Sorry about the lack of follow-through on my previous post. My best intentions were thrown to the wind and the video blog that never was, shall never be. I'm here at my officer basic course and I've been busy like crazy. My day started at 3:30 AM this morning and went until about 8:30 PM tonight and it's about 100 degrees (F) here during the day. Needless to say, I'm tired. Fortunately, I'm also finding this experience to be an excellent one and look forward to my upcoming field training. I'll do my best to keep you all updated, but please forgive my lack of comments in your blogs.

`Nick

`Nick

Please forgive the blur. Camera phone is to blame.

Even with all these fancy consoles and next-gen graphics, I've been spending my recent game time with my beloved GameBoy. In fact, I recently finished up both Final Fantasy Adventure and Rolan's Curse 2. Let's start with the one you've never heard of.

Admission: I bought Rolan's Curse 2 based entirely on the cover art. Before you fervently type a cliched response comparing games to books, try to understand the situation a little better. This was back in the days when the internet was in its infancy and you couldn't "Google" something because Google didn't exist. I couldn't just look up the name of the game and expect to learn everything about it, especially considering we had no internet access at my house. So anyways, I picked up this game because I was 8 years old and it had a sweet monster on the front. Not surprisingly, I hated it. It was too hard and just generally confusing. I played it on and off for a few years and then set it aside. 2 years ago I started it up again and found it to be a bit better than I remembered. I played through half the game and then decided to move on. After finishing FFA, I decided to pick it up again last weekand, surprisingly, I loved it. I quickly ran through the second half of the game and had a blast.

Rolan's Curse 2 is a lot like the Legend of Zelda (NES) or Final Fantasy Adventure (GB), but with a few twists. There are 8 characters in the game and you can have four in your party at a time (main character plus any three). While you only control one character at a time, you can switch out on the fly (think the original TMNT game for the NES) to conserve your health or get through certain objectives. Each character is unique, with his/her own melee attack and secondary magic ability. Combat is real-time and relatively simple (slash, slash, slash, kill, repeat), but still enjoyaable. When you kill monsters, they sometimes drop items, but you don't gain experience. To make your character stronger, you must find special treasure chests that confer a level up. This encourages (read: forces) you to explore every area. Even cooler is the fact that many characters have a starting ability which can be upgraded to a stronger or more useful version after completing a task or beating a boss. The game has some problems, mainly the difficulty and control, but they don't detract much from the experience.

All of this makes for a game with a considerable amount of variety and challenge. If you ever find a copy, I recommend giving it a chance. It can be extremely difficult at times, but it has a lot to offer.

`Nick

I still haven't got to the point of wanting a PS3, but I sprang for this earlier today. A terrible price considering what you get, but if it's limited enough, the price will look better with time. Unfortunately, it's a 40GB with no backward compatibility (a big negative for me considering my extensive backlog) so I don't think I'll be keeping it to use as my console. I'll either resell it for a tidy profit or let it sit in my collection, factory sealed and gathering dust (that sounds really, really lame).

Why must I have this collector's urge?

`Nick