Nestlekwik Happy Hour for Dec. 16

After much delay, we finally have a new Happy Hour posted over at J2Games. This entry sees the return of MixMasterLar to the show as we carry on our banter as normal. Included in this installment is a review of Donkey Kong Country and our top 10 most disappointing game sequels. Head on over and check it out.

The Nestlekwik Happy Hour for Dec. 16, 2009

Nestlekwik Journal for Dec. 9

Again, it's a long time coming, but with exams wrapping up for the week, I'll have a monkey off my back in a couple of days (well, at least until the next semester piles more work onto me) and I'll be able to be a little bit more serious about updating the content here.

After picking up a handful of games for the Xbox 360 thanks to a buy two, get one sale, I've been going to town on DJ Hero and my latest review work has me plugging away at the Xbox LIVE Arcade title Gyromancer. With the lineup of newer games to play in what little time I have, I was thankfully able to meet up with my achievement goal for the years' end as I finally ran my tally past 50,000. I haven't had much time to play games lately and coupled with the near year I was without a functional 360, it's kind of sad to think I should really be somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000-70,000 points right now. That can't be changed, however, and it's not like I'll lose sleep over that fact - I have things like work and school to do that for me.

DJ Hero has been an interesting experiment so far. I still prefer playing games such as Crackin' DJ or beatmania, but, obviously, DJ Hero is much more accessible (and recently relavent) than those two titles in their purest form. I'm a bit mixed on some of the music choices - most of them are alright and mixed with satisfying effort, but, there are other mixes that have no business being paired and just sound downright awful when the mix artist just fades between chorus lines just to sneak them in. But you have some fantastic mixes such as "Insane in the Membrane" vs. "Spooky" that are quite memorable. Outside of the music itself, I'm wondering just how accurate the controller is. Even though I can rack up 95 or so percent on the hardest of songs, the weird timing windows on the sracthing and other various mishaps such as with the way too loose crossfader and turntable spins (I activated rewind just by scratching not even a quarter turn in some cases) constantly destroy my combos. Playing just for fun, though, DJ Hero has been a great experience that I plan on tackling further.

With how busy I've been recently, it's really taken a toll on how much I've been able to contribute to other sites as well. I've had a few blurbs on Arcade Heroes and a few reviews here and there on Diehard GameFAN, but I've been working with Eddie at Bemanistyle.com for the most part on extending our coverage of music games. In a very surprising event, Naoki Maeda himself assisted us with a piece written in regard to the spread of the Playstation 2 into Central America and we've had an increase in the number of reviews published (some originating from my early work you can see on GemuBaka) along with a game contest in correlation with Aksys Games. On Diehard GameFAN, though, I've had a number of high traffic pieces including an interview on the upcoming independent release of Hypertension along with news on the first DSi-only game System Flaw and it turns out my piece on Vanguard Princess stands as the 50th most-read article ever published on the site. Once I have more time, though, I'll be able to contibute as normal and you'll definitely see more activity make its way over to GemuBaka.

For now, I'm almost about to call it week so I can charge my battery - between multiple jobs, I've been working all seven days for most of the weeks from November through this month, but I'm catching a break after my final exam on Thursday. As such, I'll be catching up on things a little in the next few days, so, hopefully, we might even see that brand new Happy Hour along with MixMasterLar!

-nestlekwik