I should have done this sooner but I'm lazy and have been recovering from various illnesses slowly. This would have been done later had something not happened today to make me do it. You see, PAX was the best week of my life. It was supposed to be one week of good to outweigh two of the worst years you could imagine and it certainly was that and more. When I got back into my house, I didn't miss anyone because well, we're all on the internet and speak to each other anyway.

PAX was also meant to help get my university course back up and running and provide me a bit extra push to get me the one and only thing I have ever really wanted, a job programming games. It did that a lot and I was all ready to sort things out but today I was given the choice between a year out from uni, which I could in no way afford, and changing to a lower degree, which would mean me getting a job programming games would be so much harder as to be near impossible. The room I am in has to be payed for and I can't do that with option 1 and option 2 reads quit to me because it's a useless option. Option 3 is I do my final year and do the placement I didn't manage to secure afterwards but that will be one of the most hard fought for things I try to get that isn't PAX and I don't much believe in that much good happening all at once.

I'm not going to go into it but the past two years have been rough. The first was pretty bad and after seeing the fun people had at PAX last year I decided last October I had to go. As the second year picked up a little I got happier and then around february it all sort of fell apart and got so bad over summer that PAX was one of the very few reasons I didn't kill myself. If I have any reason to just keep on now, it's you lot.

While there I managed to accomplish a number of my own mini life goals. I played Rock Band with some people from Harmonix, and we ruled. I also full on death screeched Black Dahlia Murder and we came off to some clapping. I also played Rock Band with Necros. I had a great talk with Nick Chester and a lot of other editors. I had Niero wish me luck on my game portfolio. I spent at least part of a night with Knives and Mandi and alcohol. I wore a full suit and top hat and didn't feel stupid. Best of all though, I got Niero to wear my stupid cardboard helmet that everyone signed and then wore the full size one.

A phrase I often heard was "I love you Bunny, you're such an awesome guy" and I still don't quite understand how so many people could like me so much. I have massive trust issues like you would not believe but for some reason with you guys I just don't care. I'm sitting here crying as I write this because I could never wish for a nicer bunch of people to even consider knowing me. My life would not be anything like it is without this site and it hurts so much that because of my life here continuing to go downhill it may mean I can't come on as much and spend time with the people here.

I'm completely losing it now and need to stop crying so I'm just going to leave you with this picture

Well, I was planning on writing one of these sometime this week so might as well do it now.

To put it lightly, this site means a lot to me. I am sure that without it, I would be in a much, much, much worse place than I am now. Some of you know about me being a mental case (Aspergers among other things including depression) and how messed up I am normally and how more messed up I have been this year in particular. I should be asleep right now but the prospect of PAX next week is keeping me awake. I promise you I will be crying big manly tears probably the entire week because of the sheer love I have for you folk.

Without various people helping me through an absolute fucking ton of problems, I'd still be dealing with them. Without the care that people have shown me on this site, I'd have lost it long ago. Christ, the only reason I ever managed to get a girlfriend back last year was because of people I spoke to giving me a few extra voices in my head and the confidence I needed. To me, there's a clear three reasons I am still at university and struggling instead of back at home dealing with debt having given up and those are my mum, the few close friends round this area and destructoid.

I would like to thank each person by name but the list is far too long and it would take me forever so I'll just put names here at random and if I missed you off, I'm really sorry: mid3vol, coonskin, countingconflict, Tactix, Aerox, Rio McCarthy, BrianKeljore, Neoninja, PsychoSoldier, elysse, Technophile, KNIIIIIIIIIIVES!, Necros, Excremento, BigPopaGamer, ZServ, Pheonix Blood, Halfie, TheYoungScot, Gibbo, Chooly, Vexed Alex, Kacie, EternalPlayer, GHost, Seth338, Power Glove, Atheistium, Suff0cat, Ben PerLee, naia, Ub3rSlug. I fucking love you guys.

Just the fact I'll get to hang with you guys at PAX has been keeping me going throughout this year and I've had way too many things almost take it away from me. If I have to swim across the fucking ocean and then crawl across America I will be there.

Most of all though, thanks Niero. Without you, I wouldn't have the kind of place where I can kick back and be me without having to edit myself and hide parts of myself just because people wouldn't accept it. Thanks for creating a great site for news and a great site where even people of completely opposing views can find a game they will enjoy together and have a blast. Thanks for the iconic image without which, I would not have had a crazy idea to turn a box into a makeshift sun shield at Download last year (This is the one I mean). Thanks for somehow spawning possibly one of the most crazy, mostly intelligent, overly ridiculous, awesome community.

The internet wouldn't be the same without Destructoid. It's that simple.

First off, I don't normally write stuff like this. This article will have some personal stuff along with my thoughts so you can skip over those if you want. I don't normally look for messages in games unless they are plainly obvious because more often than not I am more interested in how best to take the head off of someone who has every intention of doing the same to me.

I'm the guy who goes on murderous rampages in GTA4 because I find it funny to shoot people in the kneecaps and watch them stumble around. I'm the guy who would sooner grab Call of Duty over Shadow of the Colossus purely because as much as I like the latter, I like killing people more.

For me to come to the conclusion I have is therefore mighty strange. Even me playing a puzzle game is weird because it's not something I usually do. Lumines is one of the very few puzzle games I can sit at for hours at a time. I put it down to the music and the way it changes a lot. I own the PSP version and the XBL version. It was the PSP version I was playing while I realised what I did. Please bear with me on this, I have a lot of trouble organising my thoughts and writing coherently.

Lumines, with its constant changes in pace and random sequence of blocks is a fantastic metaphor for life. I consider music to be the greatest medium the human race has come up with. I would give up pretty much everything before I gave up music. I can remember most major points of my life not by what I was doing or even where I was but by the music I was listening to. In Flames holds memories of a previous job and my last year of school. The Specials is when I was starting school for the first time. The new Mastodon album is the month after I was dumped by my girlfriend.

The fact that music is such an integral part of Lumines is something that fits well with what I say at least when it comes to my life. Thanks to my very open mind when it comes to music I have yet to experience a piece of music in Lumines I dislike and the fact that the music is also the pace and that bits from it are the sound effects is also in keeping with how music fits into my life. This is probably the only bit that relates more to me than most people though.

The pacing of Lumines is the thing that made me most think what I did. It seems randomly paced and can switch from having a fast time line and fast dropping blocks to the opposite almost at the drop of a hat. Occasionally, it might mix it up by having a slow time line and fast dropping blocks. Now, if you take the blocks to be events in your life and the combinations of blocks solutions to problems suddenly I might not be so crazy.



In order to do well at Lumines, you have to plan well and work with what you are given to sort things out. Sound rather like “if life gives you lemons make lemonade”. I think though that it's not so much what you plan as how you plan. One plan may well lead to you not failing but it could do it in a way that means you have much more work ahead to keep from failing.

The way you plan for one pacing just plain wont work on another pacing sometimes. When the pace is fast you can rely on your solutions working fast and problems disappearing quickly and as such plan in a way that allows part of an event to solve a problem now and provide a little room to help solve problems that you can see coming up soon.

It is the fast paced sections of both Lumines and my life where I clear everything out and have an easy time of things. It all works out fairly well as long as I don't get a run of bad luck and even then it isn't too hard to solve things fast. It's the slow paced sections that hurt.

If you plan ahead too far in a slow section you are setting yourself up for some pain. You will find that you can plan ahead a little but as problems disappear, bits of the solution serve to create messier problems. This is where it gets a bit personal to help explain what I mean because I have recently experienced a couple of these huge shifts in pacing over a relatively short space of time. In Lumines terms, I'm now sitting on a ¾ filled screen without much sequence, a slow time bar and blocks that don't seem to be getting any slower any time soon.



The short version is that last December I managed to end up in a relationship. My first one. I was 20. Two months later, a week after Valentines, I got dumped pretty much out of the blue. Cue shift in song. Until then, life wasn't too shit. There were some big problems and some old ones I hadn't dealt with still sitting around but solutions were in place and my luck was holding out.

All of a sudden, my careful planning and placing was breaking. The old problems I thought would be dealt with instead mixed with the new problems to create a giant block of nastiness and I was still using the wrong way of planning. It's taken a few months to get to a position where although the screen is still as filled as it was, it should be easier to solve as long as I keep with the right way of planning.



The nice little squares that let you remove a chain of colours by introducing it to a solution is the people in my life that are trying to help. Dtoid is one, my friends are another and the short, blond, welsh girl who spent an hour or so yelling at me a few nights ago is another. I guess I'm probably reading more into this than I should and not explaining it too well but it makes sense somewhere in my head.

As insane as I am and as bad at dealing with the slow paced sections of life and Lumines as I might be, I don't reckon I'll be hitting a game over screen any time soon.

(Also, my run from when I realised all this is still going at 329,765. I got lucky with lots of screen clears and single colour bonuses and a few sets of 10)

This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. and then I made tea

what I was wearing

I'm still not entirely sure if this is some super elaborate april fools joke that I have yet to get or a real story that is really this crazy but it's worth a read. An article over at IGN describes a really weird set of events. It involves the declining arcade market, Will Wright (Sims creator) and Chris Taylor (Total Annihilation creator), a crazy trip to Japan involving living off of room service for six months, a cursed game made on equipment bought through room service and a run in with the Yakuza. If that doesn't sound like a thrilling if odd tale than I don't know what is.

The game in question is an arcade game called Vavatron which is described as a mix between Tempest and Robotron (neither of which I have played) and also described as cursed by both Wright and Taylor. To go with the story, IGN have taken the code and released an emulated version through FilePlanet (I know queues suck but it's worth it). I have played it and I really like it. It makes me want to put this in a real cabinet and have it kicking around for parties. The article is well worth a read, but if you don't want to read the whole thing, below is the condensed version.


Casey Staubach was sent to japan to find a new arcade game to save the US arcade market in 1982. He found both Will Wright and Christ Taylor and took them with him to help find said game. As soon as he arrived, he was told to return. As he knew he was going to be fired but also knew the room was going to be his for six months, he decided to take a holiday. Eventually, through some crazy deal making and a little work Staubach, Wright and Taylor created a game and mounted it inside an arcade cabinet.

After some failed attempts to show it to companies, they showed it off without permission at an arcade show in the men's bathroom of all places (set up in the third stall using a car battery to power the cabinet). From that they got a deal to produce 500 cabinets and sell them in America, with a member of the Yakuza. This member died from blood loss when the cabinets were lost at sea and the removing of his digit didn't combine well with his hemophilia. Staubach, Wright and Taylor fled the country before the Yakuza, who blamed them for the death, caught up with them and killed them.

When they got to America, they found they had three cabinets left. The first chance to get big was when it was scheduled to be shown on Diff'rent Strokes. All was going well and the cabinet was there for filming. Until it wasn't. It disappeared and was never seen again and a fake game was used instead. The second chance came when, after showing some people at Atari, a cabinet was sent out to be tested in an arcade. Until it was put on the wrong truck and also disappeared, never to be seen again. The third cabinet was set up at Staubach's new job and eventually found it's way into a warehouse and was then found again and this story was discovered

Well, thanks to all those who wanted in on the picture, you made this a blast to work on seeing all the different avatars.

After last time, I realised how boring it was to build this in photshop so I thought I would brush up on my PHP skills and write a script that did the job. You can view it at http://bunnyrabbit2.awardspace.com/ and if you want the script, 2 stylesheets and image that does that, just ask (gamertags are hardcoded). This site pulls the images from MS so as you update your avatar, the site will update too.

Wallpapers of this are available at my mediafire folder in all different sizes.

Also, those blank spots are waiting for those those people to make an avatar