We’ll release more info soon.

And honestly, who am I to argue with the universe.

Demon’s Souls is a game that will make you into a man. A scrawny fourteen-year-old, after two hours with this game, will be grooming his muttonchops and ready to ship off on the next boat to fight the Kaiser. If you are already a man, it will make you into some sort of bizarre double-man. What’s that you say? You’re a woman? You don’t want to be a man? Too bad. Too bad. That’s the Demon’s Souls way.

You’ve probably heard that Demon’s Souls is hard. Pshh. Lots of games are hard. Some are even harder than this one. The difficulty is not the point. What sets Demon’s Souls apart is the way that it doesn’t just kill you, but also stomps on your genitals when you’re down. And it will make you realize that that’s what you needed all along.

It’s a lot like life. Sometimes in life you win, and sometimes the giant armored skeleton stabs your face off because the flying mantis monster you didn’t even see shot you in the back with a spike at just the wrong time. And when that happens in life, do you respawn at the same spot and carry on like nothing happened? NO, asshole. You go back to the beginning of the level, leaving all your hard-earned souls out there on the pavement, and you fight your way back. And you learn a lesson from the whole thing, because you should have been wearing your Thief’s Ring, now shouldn’t you? That’s life.

The trend in hard games these days is to unlock “Easy” mode for you once you’ve died enough times. Do you think Demon’s Souls does that? Do you think Demon’s Souls is so much as aware of the concept of “Easy” mode? NO IT IS NOT. If Demon’s Souls even knew we were talking about “Easy” mode, it would come over here and kick the shit out of all of us. And we would deserve it.

I’ll tell you what happens in Demon’s Souls when you die. You come back as a ghost with your health capped at half. And when you keep on dying, the alignment of the world turns black and the enemies get harder. That’s right, when you fail in this game, it gets harder. Why? Because fuck you is why.

Have I told you about the online elements? At any time when you’re in Body form, another player from anywhere else in the world can invade your game and murder you to regain his own body, or just to keep you on your toes. This happens when you’re in the middle of fighting armies of unthinkable monsters that are probably already three-quarters of the way towards killing you. And no, you cannot opt out of this feature! This is what you signed up for when you agreed to be a man.

When this happened to me — when a guy strolled into my game like it was Taco Bell and exploded my torso, costing me my body and all my progress in the level — was I mad? No, because I was too busy being in awe at how fucking hardcore the experience was.

Now, don’t let this dissuade you. Demon’s Souls is a pitiless master, but let it never be said that it is not fair. The game rewards handsomely those who stand up to it, and the greater the challenge, the greater the glory.

What the hell are you waiting for?

I’ve also been dabbling in 3D Dot Game Heroes where I’ve designed my hero to look like the Vic Viper from Gradius. Doctor Dic had an urgent message for me. It said, “Dash Boots Get! You can now run by holding Square.” The only thing missing from the scene was the Megaman boss weapon GET music. There have also been a few references to Demon’s Soul already as well.

These two games are slowly reminding me why I loved Playstation last gen.

Also, I leave you with this amazing gem.

So in what I assume to be a last hurrah for Final Fantasy XI, SE is releasing both a new add-on (conveniently split into three parts for your wallet squeezing pleasure) and increasing the level cap to the Final Fantasy staple of 99. I can assume this means two things. It will take about a billion xp to get that far and someone will do it within a week.

Those who know me know I’ve had this on again off again love affair with FFXI. Most people have no clue why, or rather, they DO but just aren’t connecting the dots. I’ve been playing FFXI since the US beta and in that time met a lot of really cool people, exploring the new worlds together and such through the last 8 years or so. The exact same thing could be said for my buddies that have played Warcraft since it came out.

Seeing Square also evolve in their story telling was also neat over the past few years. Wings of the Goddess really nailed character animation in cutscenes. The Shantotto add-on really drove home the humor of the taru’s.

Getting back on track, level 99 I assume will be quite the ordeal to achieve. Most mobs give about 200-300 xp a kill and to reach level 75 alone required 801,350 xp. Currently, at 75 you can max out your xp at 44,000. To get from 74 to 75 required 42,000. So let’s assume that each level will require 2000 more xp to level again (more likely it will be 3000 but humor me), it will take 2,088,000 xp to reach max level. Hopefully SE will also see this as mildly absurd. Somehow I doubt it though. They will probably milk it until the population dies off and ff14 takes over.  But let’s say they have a heart. I think the best way to do is from 76-51, have it sit at 45,000 and every five levels after that, increase it by 5k. Yeah, I know, wishful thinking but a man can dream can’t he?

Also touched upon are what new skills will that have for you on your sub jobs. SE’s already touched on that. Skills that define a job will be thrown out when it’s your sub. That means all the mages, your dreams of refresh will most likely be shattered. I know, I know heart breaking. And what about level cap quests? Please, no. I’m sure there will be at least one or two though. Probably one to allow you to go beyond 75 and then one that will probably be ridiculous to complete to go from 98 to 99.

The other thing I’m excited about is summoners are getting two new summons that we have been waiting on forever. Alexander and Odin. Both will require astral flow to summon and both will automatically activate astral flow if it’s not already active. This is interesting in the fact that this means you can only summon them once every two hours unless they are changing how astral flow works. Alexander will give a rather large defense and status immunity buff to the party and Odin will of course brandish Zantetsuken, his sword that allows one hit kills unless it’s a boss where it will just deal damage instead. The amount of defense given by Alexander and the accuracy of Odin’s Zantetsuken depends on how much MP the summoner has at the time of casting. This is also interesting. I’m curious to find out how long Alexander’s buff will last seeing as a 2-hour ability is required to cast it. Odin is pretty self-explanatory. They also already figured Zantetsuken would be abused by summoner burn parties and have made it so the more mobs in its area of effect, the less accurate it is.

There are a few other updates being listed such as a rewiring of some job’s abilities but there’s nothing really to talk about there until they release some new information. The really big thing was the level cap increase.

Things should be pretty interesting in the coming months for FFXI. It’s really up to SE to decide whether it’s a good or bad sort of interesting.

More info is FINALLY starting to trickle out about this game. Here is a weapon trailer telling you about the various weapons you’ll encounter in the game.

Over the years of playing fighting games with my brother, however, I developed an internal limiter. This was reinforced playing with Sean and Phil. If I didn’t hold back and let them win while looking like I was trying, they would quickly quit playing and I’d be stuck playing with the computer. This has unfortunantly crippled my development for online play. My brother can now wipe the floor with me since he had my copy of marvel when he went to college. Apparently he had a decent group of people and learned a few of the more decent air combos.

There was my MAS (see the above team) phase until Phil found Jin to be a great Servebot counter. Then I started using Mega Akuma and Wolvie. Wolvie would just tear Jin appart. He started getting good with Captain Commando, so I ended up swapping Mega out with Rouge. Not the best CapCom counter, but it worked.  My team has evolved considerably since those teams. Since playing SSF2HDR, I picked up playing Cammy because it was the only way to survive in online play. She’s amazingly fast but I’ve yet to figure out any of her good air combos. There’s Cammy for moving around and confusing people, pulling off her QTC back + PP to catch people in the middle of attacks. There’s Mega for playing a distance game with those pesky infinite Magneto scrubs (though he is sometimes switched for Felicia cause throwing waves of cat litter at people is fun). As for my last character, remind me to thank Phil for introducing me to the awesome of Jin. I’ve worked out an air combo that I can lead-in to a mech gun super. I can’t do it all the time, but when it works it looks awesome and can drain about 60% life on some poor unsuspecting kid (oddly enough, I’ve had most success using it against MC Wolvierine).

As a parting I leave you with these two videos. Do with them what you will.

Always remember,Oh you so Pringles, Where yo curly mustache at, and That Bitch is Blue like Candy. Remind me to thank Ben for these vids.

So me and Sean are actually working on a bonafide project. Something that will actually see the light of day. I’m not sure how much we can say about it just yet, but it should be known that something very interesting and fun is on the horizon and I think you all (my imaginary audience) will like it.

Winnie got me thinking about high school. She was talking about how she missed it. It reminded me of all the people I lost touch with. Phil, Sean, Chad and myself, we had the “honor” of going to HS together. I air quote it, but it was really a great time. My self and Chad being in the Jazz band, which I still have the cd’s of, especially good times. Anyway, thanks to Winnie, I’ve looked up some other friends I may have lost touch with. The girl that in 9th grade I unknowingly helped steal liquor from the Rite Aid near our house, the guys who weren’t Sean that used to hang out in “The Corner” and talked about comics and video games, hell, even Squeek, that lil’ bitch.

It also reminded me how much a person can change from high school to now. I was the quiet guy the used to hang out with all the cliques. A drifter. If I got bored with one at the moment, I walked away to find another, usually unnoticed. Granted, we’re all as goofy as we were in HS, but in a more grown up manner.

As usual, I’m not sure where I was going with this. I guess this was more of a, “What’s on Gerry’s mind” post.

The best part though, is I still have blackmail videos of all three of the other posters I went to school with. Videography is fun.