After watching this E3 Dragon Age video, I’m more excited than before about the new BioWare RPG, Dragon Age,  than I was before. The last screenshots I’d seen were very old and not really impressive, but that gameplay footage looks a lot better.

BioWare says this has a really involving storyline, and knowing them, it’s no lie. It comes out in the beggining of 2009, and this gamer girl who must keep busy until Mass Effect 2, is now wanting to play it.

I haven’t really dedicated any posts to videogames (excluding WoW), for a while now here, and it’s not making much sense to me since it’s one of my biggest interests.

Anyway, by now the whole gamer world has read the news about Final Fantasy XIII being released for the XBox 360 and not only for PlayStation 3. As you probably know, one of the biggest assets to get people buying the still very pricey PS3 would be the exclusivity of FFXIII. Now, though it seems that the only exclusivity of FFXIII will be in Japan, though not even that is 100% confirmed. This is a huge blow for Sony, who recently stated they’re not going to lower the price of the PS3 anytime soon.

How are they intending to gain market outside Japan? I mean, sure, Metal Gear Solid 4 was a big hit, and even so I know several fans of the Metal Gear series who still didn’t buy MGS4 due to the 399 euros they’d have to cash in for just the console, but it’s part of the small handful of decent games the PS3 has.

I’m puzzled. What’s going on in the Sony managers’ minds? They apparently didn’t bother paying Square Enix enough to assure an all over the World exclusive. And why? Are they really relying on people buying the PS3 because it’s currently the cheapest BlueRay player in the market? Do you see people rushing to buy stuff in BlueRay in your country? Because here in Portugal, and I know we are often not an example, the big movie sales are still just in DVD format.

I’m not a big fan of JRPGs for a couple of reasons (they’re still using save points, and they have a turn-based combat system *yawn* ), but my boyfriend is and was thinking of getting a PS3 to be able to play Final Fantasy XIII. No need anymore. Sony made sure we’re still uninterested in their overpriced console. Good news for us. It’s 400 euros less spent in the near future.

What I’m finding amusing most of all in the middle of all this information, are the reactions of PlayStation fanboys. One of them was saying something like ‘don’t count on those graphics being in the XBox 360′. I guess he doesn’t realize that, even though the PS3 does win in terms of graphical processing (the xbox 360’s graphics are still very good), it fails miserably regarding price and in number of available decent videogames. Plus it’s a lot harder to develop video games for PS3 than it is for the XBox 360.

Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night’s Watch, for this night and all the nights to come. - Oath of the Night Watch, by George R. R. Martin

Okay, so maybe my Paladin oath does not go quite like that (and I will definitely disobey a couple of things there :P), but it came to mind. Plus, I want to play my Druid whenever I can. My Paladin is just for ‘no other way’ situations, like Zul’Aman yesterday. let’s see how that goes. I’d prefer not getting bored of WoW too fast.

Other than my successful cooking experiment Friday, I did a bunch of stuff this weekend.

I went to the Óbidos Medieval Market on Saturday. They’ve extended the event’s area quite a bit - other than the stuff inside the castle walls, they’ve added a Tournament area (was already up last year, but smaller) and a Medieval Camp. Plus there’s also a tavern there now, which was packed with people. The tournament was a lot better than last year’s, and included a Joust. Though I had some trouble seeing all that was happening in the arena, one of the Knights and his horse impressed me a lot with some decent acting.  They managed to pretend quite convincingly that the horse was struck with a sword and fell to the ground wounded. The only negative criticism I have to do to the tournament event, is that they need to add a lot more seated spots. We had to climb some hills so we could see anything at all.

There were a lot of places where to get food, however there was also a lack of seated spots. We ended up eating under some wooden floors, in a place with some cement steps. The advantage was that we were less vulnerable to the cold and wind. We ate some yummy chouriço bread, plus some roasted kebab and quail. The event is attracting more and more people from all over the country with each passing year, and they’ll really need to expand the premises even more. I’ll post some event photos here soon.

One thing I think would be nice for them to have there would a stand where you could purchase books related to the medieval period, or fantasy novels, since they are so tightly connected in a lot of cases. Of course this depends not just from the organization itself, but from the possible interest from publishers and bookstores.

I was going to meet a friend who lives near-ish Óbidos, and whom I haven’t seen in months, but unfortunately the friends we went with wanted to come back to Lisbon so we’d go to the movies. I ended up postponing my meeting to this weekend with any luck - my friend told me he might come shopping to Lisbon. If not, I can always go meet him there a couple weeks from now. Either that or one day we’ll pass each other by in the street and not recognize each other. :P

The movie we watched was ‘Kung Fu Panda’, which is a decent enough animation movie. I’m also kind of wanting to watch ‘Wanted’, but after watching the trailer again I can’t help but wonder if I’ll like it. See, it supposedly based on a comic book miniseries by Mark Millar that I enjoyed, but the trailer didn’t have much of it in there. Plus they won’t have even 10% of the swearing that was in the comic (it had a LOT of it - think ‘Sopranos’), which I thought was part of what made it more interesting that most comics around. [ Speaking of an Angelina Jolie movie, congrats to both her and Brad Pitt for their newborn twins. ]

I finally managed to finish ‘A Clash of Kings’. Now I’m wondering what to read in parallel with ‘Watchmen’ when I’m home. So many books to chose and so little ideas about what to chose next…

How was your weekend?

Today I made dinner for two, and decided to try out a Teriyaki chicken recipe. The result was the one shown in the photos that follow.

And with the Teriyaki sauce:

I did some changes regarding the original recipe, like added a bit of garlic for flavour and previously removed the chicken’s skin, as it’s unhealthy. It was yummy and I hope I’ll be able to do it again soon. :) And maybe try out some other teriyaki recipes, maybe with prawns. Mmm…

Not sure what the next weekend will entail as we’re waiting for some input on some friends who are installing some software far up North on whether they will be back this weekend. Worst case scenario is still good; Staying home/going out with just my sweetie, and arrange some movie-watching at home with a couple of friends on Saturday or Sunday. I’d also like to go to IKEA to buy a couple of glass closets I saw there a while ago, so they don’t sell out and I get stuck with something not as good.

I also need to go to Jikai! pick up my anime purchases and possibly some new paints and brush for some model kits or miniatures. Yesterday I was at my parents’ place and was looking for the Eva 00 (kai) model kit I bought about 8 or 9 years ago, and once again I didn’t find it. It’s too bad because since I’m going to have the Revoltech one, I was thinking of doing some painting experiments with the old kit, and maybe make it a metallic medium/dark blue instead of the regular blue. It would also allow me to relearn about the assembling and painting tricks, which is something I need to do before I start assembling my more recent Eva 01 model kit (don’t want to screw it up :P).

I’ll be going to visit my grandparents in Porto for a few days in August, when my other half is off to Croatia. That way, not only do I get to see my grandmother, and revisit Porto, but I’m not simply bored at home alone. That way, since I don’t have internet access there, I’d spend most of the time when I’m not out, reading. And considering the enormous amount of unread novels, comics and manga I have waiting at home, it would be very nice. It’s stupid really that I can’t seem to just read at home, even when I’m not chatting away happily on the web or browsing. I don’t know why I’ve been in this inertial status, but it’s annoying the hell out of me.

Oh yeah, a couple of weekends ago, when I was off somewhere on a birthday celebration with some close friends, I watched the first three episodes of Gundam Seed. Unfortunately, it didn’t impress me. For now I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt, since a friend told me it’s a ’slow start’ series which gets better later on, but I don’t really feel motivated to watch more right now after my disappointment. For some reason, I usually don’t like most mecha-centered anime series I see. I loved Evangelion and liked Escaflowne, but those were pretty much it.

On a completely different subject, I’ve been realizing more and more lately that in general, I’m pretty happy with my life. One year ago I was suffering from a major depression and felt like crap pretty much every day, and I took steps to getting away from those feelings, and they worked. My self esteem is way up. Go me! :P

As promised yesterday I uploaded photos of some of my Evangelion stuff.

The one up there is a photo of my Eva Unit 01 gashapon taken with only a dark light lamp I have at home on.

You can find the rest of the Eva photos here. Feel free to check the rest of my photos.

My usual anime merchandise dealer has told me yesterday that the Revoltech EVA-00 I had ordered has arrived. Not only that, but he got his hands on a box of these Evangelion gashapons. As you can imagine, I’ve already asked him to save me one Kaworu figure (he’s the gray-haired kid, for those who don’t know him). Ayanami Rei and him are the two characters I like the most in the show and Pen², but they never seem to make a separate figure of that lovely penguin [oh crap, after googling for him I found the cutest version of Pen Pen now I want one ;_; ]. Anyway, as I was saying, Rei and Kaworu are pretty much my favourite characters and although I have around four versions of Rei (they’re all very different from each other, okay? :P - I’ll take photos of all one day so you see ), I don’t have a single Kaworu figure. Speaking of which, rumours say that Kaworu will pilot Eva-04 in the second Rebuild of Evangelion movie. If that’s true I may also want to get Revoltech’s Eva-04. It’s silver, so it would look awesome near the blue of Eva-00.

I also have an Eva-01 model kit to assemble. That should only take me several years, considering how little free time I have. The good thing about this one is that it seems to be more or less the same size as the Revoltech Evas, and it is articulated, so it would look nicely near them on a shelf, or near the PC.

Since this is a post mostly dedicated to Evangelion stuff, I’m taking the chance to say I’ve been taking photos of some of my Eva figures and manga, and I should upload them to my flickr account soon-ish. I just want to take some extra experimental photos of the Eva gashapons. I was messing around with my camera’s settings and I almost got the result I wanted. Stay tuned!

First wise words o’ the day. I miss Percy and Pooch comic strips.

Anyone got some ice cubes? Meltin’ here. :P

I deleted my tourette post. I just really needed to vent about lots of stuff and there was no need for it to stay here. RSS subscribers will probably be able to see it. Oh well.