Don’t you hate it when one simple design choice ruins an entire game?

As a 3DS Ambassador, I got 10 free Game Boy Advance games via download, including Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones. I haven’t played much Fire Emblem despite owning both Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, but James, editor at Nintendo Life, asked me if I’d review it as my first Nintendo Life assignment. I agreed.

I’m not super into strategy RPGs, but I do love me some Shining Force and Final Fantasy Tactics, and I’d always wanted to really get into Fire Emblem. I liked the look of it and the “rock-paper-scissors” weapon balance was super fun. The writing was good and I loved the character designs. Things were looking good!

I read the Star Wars: The Old Republic boards pretty regularly, as I’m obsessed with the game and have more free time at work than I should. A lot of it is just people discussing the game, getting opinions on character classes and generally just passing the time until launch.

I’m mostly on the board for the Sith Warrior class, as it’s the class I’ll be playing and I like to see what other people are saying about it and keep on top of any new information. When I made the decision to play an Imperial character so I could play with friends I knew I’d be in for more than my fair share of immaturity from teenagers who are all about being GRIMDARK and listening to songs that make their mom mad, but sometimes what’s said on the boards is simply appalling.

That headline is indicating that this post is about my gaming backlog.

I’ve never really thought that I had a backlog; I just played what I want when I wanted. As I was trying to plan out the games I was going to buy for the rest of the year, I realized that a lot of games I wanted weren’t “must-plays,” there were just games I wanted. I decided I was going to limit myself to three new games between now and Christmas: Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, Super Mario 3D Land, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

I decided to use the time instead to go back and finish (or start) older games that fell by the wayside for whatever reason. I started my list while I was at work, and without even having my game collection in front of me it was over 20 games. It’s much more than that now since I’ve been home. Christina and I have over 850 games AT LEAST (this is what happens when two lifelong gamers get married) so going through our game closet brought a lot of games I had forgotten back into the front of my mind.

I’ve been thinking a lot about video games lately (cue “OH FOR EFF’S SAKE JOE NOT ANOTHER ONE OF THESE POSTS”, but hey, it’s not what you think!), specifically about if having access to each system is a good thing or a bad thing.

Right now I’ve got a Wii, a DSi, a 3DS, an Xbox 360, a PSP, a PlayStation 3 and a pretty solid gaming PC. There’s NOTHING I can’t play right now (my PC even runs Crysis pretty good!). It’s a good feeling, knowing that if a game that I’m interested in comes along I’m not going to miss out on it because I don’t have the hardware to play it on. Unfortunately, this comes with a whole new problem: I have TOO MANY games to play.

Lately I’ve found myself getting bored playing video games and doing the same old thing. That’s typically a sign that I need to start being more creative, so I’m going to start on a couple of projects that I’ve been wanting to do for a while. I don’t really know if anything will come of them, but they’ll be fun to work on.

The first is a piece of fiction that I’ve had kicking around my head since I was a junior in high school. I’ve always had a loose concept for it, but I could never really think of the right hook for it, the right pieces to make it a story actually worth telling. A couple of weeks ago I thought of one change to the foundation and everything clicked, and since then I’ve had ideas coming to me every day. I’m not terribly good at writing fiction, but I do enjoy it, and it’ll be nice to finally start working on something that I’ve had in my head for ten years.

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.

If you follow me on Twitter or are a member of the forums, you’ve probably figured out by now that I am no longer a writer for Bits ‘n’ Bytes Gaming. I left a couple of weeks ago for a variety of reasons, but it wasn’t a decision I came to easily.

I liked being part of the BnB staff but it just got to be too much. I’m a married guy who works full-time, so when I’d come home each day and have extra responsibilities, it just got to be a bit much for me to handle. My phone was always going off with email alerts and there was always something to do. That’s not inherently bad in and of itself (in fact, were I a few years younger, I would have relished it), but it got to the point where I didn’t even have time to play the games I was writing about and I wasn’t spending nearly enough time with my wife.

Another aspect of it was I realized just how apathetic I am towards the “industry” side of video gaming. I don’t care what this company’s financials are, I don’t care what this CEO said, I just don’t care. I like playing video games, and even then there’s a specific group of video games that I like, and I just didn’t have the interest to keep going into things that were just irrelevant to me. I thought I wanted to be a games writer, and I don’t think that’s true anymore. I certainly enjoy writing about video games, but only the way I do on this blog… typically tongue-in-cheek, informal articles written by a guy who just likes video games.

I’ve known for a long time that I would eventually grow up, but I also knew I would never grow OLD, the extent of which I’m still trying to figure out.

I like a lot of things that I’m outside the age demographic for. I mean, c’mon, the only reason I ever go into a bookstore is so I can buy manga. As a 27 year old man, though, I’m also a fan of things I’m outside the GENDER demographic for.

Christina and I have been really hardcore back into anime lately (thanks in large part to how awesome Anime Boston  was this year) and she’s been buying up a ton of stuff from Right Stuf, which has all kinds of series on the cheap.

Gasp! A new blog post that ISN’T a repost from Bits ‘n’ Bytes? Has the world gone mad?

It’s no secret I’ve been scarce since I started writing for BnB a couple of months ago. I’ve been trying to keep up with writing for both blogs, which oftentimes is a Herculean task with all the other things I have going on every day. I haven’t written about BnB yet over here, and since it’s a big part of my life now I felt I should document it not only for myself, but to give you guys an idea of why the scales are tipped the way they are.

Warning, though, this is going to be a bit more personal than my usual “this is how I feel about video games” post.

The other day Christina and I were at Target, since we’re adults and sometimes have to go buy things like household cleaners and storage bins and other things that aren’t really all that fun. Still, though, we have a routine each time we go in: we get what we need, stop by the action figures, swing by the video games and DVDs, and then before we hit the registers to check out, look at the trading cards. Sometimes I’m in the mood for a pack of WoW cards to try for a loot card, or we’ll each get a pack of the new Pokémon cards, or Christina finds an interesting new unknown thing to buy.

This time, though, we found something WAY more awesome: a pack of the Animal Crossing e-Reader cards. For the GameCube game. From 2002.