Are we here?

Hey all! Patrick here. Sorry for the lack of updates. It has been busy busy busy!! Melody is out on vacation and I just came back from a business seminar. Melody's definitely the more avid blogger, but I'll add my contribution and hopefully not make it suck too much.

As you may or may not know, we both have full time jobs. Melody is also goes to school. In addition to that, we also are both working on home businesses. For some reason she doesn't want me to post this, but I'm doing it anyway, so shhhhhh!!! Don't tell her! You can see here work at http://raindrops23.etsy.com. Yes, this is a shameless plug :)

Anyway, that's it for now. I just got Halo3 ODST, so I hope to be reviewing that when I'm done. Thanks for reading!

Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja

She said:

So when I saw this game it was like 12 bucks at game stop a year or two ago. I was looking at it and thought oh I bet Patrick will like this game... and it's by atlas, (I really like atlas). It actually didn't look like a game I would like because it said old school rpg and I'm not old school like that and it looked kind of hard. I get discourage really easily, just to let you know.

I bought it and gave it to Patrick. He was kind of excited about it and started playing it right away. He played it for seriously a few minutes and decided it sucked. Then he tossed it aside. Well granted he was playing another game at the time that he wanted to desperately finish I think it was the Zelda game.

It has been collecting dust in my DS collection (I say mine because I have way more games than Patrick, he honesty doesn't buy DS games even though I bought him a DS when we first started dating, he just usually play my games) until we started blogging. Oh yeah I should mention last November during Amazon's black Friday/cyber Monday sale Izuna 2 was really cheap and I got it because... it was a good deal! That at least was collecting dust with a plastic cover on it in my DS collection.

Most games Patrick has played that I haven't are super long RPGs on the Xbox or PS3 (I'm more of a portable gamer) or they are shooting games (I have bad hand eye coordination) and I'm not going to play those... well maybe someday I'll give them a try again.

This was one of the few games he has played that I haven't so I gave it a whirl. To be honest I thought I would go through the same experience as Patrick because he really didn't like this game and thought it was dumb. What hope did I have?

As you start the game you find out that you're an unemployed ninja traveling with other unemployed ninjas hoping to find a job, you're more like a family with a sister and a brother like figure and a dad like figure though none of them are actually related to you in any way, you just happen to be in the same ninja group. I should mention here that you're sort of a feisty girl.

You come into this town that has a lot of gods in it, and you knock over some gem thing which causes the gods to be mad at you and your group gets cursed. In fact they cursed the whole town. To help them you must confront all 6 gods and ask for the cure for the cruse they put on your group.

Each god is at the end of an old school dungeon with many floors. In the first dungeon, you're going to die a lot... and when you die you're going to lose all the stuff you collected and all the money you had. Until you beat the first dungeon you are always going to lose everything because the storage house isn't going to be unlock yet. You have to beat the first god to get the first cure to lift the curse from the girl that owns the storage house.

To me I just excepted I was going to die and lose all my stuff... I mean you're going to go through it again and get more stuff. It didn't bothered me.

Each dungeon though is super harder than the last so if you finally get to the point where you can breeze through the dungeon you're in, the next one you're probably still going to die at the first level.

After I got the storage house I was a little more careful about not dying and I always carried a talisman that can transport me out of the dungeon (the only other way out is beating the boss or dying). Though the dungeon monsters don't only get harder you also have traps to step on that can hurt you in some way. There is also a fire monster that will might burn something you carry with everyone of it's attack... so I have lost my get-out-of-the-dungeon talisman a few times because of that.

The weapons are interesting too. You can either wear a claw like weapon which gives you both offense and defense or you can use a sword that gives you only offense along with a guard that gives you only defense. Also you can stick talisman on it to make it have special attacks but it makes it weaker. Weapons can break in this game from wear and tear. I just used weapons without talisman to make them last longer because good weapons were few and far between.

I should mention that this game is turn based. So when you do something everyone else around you gets to do something before you can do something again. This only poses as a problem if you get surrounded by monsters because you are only able to hit one of them in a turn where they can all hit you in a turn. You can be surrounded on all 8 sides. To be honest being attacked by more than two monsters at any giving time is hard to beat so what I do is I hide in a tunnel so I can only be attacked at most by two monsters. If I'm in an open space with a lot of monsters I try to rush it to a tunnel opening. Though I should also mention that some floors have no tunnels, it's just one big fat open space... in this situation I try to make it to a corner so only 3 monsters can attack you at once. I have rarely survived open spaces like this, I usually die or am forced to use my get-out-of-dungeon talisman.

All in all it was a pretty fun game because you still get to level and check your weapons to make sure you are using the strongest one. Money didn't really matter in this game... the things you can buy at the store are usually really cheap so I had tons of money at the end of the game.

I didn't beat the game. I am at level 99 with Izuna and can't get through the last dungeon. I stock up with tons of things and still can't make it though. I tried 5 times already, I was able to get to about floor 23 until I get surrounded by a lot of monsters which it's basically impossible to beat them all at once... I might try a few more times but I have already moved on the Izuna 2 which is a rather fun game.

I would recommend to this people that are easy going and don't mind dying. I see why Patrick was frustrated with this game but hey it's just a game and just have fun with it.

He said :

Sorry, guys, I only have 10 minutes to write this review. Business trip and my ride leaves shortly. Should be ok since I only really played about 10 minutes of this game anyway.

Izuna started out pretty good. I liked the characters, and the story was pretty funny. Then I got into the actual dungeons. They are all randomly generated, so they are never the same twice. Anyway, I was expecting it to be at least similar to other RPG's I've played before, but it wasn't. The monsters in the level all move when you move, one square at a time. And they are all super strong. So you you end up dying a lot. You can't get away from the monsters very easily because they are basically as fast as you are. After dying way too many times for my taste, I gave up. Not my cup of tea.


Breakdown :

She said : Yea
He said : Nay

If you want this game :

Amazon : Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja

Also check out our blog giveaway

EA Sports Active: Week 2

I was going to write about my progress everyday but also I didn't want to junk up this blog by having more than one post a day and I thought it would get boring after a while.

So it's been two weeks since I started really working out and trying to lose weight.

Here is the break down.

2 pounds lost (on track with my one pound a week goal)
1 person told me I looked thinner and prettier (and no that person was not Patrick! ^_^ It was a co-worker of mine that went on vacation when I started and when she came back she was like have you been working out?)
14 days I have been sore somewhere (to be honest I thought this would go away after the first week, but nope still sore).

I'm pretty happy with the results so far and I can't wait to see what the next weeks will bring.

Though I should note here that last weekend we went to a food fest and I gained half a pound from it and Patrick gained 2 pounds... wii fit got mad at him and asked what happened, he was able to choose between 8 things and Patrick picked "I ate too much", so now when he scrolls over that date where he gained two pounds his mii says "I ate too much!". It's rather cute. ^_^

Here's a picture!


To buy it on Amazon : EA Sports Active


Also check out our blog giveaway

Blog Giveaway

Hey everyone so we thought it would be a great idea to do a blog giveaway. ^_^

This is just swag (stuff we all get) that we got from comic-con.

This is all gaming related so we thought it would be great to give away for our blog, which happens to be gaming related.

So here is the stuff.


(1) Dissidia final fantasy fan (one side good guys, other side bad guys)
(2) Brutal Legend iron-on.
(3) Harry Potter and the half-blood prince - the videogame : snap bracelet
(4) 48 hours free xbox live code

This is the back of the fan if anyone wanted to know.

Maybe someday in the future, I will be able to talk more appealing pictures. Sorry this is all you get for now.

Yeah comic con had limited video game related stuff. ^_^ Our next blog giveaway will probably be anime related swag we got from comic con.

So if this is appealing to you.

Here are the rules:

(1) Leave a comment on this blog post with your e-mail address in the form of : name (at) something (dot) com (we promise we won't sell your e-mail address ^_^), one entry per person please.

This giveaway will end next Staurday (9/12/09) at midnight (Pacific Time) and we will e-mail the winner (that will be choosen at random by random.org), they have 3 days to reply back or we will pick another winner.

International entries are welcome.

Um... I think that covers it. I will update this post if I need to add more information or something like that. Good luck everyone!

Virtua Fighter 5

He Said:

I'm not a huge fan of fighting games, but I definitely do have fond memories of Street Fighter II back in the good old days. After Street Fighter III came out, I basically fell out of fighting games all together. Virtua Fighter was never on my radar at all. In fact, I remember trying to play the original VF and being completely confused. Not like Street Fighter at all!!

Anyway, a few years ago some friends of mine introduced me to Virtua Fighter 4. At first, I played just to be social, but pretty soon , I was really having fun . . . and getting my butt kicked at the same time! Playing VF was a truly different experience when playing with people who know the mechanics of the game and can help you figure it out. Well, the in game tutorial helped too.

After I got into VF, I did try some other 3D fighting games. Let's see . . . I tried Soul Calibur, Dead or Alive and Tekken. I think those are the big ones. I liked some of them, and didn't like others, but I really think VF has ruined me for those other games. The main characteristic of the VF series, in my opinion, is the fact that you can't really just mash the buttons and expect to get any results. In comparison with other games in the field, it is not friendly to new users (hence my frustration the first time I played). Some of the new characters do seem to more "mash" friendly, but a character like Akira takes a lot of time and patience to master.

VF is not a flashy game. There are no fireballs or supernatural spirits or anything like that. It's probably the most "realistic" game in terms of the physics, so you won't be falling from hundreds of feet as part of the battle. The real appeal to this game comes from the tactics and strategy of the battle. You use just three buttons: punch, kick and block. Using various combinations along with a dodge mechanic and a counter mechanic you try to out-think your opponent. Someone could argue that all fighting games are like that, but VF really puts it on a different level.

Virtua Fighter 5 carries on the tradition of the VF series. The characters all return and it's absolutely beautiful in high definition. In addition, the XBOX version on the game has online play, and it actually works! Okay, some of the purists out there a complaining about the frame count and whatever, but that's not me.

If like fighting games and you've never tried a Virtua Fighter game, I highly suggest you give it a test drive. It's cheap now, too!

Breakdown

He said: Yea

If you want this game:

xbox360 - Virtua Fighter 5
ps3 - Virtua Fighter 5

Questions and Answers

I always think it's more interesting to know more about the people that are behind the blog so I thought it would be great to do a little Q/A with me and Patrick. Here are a few things about us that you might find interesting.

Where did you go to college?
She said: California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (say that three times fast), a lot of people I know just call it cal poly, SLO (pronounced slow).
He said: University of California, Davis (or just UC Davis). Go Ags!

What did you major in?
She said: Computer Engineering. It was great. I liked it a lot. Though it was sad to be one of 2-5 girls in all my classes (class sizes were about 25-32 people)
He said: Computer Science and Engineering.

What is your job?
She said: I am a software engineer at a big company doing satellite programming. It sounds fancy... oh and it is... j/k, it's like normal coding and testing and stuff.
He said: I'm a network engineer at a big company. I don't use my computer science engineering skills at all.

What do you do in your free time other than video games, watching anime and eating?
She said: Wow really limits my answer... all I have left really is sleeping? J/k! I like to sew and make quilts (weird I know), I also do a lot of other crafts but sewing pretty much takes up most of time right now. I also go Santa Clara University part time to get my masters degree in software engineering but that's not really something I do for fun, though it could be fun at times. I also like to travel and hang out with my friends. I have a personal blog that I kept for 4 years now but this blog has taken up most of time so I haven't been saying much there. Also right now me and Patrick are working out so we can look great for our wedding. ^_^
He said: I like to hang out with Melody and sometimes play racket ball. I also build my own business through Amway Globe (if any of you guys are interested in this let me know).

How long have you two been together?
We said: We have been together for over two years now.

How did you two meet?
We said: Actually we met on eharmony, there is actually a pretty good story to this but maybe that's a blog for another day. ^_^

When is the wedding?
We said: We are hoping for next year in October.

Do you have any siblings?
She said: Yes I have one older brother who is in the video game industry in fact, he has influenced me all my life, and probably is the reason why I like video games and anime.
He said: Yup I am the oldest of 3 boys, my middle brother is going to be a helicopter pilot for the army and my youngest brother just graduated college and is a waiter currently.

Well that's all for now if you guys have any questions you want to ask, we will try to answer them in the next Q&A, unless of course they are inappropriate =P

What's Cooking? With Jamie Oliver

She said :

We got this game at Fry's last month during that massive let's buy games moment I had. Well I popped this into my DS. I wasn't sure what to expect... I was hoping it would be sort of like cooking mama but different.

Well it seems the first part of it is just a recipe book. Which is cool I guess.

Then there is something called the cooking kitchen which is kind of like cooking mama but way more difficult to figure out and play.

Actually what comes to play here is that I really don't "read" instructions so I kind of think that a game would just be easy to figure out, which is why it was so hard for me to play with the cooking kitchen part of the game because I didn't read all the little things you had to do to make things work. Patrick showed me it later but by then I was already over it.

All in all I wouldn't recommend this game... good thing we got it for 10 bucks because really if I had paid more for it I would be really sad right now.

He said :

I'm not sure I should even call this a game. I THINK it's supposed to be a simulation of cooking, on the Nintendo DS. Melody picked up this "game" because she liked Cooking Mama. I, on the other hand, have never played Cooking Mama, so have no point of reference, but I'm pretty sure it's not like What's Cooking with Jamie Oliver?

I played through the tutorial . . . I think. I'm actually not sure what exactly I did. The setting consists of a virtual kitchen in the DS. The kitchen has several different sites you can visit, like a stove, a refrigerator, a cutting board, and so on. You can take ingredients from the pantry or fridge. You take pots and pans and various utensils from the pantry. You take food items to the cutting board and cut them with a knife using strokes of the stylus. You can stir things in bowls using the stylus. I don't think you can measure exactly . . . but I'm not sure. I think I made a cake. Yeah, it was a cake.

A went to another section of the game and it had recipes that I could read through. Fun!

You know, I watch food network. I actually kinda like cooking. It can be fun. This was not. Don't get it.

Breakdown :

She said : Nay
He said : Nay

If you want this game :

Amazon : What's Cooking? With Jamie Oliver

Internet Channel for the Wii is now FREE!

Hey everyone so if you got the wii like when it first came out the internet channel was free... and then that changed to 500 wii points soon after.

So when we got our wii the internet channel was not free anymore and we are too lazy to pay for stuff on the wii, they really don't make it that easy to buy stuff.

Turns out right now the internet wii channel is free again! Yay us.

Also if you happened to pay the 500 wii points for it, in October Nintendo will let you choose a game at the same value to get for free. Isn't that nice? ^_^

For more info you can read it at cnet news.

Rhapsody, A Musical Adventure - bug and fix

This isn't a review... because Patrick hasn't finished the game yet.

I actually finished the game but more on that when we write our review for it.

As Patrick was going through the game, there is this one part where you are in a contest and at the end of the contest (which is at end of the 2 chapter I believe) the game should ask you if you want to save or not, anyways for Patrick when he gets to the end of the contest, it just turns black and he waited a long time and nothing happened…

He restarted the game and played the last part of that sequence again and again it turned black and didn’t do anything. Then he took the game out of the DS and wiped it down thinking it might be dust and tried again… it still turned black. Then he tried playing it on my DSi and it still did it. He gave up for the night.

Well that was a few days ago, and I thought hmmm… I bet this isn’t happening to just us.

So I googled it and it seems you have to do two things
1. L-kun out of your party
2. Do something (like talk to someone or re-filling your stats by looking at a statue)

Then try again. That totally worked for Patrick and now he can move on to finishing the game so we can review it. ^_^

The reason this didn’t happen to me because during this part of the game you lose one of your party members temporary and I didn’t think of replacing that person with L-kun which is the only member you can fill that spot with. I think I was just lazy to rearrange my members, Patrick on the other hand thought oh an empty spot in my party, and I should fill it!

Goes to show that laziness triumphs again. If you haven’t notice I’m a lazy gamer where as Patrick really wants to do everything. For me the main story and maybe a side quest or two is good enough, so I can really blast through games. Patrick needs to get every little things so it will usually take him twice as long if not more to go through a game. Another opposite we have.

Amazon - Rhapsody, A Musical Adventure

Most Awesome Tea Pot EVER!

I stumbled upon this tea pot... I looked everywhere to see if I can buy because I totally want one of the space invaders ones. It seems I can't find it but this website has a lot of info about it and how it works... just not where to buy it!

Oh well I thought this was interesting check it out.

I mean who doesn't want a space invader tea pot?

For more info click here

Seriously?

Wow is everyone having a wedding right now? We just got invited to another one. I’m pretty excited because Patrick won’t let me steal all the ideas from the other wedding we went to.

Well there is one idea I really really want to steal this one idea for name setting, they used those chocolates that are wrapped in gold foil and stuck the name on a toothpick and stuck the toothpick in the chocolate and had it on the place that you were suppose to sit.

That’s such a great idea… *totally want to steal it* Patrick says that we are inviting these people to our wedding we can’t do this because they will be like “HEY!”, I said well we will just ask, they will probably be pretty cool with it because hey weddings are crazy, and since they just went through it they know how crazy it is.

They also had a photo booth and I totally want a photo booth! ^_^ I have seen it on wedding shows… I’m not sure if we could afford it but I really want one now… we probably can’t afford it…. *poor* Oh well.

On to the next wedding and seeing what we can be inspired from that. Yay! ^_^

EA Sports Active: Day 4

Today is my rest day because of the wedding. I thought maybe I could get a workout in because I’m kind of gun-ho right now about working out and eating right. Basically we woke up got ready and went to the wedding and came back passed midnight. No way to get the workout in.

Though I’m counting the walking we did in SF, though it wasn’t very much… in total we probably walked about 45 minutes but some of it was up hill!

I personally made some bad eating choices. I had some fried rice for breakfast about half a cup full which isn’t that bad in the grand scheme of things. Then I had a nutella crepe in japantown in SF between the ceremony and the reception. Then I had a drink (rum and coke) at the reception along with two dinner rolls, a salad, a super yummy beef dish, and cake. Along with a couple sips of red wine and champagne.

During dancing part they had a dessert buffet! I was good here; I only had on tiny tart and one chocolate covered strawberry. Patrick didn’t do so well here, he had like 4 slices of different pies along with various other things, and that’s just the stuff I saw him eating, I mean I don’t watch him all the time so he might had more; he totally pigged out on the dessert buffet. Then again he’s not on a diet so that’s okay. He holds his weight really well; he looks super thin even though his mii is overweight. So really he would look good in a tux right now if we got married tomorrow. I hope our kids have his whatever gene this is.

To buy it on Amazon : EA Sports Active

Tales of Vesperia - Super Cheap Right Now - Today Only

Today's game deal of the day is Tales of Vesperia for less than 15 bucks! What a good deal! We have this game already and Patrick is playing it right now. We will write a review for it soon. ^_^ It's awesome so far. I might buy this for my brother since he showed an interested in it.


Amazon - Tales of Vesperia

Xbox 360 Elites are 100 dollars cheaper now

Wow look on Amazon Xbox 360 Elites are now 100 dollars cheapers now! That's crazy... so it's only 299.99, instead of 399.99.

Man we bought it for the more expensive price a year and half ago. Oh well the year and half of game playing was probably worth the 100 dollars. ;-)

If you don't have one, this might be a good time to buy if you have been on the fence about it.

Xbox 360 Console

Ponyo

She said:

My brother and I are a big fans of Hayao Miyazaki, we almost always know when and what his next movie coming out. I was super excited about Howl’s Moving Castle, but it seemed like I was the only person that knew about even my friends in college (that’s when it came out) didn’t know it was coming out or have even heard of it, darn Disney for not advertising it till the last minute.

Now when I heard about Ponyo it was actually just cruising around the internet but then they didn’t have very much information about it. Okay I thought something more was going to come out on it.

Then last month while I was watching the Disney channel (it’s really my go to channel when there is nothing on the TiVo, well that and Food Network) they actually had a little short on it, because the bonus Jonas was playing the little boy’s voice.

To be honest it didn’t look that good…

But it’s by Miyazaki! It has to be wonderful… right?

Anyways I really really really wanted to watch it when it came out. Patrick… on the other hand was kind of on the fence about it. Well he didn’t want to see so I was okay not seeing because you know when you’re in a relationship you have to pick your battles.

Patrick did insist we go since I seem to really want to see it and it’s a movie he wouldn’t mind, so we ended up going on the Tuesday night after it came out.

The first half of the movie was really very Miyazaki, the visual affects were just wonderful. Though it was kind of confusing, which is okay that’s kind of Miyazaki too, he usually wraps it up at the end.

Then there was the second half of the movie… a lot stranger than the first half… and then it just kind of ended out of no where… without even attempting to tie any loose ends.

We think what happened was Miyazaki was going about making this movie doing his magic and when he realized his first half was so long and he was no where near finishing up the movie he just kind of was like “oh s***” and pulled something together for the last part of the movie.

All in all it was a good movie… very magic and visually pleasing I would totally recommend it to all my friends to see it… and I will probably want to watch it again when it comes out on video… but paying for it in the movie theaters again… probably not.

He Said:

Who here likes Mayaziki? Anyone? Who here even knows who Hayao Miyazaki is?

As an anime fan, it's been basically drilled in my head that I should love anything by Miyazaki. He's really considered a god in most anime crowds. Well, to be honest, I don't really see the appeal. Sure, I thought Princess Mononoke was pretty good. I saw Nausicaa and enjoyed it. I just don't see the "masterpiece" that the movie critics see. Granted, I'm not really an artsy type of person, so some of the meaning is probably lost on me. Ah, well...

Anyway, that brings us to Ponyo. Like the other Miyazaki films, the visuals and animations are incredible. There are tons of moving little pieces that fill up the screen. The animation is really smooth. The character designs are classic Miyazaki.

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!! Don't say I didn't warn you!

The story is kinda weird. Ponyo is a fish ... I think. Probably the weirdest looking fish I've ever seen. Her father is a creepy looking man who lives underwater. Or, he's formerly human. I'm not sure. Ponyo's mother is a beautiful sea goddess. Hmmm, creepy looking man plus beautiful sea goddess equals little, strange fish thingy. That makes sense to me!

At the start, Ponyo's dad is collecting some magic potions by... uh, actually I don't know what he's doing. Pointing some thingy at the fishes swimming by, I guess. He seems really upset about the humans who are messing up the ocean and seems to be plotting to destroy humanity . . . or at least he mentions it. Then Ponyo accidentally gets washed on shore with all the waste and trash dumped in the ocean by the human (environmental message, anyone?). She gets influenced by a boy named Sosuke and, by chance, tastes his blood. This apparently make her able to turn into a human girl with magical powers. She gets taken back by her father, but now wants to go back to land and see Sosuke again. She escapes, causing some dangerous magic potions to be spilled into the ocean. Oh my, what's going to happen???

So, the beginning of the movie start off well enough. There are the element of the Ponyo's dad wanting to destroy humanity. What are these potions? What was he doing at the beginning? Well, by the end of the movie, all these elements seem to have been dropped. When I walked out of the theater, Melody and I started talking about all these things that seemed to be important at the beginning, that were completely glossed over by the end. It felt a little incomplete.

That's not to say it was a bad movie, though. There is still a core story of friendship between Ponyo and Sosuke that is very sweet and cute. However, a lot of it just didn't make sense.

If you are looking for a cute movie for the kids, go and see it. If you are looking for more, or something that makes sense, you might want to wait till it comes out on video.

Breakdown :

She said : Nay
He said : Nay

EA Sports Active: Day 3

So now it’s the third day in my 30 day challange. It was suppose to a rest day but since we have a wedding to go to the next day I decided to take my rest day the next day. I’m actually doing this 30 day challenge everyday and I’m going to write about everyday but I didn’t want to junk up our blog with just me writing about this so I’m only posting my progress on days we don’t have anything else posted. Just to let you guys know.

My shoulders are so sore from day one and two workouts. Seriously if my arm stretched a little bit it was painful, good thing I mostly work on a computer so my shoulders don’t have to move that much. It was kind of a quite day at work so when ever I had a chance I stretched out my shoulders… oh so painful!

We actually like working out together because we can motivate each other and stuff. One thing tiny thing that annoys me about working out with Patrick is that he watches me working out and comments on it, so if I do something wrong he tells me and tries to helpfully advise me how to do it correctly. I don’t know about you but I’m not the most cheerful person while working out and so a lot of times I’m just like back off buddy and concentrate on yourself. I almost never look at Patrick when we work out together because I’m trying to figure out the exercise that the sports active is having us do.

We actually were playing with the wii fit before we started the sports active workout so we decided to just make a workout up with their make a workout function. Patrick filled our workout with lots of sports activities to basically fill up to 20 minutes because we already did wii fit we didn’t want to do a 30 minute work out.

To save time this isn’t a good idea good thing we weren’t trying to save time, because most of these sports activities were new to me and we had to watch the video for basically every single one of them.

It was actually a pretty intense workout because it was almost all just aerobic. There was no strength exercises at all mixed in. Usually the calorie worked off count for me is about 150 for a 30 minute work out with sports active on the preset workouts for day one and two, this one was 230 for just a 20 minute workout.

Alright here’s to keeping it up.

To buy it on Amazon : EA Sports Active

Puchi Puchi Virus

She said:

Another puzzle game! Did I mention I like puzzle games? Thus a lot of times I buy puzzle games.

The way I found out about this was I was cruising Amazon for video games one day and ran across this one, it didn’t have that many reviews but it had a few people saying how good and fun it is.

Then I saw it at Fry’s for a pretty good price and picked it up.

I wanted to start playing it right away which I did. Right when I came home I popped into my DS and started playing with it.

It was a kind of cute story where on a planet similar to ours there was a virus that turned everyone into these wacky characters and you as a doctor have to fix them. You are this blue haired doctor with two assistants once is a cute blonde hair girl and one is a human size chicken, both in nurses outfits.

It’s a pretty simple game you have to cure these people by knocking out the virus and each level there are different goals to cure the person. They are (a) points, (b) chains and (c) number of virus. First start out with easy levels and as you go through them more levels are unlocked.

The game play is really different from any other puzzle game I have ever played. Basically you have to make triangles connecting three like virus and then tap them to make them disappear and all the viruses in the triangle get lighted up too and you can make chains by connecting more virus together using the viruses from the inside and outside of your previous triangles before you tap on the first triangle you made, but the game moves really fast (almost all the games you play will be about 3 minutes long) so if you take too long making chains all the virus will turn grey.

Grey viruses are just stone versions of the viruses, meaning you can’t tap on them to make triangles. Also if you trap virus in your triangle that aren’t part of other triangles they turn grey and if you trap grey virus in your triangle they will turn back to normal viruses. As you play more and more viruses show up so having grey viruses really hurt you over time. Viruses also turn grey just over time, so if you don’t use a virus for a while it will turn grey.

Also the more viruses you destroy you get points for this pill icon, the more you destroy the stronger the pill is. If you get in a tight spot where almost all your viruses are grey you can use a pill to make them into normal viruses the stronger you pill the more grey viruses will turn to normal viruses.

The game is pretty easy at first especially when you got the hang of it or just quick with the stylus but the game turns really hard very suddenly. Even though each game last only 3 minutes it can be a bit frustrating.

At first I got stuck in the chain links I am actually pretty good up to 5 chains but the game seems to go up to 7 chains which is really hard to do on the board. In the points game you can get stuck too because it forces you to make higher chains which yield more points… I didn’t realize this till I played through one points game and even though I stayed alive for the 3 minutes I wasn’t even close to the points I need for the goal.

Making chains is probably the hardest part about this puzzle game and near the end it becomes a really important part to beating levels, there are 109 levels in this game and after the first 50 it’s all about making chains. I have gone about 70% of the way and right now the levels I have seem impossible to beat.

I did enjoy this game, but there was only about 4 hours of game play I got out of it and it doesn’t seem to have much in replay value other than playing levels over and over again because you just can’t beat it.

I wished they eased me more into the harder levels because it felt like it went from super easy to impossible in a heartbeat. I also wish they had more levels, with more characters to unlock. They have 109 levels, maybe having more would have been better and helped easing people into harder levels.

He said:

Another puzzle game. Man, we sure do play alot of these. Let's see where to start. First, it has a pretty wacky story line. It takes place on a planet, which is kinda like Earth, but not. All the people on this planet apparently turn into animals, and it is your job eradicate the virus. Now, the way you do this is by playing a puzzle game.

The game itself is pretty unique, or at least I've never played anything like it before. Viruses of various colors will pop up on the screen. When you tap three of the same color with the stylus, you can make them disappear. When you attach the three, it also creates a triangle. You can create multiple triangles and put together chains of virus destruction for more points. However, if you wait to long, or if there are unattached viruses inside you triangles, then they turn grey and you cannot use them unless you encase them in yet another triangle!

Ummm, yeah. Did that make sense at all?

Basically, each level has a goal. Sometimes the goal is just a number of points, which is simple. I won't spoil it, but there's a way to basically exploit the game to get massive points pretty easily. However, sometimes the goal is to get a number of chains, and when the number starts getting above three, I found it was impossible. So, in a nutshell, the game went from being super easy, which was mildly fun, to being super impossible, which was not fun. Now, I'm sure I could have spent a lot of time honing my stylus tapping skills and eventually became a master at this game, but I think I'm okay not doing that. In fact, that really does not sound like fun at all.

An short, this was a mediocre puzzle game that had some interesting and fun points, but I'd probably not play it again.

Breakdown :

She said : Nay
He said : Nay

If you want this game :

Amazon: Puchi Puchi Virus

We have a Wii Fit!

Patrick is sometimes forgetful and sometimes he does stuff that is bad because of his forgetfulness, I will be like that’s bad! So Patrick usually drives when we go out together but usually we take my car, for some reason in the last few months my car doesn’t make that noise for if you leave your headlights on anymore (I really should get that looked at but I’m kind of lazy).

Patrick has been accidently leaving my headlights on. I got upset at him because you know if you do that my car might not start and you’re like draining my battery (I don’t really know anything about cars but this is what I think). He said well he doesn’t do it that often so don’t get mad at him, and I said fine if you don’t do it so often than let’s just say you owe me something if you do happen to do it again. He said okay.

Don’t you just love my back stories about things? ^_^ This is the pitfall of having a memory that doesn’t let you forget.

Anyways we take a day trip to visit my uncle in Sacramento and when we get there he offers to drive us everywhere. When we come back to our car like 8 hours later, guess what? The headlights are on! Ha Patrick owes Melody something. Guess what I picked? A Wii Fit. Yeah that’s right.

It’s been a couple of weeks but we finally got it the other day.

After setting it up we tested it out. I went first so I got on the board and it asks for your mii, then it makes sures your name and age are correct, then it makes you do this balancing shifting weight thing and then it does calculates your weight and tells you how fit you are.

Guess what? I’m obese! Not just overweigh, but obese! Jeez. What’s funny is it makes your mii obese too! It’s actually rather cute. Haha. It does make me feel a little bad though. It seems even when I thought I was thin…which was 30 lbs lighters… I was still overweight but not just a little but by a lot! I was like seriously really?

Patrick tried it after me and he was just overweight but his mii plumped up just like mine. Haha. His mii is cute too, so now we have two fat mii. Hahahahahahahaha. Patrick does not like his chubby mii at all. He thought he was normal but nope overweight. *insert evil laugh*

Here is a picture of our chubby mii's next to each other



Look! Our chubby miis are friends with each other and having a conversation. I think they are tell each other secrets. ^_^



So how wii fit works is that they have some exercises open to you start and the more time you work out the more other things will open up for you.

I did a couple of things to start but then after than I went and did my EA sports active training. I must admit I did a few of the yoga poses and those were hard! Well we will tell you more about it as we get more though it. Hopefully this will help with our goal of losing weight and being healthy.

At Amazon: Wii Fit

You can get it for 10 dollars cheaper at costco though. ^_^

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

So exciting! Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box is coming out today. Me and Patrick are going to cruise around to find it and buy it. There was no special deal to pre-order it anywhere so we are just going to try our luck. We will tell you how it is. We really liked the first one. ^_^

UPDATE : When I checked it on Amazon it says ships in 1-2 months... which to means says they sold out on it... so I thought it would be a good idea to call the game stop I was going to and check if they still have it stock before I went to it. Turns out that this is the ship date which means the soonest any store can get it is tomorrow. Bummer! The game stop guy said that a lot of people have this confused and I'm not the only one. Funny I wasn't concerned about looking dumb I am sad that I have to wait another day for this game!

Here is our review on the first one in case you missed it. - Professor Layton and the Curious Village

To get the new one

Amazon: Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

B-List

I thought this was an interesting thing about weddings I recently found out. Did you know most brides create a B-list guest list?

When you invite people to your wedding you will get some rejections and that’s normal. Usually people will show up with more people or people that you didn’t invite will show up or you will have people that say yes that don’t show up or you will have people that said no that still show up. The list goes on, usually it all evens out.

But with recent times and events a lot of people are rejecting wedding invites because it’s a burden to them because they can’t afford to travel.

They say if you get more than a certain percentage of rejects say like 20% or more than you should invite people off a B-List because usually you already paid for a certain amount of heads and you should fill that space rather than waste it.

I think that’s crazy! I mean… doesn’t it hurt to be on the B-list? You know you’re on the B-list when you have like 2 weeks to reply and the wedding is in 2 months.

I’m not sure if we will have a B-list because even though I think its mean, it makes sense, why waste the money on empty tables.

EA Sports Active: Day 2

It was kind of late yesterday like 10:30 and I thought oh man it will take me an hour to do this 25 minute workout that EA Sports Active wants me to do… but okay I’ll do it.

I thought maybe I could cut down the time because I don’t want have to watch the videos anymore… wrong! There are new excises today, there are some old ones but there are some new ones. Like forward lungs and tennis swings.

The tennis swings was a surprising activity because it seems sort out of place with everything else. It’s a little hard to get the hang of because I have really bad hand eye correlation but this game is very forgiving. At first it seems like the balls are just flying at you, like seriously they have no pause between balls shooting at you. It seems as long as you swing when the ball is somewhat near you, you will hit it. About halfway through the tennis activity I got the hang of it.

Also on the first day you just ran or walked for part of the workout but on day 2 they have you do different types of running like high leg lifts and the sort. I liked this because it made it more interesting.

I thought that the workout was a good balance between arms and legs but today I woke up with really really sore arms, like if I try to scratch my back it’s just too sore and painful to do that. Maybe I should stretch before working next.

To buy it on Amazon : EA Sports Active

EA Sports Active: Day 1

So as our wedding is approaching it seems I might have to lose some weight because I’m kind of overweight.

I wasn’t overweight when I met Patrick over 2 years ago but our whole first year together had some bad eating choices like late night fast food every week and then last year we went out to eat a lot for various reasons and on top of that we didn’t exercise, I must have lost 5 years of my over all life from these two years.

Though I must admit me and Patrick did realize our downward spiral and tried to work out and eat better about a year ago and that went out the window in a few weeks.

Right after we got engaged we also tried to start working out but that went out the window even faster in about a week.

As our wedding is getting closer I feel like we have to buckle down so I’m really going for it now. I need to lose at least 20 lbs (I gained 30 since we been together, well if you think about it that was about a pound a month) within the year.

I think if I do a pound a week I should be okay. On top of working out with one of my bridesmaid a week and going line dancing (yeah I like doing that so what?). I’m trying to do the EA sports active for the Wii.

My brother bought this for himself and never used it so he gave it to me knowing that I was in the market of losing weight. This is when we first started working out after our engagement so of course I didn’t even touch it. About a week ago Patrick tried it out and I sat on the couch and watched him do it, I know so bad! It didn’t look that hard but eh.

Yesterday I decided to start the 30 day challenge. I mean come on I saw Patrick do it, I can do it easy peasy.

So how it works is you pick an avatar that sort of looks like you, not as cute as a mii but I don’t think that’s the point. Then you pick what level you are, easy, medium or hard. Well I picked medium. Then it shows you what you are going to do, there are about 16 items but some of them are done more than once.

You can click the ones you don’t want to do but hey it’s the first day I have no idea what these are so kept them all. It said that it will be about a 30 minute work out. Cool I have 30 minutes. Then it starts. Usually it shows you a video of what to do and then you do it. On the top left side is the calories you have burned and on the top right side is the time.

There were a lot of things we did, this is not in the order that the worked out happened. Let’s see we did was walking then running, this was pretty easy though I didn’t know how hard it was to run in place, I usually use a treadmill but it worked. Then we did squats which wasn’t too bad. Then we did side lunges which wasn’t too bad either but it’s hard to figure out the form. Oh we did inline skating that was the hardest for some reason I couldn’t get the hang of it.

Then there was boxing and arm lefts and few more things. All in all it was a surprising intense workout. I usually don’t sweat (weird I know) and I was totally sweating at the end of this workout.

The work out is suppose to take only 30 minutes, I actually finished mine in 22 minutes because I ran a little fast for the running part. But it actually took me over an hour to complete the workout because the videos that go along with it doesn’t count as workout time. I was kind of like wow an hour went by… crazy. So hopefully it will take 30 minutes next time since I don’t have to sit through the videos to make sure I’m doing it right the next time around.

I actually kind of liked this because it was fun and the hour flew by like nothing and it felt like I did an intense workout. Well I’m going to try to keep track of this to make me more accountable for actually doing it.

To buy it on Amazon : EA Sports Active

Exit

She said:

Yeah yeah I know I know I know, I'm suppose to be the one that likes puzzle games in this relationship but to be honest I didn't get very far in this game.

I was very frustrated with the tutorial and I didn't get passed the 3rd one.

I can't believe how turned off the game made me by simply going through the tutorial. I was really excited about this game too, but not being able to make it pass the tutorial I didn't want to pick it up again.

I casted it away to Patrick and he had a hard time with the tutorial too but stuck it out and now he plays it all the time. I have seen him play it and yeah it looks like fun but I still am super turned off about it and even seeing Patrick happily playing it does not make want to play it.

If you guys can manage to get through the tutorial without being discouraged. Power to you because you will probably enjoy this game. But I'll have to say pass on buying it because there are a lot better puzzle games out there that won't frustrate you.

He said:

I really didn't know what to expect when Melody first presented me with this game. I had never heard of it before. My first impression were the bright red packaging, and the stick-figure like protagonist with a hat and tie. There is a Square-Enix logo on the back cover, so that did pique my interest.

It turns out it is a puzzle game, or more like a logic game. Although it did start out slow (those tutorial levels were kinda boring) it quickly became quite fun and interesting.

The story centers around a super hero type figure who saves people from dangerous situations and leads them to the exit (hence the name). Actually, he really doesn't have any super powers other than he can jump a little higher than normal people. I guess he's more like a concerned citizen who goes to the gym, rather than a super hero. Anyway, in order to rescue the people, you will have to push crates, use ropes and ladders, swim, put out fires, climb up and down ledges, and a myriad of other things. The trick is to do these things in the right order so that the people you rescue have a path to the exit.

In addition to that, there are different kinds of people you will rescue. There are fat people, normal sized people, children and dogs. Each type of person brings a different skill set and limitations to help you pass the level. For instance, fat people can push heavy crates by themselves, but need the help of two normal people to climb up a ledge if it is to high. The children can get into spaces too small for normal people, but need help up and down high ledges as well. Dogs can jump really far, but can't climb up ladders. You get the picture. In the later levels, the puzzles do become quite challenging, and you may end up restarting a level several time in order to figure out how to get all the people to the exit.

There are a few things that are a little annoying. First, the stylus control can be a bit frustrating. In order to move a person, you first tap on them, then you tap on the destination. If you want to move somewhere off screen, you have to pan the camera over. Sometimes I will tap on my character, pan the camera, and for some reason my character become unselected. Or, I won't be able to tell if they are selected because the indicator is off the top of the screen. In addition, if two people are on the same spot, tapping on them does not guarantee you will select the character you want.

Second, sometimes the logic of the game defies . . .logic. You will be thinking to yourself, "Oh, he should be able to move right there," only to find out the the game has decided that such a simple action is not possible. The game encourages you to have the character move on their own, but sometimes you will direct a character to move somewhere on his own, only to find out that some small crate that you can normally manually click over has blocked his progress. These little annoyance wouldn't be that big of a deal except the levels are timed, so you are constantly trying to move as fast as you can.

In the end, these and up being minor concerns, and the game itself is fun and challenging. It's a must have for any puzzle fan.

Breakdown :

She said : Nay
He said : Yea

If you want this game :

Amazon - Exit for the DS

Amazon - Exit for the PSP

Amazon Promotion for Games through August 31st

So it seems Amazon is having a special promotion on video games till the end of the month. For every video game you buy you can get 5 dollars of Amazon credit for getting MP3s.

It's pretty cool so for every video game you get, you will get an e-mail telling you that your account is credited 5 dollars for MP3 buying. So when you buy an MP3 it will automatically deduct from that pool of money.

For more info http://www.amazon.com/gp/promotions/details/popup/A3D7R2436SCADJ

To know if the game you are buying is part of this promotion just scroll down and it will be in the promotion section of the buying page.

Happy video game buying! ^_^

Sorry we are a bit behind on reviewing. Tomorrow we will have a review on Exit for the DS.

Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime

A surprising fun game.


She said :

Okay so I guess you guys have noticed that last Friday that Patrick wrote a review on his own since I didn’t play that game. Now we are pretty different people are there are some games he has played that I haven’t played and vice versa. So this week it’s my turn. I was thinking of making Fridays just one person’s review or an Anime review, we don’t have an Anime lined up right now because we haven’t been watching any and we really can’t pick from ones we have seen before since one of us has a good memory and the other one doesn’t.

I must say I didn't have high hopes for this game, because my brother bought this game at full price and played it the day he got it and I never saw him play it again.

I saw this game for sale at a local computer type store (I don't remember the name but I don't think it's a chain) for less than 7 bucks... well I am always willing to add to my DS collection even though my brother had it and I could probably borrow it for free.

Well I started playing it... and I loved it! I beat it over two weekends.

I called my brother that weekend and asked him if he ever finished the game, he said oh after playing it the first time he wanted to continue playing it but had no time. He will give it another try seeing how much I liked it.

If you like Zelda (very similar to the minish cap I think) I think you will like this game... though this game is a lot easier than Zelda, in the minish cap, I got to the final boss and wasn't able to get through the 3rd level of the boss and gave up, that didn't feel good. This game it's pretty easy to beat all the bosses and you get that warm I beat the game feeling.

This game has little replay value but there are a million games out there. No one game really needs replay value. Its fun for the whole family I think. My only real compliant is that it's too short!

He said :

Nothing to say... I might play it later though.

Breakdown :

She said : Yea
He said : ...

If you want this game :

Amazon : Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime

Great buys at Frys

I'm kind of in the mind set of getting a good deal for the money. Me and Patrick have a lot of games now because I'm always buying games when it's a good deal.

I check amazon game deal of the day pretty much everyday... I try not to check it too much anymore because seriously we are back logged on playing games.

Unfortunately we went to frys this weekend. I wasn't looking for games, my mother needed a digital camera but it was taking long so I looked at the DS games. There was this one roll of clearance games and guess what I found!

Puchi Puchi Virus
Populous
Rhapsody: a musical adventure
Exit
Cooking with Jaime Oliver
The Legend Of Kage 2
Nancy Drew: The Mystery of the Clue Bender Society

They were all for about 10-14 dollars each and in total all of this cost me about 100 bucks. Score.

The only problem with me is I know a good DS game deal... I don't know good deals when it comes to buying other games... though I'm getting better at knowing if the PSP games are good deals.

These will be reviewed in the near future. ^_^

Patapon

Patapon 1, not Patapon 2, yeah this is the first one. Sorry no new games yet, we are just going through what we have played to fill up this blog. ^_^

She said :

To be honest I have no idea how we got Patapon. I usually remember where, when and how much it cost, but for this one I have no idea. I’m thinking we got it as a used game at game stop and we probably bought it along with a few other used games because the games I don’t remember usually come about that way.

It’s a bummer that Sony is trying to take away the UMD and just have it all download-able (that’s exactly what they did for Patapon 2) but to me that doesn’t feel like really owning because I can’t resell it (even though I have never resold a game, though I have let people borrow my games). Yeah yeah we know game companies hate when people resell games because they make no profit from it and try to discourage people from doing that. Well if they made games cheaper than maybe the general public wouldn’t take to buying used games, I mean I want to play the game, I don’t want to acquire it through illegal means, so what am I going to do? Buy the used copy of course. Oops going off on a tangent.

Anyways this game is pretty interesting, so basically you have a set of patapons in your army that you can change up and move around. Basically you’re their god and your rhythm tells them what they should do.

Then you start a level with this army on the left side of the screen, then you press circle, square, triangle, and cross in a rhythm like pattern to make your army do various things as it moves from the left side to the right side of the screen.

There are move patterns and attack patterns. So what your army does depends on what patterns you enter. For someone that has rhythm, this might be a very fun game… for someone that doesn’t have rhythm - like me - it kind of sucked.

I mean I would get the right pattern, I love patterns, I am on top of patterns, but just because I didn’t put the pattern in with the right rhythm, my patapons didn’t do what I wanted them to do, in fact they would just stop in sadness and sometimes get mad at me.

I found it hard to keep up with the beat and rhythm but I have no rhythm at all so yeah… I saw this being a problem for me; you would think with a name like Melody I would have some musical talent… nope!

So I had to basically quit at the about third level because I just could get through the level with my lack of rhythm. For people that are rhythm-challenged this game should probably be a pass for you.

I must admit though the patapons are cute! If I could manage to get farther in the game I would probably definitely recommend it.

He said :

Seriously, if you take a rhythm game and mix it with a strategy game, you would get Patapon. I've definitely never seen a game quite like this before. They certainly do come up with some interesting games in Japan.

Basically, in Patapon, you control an army made up of different kinds of units. Some have spears, some have bows, some have axes, etc. Each has a different strength. You take your army and advance through a 2D level, moving from left to right. So far so good, right? Now, the crazy thing about the game is the way you move your band of merry men. You have to tap the buttons to the beat of the song. Depending on the pattern of buttons, you will give different orders. For instance, one combo will advance your units, while the other will order them to attack. Neat, huh?

Since I already like rhythm games (DDR or Rock Band anyone?) this game turned out to be a pretty fun experience. As you play thorough the level, the more button combos you get on the beat, the more fired up your troops get. If you get your combo's high enough, they go into fever mode where they all get super strong and fast. It's pretty satisfying to get your guys up to that level and destroy all your enemies! I can, however, see someone with no sense of rhythm getting really frustrated, so be forewarned! :)

So, all in all, it's a fun game. I mean, it's a rhythm strategy game, so it has to be fun!

Breakdown :

She said : Nay
He said : Yea

If you want this game :

Amazon : Patapon

Valkyria Chronicles

This one is an only he said post because only Patrick played it.


She said :

I didn't play so I'll let Patrick do all the talking. I did watch him play it and I watched a bit of the Anime based on this and it looks really well made.

He said :

A friend of mine was really excited about this game. First of all, does anybody remember Skies of Arcadia? It was an absolutely fantastic RPG by SEGA that came out for the Dreamcast, then later re-released for the Gamecube. It's probably one of my favorite RPG's of all time. Anyway, the same people who created SoA also created VC. In addition, the main characters of SoA, Vyseand Aika, were going to make appearances in VC. This is what my friend was so excited about.

Since I really loved Skies of Arcadia, I thought I'd try this game also. Subsequently, this turned out to be one of my favorite games of the year so far.

Valkyria Chronicles is a Tactical RPG, not a traditional RPG. It's more like Final Fantasy Tactics or Advanced Wars than Final Fantasy. Like othe TRPG, the main gameplay happens on the battle field. You and the enemy each take turns moving your units and attacking each other until you either succeed or fail to reach your objective. The thing that sets this apart from any other TRPG I've played is the way you move your units. Instead of squares or hexes that you can move to, VC allows you to control your units freely using a third person perspective view. As long as you have enough movement points, you can move your unit wherever you like. When you fire your weapon, you go into first person mode. It is also semi-real time, so opposing units can fire on you as you are moving. It really is quite fun to be able to control your characters in that way. It sort of gives it a feel of an action shooter, but with the pacing of a TRPG.

Of course there are role playing elements as well. As you advance through the game, you gain experience that can be used to upgrade your units. You also get money that allows you to upgrade your weapons. There are five distinct unit types: Scout, Shocktrooper, Sniper, Lancer (anti Tank) and Engineer. In addition, each individual character that are in your squad all haveunique personalities and attributes, so part of the fun is trying to figure out who will be the team members you want to send to battle, and which to leave behind. Best of all, you get to control a tank in addition to all the foot soldiers. In short: Awesome!

If you like strategy games at all, get this game. This is probably one of the best games that most people never heard of. Get this game. I repeat, get this game.

Breakdown :

She said : ...
He said : YEA

If you want this game :

Amazon : Valkyria Chronicles

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood

Some of you might be saying another DS game?! Really, seriously? I think I failed to mention that I'm mostly a hand held gamer. I'm the type of person that gets the DS lite on pre-order and the DSi on the day it came out. I also have a PSP and I have my eye out on the new PSP coming out soon. Needless to say we are going to do a lot of handheld reviews for this reason. We have a lot of other games and we have all the systems and their time will come.

She said :

We actually got this game at the same time we got Ninjatown from a Circuit City store closing sale. I actually don't remember if this game was originally 35 dollars or just 30 dollars but we got it for 20% one of those prices. Yeah I usually remember that type of thing but I don't right now. Seriously I'm the type of person can remember when and how much I got all the items of clothes I am wearing. It's weird I know. ^_^ I think it's because I'm kind of a frugal person so each purchase is something that I think about before parting with the money.

I heard some great reviews about this game. The people that made this game also made a lot of great other RPG games. Let's see Sonic + RPG = Awesomeness. Sadly not true.

To be honest I didn't pick up this game to play for a while because I had ninjatown.

When I finally picked it up and started playing. At first it was kind of fun, then it got annoying.

There is way too much stylist action going on. The battles take forever and are not very fun.

I played it for about 3 hours thinking it would get better but it didn't. I got passed the first plot line of the story but that's about it. Didn't keep my interest and the game play was very annoying.

He said :

I had some pretty high expectations for this game. I mean, it's made by BioWare, the same folks who gave us Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. As far as RPG's, these are some of the best.

The game starts of well enough. You can move Sonic on an overworld that is very reminiscent of classic Sonic stages. You can see the bad guys, so the encounters are not random. You actually have to touch the enemy to go into battle. There are some pretty neat touches, like the ability to roll into a ball and use the terrain to reach other areas. In fact, as the game progresses, your characters can gain more abilities that will allow you to reach more areas that are initially inaccessible. For instance, Tails ability to fly is one such ability.

Like many other RPG's, the battles are turn based. Your guys stand on one side, the bad guys stand on the other, and you take turns attacking each other. Since this game is on the DS, they had to apply some touch screen mechanics to the battles as well. When you do your special attacks, you have to use your stylus to follow a certain pattern of taps, squiggles and other such things. If you do not do it correctly, the special attack is not successful. At first, it was pretty fun to use this game mechanic, however, as the game progressed and the movements go harder, it became more frustrating than fun.

Maybe if I were more of a Sonic fan, I'd have powered through the game, but I'm not. If you like Sonic, it's a solid title, but as an RPG, it was not enough for me.

Breakdown :

She said : Nay
He said : Nay

If you want this game :

Amazon : Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood

Back

So we totally thought we were going to finish reviews and stuff before we left on our cruise... wow we were totally wrong!

Let me tell you if you're anything like us, get things like updating your blog for future posts done at least a week before you leave because the week before you leave is crazy! Every night we were running out to buy something for the trip or checking and double checking if we had all the right stuff for the trip. Making sure we had passports and all the other little important stuff in the right places where we can find them.

These last 3 weeks have been kind of a blur... the crusie and comic con and going back to work... crazy!

We will blog about the cruise and comic con soon promise and have more game reviews on the way.

New Super Mario Bros.

Seriously who doesn't like Mario brothers?

She said :

I have been eyeing this game for a while because Mario brothers is classic, BUT it cost an arm and leg. It was always 35 dollars or more. I didn't want to pay that for a DS game... even now you can't find it for less than 30. I thought okay I'll just wait it out, the price will go down... right? WRONG. Like nintendogs this has yet to go down.

Last year during Fanime, they have this nifty thing called a flea market where they let people sell their junk on Thursday night in the game room. We checked it out, one of the sellers had this game for 16 bucks! Um... even used this game usually goes for way more... Sweet totally bought it.

I had my DS on me at the time and started playing it while we were in "boring" anime screening rooms. I mean when we were in a anime screening room that had a boring anime on.

It was pretty fun but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to save.

I am the type of person that reads manuals as a last resort, but I had to read this. It turns out that you can't save whenever you want, it seems you have to collect coins (you can get up to 3 in a level) and buy things at shops, when you buy something at a shop you will then have an options to save your game. Really now?

If you don't have enough coins to buy something from a shop to save your game, the manual suggest you just close your DS putting it in sleep mode. I hated this... because it means you can't play another DS game when you get stuck in this one and your battery drains faster from being in sleep mode all the time.

The first couple of levels were pretty easy and then it stayed pretty easy but it was hard to find coins and very chances to save and then I got tired of the game and gave up. I don't want to go back because I'll have to replay all the levels I lost when I gave up.

Overall it was fun, except for that dumb save thing... I probably won't pick up again because of the lame saving rules. ^_^

He said :

Man, I remember getting my first NES for Christmas. It came packaged the original Super Mario Bros and it was super awesome. I was so excited. You know what, that game is freaking hard, but it is a classic and I loved it!

If you're like me and you love the old school Mario and are into platforming, then New Super Mario Bros. does not disappoint. The same platforming element are there, the same enemies and it's still very hard. There are some new abilities, though. The have the super monster mushroom that turns Mario into a huge giant that can basically run through the level, crushing everything in his path, for a short amount of time. There is the mini mushroom that shrinks Mario into a super small version needed to access certain pipes. There is also the koopa shell that allows Mario to slide across the floor defeating enemies. Fun stuff.

One thing that is a little annoying is the save function. During the game, you can discover these secret coins throughout the levels; three in each level. You can use these coins to open other paths through the worlds. Apparently, the only way to save the game is to either bet a boss, or use your coins to open these paths. If you have no boss, or no paths to open, you can't save as far as I can tell. I guess you are just supposed to close the DS when you don't want to play anymore . . . and hope it doesn't run out of batteries?

Well, regardless the game is still cool. If you like SMB, get this game.

Breakdown :

She said : Nay
He said : Yea

If you want this game :

Amazon : New Super Mario Bros.

Gone Fishing

Hey Everyone!

We are going on vacation starting today. We are going on a week long cruise on the west coast of central america. I know... swine flu. Yup we are a bit worried about that but a good friend of mine who studies this type of stuff says I have nothing to worry about, I hope she's right!

Don't worry we will still be posting reviews while we are away with the handy dandy future post function that blogger has. I would tell you what is to come but what is the fun in that! I should mention now that this was weird for me to say because I HATE surprises, so if you really want to know just shoot me an e-mail or comment on this post.

Then when we come back we will rest for a few days and be on our way to San Diego Comic Con! This is exciting time for us. I hope the best for all of you, have fun! ^_^

Professor Layton and the Curious Village

Another DS game! Yup I like me some hand held games. I hope you enjoy our reviews.

She said :

I heard about this game off of someone else's blog and he was really excited about it, but didn't say much about it. So I went on my mad search to find as much info about it as I can. I found out when it was coming and I thought oh man I had to have it!

It's an awesome story with brain teasers tied in. I really love brain teasers, I use to buy brain teaser books from the local hobby shop when I was little.

On the day it came out, Patrick and I went to a few stores only to not find it in a lot of stores. We finally found it in Best Buy for 30 bucks which was a-ok with me, I really wanted it so I was okay not getting it for a steal.

I really really love this game. I love the art, I love the story, I love the voices and I love *most* of the puzzles. I didn't finish all the puzzles but I did manage to beat the game even though I didn't do that. So HA! *This is directed at Patrick who did finish every single puzzle in the game*

I thought it was the perfect length too, it wasn't too short and it wasn't too long, it was just enough for me. Also what was great for a few months you could download a new puzzle every week, they were suppose to have that be for a year but somehow it doesn't work anymore or at least the last time we checked which was a few months ago, so it might work again now. *shrugs*

I would definitely recommend this game and I have, a lot of my friends got this game after I just talked and talked about it.

He said :

Now... I do enjoy a good puzzle or brain teaser, and I do enjoy a good puzzle game. Well, Professor Layton is the ultimate in puzzle games, and I did enjoy it.

In this game, you control Professor Layton and his assistant, Luke, as they travel through the town of Mystere picking up clues in order to solve a mystery. There really is a 'Sherlock Holmes' feel to the story, which was interesting enough to keep me wanting to find out what happens next. However, even if the story was not engaging at all, this game would be worth it just for the puzzles and brain teasers.

In order to solve the mystery, you must travel through the town and solve a myriad of puzzles and brain teasers. What I really liked is the variety. There were several different kinds of brain teasers and puzzles, ranging in difficulty. It never got old and I found myself wanting to always try the next one. I think I played this game pretty much non-stop until I beat it. Oh, and another cool thing they had in this game is downloadable content. For a while, they were publishing a new puzzle every week that you could download for free. Pretty sweet!

The game play itself is fairly minimalistic, though. There is no jumping or running or anything like that. You just move from one scene to the next using the stylus for your DS. But, who cares. The whole draw of this game is the puzzles and it delivers.

Breakdown :

She said : Yea
He said : Yea

If you want this game :

Amazon : Professor Layton and the Curious Village