Snow outside == video games inside

It's March 15th. A week until Spring. It's snowing like crazy outside.

I love talking about games, so here goes...

I finished Grandia 3 a little over a week ago, and it was surprisingly disappointing. While the graphics were beautiful and the combat system is the best to ever grace a console RPG, the storyline was dull and predictable, the characters were two-dimensional, and the voice acting was excruciating. If you can't come up with dialogue that avoids using "..." every five lines, you might want to look into careers other than scriptwriting. Japanese dialogue just doesn't translate to English well; Grandia 2 was obviously "rewritten" during localization to make the dialogue make more sense to Americans, and it's a shame they didn't do the same for G3. Still, the amazing battle system makes everything forgivable. It's genious. Ingenious, even.

Galactic Civilizations 2 is finally out, which I'd been looking forward to since I played the first game. Planet management looks to be much easier now, and you can customize your own ships (graphics and all!). If only I had time for another game... Between raiding with my WoW guild and playing my Druid with Hillary's character, my free time at home is pretty rare. We can barely keep up with all the TV shows we're following.

The CTmod team released a new WoW character tracking website called CTprofiles. You can enter your character information and create equipment profiles (either your different "outfits" for various situations, or gear you don't have yet to plan out your upgrade path). You can see Jahgah, my Troll Mage, by clicking here. Click on the item slots, look at all those tasty purple epics!

Also, I was excited to hear the rumors that a sequel is in the works for the much-underappreciated "Beyond Good and Evil". Usually, when a game sells... well... zero copies, they don't make a sequel for it. Considering BG&E was one of the best games of 2004, this is great news.

I'm staying inside until summer. There's bears out there.