EDIT 1: The female hoodie has been claimed! Congratulations to VaporOfNuance!

EDIT 2: The male hoodie is now claimed! Congratulations to Syphon2399!

The contest is over! Congratulations to the winners!

It’s our first contest! I’ll make this short and sweet. We have two extra codes (one male and one female) for the special PAX East 2010 Xbox Avatar hoodies given away by Major Nelson at PAX East 2010. So, this contest is Xbox themed!

As you all know, Space Giraffe is the worst game ever. During the time I was woefully subjected to it, I earned one Achievement.

My Gamertag is Joe Sunrider. The first two people to email me (first male and first female) and tell me what Achievement I earned in Space Giraffe will win the hoodie code. When you email me, let me know which code you want, as well as the name you want to go by when I post the winners.

The contest will go until both codes are won. Good luck!

I’m 26 years old. I walk around with a Pokéball clipped to my pocket.

Well, not a Pokéball per se, but a Pokéwalker, the Pokémon-themed pedometer Nintendo has packed in with every copy of Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver for the Nintendo DS. You send one of your monsters from your DS game into the Pokéball-shaped device, and as you walk you earn experience points as well as Watts, which you can use to try to find rare Pokémon and items. There are numerous courses you can walk, each one with different Pokémon and items to find.

Today is the debut of a new feature here at PK Bloggin’! entitled Snap Judgements. I have a GameFly account now, and as a result I’m renting games for the first time in about seven years. I’m adding anything remotely interesting to my queue with a “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” philosophy. I’m not going to like everything I play, which is where Snap Judgements comes in. I’ll give you my thoughts on the first half hour or so of a game, and whether or not I plan on continuing. It should be fun and generate a lot of hate mail, so why the heck not.

Today’s Snap Judgement is Darksiders for the Xbox 360. I heard about this game a little while ago, and until I put the game in my console all I really knew was “it’s like Zelda but darker.” Well, I thought “Zelda but darker” was Twilight Princess, but what they hey. I’ll give it a shot.

There’s no podcast tonight. Sorry about that! There’s a lot going on. I have something neat for you just the same: comics!

Back in 2003-2004, I used to do a webcomic called Terminal Crossing with some old friends of mine. Most of the time it was pretty crappy but we had a few gems in there. I’ll share some of my favorites with you on nights like this when I just don’t have the time to get anything done for real.

The first one was written by my old friend Jacob, the second and third are by me. Click for full size, because otherwise they break the blog’s layout. Enjoy!

EDIT: Haha, April Fools!

So I’ve been talking to people from all around the world since I started PK Bloggin’!, because no matter where you are, there’s people who love games. I was talking to a young lady from Japan, Yonichi Kiyotsukete, about how much we love old platformers, and she told me something I had never known: Japanese side-scrollers go from right to left, instead of left to right.

She said that’s how they’ve always been, but when the games are released in Western countries, they’re flipped. In Japan, books are read from right to left, so it’s how they naturally perceive progression. However, Japanese game companies didn’t think Western audiences would get that same sense of progression and adventure from going the opposite way that they’re used to reading, so the games are flipped before their North American and European releases.

This was actually why there was a push for 3D games, because they would never need to be flipped! Pretty neat, huh?