I don't know if I ever told you, but in April of 2005 or so, I grew a wart on my left middle finger. I hadn't had a wart in forever, so I was a little worried about it at first, but as time went on, I realized that it was perfectly harmless. Of course, it only lasted long enough for time to have gone on because the wart medication in the house was ancient and had clearly lost all potency. I asked for new stuff, but it never came.

A year or so later, I was looking at the wart, and decided that it was time for it to go. Probably about a week later, I got up, went out, and bought my own damn wart remover. It was one of those neat home freezing kits that you see boasted about on TV so much. I tried it, and I thought the sensation was really cool. Two weeks after that, I realized that my little friend had retained his residence on my finger. So I used another blast of freezing, but I upped the dosage to enough to take out a heavier wart, as the manual instructed me to do. It did not work.

Time continued to move forward, and I think it must have been about a year ago, maybe a little more, that I noticed there was a second little wart growing just south of the original. Earlier this year I consulted the doctor about getting rid of them. She said that if I shaved them off with a razor and applied some new gel, they would disappear. I routinely chopped the little buggers away, but never got around to purchsing a new tube of wart gel, so they never disappeared.

It's now been over three-and-a-half years since my first little friend made his appearance, and what exactly is the moral to this long, seemingly pointless story? I just wanted to have sufficient reason to post this picture, really. To be honest, I wanted it to be long enough that it would push the picture down beyond the main view of the page, but I just can't drone on any more, and I've puffed the rest of the story as much as I can! Ah well, here's the grossness!

It's what's left of the little motherfuckers after the doc burned the shit out of 'em. good riddance. I suppose if you're still looking for a moral, it's that you need to nip these things in the bud as fast as you can unless you're eager to have them as a permanent fixture in your life.

There are twelve months in a year, so I guess that means I should probably be able to find time to post at least twelve articles a year. To date, there are three with 2008 date stamps on them. And now there are four.

I've written a charming piece about the new Banjo-Kazooie game, and tried the whole new games journalism thing I keep hearing about so much over at Parish's website. I don't know how well I did it, but whatever. The sum of the review is that I love the game. It's ironic though, because the professional reviewers say that it should have been more of the same old BK collection-platforming, but gamers tend to hate those old games. Oh well, I think it's pretty good so yeah. I suggest you go have a read.

Oh, and I did run it though the spellchecker quickly, but it's 2:30AM and I may have let some grammatical oopsies slip. Hell, there's probably a boatload of typos in this post alone. I'm not gonna fucking proof it. I need to sleep!

Against my better judgement will to save money, I went out and bought the new Castlevaina game last weekend. To say that my regret over the unnecessary loss of $40 has been absolved would be putting it lightly. It's been a long time since I've gone without slaying a new incarnation of Dracula each year, and honestly, I know I would have broken down over the issue eventually. But it's good! Better than ever maybe!

Okay, so maybe Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (ek-lee-sha) might not quite measure up to Aria of Sorrow, my personal favourite 'Vania game, but it's a lot better than the other DS iterations. And I've only played a couple hours! Separate, selectable stages are a refreshing change from one huge castle, and work better than Portrait of Ruin's levels-within-a-castle setup. Being able to hop to wherever you want in an instant is just a wee bit more convenient than having to make the trek to and from warp points. It also allows for a much broader range of stage types. Personally, I was getting a little bored with the same old main hall, clock tower, and underground cave thing with different art each year. Portait was a step in the right direction (and I'll grant that it was a lazy step), and Order of Ecclesia takes it even farther with better results.

Order of Ecclesia's Glyph system is really neat too. It's like an extension of Soma's soul-sucking powers from Dawn of Sorrow. The heroine Shanoa can absorb glyphs from various sources (statues, defeated enemies, magic-wielding enemies, etc) and use them as weapons. In fact, they're all she has for weapons. That's right! You don't collect a huge amount of swords, but rather are given a sword glyph that gets stronger as you use it. Same goes for other weapon types. You can equip one for each arm too, much like Alucard could in Symphony of the Night. Magic (offensive and defensive) is also equipped in these weapon slots, so you can keep one arm for physical attacks and one for magic, go berserk with spells on both, or whatever! There's also a back glyph that gives all the oddball powers like magnetism and summoning. The catch is that every glyph eats up MP, so even if you're just flinging knives all over the place, you'll have to ease off once in a while to recharge. The good part is that MP regenerates real fast.

I guess after the last six 2D games in the series that it kind of goes without saying that this is a beautiful game. The spritework is just as detailed as ever, and animations are amazingly fluid. It's not quite as smooth as say, Wario Land: Shake It!, but hey, let's give credit where credit is due. Once again, the environments are a lot more varied than we've seen in a Castlevania game for a long time, and it looks like there are a lot fewer reused enemy sprites than usual. But then again, I haven't exactly put two games side by side to make more accurate comparisons. So enough talk, look at the pretties!

Okay, so some of the animation is lost on YouTube-quality video, but still! Oh, and you wouldn't know it from the professionally-done run above, but the bosses are really really hard this time around. Would you believe that this is only the third? I used to think Balore was a real bitch to beat, but these guys make him their bitch. Took me at least a dozen tries and a hour to take down that stupid crab motherbuzzer.