2005 Wrap Ups: Torvus Borg reaches 150 posts! Welcome to the 150th post in the history of Torvus Borg! I happy to have reached this milestone, back when I started writing in this thing, I never would have thought it would have been this important to me. Don’t know what I mean, well, back in the day the Journal was called: “alpha99’s Journal” and it usually consisted of me writing a few hundred words about some game I was all excited about, for example the 9th post here at the borg consisted of 9 words, things have since changed. The Borg is all about brining you detailed coverage of games that I play or just about games in general. For the first time we are having our own year end awards (which will be coming December 26th) and we have surpassed the 1000 word mark 15 times now, which is usually considered about 3 pages of writing or so. We are up from about 338 words per article average in ‘04 to 567 words per article in ’05 and considering that we are nearing 100 posts alone in 2005 (there where only 51 posts in 2004), that is all the more impressive. Including this post I have written nearly 75,000 words over the course of the year and a half that I have been writing in this blog. I don’t know if word count means anything to you, so here is another example of how dedicated to the blog I have become. Before I started writing in this thing, I tended to build a lot of different websites about games that I liked, everything from Dragoon to Earthbound to Super Mario Sunshine, but now I just write about all these games here in the Torvus Borg. I can even write about older games or games that only have one game in the series or even just one game in series that I really like, so I really enjoy the freedom that blogging allows. Over the course of our existence, I have been able to narrow down the types of articles that I write about. Back in the day I used to write about anything and everything under a separate title, but now I like to condense all these smaller posts in to bigger more fleshed out posts called: Torvus Borg Update. I have also honed the game coverage down to: Impressions, Progress Updates and Finished articles, which cover my first time with the game, updating you on my progress in big name titles and telling you my final thoughts on a game after I finish it for the first time, respectively. With all these improvements I have been able to clean up unnecessary posts and keep the posts from being less than 100 words, though there have been some dark times in the Borg’s history, not all has been perfect. For example, in the early days I’d be lucky to break 200+ words in most of the posts; seven of the first 15 posts on the Borg consisted of less than 100 words. There was also a point in the Borg’s history where I didn’t make an update for approximately 21 days, which is the longest in the Borg’s history. But all that has changed now as we close out 2005 in style! In fact this post isn’t only our 150th post special, which in turn is part of our 2005 Wrap Ups special, but it is also another Torvus Borg update and impression article. I’m going to bring you some coverage of a couple games that I have just played. First last night I went to rent a game, because after I had finished FFX-2, I really had nothing to play, actually that isn’t totally true I did want to play God of War again, but it’s on a dual layer DVD, so it won’t play in my PS2 right now. Anyways, off to the video store I go, I took my sweet time like I usually do, because it’s hard to make a decision with so many games to pick from, I finally decide on Killer 7 (which I will get to in a moment), which just won GameSpot’s most innovative game award. So I walk over to my Mom who is with me on this occasion and she’s looking in the used bin and what do I see sitting there ready to be sold at an astonishingly low price of $3.99? Perfect Dark for the N64, now not being one to pass up a chance to pick up great games for really cheap, I snatched that instantly. So now I’m here to give you my impressions of the sequel to the recently released Perfect Dark Zero on Xbox 360. Keep in mind I didn’t have much time to play the single player game, I mostly spent time playing in the combat simulator mode, which is the deathmatch mode of the game. GoldenEye 007 was the game that redefined multi-player shooters on consoles, my brother, his best friend and I played tons of multi-player GoldenEye and Perfect Dark is the successor to that game, so you will find a similar experience here, though maybe slightly more advanced. I’m sure you don’t want to know how my matches went, so I won’t talk about them I’ll talk about how weird it is to go back to a game like this and I’m not talking graphics. What I’m talking about is the controls, you see, the N64 controller only has one analog stick, so manually aiming requires you to press the R shoulder button and the not move to use the fine aim, so if you aim like this you better hope your opponent doesn’t know you are there. It’s best to just grab an automatic and just fire away until your opponent falls, but skilled head shots can earn you easy kills if you are sharp enough. It’s been good so far and will have more in the upcoming Borg post about it, I’m sure once I finish the Best and Worst 2005 and we enter 2006. Oh… What? You wanted to know what I thought about Killer 7? Oh! Okay… Again I only played this for a short time and from what I can tell from about an hours worth of play is that I’m probably not going to like this game, it’s really awkward and disjointed. I really wanted to like the game, I should probably give it more time before I give my final verdict though and I should change to the inverted controls, pressing up to aim up seems really weird after all these years. The other thing I guess I should mention is that this game doesn’t just gradually get weird, it’s weird from the first second you start playing and just gets so mind blowing even within an hour of play that I couldn’t believe it. Again I will try and update you (even though the game will have long been returned) in the first post of 2006 if I want to tell you more about this game. So that’s about it for our 150th post, I hope you enjoyed it and I’ll try and come back even stronger in 2006 as my writing skills improve and I getter better and better at cover videogames. I’ll also plan to have another special when we reach our 200th post, which should probably be around April 2006 or so unless of course I start posting daily updates, but that is unlikely. But before then, we are likely to hear about Black and maybe even Zelda: Twilight Princess will be out by then, who knows. But whatever comes out, you know I will cover it as deeply as I can here on the Borg. Now it’s time to end this Borg post, with the traditional ending phrase; Laters From Torvus Borg! POSTED ON DECEMBER 23rd, 2005