I BEAT TEEN TITANS!!, wet DVD, Quest series

Earlier tonight, I was playing my GameCube version of the Teen Titans videogame. And just a few minutes ago...I BEAT IT!!! Yay! Granted, it is not that hard once you get the hang of it. I played it right after I got it (a LONG time ago) then got stuck on some part and abandoned the game for awhile. Recently, I picked it up again after getting tired of playing Soul Calibur II and Super Smash Bros. Melee. I was going to play The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age instead, but unfortunately, I was forced to format the memory card that might have had the data for that game on it (I wasn't able to check). And for anybody that has played that game, you know you really don't want to have to start back at the beginning when you've got as far as Helm's Deep.

Anyway, the only drag is that the ending is, while funny, also anticlimactic. *SPOILER WARNING* Basically, in the game's final area, you get forced into a "tournament" by the Master of Games. The first tournament involves deflecting a ball using a box and trying to get the ball past your opponent. It appears (from the purple aura around the box) that you automatically use Raven for this.

The second tournament involves using Starfire to fire bolts at moving targets from a distance. You have barrels as barriers to keep you safe, but you usually end up obliterating these anyway in the process of taking down all the targets.

The last tournament is the final showdown: a rather long and nasty fight with Slade, voiced by Ron Perlman (Slade's VA in the Teen Titans show) in all his wonderful nasty Slade-ness. Slade will periodically retreat and send lackeys after you instead, particularly minions with energy shields that only energy attacks, like those of Raven, Starfire, or Cyborg, can really crack. I played Raven pretty much the whole time - she seems to be the best for getting in close to Slade and releasing an attack that actually does reasonable damage to him. The only problem is when he starts firing fire beams at you, courtesy of the new powers he got from Trigon (a reference to season 4 of the show).

Finally, after defeating Slade with the usual team attack that finishes off bosses, the team confronts the Master of Games, telling him to let them out of the game they appear to be trapped in. But the Master of Games is himself trapped by the game. So...WHO IS CONTROLLING EVERYTHING??

The answer: You are.

You may be thinking either "What?!" or "Duh." "Duh" in the sense that, since you are playing the game, of course you're controlling the Titans. But you might be thinking "What?!" because how strange of an ending that is.

Literally, after seeing that the Master of Games isn't the top villain, the Titans realize you, the player, are the real person behind everything, and they proceed to address you directly, in a "let's break the fourth wall" style. Then they name their favorite boss fights. (Cyborg = Gizmo; Starfire = The Bunny; Raven = Mumbo Jumbo; Beast Boy = Ternion; Robin = Slade).

The real funny part is when a confused Robin says, "So are we free?" and Beast Boy says they are cause the game's over, and big white letters appear above them saying "GAME OVER."

If you sit through the credits, a scene shows afterwards where Cyborg and Beast Boy have gone back to playing the game normally in Titan Tower. Raven is trying to meditate, but the boys' button-mashing is disrupting her concentration. She then says "I still feel like we're being watched." Then Beast Boy holds his controller up to the screen and addresses the player, saying "Wanna play again?" Then the screen fades to black and returns to the title screen. *END SPOILER WARNING*

Earlier, I accidentially knocked a cup over which apparently still had some liquid in it. This liquid got under the plastic on the front of a DVD Heather lent me (which had fallen onto the floor by my desk) and made the cover all wet. There's nothing I can do except let it dry and hope the liquid didn't affect the DVD. The worst part though is that the DVD isn't even mine, and if the DVD is damaged on top of this Heather will probably kill me. Oy.

A couple weeks ago, PotterCast had a guest host on named Lisa Wright-DeGroodt, who aside from being a friend of theirs is also a writer of a self-published fantasy series called the "Quest Series." Apparently this series is about parallel dimensions and how the goal with these dimensions is to maintain a balance between good and evil, with more favor toward the side of good. Anyway, I ordered the first book online (only way to get it) and I am almost done with it. At first, I didn't seem all that into it, and I thought, "Oh no! It's boring me!". But when I first started reading it, I was pretty tired and out of it. So that might be the reasoning for that.

Anyway the first book, Oracle Quest, is pretty good, and is actually a lot like the fantasy novel I'm working on writing --The Elven Princess -- in that it involves a person from our world ending up in another world and finding out she has powers there.

Okay I think I am going to stop here, because I got up really early this morning and I'm starting to feel tired. Good night.