As I endured three consecutive tests on Wednesday (college sucks like that) I decided to get myself as a present a 1 month XBLA gold card as well as a 1600 point card and relax for most of Thursday.

My games list had a lot of demos for which I'd been meaning to purchase the full games, so these decisions weren't easy. I knew I wanted a sidescrolling action-platformer, being my favorite genre, and heard high praise for Bionic Commando, so that was my first choice. I don't normally play many shmups, but I had the urge to try my hand at them again and checked the long list presented before me. I decided on Triggerheart Excelica because the demo was fun and it has panties.

I probably won't surprise many people by saying that these games are really hard. I had fun playing them, but wanted to try something a little less stressful.

Having said that, my next choice was pretty stupid. See, I've been getting really into fighting games recently but nobody I know will play them with me. I don't really know any other hardcore gamers, so I've been forced to play against only CPU opponents. I knew I wasn't great at fighters in general, but I had been playing a lot of SF2HD and thought I could at least hold my own. Also, this was my first time playing on XBLA since my free starter month ran out, and that was a long time ago and I didn't even use it much.

Short story: I think that I lost 15 games yesterday, with 0 wins.

I'm okay with this, as I got to compete directly against some pretty high level players (or at least they were way better than I was), but what got to me was that each game was conducted in utter silence.

I really need to make some Street Fighter buddies willing to at least make small talk or chat about strategy during a fight. I obviously have a lot to learn, and would like to at least have some people to talk to about how to improve one's game.

I later tried my hand at Rock Band 2. I have much more confidence in my expert drumming skills so I assumed this would go well, and I was mostly right. I had some good matches on Tug of War, and I think my win-loss record turned out about even.