Because it is ALL STAR WARS ALL THE TIME for me I decided to bring out my old lightsaber prop I made and make a cool picture. Click to embiggen!

Only the baddest mothas carry purple lightsabers.

Here’s a close up of the hilt. I made it back in 2002 or so, using a sink pipe, rubber O-rings, PVC and the button from an NES controller.

Bam, another fanfilm clip, this time with Jedi training remotes!

We actually already had this scene “in the can” as they say, with music, special effects and sound but the lighting was terrible and as a result the scene looked like washed out bantha poop. We re-filmed it, but it never got finished.

You guys know I’m a huge nerd, but I don’t think you really know HOW huge until now.

That clip is from a Star Wars fanfilm my friend Matt and I worked on our senior year of high school. We stumbled onto the Fanfilms section of the Star Wars site TheForce.net and decided we wanted to make one. I wrote the script, he directed it, and we got some of our friends to star in it.

We never finished it, though, as dreams are always lofty and reality is a cruel mistress. I’m not going to post any more clips or anything, because let me tell you, this has NOT aged well. I’m not going to talk much about the plot, either, but it took place about 40 years after Return of the Jedi. One of Luke Skywalker’s former students founded a new Jedi academy on Dantooine, using the old abandoned Rebel base referenced in A New Hope I NEED TO STOP TALKING.

But yeah, that’s my 18 year old self swinging a lightsaber around, deflecting blaster bolts. That’s still cool.

I don’t remember HOW, but the other night Christina and I were talking and discussion turned to Power Rangers. Then we found out that it’s on streaming Netflix. You can probably guess how we’ve been spending the past few days.

Marrying a fellow nerd is so awesome because whenever these waves of nostalgia assault the marina that is real life, I don’t get made fun of; instead, my wife joins in and oftentimes will even OUTNERD ME.

Did you know that when Christina was a kid, she dropped out of dance class because it was scheduled for the same time that Power Rangers was on TV?

(Note: I originally published this article on Bits ‘n’ Bytes Gaming on May 17, 2011.)

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I’m a huge Dragon Ball fan, and I have been for 17 years. You probably don’t know this because I’ve never talked about it. I haven’t talked about it because I don’t know how to do so without sounding like an elitist prick.

You see, Dragon Ball was something that I discovered in 1994, right after I had graduated from fourth grade. My best friend lived across the street from me and he had a teenage older brother. One of his friends brought over a tape once that he had gotten of some Japanese cartoon called Dragon Ball Z. We watched it, not knowing what was going on since it was all in Japanese with no subtitles. There was some guy with yellow hair fighting some big green bug-looking guy. We were hooked.

We watched whatever tapes he could get his hands on, which meant episodes were never in order. My friend imported a Dragon Ball video game for his SNES from one of those mail-order places from the backs of old video game magazines (the game turned out to be Dragon Ball Z Super Butôden 2, which I still enjoy playing to this day). They later went on a trip to Hawaii and came back with all kinds of awesome Dragon Ball stuff.

A few months ago I saw on Kotaku and a few other places that Japanese company Kotobukiya would be releasing a figure based on Elanor, a RAcaseal from Phantasy Star Online. I’d never seen any merchandise from the game before, and you all know how I loves me some PSO. I preordered it as soon as I could, and I waited like a patient, respectable person until it arrived a couple of days ago.

The box looked so great. I never played a RAcaseal character, but the figure looked so awesome in pictures. I couldn’t wait to set her up on my entertainment center, spread gun at the ready, on the constant lookout for Boomas and Rappys.

Then I opened the box.

I love our generation. We’re really breaking out of corporate tradition and making things fun.

So one of the stamp vendors Christina deals with for her job brought everyone at her office a calendar with their company’s branding on it, and every month they take a retro video game screenshot and work in their products, like stamps and inks and what have you. The result is a pretty badass calendar that I couldn’t wait to hang up.

I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves. Someone obviously put A LOT of work into these. Click on any image to embiggen it!

This is a serious post. I say “serious” in a way that doesn’t necessarily mean serious in the traditional sense, because I’m going to discuss something that many people would consider stupid bullshit in a serious tone.

Anyway, right now I feel like I’m struggling to find my identity as a gamer. My life is VASTLY different than it was five years ago, and now that things are more or less the way they’re going to be until Christina and I decide to have a kid, I’m really trying to come to terms with where video games fit in my life.

When I was younger I played video games all the time. I don’t mean “younger” like a teenager, either. When I lived on my own, when I was at home I had a controller in my hand and I was playing a video game. The rate at which I consumed electronic entertainment back then was staggering in retrospect. I had disposable income and no one to tell me how to spend it, not to mention the perk of working at GameStop and being able to take home games as a “rental” whenever I wanted. It was never something I had to think about. I played video games.

Now, though, at times it almost feels like a chore to pick up a controller and start playing, and that scares me.

Hey, check it out, I’m still alive! Sorry for the shortage of posts for the past couple of weeks, but with the holidays and stuff with work I’ve been pretty busy. I work at a grocery store, so even though I don’t work with customers I still had a lot to do, plus I’m filling in for our HR person (and feeding her animals!) while she’s on vacation so it’s been a little crazy.

I hope you all had a great holiday! We sure did. It was our first “married Christmas” and it was full of food, family, great gifts and good times. It was actually the first Christmas I can remember where I didn’t receive a video game as a gift, unless you count the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Collector’s Edition that Christina gave me, but I don’t because it’s a better edition of a game I already have.

That leads me into what I wanted to talk about today: For 2011, Christina and I are taking a self-imposed exile from buying video games. While there are going to be some exceptions, of course (Zelda: Skyward Sword, Pokémon Black and White, and of course the 3DS) for the most part we’ll be letting new releases pass us by. We’re doing this for several reasons.