Kirby’s Dream Land 3 Review

For the last ten years, Kirby’s Dream Land 3 and I have kept passing each other by, with no more than mere glances in the other’s direction before ultimately going our separate ways.  Whether in the form of a physical SNES cartridge or a quick download vie the Wii U Virtual Console, I have had multiple opportunities to play the game, but have always chosen to spend my money on the highly praised Kirby Super Star instead.  Finally, with the release of the SNES collection provided by the Switch Online service, I hadn’t any reason to ignore this game any longer.  And now, in this post, I answer the question: do I regret taking so long to play this game?  Well…yes and no.

Day 20: Favorite Video Game Genre

Okay, so we’re two-thirds of the way through the 30 days’ worth of video game posts.  And I still haven’t found a more eloquent way of describing that.  Anyway, we’ve got another “what’s your favorite something-or-other” topic to discuss, my favorite game genre.  As usual, I find this to be a pretty difficult question indeed because I have a wide variety of favorite games spanning several different genres.

Top Songs from Metroid Prime

I recently had the great pleasure of replaying Metroid Prime, a masterpiece on the GameCube that is considered to be one of the greatest games ever made. Metroid Prime has a lot going for it, including a focus on exploration over fighting and detailed, immersive environments, the latter of which is greatly helped thanks to the game’s atmospheric soundtrack.

Today’s post will list my top five songs from the game, with the exception that this list is not going to include the music that plays during the credits, as that is easily one of my favorite songs of all time, making its inclusion in the list a bit unfair…and a bit redundant.

Top 10 Songs from Okami

Not long ago, I had the pleasure of replaying one of my favorite games of all time, Okami.  I really love adventure games, and Okami certainly delivers an unforgettable adventure, coupled with unique gameplay where you draw various brushstrokes in order to fight enemies and solve puzzles.  The game is so good…I still love it despite the fact that my drawings don’t register a large percentage of the time.  (I get angry quite often at this game, in fact, and yet I still adore it.)  Yet another area where Okami excels is the excellent soundtrack.  Behold, my top ten songs from the game!

Day 15: A Screenshot of a Game You’re Playing Right Now

Today’s newest gaming topic is yet another one that requires me to post a picture, so I shall.  Right now, I am playing two games.  Mainly, I’ve been working on Final Fantasy XII on the PS2, though I’m not currently able to take any screenshots of PS2 games.  The other game is one I’ve been playing quite sporadically, Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii.

The latter game is one I’ve been recording for our United We Game Youtube channel, and not only is it clearly on a recordable console (I’ve actually been playing it on the Wii U, which is HD-compatible, a requirement of my capture card), but I already have some screenshots available that I’m using for thumbnails.  And since I don’t want this post to be too terribly short, I’ll post a couple screenshots rather than just one.  Prepare for a sneak peek at some future videos, exclusively for you guys.  I hope you feel very special.

Animal Crossing House Tours

I’ve been thinking, after all these years of blogging, that maybe it was time to share something a bit more personal about myself.  Let me tell you a bit about where I live…in Animal Crossing.  From time to time, my mom and I enjoy playing Animal Crossing: City Folk, where we have, over the course of several years, amassed and spent millions of Bells.  If you’re not familiar with Animal Crossing, this is a game where you, a human, live in a village of talking animals, earn money (usually by fishing, catching bugs, or receiving various strange gifts from the villagers as rewards for doing errands for them).  You basically spend the game earning money and eventually upgrading your house to three levels, which you can decorate to your heart’s content.

Recently, we accumulated so much stuff, however, that we each had to make use of the third and fourth houses respectively to store all of these possessions.  I know, that’s all quite silly, isn’t it?  But we got two new houses to decorate out of the deal, and two new characters, as well.  In the end, our Crossing houses turned out so delightful (and were filled with so many rare or expensive items from our years of playing) that it seemed like it was time to share them with you all.  Now, this console is not connected to my capture card, so I was not able to take any screenshots, but I did take some decent quality photos, so here we go.

Trusting the Story

Occasionally, I like to look through the list of games on current or recent consoles to see if there are any obscure games that sound interesting.  Back when the Wii was still part of the “current” category of consoles, I came upon a game called Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon.  If you have been following my gameplay series for it on our Youtube channel, then it will come as no surprise that I did finally get around to playing the game.  In actuality, a big motivation for buying the game was due to the fact that it looked like an interesting game to test out my brand new Live Gamer Portable capture card.  It wasn’t too long, so it wasn’t a big commitment, and it looked a bit spooky, which could create some good reactions.  And the $20 price tag on Amazon helped a lot, too.

Nevertheless, I heard some negative things about the game before I bought it, namely the issue with weapons randomly breaking and monotonous levels later in the game.  While I can largely agree with these complaints, neither of these issues were the game’s greatest crimes.  But, I’ll get to that soon.

Rosalina Cosplay: The Dress

Huff huff, I’ve finally done it.  I’ve finished Rosalina’s dress!  Fireworks and applause, everyone!  It took absolutely forever, upon a bumpy path filled with trouble, but I prevailed, and now it’s time to tell you guys how I did it.  First of all, I needed to find a pattern for her dress, and this turned out to be fairly simple.  A search on the Internet told me that someone else had made the dress using Simplicity pattern 9891, which I bought for myself cheap on Amazon.  Step 1 done.  Several billion more to go.  Give or take a couple billion.

Rosalina Cosplay: The Shoes

I’m finally nearing the completion on my Rosalina cosplay, though it is still not quite time to share my dress with you all, though I assure you, it is almost done.  No, today, I will be sharing the frustration of making Rosalina’s shoes.  When I looked at references, I either saw blue shoes or silver shoes on Rosie’s footsies, so I ended up looking all over for some blue ones, as I thought those would look the nicest.  Strangely enough, no shoe store, or Goodwill, and not even Amazon, had any blue shoes that were similar in style to what I wanted.  I finally just bought some decent white shoes that more or less fit me (I got flat shoes rather than high heels because you have to walk a lot at comicons, and I wanted to be comfortable).

Rosalina Cosplay: The White Skirt

With the extras largely completed for my Rosalina cosplay, it was time to finally begin work on the most frightening part, the dress.  I did a lot of work on the main part of the dress, which will be covered in a later post, of course, but getting it to fit correctly grew tiresome, and I eventually decided to take a break and work on the white skirt that goes underneath.  This was a fairly simple project, and I learned a very valuable skill in the process, how to sew on an invisible zipper.  (They are not really invisible, by the way, in case you were curious.  That would make sewing it impossible!)

I wanted to make my Rosalina costume a bit fancier than it is in the game, so I ended up using this white fabric with sequins and this flowery design that was done in white stitching.  It looks quite fancy, and I hope the shine from the sequins will make people think of stars.  I ended up using the bottom half of a certain pattern of the dress that looked the most symmetrical, and since the dress is six pieces, I thought it would be best to cut this piece out six times in order to make my skirt.  Unfortunately, I ran out of fabric and only had space for five.  This is why you always buy more fabric than you think you’ll need.  When I talk about making the dress, you’ll see why this is so darn important….