Its a new year, a new post, and a new blog look! I don't make New Years Resolutions, because I just end up forgetting them after a month or two, so I'll just stick to what I always do. Moving seamlessly into the new year, lets bring up another subject that has me hooked.

Again it has something to do with music. I can't help this fact, music is everywhere and I just keep discovering more and more that I love! The newest group that I've become addicted to is actually the combination of a music making group and a singer that joined up to make a few collaborative records. ROUND TABLE ft. Nino.

Lately it's become quite difficult to find a place that will host ONLY mp3 files(You Tube harassed my usual place so thats out of the question), so from now on I'll just be posting links to the music, where I upload them myself. There's also a download link there if you should so desire to have it. 4Shared, my savior!

Capsules, that is. Which is the subject of this post, so let's get right to it. For maybe the past 7 to 10 days I've been listening nonstop to a duo that I recently discovered not too long before that. The name is capsule(all lowercase) and the music that they make is something of a fusion of a bunch of styles, including bossa nova, jazz, electronic, techno, pop, and lounge house music. It may seem like a lot but it comes out really well. So well in fact that, as I've said and as well as the reason they're on this blog, I've become addicted to them. Out of the 12 albums they have put out (2 of them being a remix and a best-of album) I own 10, and listen to them on my mp3 player constantly. I don't believe that will change over the course of about a month either. As usual with my music posts here's a small sample of their music in case you wondered what they sounded like, and I'd also like to link to this blog that I found that has all of their albums, as well as a whole host of other asian music that you might be interested in, or that you may find difficult to locate: Japanese Music Dream.

Level of Addiction: 10/10

"My headphones have been glued to my head since I discovered this(capsule)."

Okay, so I know I promised an in depth look at Goal Line Blitz... forever ago. But that will have to wait! As something great has come into my life and its what I've been occupying myself with for the longest time now. A new RPG has entered my video gaming life, that's role playing game(No, not like D&D), and I love it. Were it legal I would marry the game. Awkward? Yes. Stretch of the Truth? No. But anyway, let's get to the game.

Obviously the game is called Tales of Vesperia (see directly above). It's about this guy named Yuri who starts out just trying to help out his friends in the poor section of his city where he lives, and ends up getting dragged into things that get a little out of control, and a little too big for him to handle on his own.


 The most interesting storyline in the game (to me anyway) is his relationship with his former best friend, Flynn. They grew up together in poverty and they both vowed to change the way the empire treated its people.(Brief sidetrack: Why are all evil entities in video games empires?) Flynn became a knight so he could one day change things, while Yuri decides to go his own way. This tends to put them at odds about how things should be done, and sometimes may even pit them against each other depending on the situation.

Now, in terms of the actual game itself, its great. The fighting system is a familiar one, to me at least, so I was pretty comfortable with it from the get-go. I touched on it a bit in a previous post about Star Ocean: Second Story. Its a free movement type of battle system, where you control what your character does. You can link combo attacks together and also tag on special skill attacks onto those for big damage. It has a pretty good plot, as most Tales of... games tend to, and it can easily draw you in if you let it. The length of it is great as well. It's been a while since I've played a game that lasted 50+ hours, and its something I needed to remind me that games like Halo and Call of Duty(both good games in their own right) aren't taking over.

My absolute favorite thing about the game though, as it has to be with most games I play, is the interaction between the characters. It's amazing in this game, overall there are 7 members that can join your group, and each of them have individual relationships with each other, which makes for hours of fun watching them go back and forth, and its a delight to see how they grow with each other through story plots and also little side-skits that occur within the game frequently. My favorite has to be Raven. The girls of the group find him creepy, underhanded, shifty, and just plain old. But without him there wouldn't be half as much fun!