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I put in a total of 3 hours today and I'm enjoying myself a lot more than I expected. Just cleared the ruins of an ancient hospital. The best part was making the ice and fire creatures fight until they were about dead, then finishing them off with weak attacks.

That sounds interesting.

In Blue Dragon, I got a fourth party member and found that I had to go through some cave to get to the Forest of the Dead. The cave's boss gave me a couple Game Overs. But there was a checkpoint right before, so I didn't have to do any backtracking. Right before the boss, if you don't walk past it, you'll find Fira (same idea as in Final Fantasy) so I made two characters into Black Mages and let the other two attack or heal as needed. The Fira just blew this thing away. It starts off with four heads and the fight gets easier as you knock each one out.

Now I'm at a village outside the evil forest.

Each major area of the game has a warp pillar, and at most point throughout the game, whether you're near a pillar or not, you can warp to any of the ones you've found. However, if you were to warp from the middle of a dungeon, you'd have to walk all the way back again unless that dungeon has it's own warp pillar.

A lot of the complaints about the game are that not much happens for the first dozen or so hours, but it seems like a lot of oldschool games in that way. You get sidetracked by all sorts of minor problems, like a village of sick people that I'm trying to help now. The game's main villain has been directly responsible for everything so far, so it's not entirely random.

Nene might not seem like an interesting villain, but he's mysterious and cruel enough to be fun to hate. I don't know if he intended it just to get a response or if he really feels this way, but there's an early line of dialogue he has when asked why he would destroy the main character's village year after year.
"I just wanted to hear their screams."

This is a glitchy game, also. I had it freeze once completely and I couldn't even get the Xbox menu to work without powering down. The voices stopped working once. The music cut out completely another time. Both of those required restarts. Just now during that boss battle, there was this REALLY loud garbage type noise which I guess was a sound effect that glitched and came out wrong.

I ended up playing some more of the Simpsons game afterall. It got a little better, but it's only barely playable. Camera is awful, controls are so-so. Combat is really easy and boring beat-em-up button mashing. Gameplay generally involves platforming (tolerable if the camera behaves) and finding and hitting switches to get your partner through an area (not so fun).

The quality of the writing is that of a weak to mediocre episode of the series. The fully animated scenes look great, just like a regular TV episode. The in-game engine is really mixed. Sometimes it feels like you're in the cartoon and sometimes it feels like you're in a budget PS1 game.

It's really pathetic, but I think I'm mainly still playing it for the achievement points.

I asked for a replacement copy of the Simpsons disc. On Blue Dragon, I made a heroic run through that dungeon skipping everything and getting to the save point I never reached originally. Probably took less than 10 minutes, but I'll still have to go back for the treasures and experience points if I want to be truly caught up to where I was.

Update: I beat the boss of that area (Forest of the Dead) and was able to cure the sickness in that village. I now have to go through some mountain area or something. Still undecided about going back for treasures, but I'm leaning toward not bothering with that. The boss was pretty tough. He beat me the first time. He does this move where he summons a bunch of creatures that take forever to kill and heals himself while you're dealing with them. You can stop him by attacking the crown on his head for some reason, but every time I would do that, he would do this attack that would do severe damage to every character. Eventually I got lucky and he didn't do that for a couple of rounds. I did have to waste one of my rare healing items to pull through.

I'm starting to think it was the games. The Simpsons had the disc read error on the same area every time, so I think that rules out the console for that. And the Blue Dragon discs aren't exactly in perfect shape, so it could be a combination of disc condition and game glitches. We'll see what happens. If the system does die, Mass Effect is probably what killed it.

I'm worse because I don't even remember that happening.

I watched a Youtube semi-speed run of Shadowgate. I've never had the patience to finish it myself but I was glued to the screen watching some other guy play it.