Picked up some new games | looking though baseball card collection

Hey, did you know I was a baseball card collector before I got my first videogame? Astonishing isn’t it? I had a quick look at my 4 books full of cards ranging from Upper Deck to Topps. Baseball cards aren’t worth anything now-a-days. They’re worth less than old videogames though. From my point of view baseball cards are colored cardboard that isn’t worth anything unless you sell them. I’m not going to sell my cards, but maybe hand them down instead. I was going to have a complete list of every baseball card online, but after typing every player in MS Word for three pages front and back I got tired of it and stopped. I know that I own have a few full baseball card sets. Half the collection I have is the more expensive Upper Deck kind. Upper Deck is the most expensive baseball brand and was that way for 15 years. My cousin had a baseball card collection too, but his is only half of mine. He has 2 books and I have 4 books plus a sealed package of 1996 Upper Deck MLB cards. All together I probably get $150 – I don’t know. I do know I was collecting cards from 1990 - 1996 so that’s 6 years. The cards were in the book the entire time; however, I can not prove that they were out of the book. Actually, I could sell all four books for at least $150, but I won’t because I have no need too.

I’ve installed my new hard drive in my computer today. The WinXP installation CD only could partition 133 GB of the 200 GB on the disc so I used Partition Magic 8 on it and it remade the master boot record so Windows could partition up to 187 GB and the hard drive properties dialog box thinks 60 GB used when my PC first booted up! That’s confusing. Now, I only have 125 GB to work with. I reserved 8.5 GB for a Linux partition by using Partition Magic 8. One possibility is the partition zero filled 60 GB of the hard drive! When I let Windows partition the hard drive, it partitioned the whole hard drive, but filled 32% with 0000000000.

I looked on the Gamerankings.com and saw that Sega’s upcoming 2D RPG; “Shining Tears” scored a 66% average. Yow! So instead of doing Shining Force now, I’m going to purchase Ys VI - The Ark of Napishtim that got a 77% average rating. It’s much like the old SNES role playing games, so it would most likely be bought by nostalgic gamers. There is one at Toyriffic that was talking about how he wants to own all the Japanese RPGs, and other rare videogames. I am not that nostalgic as him I am sure. They’re pricing Atari 2600 for $90! Sure, the store has good deals on current generation games, but I wouldn’t pay that much for old games even if it’s in high demand by collectors. Some of those games if the manuals are in good shape (like my N64 games), they’ll charge a ton of money of them.

So at 2:40 PM yesterday I went to get Gran Turismo 4 for $50 so I have that now. Then I went to the Toyriffic to pick up a Ys IV because I didn’t see it at Target. I don’t know if it was a rip off or not, but I bought Castlevania - Harmony of Dissonance for $40 same price as Ys. I liked Castlevania - Circle of Moon somewhat well so I bought the sequel. Circle of the Moon was my first Castlevania game. Harmony of Dissonance is my fourth Castlevania. I was thinking of getting Super Castlevania IV for Super NES, but I wasn’t too sure about it. It’s an old game and there are games I want for current generation. Although being able to own one of the most popular Super Nintendo games of all time in itself makes me want to own it someday. This game has Simon in it too. He’s been in 4 Castlevania games: Castlevania, Castlevania 2 - Simon’s Quest, Castlevania 3 – Dracula X, and Super Castlevania IV.

At home I got mad about not having friends admitting that they all alienated me. I remember in Calvin Academy I left there all those students were listening to rock music and I knew I didn’t like that stuff (until later when I started to listen to the heavy metal more often) so it took a long time to get to know some of those students. Then I left there in 10th grade and the point is I feel that everyone alienates me. But that’s a long time ago. Thinking of the past is not good. I also got a pack of 15 DVDR spindle for $11. I use them for data only unless I was going to make copies of DVDs, I don’t use them. For example for the last month it took me one month to fill up a CD with mp3s and programs. After a while I felt better about being in my room all day playing my games or doing homework.

Actually, there were some high school students that were going to play paint ball and they were in high school. I didn’t know why there were 4 cars parked by my house that’s why I was curious about it. The group left apparently.

Last night I played Castlevania - Harmony of Dissonance on the Game Boy player. You take the role of the grandson of Castlevania IV’s Simon Belmont, Juste Belmont. The guy looks dead because he’s as white as a ghost! Vampires are usually pale white which makes me think he was a vampire at one time. Ever seen the movie Blade? Sort of like Blade himself. This is my second 2D Castlevania since Circle of the Moon. So it plays like Circle of the Moon for the most part. I’m not too sure about the music, but the game play is there, and the game’s graphics even looks like Castlevania. IGN said the game play was outstanding and I agree with them a little bit otherwise I wouldn’t have purchased it. It was fun. The guy had the game beat and the boss was saved in one of the spots so I’ll just keep it that way. I have seen the end of Harmony of Dissonance. Apparently, Juste’s girlfriend got all the blood sucked out of her by the boss vampire, and Juste wants her to live again. I mean all that time he was trying to save the girl. I tried to beat the boss at the end and he kicked my ass the first time out of two tries and both times he hit me with his lace time and time again until I die. It took me 2 minutes to die, because ill-prepared and ill-skilled. His health gage was 10% depleted when I died. Like any final boss he’s hard. Apparently I can’t cheat neither because there are no codes for Harmony of Dissonance. It has a lot of color use. Looks like twice as much as Super Castlevania IV. On gamerankings.com HoD got an average of 87%, but IGN (my most trusted review site) gave it a 92% and that’s good for a Gameboy Advance game. The graphics were a 9.0 for a GBA game.

I’m thinking I’ll be buying the videogame called Mercenaries tomorrow. Mercenaries is developed by Pandemic Studios, the same developer which made Full Spectrum Warrior for PC and Xbox. You play a Mercenary who gets paid and an arsenal of high tech weaponry to go to North Korea and doing some US SEAL’s missions except the US is paying mercenaries the cash instead of soldiers. I don’t think there are game retries; it’ll revert back to the last saved game. These ex-marines get the job done for money. They only hope to get rich by doing private missions, in this case killing General Song of the North Korean Militia. In the game, there is a lot of blowing up stuff sort of like it was in Far Cry. This game got 9.1 out of 10 with all 9s with IGN’s review. Gamespy gave Mercenaries a 100% or highest possible score

Games to add to list:

• Castlevania - Harmony of Dissonance

· Mercenaries