Experience Points: More Xenoblade, Illusion of Gaia, Lollipop Chainsaw, and various new NES games!

You'd think after all these Experience Points I'd have leveled up by now. HAW HAW HAW...lame. Allow me to get on with the show!

Xenoblade Chronicles - I FINALLY finished this damn game...sort of. My original plan was to complete absolutely everything before I finish off the storyline, but then I thought about it and decided that I wanted the final boss to actually be a challenge. So against my completionist nature, bit the bullet and polished off the main adventure. I will absolutely go back and finish off everything...there are still tons of quests to complete and unique monsters to smack around, but for now I'm taking a damned Xenobreak. This all being said, Xenoblade is one of the best RPGs I've ever played, which absolutely justifies the 120 hours I've spent on it so far. Story's fantastic, music is amazing, battle mechanics are fun as hell, and the characters are all awesome to play as. PLAY THIS GAME!

Pony up!! Eh? EH??

Illusion of Gaia - I realized I had a game on the go for a while that I sort of...set aside for Xenoblade. Once I finished Xenoblade I went back to Illusion of Gaia, a fairly well-known Zelda-styled action RPG for the SNES. It's a pretty damn cool game, even if the translation to English was clearly a little...inefficient, to say the least. You play as a character named Will, whose father traveled to the Tower of Babel and was killed during the expedition. When Will gets involved in a larger plot involving an evil, evolution-halting comet careening toward the Earth, he sets off on an adventure to stop it. Perhaps the coolest part about this game is that many of the locations you travel to are inspired by real-life monuments, temples, and structures. You'll find yourself observing the Nazca lines, the Great Wall of China, and the Great Pyramid while you bust monsters apart. Pretty cool stuff! Illusion of Gaia is also a sequel to Soul Blazer, another RPG by Enix...and there's a direct tie to that game through a boss named Solid Arm, whom I'd never gotten to fight until this playthrough. You have to locate 50 Red Gems throughout the entire game to access this boss, and a good many of them are permanently missable...needless to say, I was pretty damn careful to check everywhere this time around! Tough boss, too...but I managed to get him my second try. If you like classic games and action-RPGs, this game is definitely one to check out. It has some great mechanics and fun gameplay, a neat leveling system, and a pretty sweet soundtrack...even if the script is a bit laughable!

Little known fact: my ex-wife is a boss in Illusion of Gaia.

Lollipop Chainsaw - Yeah that's fuckin' right, I bought this damn game. I can't resist a Suda51 game for the following reasons:

1. A high-octane action game with sweet mechanics with an extremely strange look and style to it...is sitll a high-octane action game.
2. There hasn't been a single game from Suda yet that I haven't enjoyed and had fun with, and I've done multiple playthroughs of all of them.
3. If it's from Suda, it's probably fucking hilarious and downright entertaining.

In Lollipop Chainsaw, you play as a zombie-hunting cheerleader who attacks with a massive chainsaw and...pom poms. A goth student named Swan has decided that he hates his life and has brought a zombie plague to the city, while also releasing 5 Dark Purveyors...basically zombies that are all inspired by different types of music. For example, the Punk Purveyor, Zed, attacks you by launching his massive spiky mohawk at you and by literally firing insults at you. He'll scream things like "VANILLA SLUT"...and one by one, the letters will fly at you as a projectile, or they'll all launch at once in a wave attack that you need to dodge. If that's not fuckin' hilarious or cool enough for you...then at least wait till you see the electro-rock autotuned zombie Dark Purveyor who constantly calls you "fuckin' retarded". Under this hilarious coat of paint is a pretty solid action game...that's a tad rough around the edges. If you can see past this kind of thing and appreciate the game for the fun it provides, however, then you'll find yourself replaying Lollipop Chainsaw multiple times. I'm personally really liking it, and can't wait to tackle Very Hard Mode as well as the online leaderboards!

I...uhh...well I think this screenshot pretty much speaks for itself.

New NES games! - If I went through these all individually, the fuckin' post would be eternally long like the rest of my entries. A while ago I picked up some new NES games from a local store. They are as follows:

• Star Voyager: A neat first-person space exploration game where you land on planets and try to blast enemies that are threatening your homeworld. SOUNDS A BIT FAMILIAR DON'T YOU THINK? *looks at Mass Effect series* This isn't an amazing game, but it's got a neat concept so you have to give it some credit...overall though, it's not the most fun thing out there.
  
• Silent Service: Speaking of interesting games that aren't the most thrilling, Silent Service is another cartridge I picked up. It's basically a submarine simulator where you take on battleships using as many abilities as you can. It's very slow paced and methodical, but again, pretty cool overall just in concept alone.
• RC Pro Am: This game's a top-down racer where you play as a remote control car and race against other computer-controlled vehicles. There are a few types of weapons scattered around the tracks such as oil slicks, bombs, and missiles, which are key to winning races. I remember playing this with a friend when I was a kid...and I believe that's a better way to play the game overall. I remember 2-player races being way more fun than just playing against the CPU, so I'll have to fire it up again when I have a friend over.

Voyage to those pixels...err, stars!

Pretty neat little haul...but there's one other awesome thing that I found at a different branch of the store I went to.

I'll save that for my next entry! Keep sittin' in front of those TVs, kids!