Casual gaming is huge. There is no doubt about it as there are tons of games and huge profits being made on them that are targeted directly to non-gamers. There is nothing wrong with it, per-se, but Pie and I can’t help but scratch our heads and wonder what the appeal is. One thing I never understood was the appeal of Nintendogs or other “games” that didn’t really have any gaming aspects to them. Then we come across a game like Cooking Mama and wonder…how exactly does this get so big? I feel like I have to question my own sanity at the idea of how this game can have a number of sequels and a game like Okami can be a critical success but do marginal sales. I guess people would simply rather shake their Wii-motes in a variety of ways to cook virtual food. Not to learn to cook – but just for the sheer thrill of it all.

Anyways, if you have been a reader of Life in Aggro for a little while, you may notice some changes to the site design. There are little things in place now like navigation buttons for the thoughts post and a number of the different pages have been cleaned up and overhauled. The most significant thing about the changes this week is that the site has been re-programmed from the ground up.

The old site utilized very simplistic HTML and nested tables; it got the job done but it was an absolute mess and made it very difficult to change on the fly. Additionally, it was just an eyesore of code and chugged along; loading much longer than such a simple page should. The new code is much more efficiently written with CSS and I’m hoping you should see some much better load times then the old design. Over the next week the changes on the main page and comic page will be added to all the archived content, which should make navigations much easier if you are actually interested in our thoughts posts.

Well, Bear and I finally picked up and watched the 2009 Astro Boy movie after weeks of just talking about it; it was a very awesome film!! =D There was a point maybe about two-thirds into the movie where Bear and I thought Astro's actions were a little disappointing because they didn't reflect his conviction, but I'll let that slide. I really loved the film, but the biggest problem about it was that the last minute or so felt like (in Bear's words) a "slap in the face." It's a good happy ending up to point 1:24:50 where it feels like they went overboard with too many unnecessary, unreasonable, and awkward events followed by an very unexpected weird conclusion that I just can't take seriously; it's almost as if the makers themselves decided not to take the movie seriously.