For anyone interested, I have now entered four of my compositions to the audio portal on Newgrounds with fairly good reception. All four of my songs so far have tried to embody ideas present in many video games. I have other compositions performed as piano solos but haven't had enough guts to go ahead and enter them. You can hear an imperfect version of Dream of the Storm (an arrangement containing ideas from both Dream of the Shore from Chrono Cross and the Song of Storms melody from Legend of Zelda) here: Dream of the Storm. However, my Newgrounds compositions can be found via my userpage: http://sasquamox.newgrounds.com/. I greatly appreciate any comments.

Wow this whole debacle seems utterly familiar. I was lucky enough to witness and shall we say "experience" firsthand the downfall of the GameRankings community, notably also owned by C-Net. Notice how the user accounts are disabled over there as well as the board and the reviewing system. Because I had my account personally attacked by an editor for trying as hard as possible to stay completely OUT of the controversy, situations like this make me very sour. It also reminds how explosive internet drama can be.

I don't want to say anthing more. I simply hope that this can blow over without major consequence to the community.

I've wanted to play Final Fantasy IX for a while now. It's been sitting there on my shelf calling my name for over a year now and for one reason or another. Most likely it's just because I know the amount of time it involves. I hate having to quit games, especially RPGs, for days in a row just because I don't have enough time. And I've been pretty busy.

Finally I gave in and was more or less wowed by the entire opening sequence. I was glad I had decided to start another harrowing journey in a Final Fantasy world. I was glad that I'd finally be playing what is lauded as one of the PS1's finest games. And then something happened.

Somewhere near the twenty hour mark, perhaps halfway through the game, I couldn't bring myself to keep playing. It just seemed like a huge chore to me. The story seemed to be dragging. For some reason, I didn't care about anything, not the characters, not the world. So I just stopped. And I haven't started back up since.

This isn't the first time this has happened to me. Somehow, some of the greatest games just don't mesh at all. They seem so bad to me I can't even bring myself to finish them. And then I feel bad about it, because any proper reasoning skills would tell you that you should be enjoying this game, that this game has everything you could possibly want. I usually can't persuade myself to pick the game up again, so it goes back on the shelf as evidence that there must be something wrong with me. Perhaps becoming more busy has made me more picky of what games I play. Perhaps those time constraints are forcing me to make the most of whatever free time I have and even video games sometimes don't cut it. Or could it be possible that Final Fantasy IX was just a bad choice at a time like this.

And, of course, this is no blow at Final Fantasy IX. I thoroughly enjoyed Final Fantasy VI and VII and many other great RPGS. I'm a firm believer that every game presents itself differently to each person that picks it up. My experience doesn't (and shouldn't) have any bearing on another's view of the game. That is also a reason why I've been having so much trouble writing reviews lately. It seems that I experience games so completely differently than the average gamer, trying to influence their opinion in any way seems futile.

On a side note, Oblivion has pretty much stolen my soul. I really don't know how to pick out games that I'll like, because, clearly, other's scores have no bearing. Perhaps I just have to get lucky.

W00t I guess, or something.  I can't imagine how I reached that, seeing that I've spent an average of about ten minutes a day on this site the last month.  The good news is, I have straight A's in school, and quite frankly, I value that more than anything on this site.  I just reread my Chrono Cross review because I was trying to make my scores more accurate.  I found that I was giving way to many games really high scores, so I went through and actually compared the games to one another.  I found that many games were getting 9s that probably deserved 8s and a few were getting 10s and probably were slightly less than perfect.  Then again, the score really shouldn't mean much to the readers; It's the content of the review that matters. Anyway, I've also been spending time composing, which I really enjoy. I have a Work in Progress for OCRemix that has received a very positive response but I'm still working on perfecting it. Happy gaming.

Achieving Second Place RotW at Honestgamers, the same Psychonauts also placed second in Reviewspotting, the highest I've made it so far.   Now to achieve that elusive first.

I don't know how long it will last, but as I've right now, my review of Psychonauts is featured on the front page of Honestgamers.com. Yes, my alias there is Sasqua Mox.  It's the first review I've actually tried to perfect and then entered somewhere besides Gamespot. Apparently they liked it. I'm very excited. I entered the same review for Reviewspotting here on Gamespot so we'll see how it does there. Special thanks to Lukeriela and Teh ghost for critiquing it in the Community Contributions Union.