Late last night I beat Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII! This game is definitely a must play for anyone who loves FF7. Not to give too much a way, this game follows the path of Zack as he makes his way through Soldier. This game does a great job at setting up the story of FF7. If you've played FF7 then you will know some of the major events of this game, but that wasn't all that happened before FF7. There is more than happens that helps explain some of the weird events in FF7, but there are a few things I still have questions about in this game. All the characters are done in the style of Advent Children, so all the FMVs look awesome. The game itself looks amazing, from the characters to the world of the game. This game has great camera control to add to the great 3D graphics.

The battle system is pretty cool, this is more of an action RPG, but still has a menu like control. You use materia and can build it up and also combine it to get better materia. You can't equip as much as you can in FF7, but that's because it's done differently. There is also a new system, the DMZ, that is sort of a random system that can put status effects on the battle to help you. You can also get limit breaks quite often to help out and there are also summons. You can't control when things happen too much, it seems more random. The cool thing is that if it works correctly and you get a limit break you can also have your HP/MP/AP refilled. And it can give you more than you should have temporarily. This helps out in battles a lot, but it also makes the game easier. Probably the only thing that could have been better was the side missions you can do. There are a ton of them, and I mean a ton, and you get lots of nice items and materia. Plus they are a great way to level up. But after doing more than I can keep track of they start getting boring. For the most part they are all the same, just different mission descriptions and areas. I think this could have been better if there were more to the missions than there is. This wasn't terribly challenging, but that's okay since the story makes up for any fault of the game. I thought it was all awesome and now need to play FF7 again!

The latest Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles game is one of the first Wii Ware titles. And it happened to come out on my birthday, May 12. So I had to pick it up, luckily I had some Wii points laying around. For how small the game needs to be to be downloaded to the Wii, I was surprised how good it looks. The world isn't the sharpest, but the characters look like they are right off of the Gamecube game. It also plays different from the original one. Instead of an action RPG it's more of a sim type game. You need to rebuild your kingdom to bring people back to it, so you send adventures to fight monsters or get resources. And you get to control how to build your kingdom. And you have to talk to people to find out what will make them happy there. It seems pretty fun from what I've played, but I wonder how much is in there. You can download content for a price, so I'm hoping the main game is all here and maybe you can get more things to build or something. It would be sort of dumb if you can only get so far without buying content since it was a small download. Oh well, I guess I'll have fun playing it until then or I finish my kingdom. Also the story seems fun and it takes place years after the first game. I think it should be cool and can't wait to check out other Wii Ware games.

Well it was finally upon me yesterday. I have now moved into another class of gamer, no longer the young avid gamer. But the older wiser gamer that still has lots of games to play. Or I might be going crazy. Anyway I decided to go on a vacation and plan to do some mobile gaming. But before that I've given myself a couple days to get caught up on all my gaming. I spent the day yesterday playing God of War on my PSP, and beat it this morning. So now I'm planning on picking up Final Fantasy: Crisis Core since I didn't get it for my birthday. Strangely this is the first birthday in a while I didn't get any new games. But I did get some cool stuff though. But now I have an excuse to head down to Gamestop to pick up a few titles I was waiting on.

Also I had forgot that yesterday was the release of Wii Ware. Which means the release of the new Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles game. I had just enough Wii points to pick it up (1500) and checked it out. It looks pretty fun, even thought it's not like the other games in the series. Well over all it was a great birthday in many ways and this should be a great weak off of work.

I wasn't sure if I was going to pick this up, despite the fact I really wanted to check it out. I mainly didn't want to pay $40 for a partial game, but the full version probably won't be out for another year. That was my dilema. But then I saw in a Sunday ad for a local store, they where giving out $10 gift cards with the purchase of this game. That would make it $30! I decided I could do that, even though that is still a lot for a extended demo. Oh well, I'm glad I picked it up. I've played a little and there seems to be a lot to do. There isn't a ton of tracks, but there are a good number of cars and they have a career mode with different events. Or you can play multiplayer too. This game had definately been improved since the HD demo last year. It looks even sharper and smoother. At some moments this game looks absolutely real. This is by far the best looking racing game yet, and one of the best on next-gen systems.

Okay I did this a couple week ago, but thought I'd post it for posterity. For the first time I got a message on my PS3 that I was out of hard drive space when I was trying to download the Turok demo. So I cleaned up some old demos and got to looking at the game data. I noticed that games like Heavenly Sword and Assassin's Creed take up at least 1.5GB each. If I started getting more PS3 games I might have to start managing this which would be a pain.

Well I started looking around and Seagate has an article on the website about upgrading the PS3 hard drive. They had a link the instructions that made it real easy. So I picked up a 120GB drive for $79.99. All you have to do it pop of the side hard drive door, take out one screw and pop out the hard drive enclosure. Replace the drive with the new one and put it back together. To backup your data you need a USB external hard drive which the PS3 will detect one you plug it in. You can run the backup utility in the system settings to backup the data to the USB drive. Then when you put the new drive in, the PS3 automatically formats it and then you run the restore function in the backup utility. The whole thing of backing up the hard drive, putting the new drive in, and restoring the data took less then a hour. So now I have a 120GB PS3!

Here's the link to the instructions I used.

Hope you had another great year! A lot of exciting things happened this year and I hope the next year is just as exciting. Nothing like bringing in the new year with a little Guitar Hero 3! My new stat totals for 2007 are up and I'm thinking of enhancing the stats a little. Well time to start year 3!

Well after weeks of getting ready with decorating and shopping, Christmas has finally come and gone once again. And now that it's over, it's time to play with all the new stuff I got. The weird thing is I didn't really get the number of games I have in the past, I only got 2 games. But that's okay, it's still a good Christmas for gaming. The reason being is my new PlayStation Portable my wife gave me, along with Final Fantasy Tactics. And I also received the Final Fantasy Anniversary Edition from friends. I also got some gift cards which I've already used for some PSP accessories, a new case and a 4GB memory stick. I also was able to get Silent Hill Origins from Gamestop for free! And it was the last one they had. So now I'm ready for some all out PSP gaming. And since I don't have to go back to work till the new year, I've got plenty of time to break it in!

I've decided I'm not really into the whole blogging thing. This is sort of what I've tried to do with my game impressions. But I realized I don't have time to sit and type out a long comment about a game (or I don't want to), and sometimes I just want to add short thoughts on the good and bad aspects of a game. So that is why I came up with Pros/Cons section for games. Here I can add quick thoughts I have and don't have to find the time to write a long comment. I still will leave comments from time to time, and anyone can comment on my comments. But I think this will be a cooler quicker way to relay my main thoughts of the games I play and give me more time to play them.

I now know the fun and addiction that is Guitar Hero. I haven't really played any of these games before this week. I got a rental of Guitar Hero 3 for the XBOX360 and have become consumed by it. I haven't touched any of my other games. This game has always looked fun, and I've almost bought it a few times. But now that I've played it, my wife and I have almost decided to pick it up. Playing this game was a bit challenging at first, mainly getting use to the guitar controller. But I was surprised I did pretty okay my first time. I got at least 70% on it. I didn't realize you could get booed of stage at first. I guess I have pretty good hand eye coordination from all the games I play. I've played through this on easy and am now trying it on medium. Now my wife and I are trying to get better and get used to more than the first three buttons on songs. It's now more challenging but still a ton of fun. The 360 has pretty sweet graphics and great sound, but for a game like this you don't need awesome graphics since you pay more attention to the bar of notes you play. Anyway I can't wait to be one of those guys in the store wowing everyone with their awesome gaming guitar skills!

Super Mario Galaxy is the latest game I've picked up for the Wii. I haven't had anything to really play on the Wii for a while, except for my Wii Sports fitness regimen. Mario Galaxy looks like it'll be another awesome title in the Mario series. when I first saw early movies of the game play it seemed a little weird. But after playing it, I think it's a lot more like a Mario game than Mario Sunshine was. It reminds me more of Mario 64, except you are playing across planets in space. It seems weird that you could have a Mario level across planets, but it works quite well. Most levels (or galaxies) consist of planets that you launch across to do stuff. And like past Mario games the galaxies have multiple things to do so you can play through them more than once. one cool thing is that all planets have their own gravity so you can run around the whole planet. so at times when you think you'll fall off you just end up on the other side. It can get confusing when you have to fight enemies or get past obstacles on the bottom of a planet where you are upside down. There are also galaxies where you can fall off levels to your demise, but these are more like classic Mario levels than the planet levels. The game play is really fun and you can do all the things Mario has always done. Plus there are some new things. There isn't a ton of motion in the game, pretty much you just shake the Wiimote to spin and use the pointer at times. The rest is played with the nunchuck stick and the A button.

The game looks great and runs awesome. The only think I thought could be better was Mario character model. Yeah it looks the same as Mario Sunshine, but I thought he might have a little more detail. The character faces seem better, but after seeing how he looks on Smash Brother Brawl screens. I though they might use the same detailed model. which the only difference is his overalls look like blue jeans instead of just being blue. Anyway this is pretty much a useless point as the game is awesome and a ton of fun. And it seems like it'll keep me busy for a little while.