additional data, I'll take it. Here's my take:

Lost Levels III - PC Edition

Nothing gets me excited like a trip back home to my parent's house. I don't travel home too frequently and never for more than a couple days at a time. Besides seeing the folks and reminiscing about the old neighborhood, I usually find some old hidden gems tucked away in my room (or my brother's room for that matter). Recently I collected a nice haul of old PC games dating back to old 5.25" floppy disks all the way up to CD games. I grabbed the best of the bunch, leaving some of the older, beat up boxes behind. I'll try to keep the words to a minimum and let you soak in the glory of PC history.