Common Sword is the new Dungeon. Bring your Dragon.

Earlier this week, my Xbox 360 succumbed to the Red Rings of Death. It now sits lifeless in my room, awaiting valkyries astride UPS trucks to carry it to Microsoft Valhalla - which is apparently in Texas. Having three 360s fail to make it to their first birthday, I thought I would be more upset about this. Instead, I feel a calm resignation, accompanied with a slight apprehension on how long it will take for my repaired 360 to return to me. Apple offers overnight shipping for their repair services. I guess Microsoft's valkyries have to walk it. Just as well. Judging from Windows Vista and the 360's reliability, they'd probably just crash.

It is remarkable that so few people are outraged by the 360's abysmal rate of failure. To be fair, Microsoft's free 3-year retroactive $1 billion warranty did help cushion the blow. Still, I feel that the 360 is just so damn lovable that people just want to get back to playing it. It's like a puppy that chews up your shoes. You want to be mad, until it turns those cute brown eyes on you. Just replace those brown eyes with green and white X's.

With my Xbox officially out of commission, I've finally found the time to discover why IGN's Daemon Hatfield deemed Disgaea DS the deepest strategy RPG on the market. To say that Disgaea DS is deep is to say that the Pacific Ocean is deep. There are depths to this game which I can only begin to fathom. Indeed, it may even be deep to a fault, as its game mechanics still remain unfathomed one third of the way through the game. It makes me wonder if I will be able to come to understand them by the time I complete the game, or if I will come to the end of this story still relying on the haphazard party development and battle strategies that have miraculously delivered me victory thus far.

Yet, for all my confusion, I cannot help but admire the ambition of the developers at NIS. They created a game in which the most mundane and basic of items contains a multi-tiered dungeon capable of improving the stats and quality of the item - a dungeon for which ten challenging floors requiring an advanced understanding of the game's battle system represents a mere glimpse of the dungeon's true scope. One can only wonder what power lays buried deep within the common sword you started the game with. Perhaps it's possible to transform the most basic of weapons into an Excalibur-like blade, capable of serving the player to the very end of the game. Such an ability to upgrade and develop one's weapon, instead of simply trading it in for more advanced blades, resonates particularly well with me, and opens up an entirely new avenue for character development that I feel motivated to explore.

Still, with many Disgaea DS's core mechanics still incomprehensible, it remains to be seen if my character will ever pursue that fabled "Common Excalibur" or if he'll simply beat up the Netherworld Assembly until they commission the castle store to carry better items. Oh the decisions a demon prince must make...

- Mike