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About Me

The #007500 Box feat. Series 7
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I Suck At Games: Banned Of Brothers

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Please see my Backloggery for a list of games I'm currently playing and friend codes.

SteamID: TheExcel ; alias Excel-2011

The world would be a better place if all the leaders of all the great nations of the world would spend a little more time sitting on the potty.

My name is James A. Calwell III and I'm legal. I play shmups, mostly of the horizontal, non-danmaku variety, but once in a while I like to do something different. My personal site is located at http://whatistheexcel.com. I go by a number of names throughout the internet, including:

Excel-2010
Excel-2009
Excel-2008
The-Excel
Exy

No my name does not have any intended connection to Microsoft Excel, Excel Saga, the Exhibition Center of London, the Excel Energy Center in St. Paul or anything else you can think of. Don't ask where it came from; I don't remember and I don't care to. Exy was adopted as a shorthand form from the (female) character of the same name in DoDonPachi dai-ou-jou.

I put very low priority on merit-based ranking systems within large communities, including Achievements, community ranks and leaderboards. I don't get why so many people are conscious about their scores because as one person I will not name here says, I play for fun. The only time I ever pay attention to my score is if I'm playing a shmup or a similarly difficult game and it's used to award extends.

My favorite games include the Gradius series, Darius Gaiden, Picross DS, the Metal Slug series, Twinkle Star Sprites and the bemani games (beatmania IIDX, pop'n music, etc). In other words, I'm not like you and I don't try to be. I respect that you're different from me, except you're not. I cannot believe how ignorant you can be sometimes. Incidentally, if you ever feel the need to get destroyed at Twinkle Star Sprites, just let me know and we can set up a match over 2df.



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All original material written in this blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License, unless noted otherwise. You are free to use and modify any original text and images published here for any purpose, including for commercial or profit, as long as attribution is given to me (a link to the original post(s) is sufficient). If you would like to use my writings, you are not required to contact me in advance to do so, but I would appreciate if you told me where my work is being used. If these terms won't do in your case, please contact me at unluckystar at whatistheexcel dot com to negotiate a statutory license.


P.S.

Gamer Profile

3DS friend code: 4382-2141-7820
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/the
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PSN:
Mii: 0228 7326 9127 5396
Gamertag: Excel 2011

Following (25)

Gradius Rebirth Response Excel-2011 | 3:31 PM on 09.05.2008 5 comments

I wouldn't consider this an impressions post since I haven't played it. Rather, I decided to watch some gameplay videos of Gradius Rebirth which came out in Japan this Monday. I read a little about it from a forum thread and felt slightly miffed upon learning it is only five stages long. Then again, it being a WiiWare game, that doesn't sound too surprising. Then I decided to see for myself. I have absolutely no idea what to think of this. From the above video, it seems that this game has the weapons of Gradius II, the sound effects of Gradius 2 (MSX), the voiceover and music from Gradius III and the graphics of Gradius Gaiden. On the one hand, it's really cool that they took all of the best elements of the classical games (that is, the ones before Gradius IV came out), especially since now they're giving the MSX game fair exposure beyond its niche but the elements seem to clash at times. It just doesn't feel as unified as I would have liked, but in practice that won't be a problem for me, because at least it doesn't lag. Still, I will buy this when, if, I can.