Less than a week to go!

In five days, this blog will fall completely silent. Of course, VGTune of the Week will show up on the next Sunday as always, but I have nothing to give to people expecting just a few reviews or perhaps just a few random rants in the coming weeks. As Mass Effect 3 hits the shelves, it's safe to predict at least two weeks of downtime as I'm getting ready to begin work on my biggest and most hyped review yet. This much you already knew. The question remains, what's been cookin', and what's to expect after Mass Effect 3? Usually, I would have no answer. Now I do.

What's been cookin' is a lot of work. I've been really disappointed with my pace lately, but that's totally expected with all the work I've been burdened with. I've made a whole list of games I'm going to buy soon, 'cause my wages this and next month are going to be relatively astronomical - at least they'd better be. Yeah, Skyrim is still on top of that list, and there's another recent game that has seriously caught my attention - Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. I'm usually very hard to please when it comes to whole new franchises, and I usually lie in wait for a sequel before jumping on the bandwagon, but the playable demo on Xbox LIVE, which I downloaded 'cause my friend wanted to see it, proved that this game's the real deal.

Ryu's leaving us for the time being.

The Ninja Gaiden marathon will end with Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox and the remake Ninja Gaiden Sigma for the PlayStation 3. Besides that, I'm done dying dead enough :) I know that "slogan" is somewhat of an enigma; back when I first heard Megadeth's 2004 single "Die Dead Enough" and tried to determine whether it was good or not, I imagined the song playing over a Ninja Gaiden montage, because "dying dead enough" always reminded me of that franchise. That's where it comes from. Anyway, there was really no deep meaning to the Ninja Gaiden marathon - of course the third game in the new series is coming up, but this marathon had nothing to do with the hype surrounding it, it was just coincidence. So no, there will be no reviews of Ninja Gaiden II and Ninja Gaiden III at this time. The reviews of Ninja Gaiden and Sigma will turn up in a couple of days, and they will be followed by a totally unrelated stand-alone review of a whole other game before Friday.

After Mass Effect 3, it is finally time for me to live up to the promise I made in the end of the year and start hacking through my collection. My collection has grown by quite a bit during the last couple of months - by approximately 30 (!) games, to be exact - but my primary concerns lie in the games that were part of last year's collection. The ones that got there first are first in line, so to say. I'm totally stoked about this "marathon", but I'm trying to contain myself as I have a galaxy to save and an Earth to take back. As we're slowly heading for the summer, it's safe to assume that I'm perfectly capable of picking up the pace and delivering a lot of interesting reviews to make up for a good Year 2 summary, which will be published some time in August.

See you in a couple of days, the blackout isn't 'til Friday.