There’s been three big games released recently, and I’m a lazy good-for-nothing so I haven’t written about them yet. Let me rectify that, as a Christmas gift to you, my handful of loyal readers.

This is part two in the series of me trying to justify games on my Xbox 360 achievement list. As you guys know, I’m a reviewer for KINECTaku now. As such, companies have been sending me games to review. What this means is I’m playing a lot more games and getting more achievements.

I have some people on my friends list (who will remain nameless) that clearly only play games for achievements, and it’s REALLY obvious. All kinds of Disney games, movie games and stuff like that. What I always liked about my Gamerscore was that it was all from games that I actually wanted to play; there was nothing on there that I played JUST for achievements. Well, except for those free Doritos games, but they were free so they don’t count.

If you’re my friend on Xbox Live, you’ve probably seen me playing things things like Cabela’s Big Game Hunter: Hunting Party and Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked and wondered “WTF Joe”, but let me explain!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with what I do for my day job, I work in the administration department of a natural and organic grocery store chain. My job entails counting cash and working with store financial reports, so as a result I have an office that has no windows and requires a key code to get into. My job is one that must literally be done every day, and as such I have a backup who works on weekends while I’m doing cool things like saving the world and winning NBA championships.

A while back Christina and I were at our local Newbury Comics and they had some of the American Legend of Zelda gashapon figures. They were less than $5 so we bought a few. We got a Darknut, Tetra and two Links. I took the spare Link to work, where I set him up on my computer so he could protect me from Keese and Stalfos.

Last week, I came into work on Monday after a weekend of bench pressing Buicks and tempering swords to find my Link figure broken. The figure ITSELF wasn’t broken, but the peg that connected him to his base had snapped. There was no note and no email. There aren’t a lot of people who have access to my office, so I figured it was either my backup or my store team leader. No big deal. I’d just take him home, glue him back together and set him back up.

I finally found a new main in Soulcalibur V! I wasn’t sure who would become my main character after Namco Bandai decided to kill off my Greek goddess Sophitia, but with today’s character announcement by Famitsu there is no choice but Xiba (or Sheba, or Sheva depending on which Romanization you’re looking at. I’m going with “Xiba” because technically it’s correct when translating from Chinese to Japanese).

As you guys know, I’m a big Dragon Ball fan. What you might not know is that early on, Dragon Ball was loosely based on the Chinese epic novel Journey to the West which featured the great monkey king Sun Wukong as its main protagonist. “Son Gokuu” is the Japanese pronunciation of Sun Wukong, and both characters feature a tail, a staff that can grow in size and ride around on a cloud. Noticing a pattern?

Anyway, as such I’m always a fan of fictional characters based on Sun Wukong. I loved playing as Son-Son in Marvel vs Capcom 2 and I even nicknamed my Infernape “Wukong” in Pokémon Diamond. When I saw Xiba, I immediately knew I had found my new favorite character.

I haven’t written much lately. Looking at this front page, I’ve hardly written anything of substance in the past month! Sorry about that. That’s just like me, saying I’m not going to stop writing and then doing exactly that. In my defense Christina and I have been very busy, she’s been sick and those Blogimations that no one watches are a LOT of work.

Rather than spend another day doing nothing and complaining that I don’t know what to write about, here’s a few quick thoughts on what I’ve been up to.

This is not going to be a real post. It’s a filler post! I’ve been very busy lately (those Blogimations are WAY more work than you think, and I am NEVER doing them once a week again) and I’m doing prep work for a few different things. For one, I’m going to be a guest on the next Daizenshuu EX podcast to talk about Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi, which I’m excited about because it’s a podcast I’ve been listening to for a LONG time. The other thing is a big announcement that I am going to make on Friday, which I still need to do a little bit of work for.

So in place of a real post today, I’m going to post a transcript of a conversation I had with regular reader and mega fan MegaFan over Google Chat while I was at work last week. Since I have an Android phone I’m constantly logged into Google Chat by default, so when I check my email at work people try to talk to me. This is the kind of stuff I have to deal with while I’m trying to earn money to support myself and my wife. Enjoy.

You know, I thought these would get easier as I did more of them, but this one was WAY harder than the first one and I’m not really that happy with it. I’m really NOT going to do these every week; I thought of a Halloween joke and realized I had to do it this week. Remember to watch in HD!

Okay guys, it is ALL ABOUT Skylanders now.

I’ve been following the development of Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure for a while now, because I thought the idea of collecting toys that would then work with a video game was an awesome idea. I’d been dying to play it, and the other night Christina and I picked up the Xbox 360 starter set along with a couple of extra figures.

Since then, we’ve been back to the store twice to buy more. I’d say it’s working.

Here it is, my secret project revealed! PK Blogimations! is a new sorta-animated series I’ll be doing from time to time. Let me know what you think! It’s in HD as well, so make sure to watch full screen!

I mentioned it a few days ago on Twitter and Google+, but I’m going to be an honest-to-goodness game reviewer for KINECTaku!

I’ll be honest, I hadn’t even heard of KINECTaku until I saw their call for reviewers pop up in my Twitter feed as a retweet from Nintendo Life. What immediately got my attention is that it’s run by the same team as Nintendo Life, which is one of my favorite gaming sites for a long list of reasons.

One of my favorite things about Nintendo Life is that they review every single Virtual Console, WiiWare, DSiWare and 3DSWare game released. It seems like an odd choice, but the vast majority of these games fly right under the radar of the gaming press; in addition to providing excellent coverage of all news pertaining to Nintendo, they’re the only site you can go to check out any of those games and know that they’ve reviewed it.

They have two other sites, KINECTaku and MOVEmodo, focusing on the motion control efforts of Microsoft and Sony respectively. Again, it’s a small focus, but it really sets them apart. If you’re a Kinect or Move owner who doesn’t buy into all the “casual vs hardcore” garbage and just want to know what games are good, where else can you go?