This is one of those few moments when Australia actually gets something before the rest of the world, so I’m going to take full advantage of it and bring you this game spotlight so I can try and be one of the first out of the gate among the big game site reviews.

Disney games haven’t been awesome for a very long time, at least not since the days of the SNES with The Lion King and Aladdin… and in turn, Disney itself has changed much and has lost a lot of its awesomeness over the years. The kind of awesomeness I’m talking about is the type that gave birth to the original design of Mickey Mouse which is far superior to his current form, and also the type that spawned things like Fantasia (which is being released on Blu-ray soon!).

Epic Mickey takes us all back to those days before Mickey Mouse was corrupted and also takes you through Disney’s lost history in what is a very interesting game for so many reasons.

Time for another Animation Spotlight, and like the previous one, I’ll be focusing on another animation that’s related to a game.

Valkyria Chronicles, or Senjou no Valkyria (Battlefield Valkyria) if you prefer, is one of my favourite new game series of this generation and has already spawned sequel games as well as two manga and an anime TV series of the same name. I absolutely loved the first game and was naturally excited when they announced the anime quite awhile back… though, to be honest when I started watching the anime when it was initially being released, I kind of gave up on it and stopped just before the half way mark.

But, I did give the Valkyria Chronicles anime another chance and have finally watched the entire series…

In this entry, I’d like to ask you all about your experience with console hardware and also computer hardware in general when it comes to gaming. How reliable has it all been for you and if you’ve had any problems, what happened?

Personally, I’ve had very few hardware issues over the years… in fact, I think I’ve only had two issues with consoles and one potentially dangerous issue with one of my computers many years ago. I guess that makes me very lucky considering the horror stories you tend to hear from people on the net about how they lost all of their saved game data or how they’d keep having their consoles replaced only to have the replacements die on them over and over… poor bastards.

Ever since they came into existence, I’ve always thought that I’d be able to go through life never having to play any kind of MMO game… ever.

I had to reconsider my position on MMO’s when BioWare and LucasArts announced Star Wars: The Old Republic… it’s pretty hard to resist… BioWare, Star Wars, the successor to Knights of the Old Republic… and the fact that it’ll be the ONLY decent Star Wars game to be released in a very long time make it something I really want.

Of course, since I have… had ZERO experience with MMO’s, it was going to be a little difficult for me to learn about the basics without feeling lost for most of the first couple of days of playing it. However, thanks to The Lord of the Rings Online, I’ve begun to gain a lot of valuable insights into MMO’s and I’ve begun to understand why they work the way they do.

It’s time to shift gears and bring back something that was quite popular from my old websites, The Anime/Bubblegum Crisis Center… Welcome to the first of many Caption Corners… though, to be honest I’m going to spread these out amongst other blog posts so the next CC will probably take awhile to appear. If you think you have a great video game related picture to use for a future CC, send it to me by private message… but just make sure it’s a good quality pic and is actually worth putting up.

Just to make sure you all know what you’re supposed to be doing with this… here’s a short explanation: I post a picture and you guys write up a funny caption relating to the picture. Could be anything, I dunno, just as long as it’s funny.

Anyway, the first screenshot is of Link holding a pig above his head with some random dude on Outset Island from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

I’m not going to bother trying to hide any spoilers for this Game Spotlight for a couple of reasons… the first is that Majora’s Mask is a pretty old game now and if you haven’t played and loved it by now then you’re probably never going to. The second reason is because I’m going to be gushing about some of the awesome moments of this game. So anyway, here goes… I think this one’s going to be another long entry too…

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is one of my most loved games of all time and also one of my absolute favourites. It’s a game that dares to be different, especially when Ocarina of Time was just a reworked version of A Link to the Past. Of course, like many other games, Majora’s Mask has a niche following… a lot of people tend to ignore it for whatever reason… which is a shame.

“I… I shall consume. Consume…Consume everything…”
— The Moon

But don’t worry, I’ll be spilling just about everything in this blog entry, so if you’re awesome enough to read it all, it’s probably going to feel like you’ve played the game yourself… or hopefully makes you want to play it yourself.