Well, after a few weeks of work, Rydia's up... And... Meh. I think I blew it again. :\ Oh, well.

Two weeks ago, I went to exchange my mother's birthday present which was sadly a game I already had and found that she had also gotten me a $40 gift card to Best Buy that I did NOT know about! XD Well, with the $20 from the copy of Club House Games she had mistakenly gotten me and that $40, I ended up with Retro Game Challenge which I had been wanting for a while (I even made us late for Valentine's Day Dinner while I ran around frantically gathering up ALL the games I could get my hands on to win RPGamer's Retro Game Challenge contest, which of course, I didn't win) and Venture Bros. Season 1! ^^ I also went out with my own money and FINALLY picked up Super Robot Wars: Original Generation Saga - Endless Frontier. Yup, long name. It was supposed to have come out on my birthday, but Gamestop didn't get it until the next day and then I simply wasn't able to go get it then. But I have it now! And I've been playing both nonstop for these past couple weeks! ^^ Oh, and I also watched the Venture Bros. to death, too.

Aside from that, as described in my last entry, following the completion of Ultima 1, I've now begun Ultima 2. And Ultima 2 is certainly the WORST in the series thus far. >_< The game is certainly ambitious, in terms of basic set up, it's very similiar Square's 16-bit legend, Chrono Trigger. I.e., you must travel across the world and through time using warp gates to collect all the information and items necessary to destroy the evil that will destroy the world in its resident time period. Of course, where the game fails completely is in the utter lack of direction (I know I made the same complaint about the last one but at least that one had a noticable pattern to its quest, this one has squat), the lack of significant differences other than basic geography between time periods, and worst of all, instead of a million almost pointless dugeons, this one gets away with a few dungeons that you never, EVER need to step into, AT ALL! You spend most of the game killing things for money and the occasional important but rare drop, but that's it. Even worse, unlike its predecessor where projectile weapons were PROJECTILE WEAPONS (you could shoot stuff a few squares from you), in this game, projectile weapons are melee weapons. Even the Frigate's guns are melee weapons! Beautiful. It's not all bad, though. Unlike the previous game where towns and castles were just one screen, in this one, towns and castles are big, big places to explore. There's even a "McDonall's" fast food place, complete with a drive-thru. Indeed, you can see the roots of moderns RPGs in the game's towns and NPCs.

Of course, history says the reason why the game is so overly ambitious and crappy is because of repeated head butting between Garriott and Sierra Founder, Ken Williams who supposedly tried to hurry along the project to market. In the end, the game came out to be the worst in the series and gave Garriott a reason to start his own company, Origin Systems so he could take his time and not be pushed around. How ironic that Origin would later be sold to EA Games which eventually tied a noose around the company's neck, drove Garriott out and gutted what was left of the carcass. Supposedly, Ultima 9 suffers from the same rushed-to-market problems as Ultima 2, which also led to Garriott's departure.

In anycase, I'm still working through it.

Let's see... What else...? Oh, we went to see Star Trek on Monday! I was a little scared at first but soon found it to be much, much, MUCH better than other recent remakes and such. I especially LOVE the actors they got, even of them did a splendid job of handling the classic characters! Though... I'm still trying to figure out the whole SpockxUhura thing... That just doesn't make sense... O_o

Oh, and I also got a new cell phone! Which... Well... It seems my old one was dropped one time too many and the part of its memory that's reserved for text messages became corrupted and it couldn't send or receive messages anymore. And not wanting to wait until my plan expires (which it does while I'll be AT SEA in July) or to GO TO SEA with one of those cheapy pre-paid things, I just bought a totally new phone instead. Anyway, it's a really nice phone, I just wish I had more to do with it... >_>

And one last thing... I should probably post about it on the DA Forums too but maybe you guys know something too...

What's it mean when your tablet keeps losing contact with the computer while you're using it, forcing you to have to keep unplugging and plugging it to make it work again? I know it can't be the USB ports themselves because I routinely place other stuff in those slots and those devices haven't been having any communication problems. Is... Is my tablet... Dying...? ;_;

Anyway, that's that.