1080 Avalanche, .hack//MUTATION, .hack//OUTBREAK, Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising, Airport Tycoon 2, All-Star Baseball 2004, Amped 2, Ape Escape 2, Aquanox 2, ATV Quad Power Racing 2, Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge, Baseball Mogul 2004, Bloody Roar Extreme, Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter, Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds, Burnout 2: Point of Impact, Bust-a-Move 3000, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, Casltevania: Lament of Innocence, Clock Tower 3, Colin McRae Rally 3.0, Conflict: Desert Storm II: Back to Baghdad, Command & Conquer: Generals, Crash Bandicoot 2: N-Tranced, Crazy Taxi: Catch A Ride, Crash Nitro Kart, Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge, Dakar 2: The World’s Ultimate Rally, Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix, Dark Cloud 2, DDRMAX2: Dance Dance Revolution, Deus Ex: Invisible War, Devil May Cry 2, Digimon BattleSpirit 2, Dino Crisis 3, Dragon Ball Z Budokai 2, Dragon Ball Z: Legacy of Goku II, Dynasty Tactics 2, Dynasty Warriors 4, Etherlords II. Evil Dead: Fistful of Boomstick, Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly, FIFA Soccer 2004, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Final Fantasy X-2, Final Fantasy XI, Flight Simulator 2004, Freestyle Metal X, F-Zero GX, Gallop Racer 2003: A New Breed, Golden Sun: The Lost Age, Gothic II, GT Advance 2: Pro Concept Racing, Guilty Gear X2, Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak, Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town, Hidden and Dangerous 2, High Heat Major League Baseball 2004, Hunter: The Reckoning Redeemer, Indiana Jones and the Emperer’s Tomb, Inside Pitch 2003, Iridion II, Jak II, Justice League of America 2, King of Fighters 2000/2001, Legacy of Kain: Defiance, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Lethal Skies II, Links 2004, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Lost Kingdoms II, Madden NFL 2004, Magical Quest 2 Starring Mickey and Minnie, Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, Mario Party 5, Master of Orion III, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, Mega Man Battle Network 3: Blue, Mega Man Battle Network 3: White, Mega Man Battle Network Transmission, Mega Man X7, Mega Man Zero 2, Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, Midnight Club II, Midtown Madness 3, Mission: Impossible Operation Surma, MLB Slugfest 20-04, Moble Suit Gundam: Encounters in Space, Monster Rancher 4, Moto GP3, Mysterious Journey II: Chameleon, NASCAR Racing 2003, NASCAR Thunder 2004, NBA Live 2004, NBA ShootOut 2004, NBA Street Vol. 2, NCAA Football 2004, NCAA March Madness 2004, Need For Speed Underground, NFL Gameday 2004, NHL 2004, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Patrican III, Pince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Pok�mon Ruby, Pok�mon Saphire, Postal 2, Project Gotham Racing 2, Railroad Tycoon III, Ratchet and Clank Going Commando, Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc, Red Faction 2, Romance of the Three Kingdoms VIII, Silent Hill 3, SimCity 4, The Sims: Bustin’ Out, SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals II, Sonic Advance 2, SSX3, Star Trek - Elite Forces 2, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike, Soul Calibur II, Summoner: A Goddess Reborn, SpyHunter 2, Spyro the Dragon: Attack of the Rhynocs, Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Puzzle Fighter II, Sword of Mana, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004, Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, Tony Hawk’s Underground, Trainz 2004, Train Simulator 2, Tropico 2: Pirate’s Cove, UFC: Tapout 2, UNLIMITED SaGa, Unreal II: The Awakening, Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution, Virtual-On Marz, V-Rally, Warlords IV: Heroes of Erethria, Winning Eleven 6 Final Evolution, World Championship Pool 2004, WWE Smackdown! Here Comes the Pain, WWE Wrestlemania X9, Xenosaga Episode I: der Wille zur Macht, XGRA: Extreme-G Racing Association, Zone of Enders: The 2nd Runner

I visited every video game retailer in Vacaville yesterday, trying to secure myself a copy of the GameCube version of Prince of Persia. Sadly, not a single outlet had the game in stock, and only one even had a place for it on the shelf. I’d like to think the game sold out after seeing solid holiday sales, but every ounce of sales data I’ve seen (albeit none of it from very reputable sources) indicates that Sands of Time was not the blockbuster it (probably) deserves to be. At least my console isn’t the only one getting the shaft, as I didn’t see the XBox or GBA versions of the game at any of the stores I visited either.

Given my time-rewinding, magic dagger-wielding, deprived afternoon, I instead continued my journey through the Beanbean Kingdom in Nintendo’s excellent Mario & Luigi. This is a game that rocks pretty hard, kids, and provides reason enough for me to finally get around to purchasing Paper Mario, despite how much I like to pretend the last console generation never existed. However, just as I reached the eight hour mark, I made a most unsettling discovery (I don’t know what kind of punctuation to put here) neither Mario nor Luigi have whites in their eyes. Instead they each have gaping black holes. Needless to say, the next hour of gameplay was spent standing perfectly still as I put the RP in RPG to good use, deciding that the Mario brothers are actually soulless zombie plumbers. Soulless zombie plumbers with hearts of gold, that is.

I have returned (again).

I apologize to you, my friend, for not updating on the important days of Christmas eve and Christmas day. Web access sporadic, at best, until I return home. I also won’t post on New Year’s Day, even though I know that will hurt you emotionally. That’s the day on which I have scheduled myself to be scanned and prodded by the TSA when my only objective is to return home in a commercial aircraft.

(Parenthetical comment: to answer kitty’s question, one eats his English degree. Ideally, immediately upon recipt and on stage in his graduation robe, in front of his gathered family and the dean.)

In the meantime, I sit here and listen to my metronome.
It goes: bip-two-three-four bip-two-three-four.

There’s no reason not to like it, really. It keeps me calm on the busy days. Also, it’s an unsolvable puzzle.

(vector_black steams rice)

After rocking harder than humanly possible and pulling an A, A, A, B+ for the last quarter, my cumulative GPA is now up to a 2.87. It’s a shame that juicy five credit A from Spanish 1 doesn’t count towards my GPA. With a little luck, I might just be able to counterbalance all those computer science, chemistry, and engineering courses I took over the first two years of college and end up with something marginally respectful. Of course, the real question stands: what, exactly, does one do with an English degree?

He didn’t die the first day
He didn’t die the second.
He lived through seven decades
And he thought
That’s it.
I am done for.
But then he lived for five years more.
He began to doubt that he would ever go.

Others were. They took the back door
Suicides
Or the window
They just plain fell out
Through car windshields and
well, they went. Most of them, it seemed, had
closed caskets.

He didn’t see their faces anymore.

And it seemed these deaths were a reminder.
That some day, he’d go too.
But his friends kept on dying,
And he kept on living,
When it seemed that someday soon. He should end.

“I am never going to bite the bullet, am I?”
he asked himself.

“I will be like this forever.”

Growing older. And thinner, and fatter, with wrinkles
all over my loose, paper skin.
Lacerations. And so on. Where I can’t imagine. I can’t
imagine where it will end.
It won’t.
I’ll be like this, but moreso, forever.
And my friends will go on dying, he said, to the closed casket. He looked down at it and he knew he didn’t know who It was. That wasn’t new.

There’s a blue moon in the sky, hell’s frozen over, and I actually have a backlog of updates just waiting to be uploaded. Piyonugget has answered some questions for the first time since March. There’s really no way I can follow that up.

Speaking of colors, Windows XP, aside from being infinitely more stable than Windows 98 (and a full order of magnitude less warm and fluffy than MacOS), includes the option to customize not only the colors of windows and buttons, but those of the start menu as well. Imagine my surprise when the color schemes of both the start menu and the windows both matched those of dorkclub.com right out of the box. Please keep all “800×600 ur n00b lol” comments to yourself.

This is the time of year when every gaming site decides which games are lucky enough to get “Game of the Year” stamped across the back of their boxes (and GameSpy continues to serve as the sworn defender of Dues Ex: Invisible War. Honestly, have you played that thing. The first one was enjoyable, like System Shock minus fun, but this sequel is the most cumbersomely designed, graphically unimpressive disaster of a game I’ve seen in a great while. Well, I guess it’s not that bad, certainly better than any of these games, but still garbage nonetheless. I guess Warren Spector finally got his Batman & Robin (Schwarzenegger reference). I think it’s about time I joined in on the fun. By producing my own Games of the Year list, not by getting my own Batman & Robin (Schwarzenegger reference). Parenthetical references and random asides sure makes everything I type near illegible. I had originally intended on drawing this (that list thing) out over five days, carefully detailing what makes each game so uniquely enjoyable. Then I realized nobody wants that, least of all me. So, instead here’s my picks for the top five games of the year with absolutely no qualifying statements attached. Enjoy:

5. Beyond Good & Evil
4. Wario Ware, Inc: Mega Microgame$
3. Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic
2. F-Zero GX
1. Marathon (trilogy)

The way I see it, “game of the year” counts any game or games I played for the first time this year. Playing bits and pieces of Marathon 1 and 2 nearly a decade ago on LeadPipe’s Mac doesn’t count. If this really upsets you, and I can’t see why it would, then consider Halo (PC/Mac) this year’s winner by association.

Yeah, that was stupid, but I’ll have a much more interesting GAMING YEAR IN REVIEW LOL OMFG! update on the 31st. I can promise that because it’s already done. Also: I’ll have some shiny new content tomorrow which I had no hand in creating. Me.

Merry Christmas to all you poor souls bored enough on Christmas day to visit this website. And read though that mess. You do Jesus proud.

Not quite Christmas yet, so this is still allowed. “This” being whatever I’m about to produce.

Here’s a fun game I like to play sometimes. I call it: “I Don’t Know HTML Or How To Properly Use Photoshop.” All you, the dorkclub.com reader with nothing better to do on Christmas Eve than visit this obscure webspace, have to do is look at the puke-green on puke-beige background of this site and try to find all four distinct (non-gray) colors. According to the HTML tags I used, two of them are CCE-389 and EEEEB2. According to Photoshop (7.0), the other two are CCE-389 and EEEEB2. Hurray for continuity.

Also: all you Windows XP owners can hold down your right shift key for eight seconds in order to trigger the FilterKeys dialogue and enjoy what has to be the most terrifying sound in existence.

Totally not updating for the sake of updating.

I think the reason I don’t update as often as I should is that I feel the need to make every update something worth reading. This usually means I choose to discuss something other than my daily activies, and almost always turns out being some lengthy discussion on my opions on a particular video game or, on several rare occasions, film. I don’t blog. I don’t even know what that word means. To me, it means rambling aimlessly about what laundry degurgent I use or typing up a lengthy essay on why my cat (Mr. Noodle Puff) is the cutest animal ever to spring from God’s loins. There are several reasons why I find this so unappealing, chief among them is the fact that I’m certain God is without loins. Poor God.

I feel this unjustifiable need to instill substance into each update, a need I rarely, if ever, fulfil. There’s really no reason for it, and reading through this site’s archives, most of which I actually find quite amusing, clearly demonstrates substance is not a prerequeset for entertainment. Still, I just feel like “I saw Return of the King today and it was good” does not justify the effort required for me to type, copy, and upload the update to the site or the effort required for you to read it.

Another problem steems from the fact that most of my opinions, esspecially those concerning video games, have already been expressed several times over during the course of this site’s existence. Though I’m positive repeat readers are greatly outnumbered by first time visitors, repeating what I’ve already said is as appealing a prospect as watching twelve hours of Crank Yankers. Of course, that doesn’t stop me from doing it. Honestly, Special Ed really starts to grow on you after those first four hours.

So, to sum up, I have no excuse not to take fifteen minutes out of my day and update this space. I have no excuse not to put those dozens of Halo and Marathon screenshots I’ve farmed to good use, finally usurping this monstrosity as the best proof that Halo is a sequel to Marathon. In case you don’t bother to click that link and read the horror that awaits on on the other side, know this: it is only the best article concerning the Halo-Marathon connection because it is the only article that explores Halo as the continuation of the Marathon trilogy which goes beyond “they’re both first person shooters made by Bungie.” Of course, it only goes as far as an article written by someone who has very obviously played niether game can go. Which is to say, nowhere.

I saw Return of the King last Friday and it pushed me over the legal limit of rad for the week. That, however, is a prefectly exceptible statement.

Keep on rocking, children.

P.S. Totally not spell checked/proof read. Wedge55 in the buff

I guess it’s about time we officially call this a haitus, or at the very least, a winter hibernation. I had planned on accomplishing so much for dorkclub.com while on vacation. I had visions of updating every night, writing several new articles, and fixing the minor layout and functionality errors still creeping about since the new design went live. In reality, I haven’t even visited the site in days. I’ve only read the forums once or twice over the last week and a half. That has to count for something, right?

Instead, my vacation time has been sucked into the largest video game-related hole I’ve ever dug for myself. My new PC arrived recently, causing every second of my time since to be consumed either by Halo or Knights of the Old Republic. Both are beyond excellent, as every XBox owner in the nation should already know. Halo is just like Marathon, only with some of the most inspired gameplay consepts and some of the worst level design ever burned to a CD, and KOTOR is as brilliant as you can imagine Planescape: Torment set in the Star Wars universe would be. Some people pay $200 for an XBox. I pay $1200 for an XBox with word processing programs. I would have purchased a Mac, but seeing as how Blizzard’s leaning towards not releasing the Mac version of World of Warcraft alongside its PC counterpart, the decision was an easy one to make. I supposse I could blame this website’s sudden and extreme lack of content on the fact that my computer failed to arrive with Microsoft Office, despite the fact that I ordered it, leaving me without the ability to spell or grammar check my work, but I try not to make my lies quite so blatant.

Then again, it’s not like it really matters. Traffic has been spiraling downwards over the last few months, and December is traditionally the least bandwidth-intensive time of the year. I have about a million updates I’d like to type up and post in this very space and about a half-million articles which only need to be transcribed, but I wouldn’t expect to see anyting of note happen here anytime soon. This site’s just like solidsharkey.com, only not entertaining or popular.

On a positive note, I should have some fun (read: free) goodies for every interested dorkclub.com reader sometime over the next couple of weeks. Kids still like the free stuff, right?