Yu-Gi-Oh! Card of the Week – Blue Eyes White Dragon

Its’ card of the week time and this week’s winner is the legendary “Blue-Eyes White Dragon”.

Nature : Monster/Dragon

Attribute : Light

Now, while this card is highly powerful with it’s 3000 ATK points in itself, it is also known as the strongest monster in the entire game. While it’s true that there may be other monsters with higher ATK power at the same level, what makes the Blue-Eyes so drastically powerful is the wide range of Support and Fusion cards that can be used alongside it.

One example of this is the infamous “Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon”, which can only be summoned when you have all 3 Blue-Eyes White Dragons in your Hand or on the field. You can then use the Spell Card “Polymerization” to Fuse these 3 dragons into one almighty powerful beast with 4500 ATK points!

This, however is only one of the few perks that come with Blue Eyes White Dragon. You can also Ritual Summon “Paladin of White Dragon”, a level 4 card and IN THE SAME TURN IT WAS SUMMONED, replace it with a Blue-Eyes White Dragon from your Deck OR your Hand.

This card was also the trademark of the anti-hero of the original “Yu-Gi-Oh!” anime, Seto Kaiba.

Review – YuGiOh! 5D’s Tag Force 5

Overall Rating – 7/10

This is the latest Yu-Gi-Oh! game to be released and it has taken quite a chunk of my time to get it finished … somewhat.

Tag Force 5 gives you control of an all new character, never before seen in the anime counterpart, whom you can name. You then proceed to talk to different characters from the anime and then take part in key duels. The only difference is … all key duels are Tag Duels. Hence, the name – Tag Force.

Now, let me warn people that the reason I have deducted 3 points from this game is purely because of how RIDICULOUSLY powerful the AI in this game is. Seriously people, these guys always get the right cards at the right time and seem to know every trap that you’ve placed down. It’s almost cheating, except computers can’t cheat and they’re ALWAYS beatable … even if you end up losing a couple of times to figure out their strategy.

Now, time to get down to cards – this game has EVERY card ever released as well as some which have only been seen it the anime so far, like the Wise/Sky/Grannel Core series which is an ANNOYING combination of cards to beat. It also has a Password Machine in the “Downtown District”, which basically allows you to enter the number of a card you know of and then you can “rent” that card from the rental machine. At first, you can only rent one card at a time, but the plan becomes more flexible once you level up by getting more cards.

A lot of people may get stuck on the storyline, as in how to get the story moving, so here’s how it’s done. Talk to some characters (preferably Crow, if you’re a beginner since he’s a good Tag partner), and do the minigames to fill up their hearts in the upper-left screen. Once their hearts are full, End the day and the next day, they’ll come to you with a request which will involve helping them duel. Fill 4 hearts and do 4 Tag Duels and the story will be complete and you will be given 3 copies of an Ultra-Rare card as a reward.

To end this review, I’ll say that overall this is a good game, and if you’re a die-hard duelist, you should buy a copy of this game ’cause the AI is DAMN challenging.

Out with the old, In with the new …

Out with the old, In with the new … as they say. And it looks like Lightning is the new dog on the field in the eagerly anticipated sequel to the highly successful PSP video game “Dissidia : Final Fantasy”, titled “Dissidia Duodecum 012”.

The Final Fantasy series is perhaps the biggest underdog story I have ever heard and for those of you who don’t know, let me explain –

Square was a largely failure company that made video games back in the 1980’s. In 1987, on the verge of bankruptcy, the people at Square decided to make one final RPG and decided to title it their “Final Fantasy” … and that is the tale of how one of the greatest video games ever to be made came into existence.

Final Fantasy became an instant hit and has since then spawned many sequels and spin-offs, among them the highly popular “Final Fantasy 7”.

Squall, however came from “Final Fantasy 8” and also became a famous character, though no sequels or spin-offs were made of FF8, unlike FF7, which has spawned a large number of spin-off games as well as movies. Since then, Squall has had a tight competition with FF7’s lead character “Cloud Strife”.

Coming back to topic, Lightning made her debut in Final Fantasy 13, with her spectacular GunBlade skills.

The GunBlade was a weapon introduced in Final Fantasy 8, weilded by none other than Squall.

So, the question we have arrived at now … Is it time to throw the old stuff out?

Squall has seemingly been replaced in this new game by an adversary who also weilds a GunBlade and has a cult following of her own.

Only time will tell … but for now, let’s enjoy the picture of Squall getting owned by Lightning!

(My apologies to all Squall fans, I simply couldn’t resist.)

Writers needed!

So … me and a friend are starting a new blog project to detail the world of Duel Monsters and after just going through the cards in my collection, i realized it was gonna be a much difficult task than i had anticipated.
Hence, We’re going to be needing some writers who have experience of Duel Monsters to get this project going.

If you have some knowledge of Duel Monsters, post you email address and I’ll get back to you.

OnLive. Threat or Trash?

Welcome to OnLive! the newest form of gaming on the planet. This technology has the potential of displacing the PS3 and 360 from their throne, or it’ll fail MISERABLY.

Here’s what it’s all about.It’s basically a type of service that allows you to play PS3 and 360 games without owning wither one of them. “How’s that possible?”, you may ask. The answer is simple.

It synchronizes, renders and stores games on servers and delivers them via internet. Surprisingly, it provides 720p format along with High-Definition quality. As of today, over 35 games have been stored this way, ready to be provided to clients via internet streaming on demand.

No more waiting in lines to buy games. Just make a call and you’re all set to play. How wonderful!

Or is it?

Here’s the negative side-effects of OnLive. First of all, it requires an internet connection of 5 Mbit/s or faster or you will be subject to the case of “lagginosaeur”, a disease by which all gameplay lags by 3 or 4 seconds, thus making the game crappier than a 32-bit in terms of Visual.

Secondly, you can only buy games which have been synchronized for OnLive. That means playing new releases on the date they come out is out of the question.

As of June 17 this year, this system was implemented in the United States. There have been no announcements when it will arrive in other countries.

In the end, in my opinion, this system does not even come close to making up for its cons with it’s pros, so I’ll stick with a PS3, thank you very much.

But, as they say – Each to their own.

Review – Air Gear

Air Gear is perhaps one of the lesser known anime out there, mostly because it only had 25 episodes made as well as an OVA before being shut-down.
However, in those 25 episodes, it made a bigger impact than most of the mainstream anime like Naruto and Bleach have with their 200+ episodes.

Like most anime, Air Gear is based off a manga, a manga written by a guy who calls himself “Oh Great!” (not so great if you can’t keep your anime running ;P)
The manga has spawned more than 295 chapters as of date and is showing no signs of stopping any time soon.

The storyline is simple enough. The tale is of a 13 year old boy named “Ikki” a.k.a. Crow who discovers a pair of “AT’s” in his sister’s closet, a type of roller-blade device that has a motor equipped to it that allows its user to literally fly through the skies.
But, what Ikki soon realizes is that flying in the sky is not as glamorous as it’s shown to be.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Card of the Week – Scrap-Iron Scarecrow

Yes, that’s right. I play Duel Monsters. Laugh all you want. It keeps my wits sharp and improves a bit of my arithmetic at the same time. So, i decided I’m gonna be doing a card of the week thing for yu-gi-oh based on the cards that have helped me get out of a tight spot and the first card will be Scrap-Iron Scarecrow.

Review – A Thousand Suns

SCORE – 6/10

Now, I’m a die-hard Linkin Park fan.

Seriously, I know all their songs BY HEART, even the raps. And up until this album, I had thought that they just kept getting better with every release.

HOW TO CREATE A RENDER

Okay, this is my first GFX tutorial. I basically use GIMP to do all my work but I’ll try writing it in a way so that Photoshop users can understand it as well.

First off – What is a Render?

A render is in its most basic term an image with NO background. By no background, it is implied that there is nothing there but an image.

There is NO white, black or any other color in the background.

The purpose of this is so that when this image is added in a photoshop/GIMP document, one can change the background BEHIND it and do all sorts of stuff.

An Accidental Shoplift

This is something that actually happened to me a few months ago.

I had gone to a local convenience store to get a packet of brown bread. When I entered the store, i picked up a basket and the first thing that caught my attention was that a stack of chocolates had been piled up in a corner.

Now, if it had been any ordinary chocolate, I wouldn’t have paid any attention but the brand was one that I used to eat a lot when I was 6 years old and which had been stopped being manufactured a number of years ago.

I picked one up and checked the Date of Manufacture, and sure enough