To those of you who have not heard yet, Diablo 3 was announced this week at a Blizzard event in Paris. That’s right, 8 years in the making and they finally have a tech demo to show off what we all knew was eventual: a sequel to a game that was just that good.

Go on, head over to their website and watch the entire thing. Then go change your pants because you’ve most likely messed them by time it’s over.

The only downside is we all know that Blizzard is notorious for being VERY slow in their development. In fact, only World Of Warcraft has been deserving of their lethargy. Let’s hope Diablo 3 and StarCraft 2 come out soon enough for my grandkids to enjoy (I’m not exaggerating, they started in 2003, that’s a long time for a project that picks up an existing physics engine).

My dearest Video Games,

In the spirit of all of the farewell letters typically sent to soldiers from their two-timing worthless girlfriends, I felt I needed to finally make official my break up. It is with a heavy heart that I am going to have to break up with you, Video Games.

It’s been a 22 year relationship that has had its ups and downs. We’ve been through the arcade, the PC, the Atari 2600, the NES, the Sega Genesis, the Lynx, the GameGear, the Super Nintendo, the Turbo Grafx-16, the Saturn, the Virtual Boy, the Jaguar, the N64, the Playstation 1 and 2, the Gamecube, the Play Station Portable, the Game Boy, Game Boy SP, and the Nintendo DS Lite. We’ve played hundreds upon hundreds of great games (the list is simply too long to list). I still own most of the games I bought for the really good systems (NES, SNES, Genesis, PS1, PS2, GameBoy, Gamecube, DS). I didn’t keep all of those systems, I didn’t even own all of them (rented frequently at BlockBuster or a friend/relative owned it).

It’s a shame it has to end this way. Unfortunately, I have found someone else. Her name is Grad School, and she keeps me so busy, I simply don’t have time to waste with you. We had so many great memories and you’ve never let me down. I will always hold a special place in my heart for the interactive game. Any time I see a child playing a Virtual Console game as if it’s brand new, I will weep with all of the memories of days past. Any time someone rants about how great the new Mario game is or about how they’re tired of seeing MegaMan sequels, I will probably shed a few tears.

This has been a year in the making and I have been dreading making it official as I feel I will now be missing a part of myself. The seventh generation of console games has arrived with full-force and I am lacking the desire to continue our relationship at this point. The prospects look very promising as all the systems have something to offer a hardcore old-school gamer such as myself. I think this time, I’d rather spend my money and my time on other things.

I hope you understand. Best of in all of your future ventures; try to avoid the mediocrity of the movie industry and don’t over-glutton yourself like you did in 1983. In fact, I hope we can continue to still be friends. I have still have to ride a vanpool to work, which leaves me with about 6-8 hours a week to enjoy some great DS games. Also, I will probably keep my subscription to EGM (going on fifteen years strong).

Love,

s1n

I should be working on my project, but I have been dying to write about 2 DS games that have me extremely excited.

First, I am most excited about a second Castlevania game for the DS. I have played basically all of the 2D Castlevania games and became addicted to the new adventure style play introduced in SoTN. I am working on finishing Dawn of Sorrow right now and can’t wait to wield the Vampire Killer and control a new Belmont. They could keep reinventing this game over and over and they will perpetually fulfill all of my completist desires.

Then I am pretty excited about a new Front Mission. Well, it’s actually a port of the original which I fell in love with on the Super Famicon. No, I don’t speak Japanese, which made the game all the more challenging. These games can suck away something like 100+ hours of your free time; a perfect way to spend that time before you fall asleep at night or while you wait for a table at a restaurant.

Oh and I have to drop a mention to this SPECTACULAR review of the LG Fusic phone written by none other than Joel. I’ve always hated cell phones, and reading this made me cry inside.

So I just received a response from OPM concerning the article at the end of the latest issue. Apparently, those are 0.5. The decimal is very close to the bottom of the 5 and the missing implicit leading zero is deceiving. I read the article about a half dozen times and did not once notice this until they responded.

So I would like to publicly rescind my derogatory comments regarding the OPM review crew.

I signed up to receive a year of OPM (Official Playstation Magazine) for free and I received my second issue today. I discovered something barely noticeable when reading the boring sections in the back of their magazine. To put it bluntly, their professional reviewers must be the worst in the industry. You’ll see why many developers are justified in hating game reviewers:

Dear OPM,

I’ve never been a faithful reader of your magazine (or any lopsided platform magazine) but I discovered something in the back of Issue 107 (Aug 06) that I doubt many other readers found. The feature on page 92 titled “The Opposite of Fun” clearly proves that the people who review your magazine are looking through beer-goggles when reviewing Playstation games.

Of the 20 games you advise to avoid at all costs, OPM gave scores of 5 on HALF of them. That is to say, 50% of the games you list as the worst for the platform, your magazine at one point proclaimed was flawless. Four of eight PS2 games and seven of twelve PS1 games received a 5.

Perhaps OPM should actually play the games they review for longer than an hour. How do you honestly call yourselves gaming journalists and still sleep at night?

Horribly Unsatisfied Reader,

Jason Switzer

For those of you who are familiar with your Roman history, today is referred to as the “Ides Of March.” In spirit of the bad omens that haunted Caesar before his murder, lets go over some creepy and big news items that happened today.

First and foremost, Sony finally made a public apology for the mess that has been their PR machine. To clear up any and all confusion, they held a conference to let all developers know exactly what they are planning, minus some details. You can read the full report made by 1up as they posted during the event. Most notably, they dispelled the rumors about the online service (supposedly will be free from launch), the required HDD with every unit (pre-installed Linux, sweeeeeet), the back-library downloads, PSP emulation and downloads of PS1 games, the shifted November launch date (damn DRM), and the PSP updates (price drop and EyeToy camera). Finally, something concrete from the world’s most powerful video game company. It’s too bad they blew their load before E3 because that leaves only Nintendo to steal the show. One thing I would like to note, I’m glad that Sony decided to include an HDMI interface in all of that time while waiting for BD to finalize.

Then I saw this article on Kotaku about the Twilight Princess debacle. In case you haven’t been following, there’s been much speculation as to whether or not Twilight Princess will be a Revolution game or Gamecube game. Shiggy announced today that it will have some awesome Revomote support. I’m looking forward to my arm getting tired after long gaming sessions.

It was also discovered today that Vista, Microsoft’s fifth major version of their OS, will not make heavy use of their .Net platform. Sounds a bit hypocritical if you ask me, but what can you expect from an OS that is going to be 3+ gigs, have few applications to boot, and have insane hardware requirements.

Apparently, shredding your documents is not enough anymore. Thank god the US government provides my employer with “burn barrels” (documents that need burning).

At what point can we expect a Terminator like scenario to take place now that the US government has decided to use robots to harm, or preferrably kill, humans? I for one welcome our new robotic overloads.

Lastly, in a shocking move, Amazon has shifted to unbelievable webhosting. For just $0.15 a month, you can have 1GB of Amazon storage. You will access this storage via SOAP and bittorrent. This is just freakin ridiculous. I can’t wait until they build a linux filesystem based on this setup.

I also wanted to point outa few stories that caught my eye but did not appear today (yesterday actually). First, there’s the world’s largest video game collection. This guy looks like he either has a rather large inheritence or is addicted to games like a true heroin addict. Then there’s the PSP Spot that was found in a train station in Tokyo. Take a close look at that picture. What freaking subway looks like that??? Where’s the homeless man deficating in the corner? Where the booze and bodily fluid stains on the floor? Too bad New York is not this clean. Lastly, Shiggy was knighted in France. Wow, “Sir Shiggy.” Rock on JumpMan!

I was surfing over on Kotaku and I spotted this jewel. I am going on over to Gamespot immediate after work tomorrow and plunk down some cash for this pre-order. I’ve been anxiously awaiting this game and this is like icing on the cake.