Playstation Home

Playstation Home is something on the PS3 that looks pretty much like Second Life. It's kind of a social network for PS3 gamers. At first I didn't really like it because it just seemed like a way for people to waste their time asking for pictures of each other (at least that pretty much all I saw when I got on with my PS3). Although I looked into and when it's explained more as a gaming social network it sounds like a really good idea. You can meet new people to play games with if you don't have many friend's on your list. Sony can even profit for it by selling people stuff in the virtual world for actual money (I don't really know who would buy stuff for their in-game avatar, but apparently people do). There's also events with prize-giving events to entertainment events in the game world. Since it's free to join, it's at least worth a look for anyone with a PS3.

Playstation Network

Plastation Network is the PS3s online community. It's what you use to play online and buy things from the online store. One thing the PS3's online store has started doing is selling PS1 games as full games for the PS3. This seems like a really good idea on their part, because some PS1 games are really hard to find and instead of having the people that want to play them look for a used one somewhere and buy it so a store can make some profit, Sony can just sell them a digital copy of the game and make the profit themselves and make it more convienient for the consumer. The only thing that seems like they could improve upon that would be to put PS2 games in that market, but they can't do that since PS3s cannot play PS2 games. There was a program on the marketplace that supposedly would let you play PS2 games, but I tried to get it and it didn't work. I also have talked to other people that have downloaded the same program and they couldn't get it to work either. I think if they could get that software up and running, their profit would be increased immensely by all the PS2 games they would sell online.

Singularity

Singularity is a Sci-fi shooter that takes place in present day (2010 which is when it comes out) and takes place on an island called Katorga-12 where there's Russian experiments involving the element Einsteinium which took place at the height of the Cold War. During 1950, an event known as Singularity occured on the island. You play as Nate Renko, who is an Air Force pilot sent to investigate bizarre radiation coming from the island and crash lands there. Nate finds a Time Manipulation Device and finds out the island is constantly changing between the times 1950 and 2010. The goal is to stop the Singularity from happening back in 1950. This seems like a great concept for a story since there aren't many games that have to deal with time manipulation like this, and definately not during the Cold War. This game looks like it will incorporate interesting uses of time control with an interesting story. It could be a good game, but there's not enough information about it out there yet to make a definite opinion.

Braid

Braid is another game that is on the Xbox live arcade that I've seen on gamespot.com's front page quite a bit, but never actually looked into. Turns out it's a puzzle/platform game with a guy named Tim trying to save a princess from a monster. Gamespot describes the story as a deep plot that makes you feel what the character you're playing as is feeling. Tim has lost his love because of a mistake he made and throughout the game you see Tim's thoughts on subjects that are eating away at him. The puzzles also emphasize clever thinking over quick reflexes, so it would probably be a fantastic puzzle game because you're encouraged to think more than act fast. It got overall great ratings ranging from 9-10 out of 10. A game that got that good of ratings from everyone seems worth looking into, even if it is more expensive than most arcade games at $15.

Castle Crashers

I've only heard of Castle Crashers because every once in awhile people tell me it's a good xbox live arcade game. Other than that I know pretty much nothing about it. It's eesentially a side scroller with RPG elements. The game got overall high ratings and seems to be mostly geared towards multiplayer play. In each level, the objective is to save the princess and if you're playing with more than one person the players have to fight it out at the end to see who gets the princesses kiss. In the game you can level up and purchase items with coins you get from defeated foes, so it seems like it has a certain party fun essence to it. It seems to me like it's a 2D Gauntlet game, which was an extremely fun multiplayer hack and slash game (although it was a lot less fun when not playing with other people). This game seems like it would be a good buy if me and a friend or 2 are just bored one night and looking for something to do, but other than that, I think this game might be not for me.

3D Dot Game Heroes

3D Dot Game Heroes is a game that will be coming out on the PS3 and will be taking an old graphic style, 8-bit, and popping it up into 3D. It brings up nostalgia for the old days in a new way. The play style will be based on The Legend of Zelda in the way it's designed gameplay wise. The story is that the king of Dotnia decided that things were to boring in 8-bit land and decided to make everything 3D. This caused demon's to come out and steal the 6 magical orbs that were keeping the place safe. The game seems to have a good new concept of trying to merge the old and the new graphics and bring in the old dungeon delving concept. It also seems to have a good variety of items to use such as different swords and boomerangs. It is set to come out May 11, 2010 and will cost $40, so I might wait for the price to drop. It looks like fun and everything, but a game I would buy just for nostalgia doesn't seem worth $40.

Xbox Live Arcade

The Xbox live arcade is an online place where you can download smaller games for about $10-$20. It used to be when I think Xbox Live Arcade, I thought about a waste of people's time and money since they're wasting small amounts of cash of many games, which adds up. I also thought that this would probably make bigger game companies stop making good games and start making tons of little games with half the effort. After looking into some of the games I found that many of them are made by just little companies or single people that are just looking for a way to make money doing what they like. Also since I actually got live at college, I've seen some of the games and have become interested in some of them myself. Now I've only bought one, but I wouldn't be ashamed of buying more because they actually can make fun games in the arcade. Now I actually think the Xbox Live Arcade is a great idea because it provides little time waster games for when you only have 10 or 20 minutes to play, which isn't enough time for a fully immersive game on a disk, so you can just play a little arcade game to take up some time. Along with being easy to pick up and put down, it's also providing business for the little people out there.

Dragon Age: Origins

Dragon Age: Origins is yet another game that I have bought, but have had no time to play. This game is supposed to be one of the greatest RPGs ever released, and it's from Bioware so the chances are that's a pretty good possibility. From what I've seen, the reason it's going to be such a good RPG is because there's so many different stories you can have. The three races have different origins such as noble or commoner as well as different classes like mage and rogue. Each combonation has a different story, which makes quite a few to play through. The battle system is just a click and attack thing and you can use skills, kind of like a standard MMO. Which is a thing I kind of wish they could've put in the game. Multiplayer. It kind of makes the game less RPG-like, but I think that if you had the option to play with another person in your party, it would be more fun. Although I think they made it single-player just to complete the entire RPG experience. There is only you in there story, and no one else in most RPGs and it's kind of what makes them better. So I kind of hate myself when I want to play with another person when I'm playing a great RPG, but the feeling is there, nonetheless.

As for the ratings of the game, it got great reviews. Most of the reviews were around 9 out of 10 and some things even said it was "the RPG of the decade". I hope I get the time to play this soon and see for myself just how good it is.

Magna Carta: Tears of Blood

Magna Carta: Tears of Blood is a game that I randomly decided to buy on a trip to Gamestop because I saw somewhere an advertisement for Magna Carta 2, so I just figured if it was good enough for a second one, it would probably be safe to buy the first one. Unfortunately, due to an overload of homework, I haven't even gotten to start the game yet, so I decided to look up information about it. It came out November 16, 2005 and is an RPG.

The story takes place in a land called Efferia, where a war is taking place between it's two species of human and Yason. The protagonist, named Calintz, is the leader of a mercenary group named the Tears of Blood hired by the humans to deal with problems that they can't touch. After a battle where the humans try to use forbidden magic and fail, Calintz finds himself being healed in a cavern by a woman named Reith who has amnesia. Calintz offers to take her to a city of powerful priestesses as thanks and because he thinks she is one of them. As the story progresses, The Tears of Blood realize that Reith is more important than anyone thinks.

The battle system seems rather complicated. Three characters move around the battlefield in real-time (you being one of them) and can only attack when a thing called the leadership meter is filled. When it is full enough to attack, you must have a series of three button presses for an attack to succeed. If you fail, the meter empties and you have to wait for it to refill. I'm hoping there's more to the battle system overall than just that, because that seems like it would get pretty boring.

The reviews were mostly 6-7 out of 10, so unless the battle system is a lot more fun to play than it is to explain, that means the story pretty much saved the game from being terrible. Which if the story is good enough, I can stand bad gameplay. Hopefully I won't be to let down by this game.

Bayonetta

Bayonetta has been on the front page of gamespot.com pretty often for the past few weeks, so I finally decided to look into it. The game's release date is sometime in January 2010 and looks like it will be a hack and slash game. It is being made by the same person that made the Devil May Cry games, which are extremely popular. It takes place in a fictional city in Europe named Vigrid. The main character is a witch that who shapeshifts and uses various guns, as well as magic attacks she performs with her hair. She initially wields four handguns, two in her hands and two in the heels of her shoes, but can wield other weapons such as shotguns, rocket launchers, and two-handed katanas. The story is wakes up after a 500 year sleep and can't remember anything about who she is or where she's at. As the game goes on, she starts to remember what caused her predicament that she's in, which is not mentioned.

Gameplay video

After watching that video, I think that the story has more depth than I thought there would be, although the battle system looks pretty much like a carbon copy of Devil May Cry's battle system. If I hear it has a great story after it comes out, I'll consider buying it, but if the story is weak, I'd rather just try to finish the Devil May Cry series that I can never seem to get around to beating.

Monster Hunter Freedom 2

I haven't heard anything about Monster Hunter games, good or bad, although I have played Monster Hunter Freedom (the first one) on PSP and was kind of skeptical about it. The only thing that seemed like it would've been fun on it would have been the multiplayer, and I didn't have anyone to play with. I mentioned that to my friend and he let handed me one of his copies of Monster Hunter Freedom 2 and said "This game has way more content and we can play multiplayer!" He says it's better, but I'm still skeptical. There really isn't a story, which can actually work for this game since it's just set in a town that needs to kill monsters for their materials to make random stuff, just like in any villlage. The combat system is hack and slash, which is usually boring alone when there's barely a story if at all. So I'm hoping playing with someone else will fix my problems with the game. The ratings the second one got ranged from 5-8.3 out of 10 and the first one got about the same. My rating for the first one when I played it would probably have been around the 5.5 range, but I'm thinking with multiplayer and some new content, the second one could be in the 8 range. Of course I suppose I'll only find out when I get around to playing it with my friend.

Darksiders

This game caught my eye one day while I was browsing gamespot.com so I decided to look further into it just because the name "Darksiders" piqued my curiosity. It turns out the story is rather different than most. The Apocalypse has started prematurely so on of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, War (you), has been sent to Earth in response to the final battle between Hevaen and Hell. After Hell wins, War is accused of being the one that started Armageddon early and is stripped of his powers and is banished to the desolate Earth forever as punishment. War sees this banishment as an opportunity to clear his name and find the real culprit that preemptively started the Apocalypse.

I don't really believe in all the religious prophecies such as the Apocalypse and the four horsemen, but I do think that this is a great idea for a game. It is basically the plot of a person wrongly accused of a crime and they have to find the real criminal, but in this setting it seems more interesting. It is said to be an action adventure game with puzzles, and is compared to The Legend of Zelda games. If it's any way like The Legend of Zelda games, that makes it even better in my opinion. I'm hoping that when this game comes out on January 5, 2010, it lives up to my expectations.

Dark Void

One day I was talking to a classmate about games when he mentioned a "vertical shooter...with jet packs!". It took him a few moments then he recalled the name of Dark Void. I started to look into this game to see that it's release date is January 19, 2010, and stated to wonder why I hadn't heard of it yet. The story is a cargo pilot named William Grey crashes in the Bermuda Triangle and is teleported to a parallel universe where he meets other humans, called Survivors. The Survivors are battling an alien race known as the Watchers to get back to Earth. The Watchers are creatures that came to Earth and started making humans do their bidding. Eventually people called Adepts emerged and banished the Watchers to the realm that William gets sent to. What draws me in is the introduction of vertical cover. This story seems interesting, but usually in shooters stories are just kind of there to give you a reason to blow stuff up (not always, but usually) so I'm not necessarily excited about the story that sounds interesting. Although what does interest me is the combat. When in combat, you can climb up walls with your jetpack, which brings in new ways to defend yourself and attack the enemy. Also, the developers seem to be trying their best to make the flying of the UFOs and jetpack as responsive as possible to avoid the annoyances of some flying games where you try to turn and just hit a wall. I'm looking forward to this game, but I'm going to wait until the reviews are out because when you're dealing with something that has physics like jumping up cliffs and flying around with jetpacks, it could be easy to make the game hard to control, therefore not fun.

Dante's Inferno

Dante's Inferno is another hack and slash game that is set to come out February 9, 2010 (assuming there's no pushbacks). The game is supposed to be loosley based on Inferno, the first book of Dante Alighieri's poem The Divine Comedy. You will play as Dante, a veteran of the Crusades, who pursues his lover Beatrice to try and free her soul from Lucifer, who needs to wed a heaven-bound soul to break free of Hell and make another attempt to take over the Throne of God. On his way through the nine circles of hell to Lucifer, Dante must face his past sins and war crimes. This story is definately a change from the norm which makes me interested. Instead of trying to save the world or something from being destroyed, you're just trying to save a person you love from being damed to Hell for an eternity. Although when you bring in the fact that the only way to save you loved one is by helping Lucifer try to retake the Throne of God, it makes the story even more intriguing. In the end will Dante realize he could be damning the world just to save his loved one? Even if he does succeed and save her, will they live in the world that Lucifer has taken over and probably just turned into hell? It makes you curious about what the ending will be, and whether or not you'll be able to decide what Dante does or if it's a set story. Either way, I'm fine with it because I think that the whole "choose your way - good or evil" is starting to be overused in video games. It seems like a good concept, but when every game starts using a form of it, it gets old quick. Either way, I'm looking forward to the reviews of this game.

Brutal Legend

Brutal Legend is a action/adventure game AKA hack and slash. I played the demo and got a good feeling about the game, but other than the demo I've seen nothing for it. The only reason I really knew about it in the first place was because I heard Jack Black was in it. Technically it's a character voiced by and modeled after Jack Black named Eddie Riggs, but since Jack Black has something to do with it will probably be funny nonetheless. The story is Eddie Riggs is a roadie who is transported to a fantasy world after an accident where he gets killed that is inspired by the music genre of metal. In this world the human race is enslaved by a demon, and Eddie is trying to save them. Being a fan of Jack Black and metal, this game looks pretty good to me. I also found that the game incorporates real-time strategy which is pretty much the last thing you would expect in a hack and slash game, so I'm interested to see what that turns out to be like. Also, the game features 107 heavy metal tracks from 75 different bands which means the chances of me liking the soundtrack are pretty high. This is yet another game I hope to get and play through soon.

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood

Now this game I actually know pretty much nothing about. The only thing I've heard is that it's Sonic and it's an RPG. Which, to me, makes it look pretty good already. Not to mention it was made by Bioware who also made Mass Effect and the new Dragon Age: Origins game, so they know their way around an RPG. The story is split into two acts, that are divided further into chapters. The first act is Sonic and company keeping the Master Emerald from being taken, and the second act is them travelling to a new dimension called the Twilight Cage to stop a threat to their world. The game opens with details on Sonic defeating Dr. Robotnik by destroying the Egg Carrier. Robotnik is presumed dead, but anyone that has played more than one Sonic game knows that he isn't since he's usually the main bad guy in every game (or is behind the main bad guy). Although this looks like it may be different since Sonic has to go to a different dimension. I'm not sure if Robotnik could pull off threatening the world from another dimension. Not having Dr. Robotnik be the bad guy could be a good change of pace for Sonic since after seeing Robotnik's plans get foiled is only amusing for so long before you just want a break from the same villain.

The game got mixed reviews ranging from 6.5/10 to 93% and an A rating. I think that even though some reviews were in the 6.5-7 out of 10 range, I'd still feel safe picking this game up since I'm a major sonic fan and I'm extremely curious to see him in an RPG game.

Scribblenauts

Scribblenauts is yet another game I've heard about from a friend that has said nothing but good things about it. He got me interested in it with two sentences which was "I summoned Cthulhu and God and they fought. Cthulhu won." Now I'm not saying God losing is good or bad, but just the fact that you can make those two things in the game is impressive. I looked it up and saw that the game is pretty much just a sandbox game to screw around in, but the point of the game is to collect "Starites". You get these starites by bringing up a text entry table, writing what you want to appear, then using it in some way to get the starite. There's one level where a starite is up in a tree and I've seen three solutions. One is making a ladder, another is making a beaver gnaw down the tree, and the last one was making a lumberjack and an axe and watching him chop down the tree. I'm sure there's tons of ways to do just that simple action of getting something out of a tree. I want to get this game not to play for a story, but just to see what kind of wacky things I can do with a Cthulhu and God and say....a skateboard and a shotgun! Oh wait...it has been done...

Skateboarding God vs Cthulhu in Scribblenauts

Chrono Trigger

I was told about this game about 5 years ago by my friend who had played it on an emulator and said it was a good game. I thought nothing of it at the time since I didn't have a way to play it (back then I didn't even know what an emulator was...dial up will do that to you). Although now they have re-released it for the DS and my friend here at college got it and has been playing it non-stop. It is also my other friend's favorite game, and both of these friend's love RPG's so I knew it couldn't be bad. I decided to look into it's story, since I already know it has a turn-based RPG battle system. The gist of it is a group of adventurers travel through time to stop a global catastrophe. This seems to be a concept that isn't used very much, and since the fabric of time interests me, it seems like it would be an intriguing story. The DS version also included a New Game+ concept where you start a new game after beating it with the same stats you ended the game with. This seems pretty useful since the game has multiple endings and it makes it easier to see them when you start out really powerful and can speed through the game instead of going back to the beginning when you were inexperienced. I'm guessing I'll either try to borrow this game when I get the time, or just purchase it myself sooner or later.

Rogue Galaxy

Rogue Galaxy is a RPG that released in North America in 2007 for the PS2. I've heard nothing but good things about it (basically summed up as "that game is awesome!" but I've never had the money to buy it since all my funds are going into the new 360 and PS3 games (and Wii if you really want to include that in there). I found out it's basically about a guy named Jaster Rogue that dreams about becoming a space pirate then one day a beast appears and attacks his town. Jaster chases the beast and get's ambushed by smaller beasts, then gets saved by a man known as the Desert Claw. After that the Desert Claw gives Jaster his sword and some pirates mistake Jaster for the Desert Claw. Those pirates help Jaster defeat the beast and their captain asks Jaster to join their crew. That's all I read into the story because I didn't want to read any spoilers, but it sounds a bit like Disney's Treasure Planet to me.

The game was developed by Level-5, which are the creators of Dark Cloud 1 and 2 (which I loved) and it also uses the cel-shaded style graphics. The battle system works pretty much like Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII's did where enemies appear and there's no transition between exploring and battle. Game sites rated it in the 8-9 out of 10 range, so I'm guessing that since game sites and user reviews are both high, the chances of me liking this game are pretty good. I hope that soon I'll have the money and the time to get this game and explore space as Jaster Rogue.

Black Holes

Black holes are pretty much a mystery to everyone. Since we've never been out in space, we've never actually been able to study them close up. However, based on observations, some theories have been produced to try to explain them. The most accepted one is that black holes have gravity wells so deep that time is stopped near them. This makes an event horizon that things can go in, but nothing comes out. Once something (such as light) is past the event horizon, it can't get back out. It's also been shown that black holes have a temperature and give off Hawking radiation. This means that a black hole actually can evaporate if it's small enough if it's giving off more radiation than taking in mass. The study of things like this could make space exploration safer when we get more technologically advanced and are able to go that far into space. I wish that in my lifetime I would get to see humankind adventure that far space into space to see what a black hole actually does, but I know that it will most likely not happen for many, many years.

The Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator in France. I've heard somewhere that it could create a black hole (or at least the media claims it can). I found out that it was made to discover the higgs boson which is the only standard model missing in particle physics. Basically, if we find the higgs boson, it would help explain the origin of mass in the universe. What the Large Hadron Collider does is sends protons at each other near the speed of light, and when they hit they are supposed to recreate the big bang and let us observe particle that were in the big bang that we've never seen before. Along with that came the theory that it has a slight chance to create a black hole. Even if this smallest of chances comes true and a black hole is created, it would be so tiny that it would evaporate because it's not close enough to anything to suck it in so there's no way for it to grow.

Opera

This post is not about the musical opera, but the web browser named Opera. My friend was complaining about me only having Internet Explorer on my laptop one day so I just told him to download whatever web browser he wanted, so he downloaded Opera. Having known nothing about this browser, I decided to look up information on it. I found on wikipedia it supposedly the fastest browser out there and was designed for people with motor impairments. It uses mouse shortcuts such as holding the right button and clicking the left button to go back or holding the right mouse button and dragging the mouse left to go back. So far I've been using this instead of Internet Explorer and haven't had any problems with it, so it seems to me that it's a good web browser.

Sinks with handles

This is any old bathroom sink. You turn the handle, water comes out for you to wash your hands, then you turn it back, dirtying your hands right after washing them. They've made motion-sensor sinks to combat the dirty handles, but usually those are really annoying to get working and then when you finally get water out of them, they shut off right away. After talking with my friend about this, we wondered why they don't just make foot pedal sinks to replace the handles. After looking around, I found that there are actually quite a few sinks that have foot pedals instead, although they appear to be a bit more expensive. The lowest priced handled sink I found was priced at $80, and the cheapest foot pedal one came in at $410. This is a matter of are these sinks so expensive because they cost that much to make? Or is it simply because they have no real competition in the foot pedaled market? I think that if a few public places start to use foot-powered sinks, they could start a new trend that will give people less annoying and cleaner sinks.

Charr

The Charr are an enemy race in Guild Wars that invades Ascalon at the beginning of the first game. I find them to be an interesting enemy because their design is unique (even though based on cats) and they're ways are savage, but as you go through the games you start to understand them better and some people even start to like them (like me). I never knew much about the history of the Charr, but I found out in older times they had a somewhat hierarchical way of living. After a period of them fighting anything that threatened them (sometimes even each other) all the warbands united for the good of the race under a single leader called the Khan-Ur. Sometime after that the human race were made by gods that the Charr didn't recognize, and the humans started to threaten the Charr's dominance over the land. After the Charr got pushed back, the Khan-Ur was assassinated, separating the Charr and giving time for the human to build defenses around their newly seized lands. For over a thousand years no Khan-Ur was made, and what finally made the Charr unite was new "gods" that were the titans. With the power of the titans, the Charr attacked the humans in what is known as the Searing, and that is where the first game starts off. With this newfound history, I like the charr even more because technically, they're just taking back the land the gods took away from them via human force.

Knuckles the Echidna

After posting about Sonic, I started thinking about his friend and rival, Knuckles. I also realized that knuckles was an echidna, and I had no idea what an echidna was. When I looked them up, I kind of thought they looked like a mixture of a hedgehog and an anteater. That makes a somewhat good choice for Sonic's rival since it's not just another hedgehog, but a different, similar looking species. They didn't really make the nose look like an anteater nose, but I can understand why. Having a rival with a long nose, but everything else similar to Sonic facing him would just look silly. They did a great job with the concept of Knuckles since Sonic focuses on speed and Knuckles on strength, Sonic is blue, Knuckles is red, and while Sonic can run so fast he runs up walls, Knuckles can use the spikes on his fists to climb walls. They are opposites in many ways which makes them great rivals, yet they're still friends. Normally I would think they shouldn't be friends, but since they were brought together by a common enemy (Dr. Robotnik), it makes sense to me that they become friend's after his defeat.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Sonic the Hedgehog is my all time favorite character in video games. This is mostly because the first game I ever played Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Although I'm suprised at how little I actually knew about Sonic. Sonic was made to replace Sega's unofficial mascot at the time, which was Alex Kidd and combat Nintendo's mascot which was Mario. So in a way, if there was no Mario, then there would be no Sonic, which is his console rival. Also I found out that Sonic was created in 1991, which is the year I was born so that makes me like him even more since we were both born the same year. There were many designs submitted such as an armadillo, a dog, a Theodore Roosevelt lookalike in pajamas (which is actually what the villain, Dr. Robotnik, is based off of), and a rabbit. The only other thing I think I wouldn't have minded Sonic being is the armadillo. Any of the others seem like they would make him less of a good character to me. Of course if he was an armadillo, then he wouldn't have spikes on his back and that would make him look less threatening, so the hedgehog concept is definately the way to go.

Batarangs

Batarangs are a well-known weapon of Batman's arsenal. Most people probably just think of a boomerang that looks like a bat instead of looking further into its design. The shape of a bat works as a symbol for a weapon, so you know who's attacking when you get one of these thrown at you. Since you usually can't see Batman when he's attacking you, this instills fear in whoever sees the batarang thrown, because they know they're about to be attacked, but have no idea when or from where. However, I've sometimes wondered why batarangs are named after boomerangs, since they usually don't come back to Batman, just curve. Some don't eve curve, they're more like shuriken that are just thrown then stick into something or fall. After looking into boomerangs, I found that there are some that don't have to come back to you (I thought the reason mine never came back to me was because I just didn't throw them right...). So that explains most of the batarangs, but not the ones that are more like shuriken. So I suppose until they make a mixture of bat and shuriken as a word, batarang will have to do for the bat-shaped shuriken.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Batman: Arkham Asylum was somewhat recently released and got great reviews from pretty much everyone. Personally, I like it because it seems darker than it should for Batman, but it still fits. It's also a great stealth game that requires strategy and also teaches a lot about the history of Batman and the asylum. I learned a lot about many Batman villains and even their history. This information is presented as files that are kept at the asylum since all the villains are kept there, which seems a great form to give the history as well as their habits in crime. Gamespot.com rank it high because of the amount of unlockable content, the fast-paced, easy to use combat system, and the great audio and visual presentation. They also mentioned how outstanding the story was. I thought that the story was good, but it was pretty much just standard "stop the bad guy" story. There were some twists, but not any that made my jaw drop and automatically know that the story was going to be great. I'm not saying the story was bad, but I don't think it was as great as Gamespot said it was.

The Tauren

The tauren are a race of the Horde on the MMO World of Warcraft. They are my personal favorite race because I find it a nice change of pace to be a bull while running around doing quests in games instead of the standard human, elf, or dwarf in RPGs with race selection. The reason I'm writing about Tauren is because I saw in a forum someone argue about a Tauren being able to be a Paladin (since they'll be able to in the next patch) because they're "bloodthirsty cows". I'm assuming some people think that since Tauren are on the Horde (assumed by most to be "evil" which it isn't) and look like they're minotaurs, they're bloodthirsty cowmen with no hearts. I looked into the backstory which I only vaguely knew of and found out that they're probably the most peaceful race in the game. They worship the Earthmother and are taught to not take anything away from her that they do not need to.

Cel-shaded Animation

Cel-shaded animation is a form of graphics that has started being used in video games which makes it look more like a hand drawn story.

An example of older cel-shading (The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker).

An example of newer cel-shading (Borderlands).

I like this style (not necessarily more than the normal graphics that are used) because it's interesting to play. It kind of makes you feel like you're in a storybook playing out the story. Some people may complain it makes it harder to get into the game because it looks less real, but I don't think looking real makes something much better. If you're looking at a huge monster that you can't even come up with in your imagination, it can't look real anyway since there isn't a real one in our world. I was curious about how this art style was produced, so I looked it up and found out it actually starts with a 3d model. Except then they take that model and use non-photorealistic lighting while rendering. This makes shadows and highlights look more like blocks of color instead of smoothly mixed, giving it a flat appearance.

Bionic Penguins

These are bionic penguins created by German engineers. They use their fins to swim through water just like actual penguins, and have sonar installed so they will avoid running into objects. They company called Festo is also producing other animals such as jellyfish and a bionic octopus. This could possibly lead to people having their dreams come true with pets without so much danger. Want a rhino as a pet? You can get one built for you. I also found that they made flying penguins as well. So they're actually making animals, then changing them. So you could get a sloth that is quick or a koala bear that can float. This could lead to extremely fun bionic pets that are safe for everyone in a home.