You want to update, Snake?

It's crazy how time just flies by! It feels like it was just yesterday I wrote those Track & Field reviews and the Castlevania DLC Guide, but apparently it's been a while. I'm very sorry, and I promise to deliver new reviews this week, as I'm currently enjoying my holiday. Actually, "enjoying" is not the proper word to describe it, as it's freakin' cold in here. This has got to be the worst summer of my life, in terms of weather at least.

Well, enough about the weather, let's take a look at what's happening in my fruitful relationship with the video game scene. First of all, I bought Blue Dragon for the Xbox 360 today. I wasn't supposed to buy any new games this month, but Blue Dragon is a Sakaguchi game, which automatically makes it a must-buy for me, it's not very easy to come by these days, and finally, it was on sale for €9.90. I spent the night at a friend's house, and took a bus home, and it stopped right in front of the mall the local GameStop is housed in. From this day forth, that bus stop shall be called "the bus stop of doom". Anyway, in its overtly anime/manga-influenced style, Blue Dragon is really not my tastiest cup of tea, but I think it will make for a very interesting review one day, considering my (cult) infatuation with Final Fantasy and the more recent Mistwalker game Lost Odyssey.

Some time ago, as prompted by the long-anticipated Trophy support patch for the first true PlayStation 3 masterpiece, I teased the thought of going back to one of my favourite video game franchises of all time - Metal Gear. I've been working on some sort of a solution to how this Metal Gear "retrospective", if you will, should go down, and it's still going to take me some time. The only thing I can state for certain is that you're going to see new reviews related to the Metal Gear franchise in the near future - I'd love to do a REAL retrospective, but I'm not sure where to start or what kind of a basic concept such retrospective should have. I'm guessing I'll get back to this. I'm currently replaying Metal Gear Solid 3, and I have at least four more games to go after that (including the newly Trophy-imbued Metal Gear Solid 4), so there will most likely be a lot of unrelated reviews in the between to fill in some gaps - one does not simply rock through Metal Gear.

What I personally consider VGArchive's most important function is nearing completion; I've finally grasped what I want the Collection to look like. I'm aiming to publish the Collection in its final basic form around the same time I publish my next reviews. I'm not nailing a date here, but from the looks of things at the moment, I dare to guess Thursday.

Finally, in a note totally unrelated to everything, I'd like you to take a peek at a band I've liked for many years, but grown to LOVE in the last few months; they've climbed my last.fm charts faster than any artist, ever. I'm listening to their whole backlog as I'm working on the Collection, and I thought to share the pleasure with you. They're called Evergrey, they're from Sweden, and they play their own, distinctive style of melancholic, progressive power metal. This is the namesake lead track from their 2006 album Monday Morning Apocalypse.