I was destined to be a gamer. My dad was a gamer. He had an Odyssey and an Atari 2600 before I was born.

I don’t remember much of either, but I do remember how we lost our Atari. It wasn’t because my dad tired of it, it was because he loved the Golf game so much that he played it so often the system got so hot, the cartridge melted into the slot! :)

I was born too late to be into the Atari craze. I was born in the NES era. :) But, when I saw an Atari Flashback 2 at Wal-Mart I had to buy it. It was an Atari all-in-one unit that could actually use Atari joysticks (and Sega Genesis controllers!), and could be modified to use actual Atari 2600 cartridges (although I never modified mine to do that).

The built in games were fun. I always loved the simplicity of Pong, so Arcade Pong took up a lot of my playtime. I’ve always enjoyed Centipede and Millipede in the arcades, so I played a bit of them here too.

I didn’t really start getting into the Atari 2600 until recently though, since I started using ConsoleClassix. You can play Atari 2600, NES, and Colecovision games for free, so I’ve been playing some Atari games I haven’t played before.

I completed one of the few Atari 2600 games with an ending, Adventure, and now wish I still had my Flashback 2 so I could play the sequel to that game that is only available on the Flashback.

It’s actually quite amazing that the Atari can get me wanting to play it at this point. The graphics are dated now, but the gameplay is still solid. And, when it comes to games, gameplay is really what matters most.

I got The Shivah for free during the Wadget Eye Games Yom Kippur special a few weeks ago.

While humorous adventure games are my favorite, I do enjoy the occasional serious adventure. And this was definitely a serious adventure I enjoyed. While it was a short game, it took me a while to get the good ending. There’s one more ending that I want to try though. I really like it when adventure games have multiple endings, because they are so linear that you don’t really want to replay them too soon after completing them otherwise.

Another thing I really liked about this game was that when you finished the game, there’s DVD style extras. There’s blooper audio files that come up when the game is completed on the good ending, and you can view the game with DVD style commentary if you want to.

I was looking through the free NES selection they had at the video game rental site Console Classix and came across DuckTales. I played through it again tonight for the first time since I was a little girl.

The game follows Scrooge McDuck as he once again tries to beat Flintheart Glumgold to the world’s greatest treasures so that he can remain the richest duck in the world. The game has you scouring the Earth, from the Amazon to the Himalayas, in search of treasure, and one level even takes place on the moon. Unlike most platforming games of the time, the game isn’t completely linear. You can choose which level you want to play and in which order. Most of the supporting cast shows up in the game (Huey, Dewey and Louie, Launchpad, Gizmoduck, Bubba, Webbigail and Mrs. Beakly) with the exception of Gyro Gearloose and Duckworth. Throughout the game, fans of the show will notice some characters from different episodes showing up as enemies in certain levels.

True to the show, all Scrooge has to defend himself on his expeditions is his trusty cane. But here, it seems to have been fitted with a pogo stick attachment (which isn’t at all a stretch, considering all the inventions Gyro has made for Scrooge over the years), which will help Scrooge through areas that can’t be crossed by foot. You’ll find yourself using the pogo stick a lot, but in the Himalayas Capcom has made Pogo sticking a little harder by making Scrooge get stuck in the snow if he pogo sticks in it, which requires a little bit more strategy to the play.

The game is just as much fun as I remember from when I first completed it as a little girl, although it’s not nearly as hard for me now as it was back then. :)

I went with my mom to the 25th annual Spiedie Fest in Binghamton on the last day of July. We went for the hot air balloons, but we had to try a Spiedie. Mom had a sandwich that was called a Spiedie years earlier in Elmira, but it wasn’t the real thing. The one she had was just meat marinated in spiedie sauce and put on a dry roll.

We split a buffalo chicken and bleu cheese speidie wrap. It was absolutely delicious! The restaurant that ran the tent was called Brothers 2, and they are located in Endwell, NY. The meat was cooked on an open flame wood grill. I’m not the biggest fan of bleu cheese dressing, but I do like it if it’s cooked into the meat. The chef said that he believes that the buffalo chicken and bleu cheese speidie wrap is the best Brothers 2 makes, and I’m definitely not going to argue with him. It’s been over a week since I ate the speidie and I still can imagine the way that it tasted as I’m writing it just like I ate it yesterday!

There was a little hot dog and hamburger place in the mall that I loved, but it’s closed now. My mom and I went to the mall today to eat in the food court, and I was happy to see that a similar shop had opened up in the same location.

I was looking through the menu, at the hot dogs and steak sandwiches, when I came upon the gyros section. I had never eaten a gyro, but I had heard good things about them. I tried lamb at the fantastic Blue Dolphin Greek restaurant once, and did not like it very much.

But, I had read several articles on gyros that said that lamb was the way to go, so I decided I’d be brave and try the beef and lamb gyro.

I’m really glad I did. :) The lamb still had a hit of it’s odd taste (I call it the “lamb” taste, since there’s really no way to describe it – it’s not sweet, it’s not salty, it’s not tangy, sour or bitter. I’m positive lamb has it’s own taste bud section on the tongue. :D), but the gyro sauce, and toppings of cucumbers, sour cream, and tomatoes actually complimented the flavor. It was really good. :)

Like most Nintendo systems, I got the GameCube within the first few years of it’s release. I haven’t played very much of it, as I enjoyed the PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast more in this generation.

I did enjoy a few games quite a bit. I played Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64 really late, since I bought it from a friend after the GameCube was already out. I enjoyed Super Mario RPG a lot, and it had a lot of nostalgia value to me, since it was the first RPG I ever played. So, I was excited to get a chance to play it’s sequel. Paper Mario turned out to be a different game, while still feeling familiar. I liked it a lot, so I decided to rent Paper Mario: The Seven Year Door for the GameCube. It was just as fun as the original, and seemed to have a more entertaining plot.

I also enjoyed Super Mario Sunshine, although it is definitely my least favorite Mario platform game. Mario Kart: Double Dash was a lot of fun, but I still enjoy the earlier Mario Kart games more.

My original Game Cube broke, so I had to get a new one. When I did, it was the time that the Zelda package with Zelda 1+2, Ocarina of Time, and Majora’s Mask came bundled with it. I still have not yet completed any of those games, but I intend to some day. With the bundle, I’m more likely to achieve that goal than I would before, since Ocarina of Time and Zelda 1 were the only games for which I ever owned the cartridges.

The only GameCube game that had me hooked for a while was Animal Crossing. It was a lot of fun to earn money to buy stuff for my house, and even more fun to buy the classic NES games that could actually be played. I was an Animal Crossing addict for a while, I would come home after work and spend at least 3 hours a day building up my home. :)

I haven’t yet purchased a Wii, but the GameCube to me seems kind of like a middle ground between the Nintendo 64 and Wii. There weren’t a lot of new game ideas here. The games mostly built on the foundations that Nintendo set with the Nintendo 64. The games were still fun, but for the most part they didn’t suck me in like the earlier Nintendo games had.

I completely wasn’t expecting the person who was eliminated this week to be in the bottom two, let alone be the star with the lowest combined total. The elimination of David Allen Grier early in the competition was a disappointment to me, but this elimination was a complete shock.

I watched Good Morning America the day after the show, and a question was brought up from a fan about if the celebrity was eliminated because people didn’t vote since they thought the star was locked in for the next week. This is most likely what happened, since they have been top of the leader board more than once this season.

One things for sure though. Now it will be really interesting to see how the competition goes from here on out!

I never would have imagined that competing networks would ever put all of their shows on the internet on a single site, and that it would contain very little commercial interruptions, but Hulu proved me wrong! It’s kind of surreal to see a commercial advertising NBC during a commercial break of a show from FOX. :)

All the television networks out there aren’t on Hulu, but most of my favorite shows are on the networks that are. It’s great to be able to watch a show with one 30 second to a little over a minute commercial every break, rather than 3 to 5 minutes of commercials every break.

I have a TV output on my video card, so I’m able to watch the shows on my television set from my computer. With Hulu, I’m tempted to cut the television portion of my cable bill out forever. :)

Yay! I loved that they included the cutscenes from the Futurama game on the “Beasts with a Billion Backs” DVD as “Futurama: The Lost Adventure” as a special feature. The game was merely a passable platform-shooting game, but the storyline and cutscenes made up for it. It has some really funny jokes, in fact one joke in particular is probably my favorite one-liner out of all Futurama. The story is fantastic, moving Mom to a new level of evilness, and it ends with a great twist. It’s great to be able to watch it as an episode without having to replay the game.

Strong Badia the Free, the second episode of Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive people takes the ball from Homestar Ruiner and runs like crazy. It’s not quite a touch down, but it’s a great step in the right direction.

In Strong Badia the Free, Strong Bad is placed under house arrest after the King of Town places a tax on e-mails. Strong Bad has to find a way to get out of the house, but he has an exploding collar on his neck that will go off the moment he walks out the door. Once escaping imprisonment, he declares that he will create his own, independent nation under the Strong Badian flag. He asks the citizens of Free Country, USA to join him, but they all decide to make nations of their own.

Now Strong Bad must travel to these nations and convince their leaders to join Strong Badia in it’s fight against the municiplality of the King of Town. Since this is the Homestar Runner universe we are talking about, the “nations” all consist of one person (or at the most two people) in their usual stomping grounds. For instance, Marzipan’s house becomes a nation, as does the House of Strong. There are locations that we haven’t seen before in the game’s continuity that should be quite familiar to fans of homestarrunner.com. Every location, including the locations previously seen, is well utilized as a nation. None of the locations get a major overhaul, but are given banners or new objects to show they are now countries. These are exactly the small-fry changes that the characters would make in the flash cartoons, so it’s actually nice to see that Telltale didn’t go overboard with the concept.

The user-placable map from the last episode has been replaced with a map of the nations. In order to enter a nation at the lower portion of the map, Strong Bad has to form an alliance with the adjoining nation so he can have safe passage to the new nation. Strong Bad must play to each character’s personality quirks in order for them to join forces. Each time an alliance is formed, an early-film style newsreel is shown with a narrator telling the viewers the news. This is a nice touch, and adds a lot of polish to the game making meeting the game’s goals seem a lot less tedious than Homestar Ruiner.

To my pleasant surprise, there is actually a great deal of character development here. We get to see one character in particular in a way never before seen. It’s unchartered territory for the Homestar Runner universe, but surprisingly it actually fits in perfectly with the series’ atomosphere. I loved that aspect of this game, and would love to see more of it in future games.

Another thing that I really loved was that the game had Strong Bad going into drawing tangents while reading his e-mail. Strong Bad’s plain reading of the e-mail last time felt a little lacking, so it was nice to see Strong Bad’s trademark illustrations while he was making his point in this e-mail. I’d love to see the game get into some “made-up” territory, as is common with the Strong Bad e-mails, but as things are now I’m still a happy camper when it comes to the e-mail aspect of the games.

One thing that did seem tedious this time around was the trophy quests and the Teen Girl Squad comics. Telltale did try to make things a little fresher by making the Teen Girl Squad comics chalk drawings on rock as “Cave Girl Squad” this time, but the experience still feels a little hollow. I love the Teen Girl Squad comics on homestarrunner.com, and making your own comics sounded like fun when it was announced. However, the experience feels lacking. The comics aren’t exactly being made, but rather connected like a jigsaw puzzle. And, like last time, the better puzzle pieces are hidden throughout the game. This time around though, I just didn’t feel like there was enough incentive towards putting in the effort to finding the pieces of comics and the trophies. It feels like just more of the same-old same-old.

Strong Badia the Free is a much more satisfying game than the last. It has a fairly epic plot and a good deal of character development, but it still fits nicely within the Homestar Runner universe. The quests and comics are starting to feel tired already, but thankfully they aren’t necessary to complete the game.