Battles and some of Modern kind

For some reasons it's nice to have different release dates for North America and Europe - even if in most cases it's kind of annoying. In this one my preorder has been shipped already, not today, not yesterday, but at sunday (local time). Today is release day of Battlefield 3 in NA. Tomorrow in Australia. 28. day in Europe. Luckily I have stuff to do before the EU launch, but hopefully not too much.

While waiting for the release, I should play other games while I can. Few days back I got back for PS3 games. Tested PS Move once again with Sports Champions, which is quite nice if you ask me. Many gamers don't like the Move at all, but once you get used to it, it's not as bad everybody says it to be. Move still has low game count, but it doesn't mean it sucks. It is hard to do a good game for Move to it actually work smoothly and to be addictive. Yeah, the price is little bit high (games are little pricey too), but if you have cash left with your other purchases, why not try this one out.

But enough of Move.

Battle at Hu Lao gate - beware the almighty Lu Bu!

With Sports Champions to Dynasty Warriors Strikeforce. I believe the Dynasty Warriors may be known series for some. It is one of many titles from Tecmo Koei. As I liked Dynasty Warriors 4 Hyper (PC) years ago, I wanted to try this one out, one reasons to be the good price. But as I played, it might be quite difficult game, even if you tweek the difficulty settings pretty low (or I'm just bad player in this game). Maybe I'll play Bayonetta next time with PS3...

Another game I could play as I wait BF3 is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Even if I don't like it much as the first two games, it makes more harm not to play paid game. Graphics are nice yes, but this time I'm going to for game mechanics more. MW3 has pretty smooth settings (not the plot), but configs for keyboard changes (example: toggle buttons) are not there. You can change some keys for toggle, but not all. Ironsight and crouch can be changed to toggle, so you don't have to press them twice to go crouch and back up.
When I played the multiplayer first time some time ago (free weekend and maybe it was with 2x XP amount) it was fun, at the time didn't quite notice few things which made my decision of the game in the future (aka. today) change to not as fun as it was. One feature that I don't like is the kill spree award system, where you get chance to use harriets or other aircraft to almost instantly kill enemies (or other "usefull" stuff against opponents).

This all reminded how much I liked the first games in the series (sad they don't have multiplayer though). Love for the first game in the CoD series newer will go numb. They were simple as raindrops and someway entertaining for gamers in that genre. And as written before, 1 and 2 were the only games I played with every difficulty setting, or almost all of them. Still remember one-man mission in the first game - god I hated it so much. And the escape afterwards was pain in the ass. Times change and so does games do. Some to good some to bad and maybe some in between.

But when you think things through, every game has it's own problems and some may not even be that. All depends on players and their opinions what works for them.

Comics and Kimonos Part 2

Part one covered my love for anime, this part will cover second type of art: manga, which I'm kind fond of these days. I have always wanted to have quite big collection of manga in my bookshelf, but in a long run it takes quite a lot of money, and waiting for new is always something I curse (publishers deadlines for upcoming releases etc.). I had over 100 mangas, but now I may have less; got rid of finnish releases which I bought few years back because they were too easy to get and little cheap and I have gotten used to reading english translated comics basicly. And there are so many odd translations if compared to original text, or they just don't fit in at all.

At this moment I should have nearly the amount of copies of manga I had back then (or slighty over). And more is coming as I'm writing this.

Like with anime, I do have favourites among manga. The most liked series are Berserk and Claymore (their anime counterparts are nothing like them). Many of those who have read them at least one book or few pages, knows that these are very much alike. Blood, Gore, Horror and little thrill, big swords and bigger enemies. And the characters get in real troubles, not like in mangas for teenagers, where characters just hit in the head and keep saying "get stronger" or whatnot.

Other series I have which I like too are Fairy Tail, Samurai Deeper Kyo, Togari and Dragon Sisters! Well, after 20 volumes of Samurai Deeper Kyo, the story is just barely keeping up. Substory after substory, event after event they just keep adding more of these, never really explaining why and how. First 5-6 volumes were just fine with everybody looking out if Kyo, the main character might have been the guy who slaughtered hundreds or people at some point, but now it's more like their friendship...why?
Fairy Tail in this manner is handled little different and little better to my opinion, even if it relies more and more to some class as Dragon Ball with character development. As I am little fan with Koei's games, Dragon Sisters! rely on the story of The Three Kingdoms (with little twist) is quite funny, but yet again, I haven't read much to tell more about it. Same with Togari.

Artwork is pretty stunning - beware of the revealing stuff though

There is one another awesome serie, in anime and manga: Highschool of the Dead. Schoolgirls with...*ahem*, guns and zombies, you can't go wrong. And the art style, just breath taking to my opinion. Anime with same art style speeks for the serie itself.