As my previous (or next, depending on how you read these) post indicated, I’ve got a lot of things planned for this year. Some of them involve gaming and my gaming lounge, some don’t. Because it is mostly for my benefit, the list can be found after the jump.

MINIMALIST GAME COVERS
A super classy, meticulously edited collection of minimalist covers for my entire gaming collection.

WALL ART FOR MY HOME
I know I want a roller coaster theme in my bedroom, because we went to Cedar Point for our honeymoon. I’d like to create something for the gaming loft too but I dunno what, and then I need to hang all the stuff I already have.

DESIGN T-SHIRTS
Something I’ve always wanted to do, and with the help of CafePress it might just be possible.

PHOTO ALBUM of GREETING CARDS
I want to make an archive of all the cards I have, some from childhood still but mostly from my wedding. I’d like to take a photo of the outside and inside of all of them, and then… throw them away! but keep the memories safe in some gigantic digital folder of cards.

SLIPCOVERS FOR SECTIONAL
I’d like to make individual slip covers for each segment of my new white sectional couch, because I fear if I don’t, it won’t be white for long. But that’s hella fabric, so we’ll see.

VIDEO GAME BLANKET
In all caps it seems kinda lame, but I have plenty of video game t-shirts I’ve acquired over two years at GameStop, and because they are all too large to wear, I intend to make a “big one” sized blanket out of them to go with my “big one” sized lovesac (a foam filled bean bag the size of a three seat couch).

SKYLINE WALL CURTAIN
Even though I want to make new covers for my cases to make them more appealing, my old plan to deal with this was a full length curtain on a track. For the fabric, I’m actually using a shower curtain…. it’s a really nice looking shower curtain, I promise. It’s going to take three of them, and I sill have to add fabric to it to make it long enough. But! the shower curtains were only 15 each for essentially 2 yards of fabric, which is rather affordable for the type of print they are.

FINISH PAINTING MY HOME
Just a two story living room and a loft left. Can’t decide whether to rent scaffolding or just pay someone to do it for me. I’ll probably go with scaffolding, even though the thought of it makes me very tired.

BUILD A STAND FOR MY FRIDGE
It leans forward.

BUILD A TOP FOR GRANDMA’S TRASHCAN
It’s broken and a replacement trashcan costs $250!

FINALLY FINISH CLEANING OUT CLOSETS
My father dropped of the entire material contents of my life one random day shortly after I got married. Filtering through the last 24 years has be daunting.

ENJOY MY HOUSE THEN SELL IT.
Shortly after I get all this together, it’ll be time to sell and move on to the next house. Hopefully all the hard work will amount to extra money!

also, in terms of less tangible things:
LEARN JAPANESE ALREADY
There are two alphabets and thousands of Kanji… something that can’t be mastered as casually as I pretend. I have the resources, but I need the time and dedication.

LEARN GUITAR ALREADY
I mean, I can play guitar, but at a very mediocre level. I’d like to practice more and start learning tabs again. I once knew how to tab “Tears in Heaven,” some of “Layla” and snippets of other popular things.

 YOU KNOW, GET A JOB
Given my list, I would prefer to not have a job and work on all these creative things but I’d like a million dollars too, and I don’t think I’m getting that either. Maybe one of these endeavors will get me a job, but I’ve got to keep looking just in case.

I believe it was Pablo Picasso that said ” good artists copy; great artists steal.” I am but a good artist, because I will only be copying an idea of this guy. He (she? I don’t really know) has created a fun series of minimalist images to go with some popular movies and games. Because a lot of current cover art tries to throw the kitchen sink in, these simple, iconic versions gave me an idea. The visual clutter that is my gaming shelf has always been a problem. Even when it’s clean, it looks sort of messy because of all the random colors. If I were to use covers like lbo’s, I could get a nice uniform look, and swap mine so I could see the originals when I open the cases. The only problem? That is easily 100 cases that need iconic designs and a lot of ink to print them…

I have a bad habit of creating too many projects at once. And they all feel necessary.

Rather, I like it, as I have yet to beat it. It is another fun and upbeat game, predictably on Nintendo Wii, but made by THQ and soon arriving with a sequel that will be on a few different systems. It’s sort of a cheesy re-hashing of a classic plot, but there’s something catchy about it.

The use of sound in the game may be the reason I enjoy it so much. It starts silent, then as you add color, the music goes from simple beats to a crazy jamming party. I haven’t heard much about deBlob 2 but I’m interested to see if the game has the same feel when played with an average controller. And by the way, blob is green on the 360 cover, red on the PS3 cover and blue on the Wii cover. Colors are fun!

Its seems like once a game gets popular enough, they hand it over to a team of 13 year old boys. This was the case with great franchises such as Tony Hawk, SSX, and Guitar Hero.Why don’t these games grow and age with the people playing them, instead of getting stuck in a teenage wasteland? Some parallels can be made to various companies who seem to exploit a certain title or series (nintendo, final fantasy) but they manage to balance the level of exposure and demand with the level of quality. And i think you can tell just by looking at the box art.

The ones on the left? Pretty nice! The ones on the right? They get a little lazy, I think, and not lazy in an awesome way, lazy in a “we never replaced this makeshift cover art but that’s ok” kinda of way. But you know, I don’t expect much of Activision these days. Nothing classy anyway. Nothing, let me repeat, like this.

Back in simpler times, when you bought a game you were just buying that game. Sometimes that’s still true, but more often the content is dependent on things you can’t control. With a game like MAG you know you are paying for just the online mode, but you don’t control the servers. I’ve always been cautious of games like this because if the servers are shut down or malfunction, I don’t get to enjoy the experience that I paid for. It’s like buying the tickets to an amusement park, but when you get inside all the rides are closed.

This analogy also explain the feeling you get when games like Black Ops suffer from online inadequacies.You get into the amusement park, but only three rides are running, there’s a huge line and when you get on the ride, it’s going way slower than it should and actually, it just isn’t fun at all. So even though the concession stand and the merry-go-round are doing everything they are supposed to, you didn’t pay $60 for a merry-go-round. That’s only worth about $20. In this scenario, the merry-go-round is the story mode for Call of Duty. I avoid buying a game based on it’s online content because I don’t want to be stuck with the merry-go-round instead of the roller coaster.

I’ve debating getting a new Gamer tag. I’m daunted by the prospect because it would mean starting at zero. There was a good article in Game Informer a few months back where the editor-in-chief talked about starting over his gamertag. I don’t remember why he did it, but he said it was freeing to shed the obligations that it seemed to impose on him. The concept souinds a bit overdramatic, but your gamerscore does recognize your achievements, be they worthwhile or not, and it is a record of the time you have spent doing things you enjoy. The one I use now is really my spouse’s gamertag that I took over. I’ve built up nearly 10,000 gamerscore and I kinda hate starting at zero all over again.

I do other things with my free time besides gaming. Things like watching tons of television. I watch 30 Rock, The Office, Big Bang Theory, and most disappointing, Outsourced. Even the movie wasn’t that great. I really thought the movie would be good. I know some people who legitimately like it, but it just feels too forced to me. “Oh, I am from America, and this is not America, how weird!” seems to be the plot of every episode. I wish they would focus more on developing the characters than this endless list of ways India is different than America. Though, I guess its a brand new ethnicity to NBC and that’s a good thing to support. I like DIY network and aside from that, I just watch old stuff on Netflix that I should have watched when it was on.

Arrested Development is probably the best show I watched too late. Unfortunately, it is hard to explain to people. (Like trying to explain the game “Sneak King” to someone. “You’re the burger king mascot, and you are sneaking around in the dark, and you deliver burgers. Burger King made the game… It’s not a good game to buy… You’re like a guy dressed up like a king, with a big creepy mask… you know, there was this commercial…. just, it’s not good. it’s bad.”)

Lately I’ve been getting YouTube links for quotes from my favorite shows, just for kicks and general web posting, such as:

or these from the office, which seem very useful:

 and this

I like watching seasons in their entirety, including miscellaneous reality shows, so I’ve seen season one of hoarders and undercover boss thanks to Netflix. “Hoarders” I watched while I went though junk in my walk-in storage. It was great motivation to throw things away.

Undercover Boss was kinda fun, it was just feel good TV. Hard working people getting recognized and promoted is nice to see, even if its just for entertainment. I hope that the general public continues to be entertained by stories of life improvement, so that Extreme Home Makeover can keep giving away houses, HGTV can keep remodeling rooms in peoples homes for free. etc. I think it’s one of the more responsible things that can be done with advertising dollars.

Gaming machines are doing more than just gaming these days, and I for one could not be happier. I always found a way to legitimize my console purchases, however thin those excuses were. Because at the end of the day, you were buying a device that would only play exclusive and likely expensive content. But no more!

I have but one word to offer, a word that kicks down the door for multi-fuction systems when others merely knocked. That word is Netflix.

There are other services, yes, but none of them seemed as worthwhile or gave me the “I want to go to there” feeling like Netflix available for the system I already owned. I had a 360 and was going to pay for live anyway. Now Netflix is actually getting a robust list of watch instantly titles. Hooking my laptop up to my TV could only last so long, right? But then, when the Wii and PS3 got it too, and I still didn’t have to pay an additional fee? Then I started thinking: Could just buy a couple used Wiis and cancel cable all together? Its a great time to be alive, and for only $8 a month.

On a related note, the capacity of phones to now have apps, though 90% are truly useless, really makes the present a great time for the synthesis of device and content. I suppose you have to give a nod to the actual network and service making this all possible, including Netflix. I guess that is the real hero in this story, but all the bandwidth in the world is useless if you don’t do something exciting and seemingly useful with it.

Do you feel that I am rambling on uselessly? I am. I’m just trying to say, I like Netflix on my consoles, and I’m excited about it. I’m not nearly as excited about that as Facebook. I’m sort of disappointed in Facebook. Maybe I’m getting old.

I remembered I have a blog that I rarely write in. I’m not big on New Year’s Resolutions, but it is a good time to think about the future. I’d like to write more, play guitar more, actually learn Japanese, and get one step closer to a fulfilling career. I imagine that very few of those things will happen… but every day is a new opportunity. We’ll see how it goes.

Many people, magazines, and television shows take time to review the year in December and January. I thought that I would like to have a year in review for 2011. Because my memory is horrible, the only way to do that is to start documenting this year now.

As far as gaming, I am playing Kingdom Hearts, Fable III and Picross 3D. One of my favorite gaming moments of late last year was playing through the auoran caves in Fable III. I thought voices of the “darkness incarnate” and the uneasyness of your companion was captivating. My husband is currently playing the same part of the game, and he said it seemed non-sequitor, but I strongly disagree since the story hangs on it rather heavily. He has been playing the game sort of sim-style, running around buying houses, doing jobs and whatnot so I think he has lost the actual pace of the story.That is a post for later I guess. Maybe I have some lingering fear of darkness, or maybe the shadowy creatures reminded me of Kingdom Hearts. I don’t like playing creepy games, but when they take your control away I find it both annoying and captivating. In Uncharted it was mostly annoying though….

I have yet to purchase a game in 2011, and the first will be Little Big Planet 2 and Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded. Let me just say now that I know it’s bad, I know it was a cell phone game and I know that it has gotten horrible ratings. I can only hope that the money they get from me every time I buy one of their crappy KH games (I’m looking at you Chain of Memories) is going a Kingdom Hearts 3 fund. Though, I do feel that Birth by sleep is a respectable addition to the Kingdom Hearts cannon. 

I don’t think I’ll care much for Little Big Planet 2. I like ModNation Racers much more than LBP in the “play, create, share” genre, but it’s good to see another company besides Nintendo making high quality, upbeat games. But, I did want the bookends, and just in case, I thought I should have all those download costumes, too.

As I mentioned earlier, I got my husband to willingly play Fable III. Its a big victory for me, the major gamer of the household. Though, I can’t take much credit because I think he only wanted to play after he served and messenger between one of his friends and myself. We were sharing Fable III experiences and using him as a intermediate. I think he just wanted to see what all the fuss is about. Since he was a philosophy major, I thought that he would like these highly hypothetical worlds, morals, and choices. He even enjoys science fiction, which is what many games are. Right now, the story is sort of escaping him, because he already knows what will happen and is more interested in making a fortune.

One strange thing in watching someone else play a game you’ve played is seeing how they perceive it differently and make different little choices. When it’s someone you are very close to, like a spouse, it’s sort of enlightening. You can see how you view an objective situation differently.  I often want to get straight to the point, not talk a bunch of fluff and skip to the action. He browses around more and takes indirect routes. As we (hopefully) play more of the same games, I think it could help us to understand each other in the real world.

I think some of the best video game journalism lies in personal accounts of how games impact the writer and what they perceive the roles of games to be. I have done much more casual gaming in the last year, and it has changed my opinion on the non-committal gamer. But, I think casual games for phones are much better with the success of the app store and android market. I still can’t feel justified in paying more than a dollar for one, because…. I still don’t think it’s a real game. I think real games are console games and PC games, but phone games are mostly time-wasters and line-waiters. It’s been fun to play games while at the bank, or the grocery and I think that it has helped general impatience in retail, but it’s rarely something I will carve out time at home to play.

Well, those are my new year new thoughts. I might expand some in later posts where appropriate.

I have seen this original commercial and heard the dramatic drumming and optimistic “aaaaaahhhhh”s before. It plays at work both on the 360 interactive and on our TV…. I think 100 times would be a fair estimate. I’ve always felt that there was something a little odd about it, something a bit over the top and unbelievable. Especially at the end when we see all the smiling faces, in slow motion, with that “dawn of creation” type music. and this parody absolutely nails it for me. I’m heading to sarcasticgamer to see if we share views on more than just Kinect.