By MyaSharona 2 years, 7 months ago.
8 months since I submitted a blog entry to my GG account? yeeeesh.
Well.
Currently the world is all about motion control.
And I have a backlog of games I need to attend to as we head into the fourth, and historically, most remarkable quarter of the year.
So it would seem
Fable III
Assassins Creed BrotherHood
Need For Speed Hot Pursuit
Mod Nation Racers for crying out loud
Civilization V
even DS games like BEYBLADE: Metal Fusion
or the downlaodable Comic Jumper or Super Meat Boy (even tho I am dangerously close to DL it anyway)
are ALL games that lie in wait for me if only I had the end of the year budget.
The last quarter of the year seems to always sneak up on me no matter how hard I try.
My intentions are good: save up for the Christmas season and the fall/winter influx of WIN... but somehow your 'to shop for’ list never quite includes yourself and all these games you’ve waited for all year get pushed back on the self purchase priority list.
Oh I realize that in the grand scheme of things this is not a live or die situation.. but
'bummer dude’
Not to mention being subject to marketing for such items as the Kinect and Move, it seems I need to acquire some sort of potion that will turn my regular tree into a money tree.
While I am at it, maybe create a few more hours in the day?
(for gaming of course)
On the flip side of the coin, there are some great games now available for fairly cheap.
I almost kicked myself when I saw borderlands for 20 bucks in EBGames the other day, knowing that I paid release price and have yet to build up my level 9 character to an almighty status.
Ive finally picked up Demon’s Souls for the PS3 and, brand new, it was only $30!!! A steal considering the vast gameplay time and intensity that awaits my frustrating loving determination.
I know there are great deals to be had with titles that are fantastic if you missed them when they were all the rage. Brutal Legend, Red Dead Redemption, Alan Wake and so on, are games that are really giving you a bang for your buck these days!
I even saw my holy coveted special edition Bioshock 2 package sitting on store shelves for a price that, well, let’s just say..if i didn’t already have the three Raptor posters framed and hanging in my living room and the art book adorning my coffee table, I would have insisted myself to buy it.
It’s the age old plight of having it now and paying more, or waiting a while and playing it later; long after the masses have told you all about it, inadvertently spoiled the story or stopped participating in the multiplayer community in favor of the next FPS. But hey, at least now you can afford it right?
In any event while i pine over things beyond my grasp financially, I currently turn to a number of games I need to push farther . Games such as the aforementioned Borderlands, Red Dead Redemption and finish out that Costume Quest (such an awesome game).
If any of you have found that magic money tree potion… well, dude! share the love.
By MyaSharona 3 years, 3 months ago.
Hey everyone: Please excuse the interruption from my oh so timely and riveting gaming blog for this shameless sort-of self promotion.
A few of my friends have been working hard on organizing a benefit concert to raise money for the Mary Kay Ash foundation for the prevention of Violence Against Women.
I donated all the print advertising – posters, postcards, tix and so on.
Anyway – if you are in the area – please come on out to the concert – The bands are awesome and it’s going to be a GREAT event and if you aren’t please tell all your friends about the event.
There will be raffles, great prizes and did I mention the bands are great?!
The concert is April 17th at the Opera House in Toronto.
There are three bands playing (with a special surprise guest)
And a bunch of us in the west end are taking a limo if anyone is in my direct area. :)
You can find more information at
http://www.rockthewave.ca
Or feel free to email , facebook, or DM me for more information.
Thanks in advance for your well wishes!
Sharon :DDD
By MyaSharona 3 years, 3 months ago.
So Ive been trying to keep some sort of online sketchbook.
http://sharonssketchbook.blogspot.com/
and there’s some more stuff in it.
ROUGH stuff.
feel free to creep me out… err, creep on it. ;)
There’s so many awesome artists on here, I feel almost guilty not sharing. :)
Disclaimer: I’m a struggling artist – you will see why. LoL.
By MyaSharona 3 years, 6 months ago.
In the recent and tragic loss of my external hard drive (and the subsequent loss of my artwork and photos/music/documents from the last two years) I was forced to take a little road trip into days of yore. Days past and creations from my early career. Oh the horror.
As a result of the above loss, I have spent much time over the past week pouring through old CDs and back up discs of all that I was working on some 5-7 years ago and some things even older than that. gasp
I came across my old DeviantArt work as well as a blog I had completely forgotten about. It had sat somewhere in the recesses of my brain, completely unaware of my eventual return. The blog was called :
The Gaming Girlfriend Grotto. [long winded? me?!]
The blog had a sarcastic tag “we game -we watch – but we’re just girls. A guide for the girlfriend who games.”
One of my favorite submissions was a rather opinionated review of the 05 NFS Most Wanted. My resentment for the music and cut scenes eventually gave way to my addiction to automotive racing and the fact that NFS had been letting me down prior to this release.
In any event, it would appear that upon stumbling through more than ten years of online identity, the core elements of me remain; gadgets, the interwebs, games, art and being opinionated about all of these things ;)
How wonderfully nostalgic I feel when reading my opinions and seeing my fanart (no matter how embarrassing it may be). Perhaps at some point, many moons from now, I will look back at my current work, laugh, reminisce about good times and good friends and good games, and be thankful that i never let go of those things which fill my time that I find oh so enthralling.
By MyaSharona 3 years, 8 months ago.
Well, its Rocktober and dayum, the winter shopping season lineup is well underway.
Release after release of titles that I want to acquire and to add to my library will continue to dominate the stores from now until, well, possibly march of next year.
So how do I, a single income person barely making ends meet, budget for my gaming entertainment for the rest of the year?
I have no idea!
In all honesty this year I am torn. The drop in the PS3 causes me more consumer conflict than I have had to accommodate for in the past.
The idea of adding the recently released version of the console to my repertoire is appealing and having played some stellar titles on the system, this is where I lean. HOWEVER, the idea that the cost of the PS3 could add more than a few titles to my collection of 360 games is hard to dispute.
So what’s a gal to do?!
Goodness knows I am slow to get to most things. Hell, I only JUST started playing L4D and have yet to complete one of the games picked up last season, but better slow than never right?
In any event it is with great excitement that I watch as all the anticipated titles are released and thus reviewed by the masses. Like a kid in a candy store, I am in awe of all the colours. Oh the horrifyingly beautiful colours!
Keep writing folks, I love hearing what you think about all these titles!
By MyaSharona 3 years, 9 months ago.
Preface – I am not trying to promote twitter – RATHER I am making an attempt to invite you all to link to me , or better yet take some time OUTSIDE of twitter to connect even further. The moral of the story is : you guys rock. :)
Now, with that in mind, read on. o_O
It was only a mere 7 (or so) months ago that a colleague of mine approached me in an attempt to get me on board the twitter train. Being the internet junkie that I am, I was WELL aware of twitter and found it to be absolutely useless in concept.
I rejected her.
And like my battle against facebook some 2.5 years ago, I rejected it again and again and again even as more and more people began to advocate it to me. Like my fight against facebook, eventually, I gave in. I signed up for twitter and decided to use my gamer tag as my ID/screen name or Twitatar whatever twitter is calling it.
Within a month of signing up and linking with 3 friends, 2 of them deleted their account due to uselessness. My account remained, stagnant, but remaining.
I then came to this online community at girlgamer and a small handful of you folk connected into my twitter and I yours. I then came to realize that I could link in to companies, news, and events and the twitter sank it’s hook ever deeper into this fishie’s bottom lip.
In June of 09 I followed E3 almost exclusively via twitter (and through links arrived at through my twitter connections). Ever since my following of E3 the site has been very useful in allowing me to follow this community of gamers and the industry that feeds it.
I now have 22 followers – 2 of whom I know IRL- and I follow game sites, game information, gamers, and game events, almost entirely.
Twitter has become my custom designed newspaper/cast. And that is a concept far more intriguing than what I was first introduced to earlier this year.
My only desire would to have the ability to communicate a tidge more personally with the folks I follow and who follow me. I want to get to know these artistic, intelligent and random individuals who are providing me with hours of web browsing deliciousness. But then i suppose that is what facebook is for.
Will all of these social networking tools evolve even further, thus bringing together the four corners of the universe? I sure hope so! It is a pleasant feeling to be able to connect with people who share similar interests and ideas from far across the land.
Ah, technology! I <3 U.
By MyaSharona 3 years, 10 months ago.
With Chrono Trigger.
Admittedly, I was never an RPG type of gal as a gamer. The concept of taking turns to implement attacks and sitting idly by why a friend or colleague is injured is still quite vexing to me. BUT. I have to say, right now as I play through Chrono Trigger on the DS, I am compelled to continue on.
Even many of the final fantasy incarnations did not hold my attentions as well as this and I can not quite put my finger on why.
Now it was quite some time ago that this game was suggested to me and lo and behold a short time after I was presented with a gift card to my favorite gaming hang out. My “regular guy” (you know, the guy that works at the game store that seems to always like the exact same games as you and doesn’t talk to you like you are a …. girl), well my regular guy confirmed that which had been discussed with another the first cute fella and while my purchase was leaning towards
New Super Mario Brothers OR a Zelda incarnation.
I decided to go with a game I was completely and one hundred percent unfamiliar with.
Chrono Trigger.
Now you might find yourself asking “Sharon, how in the hell did you miss such a gem when you claim to have been playing games for so much of your ever extending life?”
Well that’s a little bit judgmental of you!
The answer is simple.
I don’t know.
But i have an idea.
Chrono Trigger was apparently released by Square in August of 1995.
This is the summer I was 15 years old.
So to sum it up.
Boys.
I got distracted by boys and missed out on what could have saved me a lot of teenage drama and heartache.
This is not to say that I played no games during this period, but that my transition from PC to Playstation was beginning to take place and my daily play was still PC gaming as to allow for me all the online chat time a technologically savvy 15 year old girl requires.
This would have been a time in which i was knee deep in Virtua Fighter and/or tekken and shortly before my Tomb Raider obsession began.
But i digress.
Here I am, a grown adult (that much is up for dispute) and for the first time playing my way through Chrono Trigger on the DS.
Now the nifty thing about playing this game on the DS as apposed to say SNES system of time past, is that I can take this with me where ever I decide to go. And I do.
Each day I plug a little bit further and a little bit farther and surprisingly i have not grown tired of it.
I still wonder why we all have to take turns hurting each other when instinctively I’d like to pull a Leroy Jenkins on all those funny creatures, but such is the game play, teaching me patience and strategy that I typically cast aside in favour of a more berserk approach.
While I am still in the beginning stages of the game, i am somewhat compelled by it’s repetition and familiarity in the different ages and I find myself much more attracted to the cut scenes as an adult than I would have as a youth. The kind of game that, ironically, as a youth would have inspired some fan art from me.
So as I suspected, this all consuming relationship that I have started with Chrono, Marle, Lucca and the whole gang, has been a pleasant one. I suspect that the varying bouts of frustration will give me all the more pride when i finally piece this game together.
Will i go back and purchase those games i once considered over this one? Perhaps, perhaps not. But what is known is that tonight I retire to my abode, curl up in soft cuddly blankets with a purring kitten beside me and a DS in hand, and I wind slash, and supersonic spin my way through time!
Oh
And isn’t Chrono soooo brave ??? <3 <3
By MyaSharona 3 years, 11 months ago.
Online communities have long been an area of gaming that has filled me with a tumultuous contrast of love and hate based emotions. As time moves forward and I grow older, I come to the realization that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
My initial and positive experiences with multiplayer FPS play came from my days of PC gaming in Doom, Quake and Duke Nukem, later Half Life and Soldier of Fortune and the many other franchises to continue the genre. I would sit in my bedroom at 12-15 years old and connect with my brother somewhere else in the household while we maneuvered our way through various levels hoping to achieve the next kill shot.
How humorous it must have been for my parents to hear the echoing war cries from contrasting places in the household, at random intervals on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.
Had I stuck with PC gaming and not converted to the console altogether, I am sure my brother and I will still be splattering each other’s guts out every so often.
These days the FPS genre has a massive online community no matter what the platform, and one that I am not partial to participating in. Oh I still enjoy a good FPS linear play, but no longer do I find the desire to play with a team or folks who reside in varying places. Why is that? Well, it would seem that one or more of my online experiences from the mid nineties, with the increased use of cheat codes in online play has soured me. And with each return to a “community” I find very similarly negative experiences.
For a while my online gaming switched from the FPS genres to the RTS subgenre games like Age of Empires, empire earth, age of mythologies and for about 3 weeks I too played Warcraft. The lesser impending games like Simcity, The Sims and other sim games fell into this time in my history but never as multiplayer games.
Currently I seem to shy away from most multipayer options as I have set myself into a tidy little box of gaming recluse.
I Do not play with people who are way way way better than me. (the guilt of holding back the team is just too much)
I Do not play with “serious” gamers. (in the FPS genre especially).
I only play with friends and I always warn them about my lack of skill before they enter into any level of any game with me.
If playing with strangers, limit this to games that are fun, contain a greater degree of chance than skill, or that have little to no standings in the world i perceive as important to my gaming history.
So what do I play online?
Well participating in the xbox live community is a bit of a random stab in the dark with a giant machete. Sometimes I find some real decent folk with which to play, and then other times the gamer on the other side is one of the many schlubs perpetuating the stereotype further into the gutter than I care to admit out loud.
So it would seem that my online play includes things (from my currently limited collection) like: racing games:dirt and forza to be certain and arcade games like Uno and 1vrs100 (which is a whole other topic in and of itself… lol)and the occasional rhythm game like guitar hero – oh and of course some Virtua Fighter.
My attempts continue however. I return to the community about once or twice a week hoping for a better result, and always make the mistake of putting the mic on and actually talking to the person I am playing.
I swear if one more guy gamer makes a pass or tries to get me to talk dirty to them….
So what is the solution?
Do I long to return to the world of PC gaming? Occasionally I get out Unreal Tournament and ponder anyone who I may know or be able to finagle into playing with, but to no avail. It seems my hiatus from this has left me somewhat perplexed about what and how to return to this platform.
Do I need to keep searching for the right games and/or gamers with which to play in the xbox live community? It would come to reason that this would be the obvious and cheapest solution – ignoring the possible but costly transition to the PS3.
Or better yet, it may be in my best interest to never turn on the mic, never speak to those who I am playing with and never be disappointed with the actions of the player on the other side of the game.
But can I do it?
thinks maybe I will give it one more try tonight… maybe tonight will be different
