Not just another NPC - (ds-x2 ver.)

Behold!

Though it may not look impressive to some, I’m quite proud of my new gaming “rig” (please excuse the lousy picture). I’ve got a 20″ Sony Trinitron with three game systems elaborately set up to it all at once. Which means if I get bored of playing Sonic 2, I can start play Super Smash bros. online with the push of a few buttons. Pretty sweet stuff though I must admit I haven’t played much of the Wii as I have Dreamcast and Sega Genesis. Playing Soul Calibur 4 at a friend’s house rekindled my love for the series so I’ve been playing the original on Dreamcast on occasion. Also, I tried beating Sonic 2 as I have always tried as a kid… but failed. You would think after all these years and extensive experience in action games I would have a better handle on… well… mainly the last boss, the rest of the game is easy as pie. Though there was this one pit in mystic caves… the one with the spikes and high walls… yea. Fun fun fun.

On this note I should… note.
-that despite my lack of updates (which I’m sure you are all used to by now and have stopped checking the site… all 3 of you) I have been quite active. Well, by my definition at least. Before making a blog update I set a few goals for myself which were: publish interview with GAMEINVEST, make an inanetalk.com podcast, and make the best mix I possibly could with the vinyl I have. It was the last one that I got hung up on. With a limited selection of vinyl I figured the mix I release has to be perfect otherwise I end up using the same tracks over for other mixes to show my progress and that takes away the “freshness” of my music. Yesterday however I made a bold move and ordered 50 records for a very cheap price. Primal records is abandoning it’s vinyl business and was practically throwing vinyl at me. How could I say no? Yes I suppose it was yet another impulse buy for me… Either was expect a mix here next week. DEMAND IT if it’s not here.

Oh but what about the other two goals?
-The GAMEINVEST interview can be read here at the ever awesome DS-X2 site.
-While the first ever inanetalk.com podcast can be found here on this page. (we’re also on itunes… somewhere)

Korg DS-10 is mentioned in the podcast now that think of it, and I made a track using it and a sample from Ken Ishii’s new remixed album. Korg DS-10 is lots of fun to tweak and play around with and it’s of such high quality that one could use it in a professional production environment. I’m kinda lost when it comes to arranging melodies, (I will be learning some of that this year at Sierra college hopefully) so most of my creativity comes in the form of the drum machine. You can download this “remix” right here (right click->save as).

Here’s the promo video for Ken Ishii’s new album (where I took the sample from). I totally want this… sooo bad.

so bad

Put away the party hats, I’m still alive.

I took a little unannounced vacation from my blog. That and I had nothing to blog about! Really, nothing. Then E3 hit and I was busy helping out Dennis post stuff up. I also have an interview with the founder of a unique Portuguese company making “pop” games called GAMEINVEST (their caps, not mine). Ok, there’s only about 8 questions, but I put a lot of thought into this! Especially because I had no clue who these guys were at first and I had to make questions that were… you know… relevant to the company. Should be interesting, look for it sometime next week.

On a side note: Holy **** they completely redesigned their website in the last 6 hours.

While I haven’t been playing many games my friend Mike actually made one! It’s quite niche as it’s an interactive fiction game (all text) or “IF” for short. I think it’s still pretty cool. You can check it out here - and yes he used that game as an excuse to make a mini-site.

Back to talking about E3… yes opinions are everywhere on the web… but I want to rant about it too!

Nintendo fucked up their E3 presentation. Don’t get me wrong, if you make an effort to seek out upcoming quality games for Wii and DS, you will definitely find them. Nintendo however did not present any of these. Ok maybe a few, but really just the tip of the iceberg. Nintendo is taking the Wii’s potential hype and just throwing it in the fire.

Nintendo:
Dead rising for Wii? phhs… Mad world? bah!… Sam and Max? Who cares about point-and-pick games anymore?… Sonic Unleashed? meh. …You know what we need to show? We need to show WiiSport resort and WiiMusic! Yea! People will love crappy simulations of cheap midi instruments!

I didn’t watch Sony and Microsoft’s presentations, but I pretty much know what they showed and on that basis I’ll say they were equally good. Final Fantasy XIII for 360 stood out as one of the bigger surprises by far. Shows Japanese game developers are trying to bank as much as they can on the “hardcore” American gamers.

Alright, that does it for this week. I’ve got plenty of time now before school next month so I’m going to try finishing Advance Wars and reviewing it like I promised. I’m going to try getting my hands on “Korg DS-10″ next week as well! Should be fun, look out for it.

I finally got around to playing Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness - demo, in Linux. The demo/game itself was great, though a bit short. I pointed out to my friend the graphical drivers freaked out on me a lot when I tried to use higher resolution but it turns out running Compiz in the background at the same time was probably a major contributor to this. Oh well, it still looked great in 800×600. Penny Arcade’s artist ( “Gabe” ) has gotten progressively better over the years. To the point were you could marvel at some of his more artistic pieces. In fact right now they’re pulling off some weird 80s ping-pong movie and it looks amazing. True webcomic revolutionaries at work. The fact that they now have a game is further proof of their influence. Anyways, I’m tempted to buy the full game, but I want to start building a vinyl collection this summer instead (while maintaining a steady savings - did I mention I’ll have a job soon? ).

I’ve got a lot of catching up to do before E3 hits. Did you know Activision isn’t even attending this year? WTF is that about? Or are they back in it now? Shit, this is what I’m talking about. I’ve got a lot of reading(/watching (the 1UP show)) to do! Sometimes I grace something with the source of gonintendo.com and shutter. There were a couple of times I would be ahead of them, but now it’s just scary. Could I ever catch up to these people? Match their persistence? That RMC guy is one crazy M.F.-er. Alright, I shall scour the internet, tonight! I will hopefully be back on my shit before July… and get some daily DJ practice in somehow.

I have soooo much to blog about. A few times I tried to blog last week, but I either got distracted or was pulled away from my computer while writing. So I’m starting fresh today to write about what’s been happening lately and holy shit has a lot happened.

Beginning with the days before graduation, I went on an all-out blitz to complete Earthbound before graduation. For about 2 and a half days I did nothing but play Earthbound… well, I also ate and slept. Point is I played a shit load of earthbound to where I was going a bit crazy. In fact I’ve been having some crazy dreams that I can’t seem to elaborate on. Trust me though, they’re crazy. Sadly I didn’t finish Earthbound before graduation, the last part of the game was hanging me up. More specifically those f^cking Nuclear Reactor Robots spawning everywhere.

After the graduation ceremony I went to Lucille’s which is one of those generic BBQ places with lots of random crap on the walls. However not only is their food better than the average - generic BBQ place with lots of random crap on the walls - but they had a badass blues cover band playing live with a band member whose middle name was actually “guitar”. I kid you not.

When I got home I received a call from my friend Tyler who said I should come over and “party” with him and his friend. I use quotes on “party” because our ideal party is one with lots of video games, soda, and various chips(likely Doritos). It was here that whilst (ironically) not paying attention and stuffing my face with Doritos that I got around to the last part of Earthbound up to the final boss. Then I beat the insane last boss and finished the game in complete awe. Tyler then remembered he had to work early that very morning so I ended up walking home at 5AM. I kinda felt like a zombie… who needed to brush his teeth.

The next day I went to a few other “parties” which was sort of surreal. I was really tired so that probably had something to do with it.

Couple days later I got everything sorted out with Sierra College… I’ll spare you the details, but it was really complicated. I’m just glad I’ve got classes to take coming this fall.

Bought a microphone(more on that here), stand, and some Midi cables. What do I need midi cables for? For my… wait for it… keyboard! Yes that “surprise” item I bought during the mega-garage sale event a couple weeks ago was a 48-key keyboard. A complete steal for 22 bucks though it required dragging home a mile and a half or so. Heck, that wouldn’t have been so bad if I didn’t have my bike to drag along as well. That was awkward - but so worth it. With midi I can make it sound like any synthesizer I can emulate on my computer. Now I have to teach myself Piano… I have some books on it somewhere.

Last Saturday I got a car. Yep a car. I’ll make a post about it later or something it’s too ugly to take pictures of now(getting detailed soon). My uncle really trashed it.

aaaand so that’s basically what I’ve been up to.

Just for the hell of it, here’s this:

Lack of updates you say? Well, I have good reason: I just finished wrapping up High school! Woo!
…
It’s been a wild ride. Lots of memories from the last twelve years of public education. Lots of… horrible memories. Oh ok, and some good ones…

But mostly bad ones.
(I might reflect more on that after I have my graduation ceremony later this week)

Within the last days of school I finished filming my broadcasting project(not actually finished on the last day, as the schedule was really wonky). Now I just need something to import it and edit it all with. However I did manage to take some random pictures here and there with the video cameras since pictures can be directly saved onto my SD card instead of the archaic miniDV tape. I’ve even uploaded some of the pictures to my flickr account.(in 16:9!)

I would buy a miniDV camera or something, but I’ve been strapped for cash since last year. I bought the turntable using money I had in my bank account which I usually never do. I consider withdrawing a bad habit so up until then I had never actually withdrawn money from my bank account and don’t plan on doing it again until I get a job.

Speaking of looking for a job I have been searching for one since April or so - with no luck. Now that school is over though I’m going to be a bit more aggressive with the whole thing. It’s not going to be easy with this economy. There are probably plenty of experienced people out of work looking for any job they can get their hands on.

Progress on Earthbound is slow but steady. I’ve been playing it almost 2 and a half hours each day with the exception of this weekend and Monday so far. When I was in the town of Threed I contemplated making a blog post as if I were right there with the zombies or something:

Hey it’s NPC here vacationing early in the town of Threed! Zombies seem to have invaded the town before I arrived - and after my travel agent sold me this vacation package. Every now and then I have to smash a zombie with a baseball bat to protect myself. In short, the nightlife here is dead…. or would that be un-dead?

Yea I just think Zombies in general are funny. Ever since I saw Peter Jackson’s “Braindead” I’ve been pretty much desensitized to all horror films.

Yet Metroid Prime still freaks me the fuck out.

Last but not least I promised I would post up my first turntable mix if I thought it was “decent” and sure enough I have one which qualifies. I can’t link the thread I made on the DJforums because it’s blocked to non-members, but I reposted it all at inanity. Complete with a screenshot of the comments left at the DJforums which I find inspiring. I must add the music I use isn’t for everyone. Which reminds me, I actually drove a person in broadcasting crazy with my music one day. That is actually what sparked the idea to start filming the type of project that I made… unfortunately he didn’t flip out again despite my best efforts.

Another week, another pair of retro headphones.

Better picture here

This time it was by complete coincidence. Last Saturday there was a mega-garage-sale event in my part of town - basically a bunch of people sold crap in front of their homes simultaneously - and I originally planned to take this time to hunt for some records. Well that didn’t go so well, but I did find these awesome headphones for the irresistible price of $1.75. After some cleaning(these things still smell like the 70s) and some research googling, I learned these cans are actually quite collectible. This thread here at head-fi.org explains the details of why these headphones are somewhat desirable. Basically, these are practically the first headphones to have full rage of sound: high and low frequency response. Plus they look hella tight.

I bought one other thing from a garage sale, but I’m keeping that a secret until I’m fully ready to reveal it. Hint: I need some midi cables.

Besides some last minute school work not much else is going on. I have been playing Earthbound for about an hour a day though. Classic RPGs are hard to sit through these days…

Oh and I have a very ambitious(more so than a game review) broadcasting project in the works. Sadly, filming will commence up until the very last day of school so I’m going to have to figure out a way to import it all and edit it outside of broadcasting class. Perhaps my friends could help me with this. I don’t know, we’ll see.

There is this little thing called “Math” I forgot to account for last week when I made my pledge for bike month of only 25 miles. I surpassed it pretty easily; when I thought about it, I commute 2.4 miles 5 days a week(22 weekdays in this month) so I should have at least pledged 52 miles. Well I’m already at 35 so I figure 70 miles should be a much more realistic goal. That will force me to get out a bit on weekends. 25 miles? That’s weak sauce!

Rearranged my gaming set-up in the other room. Main difference is that I’ve moved the snes into the same cabinet as my Gamecube and started using its AV cables for the SNES. GC games will now only be played on my Wii, sure, but I’m still keeping this baby for the Gameboy player. I am more of a handheld guy after all. The GC gameboy player is vital for long Gameboy RPGs like Summon Night and Yggrda Union. Who knows when I’ll get back to them though. Main reason why I set up the SNES in it’s new home to begin with is because I’m prepping for some serious Earthbound gaming.

While cleaning/rearranging all my systems I decided to check out the new “Nintendo channel” on my Wii. It’s pretty awesome, for me it’s a great and lazy way to stay on top of the latest Wii/DS releases. Most of them at least. The two main features of this channel are: The streaming video, and… I’ve been waiting for this for a very long time… drum roll please…. DS game demo’s! Yay! Both are pretty well thought out. The Wii streams video surprisingly well at a pretty decent quality(thought it varies on the publisher) and even has a nice full screen option.

“Thanks to WiiFit we can now crush our opponents with our bare hands! Both in sales and real life! Uhahaha!” - Miyamoto

The DS demo’s are a step in the right direction for Nintendo’s online. It’s very convenient because now I don’t have to download and patch walk into a store and use their download station, or buy a copy, to test out the latest DS games. Hopefully with the realization that a “full” Wii game can be developed within the Wii’s memory limitation (and downloaded via Wiiware), that regular Wii game demo’s will be made as well. A bit of a stretch but Iwata did hint at expanding the Wii’s memory, so it could happen. You never know.

Not sure if any of my limited readers remember this, but I once posted a video of DJ Terrence Parker using a Phone handset with 1/4″ TRS jack on the end of it to cue records. Well a couple weeks later I asked my parents if they ever see one laying around in their office about to get thrown away or something, that I would like to have it. Sure enough…

Firstly, sorry about last week, without warning I decided not to post. Secondly, you must check somethingawful’s review of GTA IV - rating on a scale of how much of an asshole you can be in the game. Just brilliant.

Last week I picked up my copy of Persona 3 FES (despite no PS2 yet) and then decided to check out my local dimple records store. I was already out and about and needed some more vinyl.

I didn’t expect much from Dimples knowing this area probably isn’t the best place for electronic music but I was actually surprised to find they failed to meet even my lowest expectations. I spent a good amount of time searching their entire vinyl collection where I found only two “dance/electronic” records. I might have considered buying one of them had both not been ridiculously overpriced. I was just floored when I saw how freaking expensive everything was in that store. After that, I came to the conclusion that if I looked through their entire “Techno” CD collection I may just be able to make this my last visit ever. I don’t think they’ll improve or get anything new that may be of interest anytime soon. So once again I found something that mildly sparked my interest but was priced ridiculously high (around 25 bucks for this one very old and used CD I wanted). I considered haggling but seeing as everything had a bar code on it and the cashier looked kinda light headed I decided it would be best to just forget about this place and leave. I’m going to have to set up something so I can order online or maybe even make a visit to the bay area.

Computer-wise I’ve updated to the new release of Ubuntu (Linux), called: “Hardy Heron”. Which I mistakenly called “Hardy Hardon” the other day…(hardy… hard… on) yea… uh… whoops lol. Didn’t even notice/think about that till just now. That’s like that time I kept calling Dennis Kucinich “kruschev”. Anyways, the update is not so great in that it completely abolished everything I had set up in compiz, the auto-drive mounting I had configured, and now refuses to read one of my NTFS partitions. Strange considering it reads another NTFS partition on the same drive. At least it has… potential. I think I’ll login and update it tonight to see if anything has been fixed for me.

I’ve been staring at NeoGAF’s tutorial on how to sign up for NicoNico web-video service for a couple of months now. Finally came across enough links on neta michelin to give me a reason to sign up and did so with relative ease. It’s quite interesting because despite the vastness of youtube I think NicoNico still beats it in terms of exclusively-Japanese content. Anything from anime, to video games, to even video option - it’s all there in full length glory. Not just stupid 10min clips at a time. Quality varies on the source but overall I say it’s much better than youtube. So I suggest giving it a shot if you’re into that kind of stuff, but don’t count on anything being subbed… oh yea and there’s video-overlay comments. That’s lots of fun. If you don’t like them (or just way too many) you can turn them off too which is nice.

In other news, I have two goals for this month of may: one is to meet my pledged miles for this years’ bike commute month(25 miles should be easy enough), and beat my friends’ copy of Earthbound. Hopefully I can beat Earthbound within the month or two, before graduation.

Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been busy with school(as usual), a certain new hobby of mine, and playing super smash brothers in broadcasting class….

(I’m Ness -P4)

Yea… I have broadcasting in the morning(8AM-ish) so I wasn’t exactly on top of my game.

Not sure what I’m going to do with the other footage I recorded, a good video review would require a good deal of game footage and editing. No one likes bad video reviews, those are the worst. More footage however requires lugging around my Wii. Don’t let that small size fool you, the Wii is heavier than it looks. Or maybe it’s the power brick, cables, and controllers in tandem with the Wii that weigh me down. Another problem is I can’t say no to a good multiplayer Brawl once I have it all set up. Especially when people start bringing their own controllers. I still have a good 5 min of game footage, menus, and whatnot. Maybe I’ll film myself without the wii and just talk. Then do some editing here and there with game footage weaving in and out. We’ll see where this goes, I may bring in the Wii covertly after a week or so. After all it may be my final project so why not put lots of effort into it?

Ok, if you’ve read the second sentence of this post you’re probably wondering what my new hobby is…

Yes I bought myself a turntable (Technics sl-1200M3D) and mixer (Stanton RM-3s). I bought the mixer a day or two after the turntable when I learned playing back a turntable without an amp or mixer (has preamp and ground connection built in) is useless. The guy who sold me the turntable (Zach) was cool though. Turns out he runs an internet radio station called XTCRadio. Cool dude, gave me a great deal. This also marks the first time I’ve ventured into Sacramento alone. Let me just say google maps is your friend. The guy who sold me the mixer was much more local (here in Rocklin) and much less competent. Which is to be expected from Rocklin. Sure he was nice, but he almost sold me the mixer without a power cord… and he had raiders posters… and an SUV (explorer) with chrome rims(or should I say rimz). Then he told me: “hopefully you’ll have better luck with spinning than I did, I gave up after five hours“. I’m like: “wat“. Especially since he told me he bought everything new. Great deal on my end, getting new equipment for the price of used is awesome.

I need some more vinyl and cables before I can record anything, but when I do I will post it! Or maybe the one after that, it depends. I think I’ve got the basics, it just needs lot of refining to make a “smooth” mix.

Last week April fools seemed to have really struck a cord with our forum (which is ironically called “inanity” as some may know) and it’s been quite busy ever since. So busy I had to finally draft a set of rules for the forum. Pretty basic stuff, but some of the newer members want to post crazy borderline 4chan shit. They seem to be taking the forum name literally which… we can’t really argue with. Instead of letting them trash the whole forum though Mike and I gave them their own board where they can post without having to worry about rules… most of them anyway.

I didn’t get around to too much gaming besides the occasional Bangai-O: Spirits and Armed Police Batrider. Which I’ve been meaning to write about. I haven’t written about any arcade games for a long time! Blasted forums, distracting me from everything. I have lots of spare time in Broadcasting class though (with no internet connection! Can you believe that Dennis?), I might do some video capturing for the hell of it. If I feel ambitious and not like an ugly creepy person, I might even turn it into a video review. Though the capture card is interlaced only so it’s kinda crap quality.

In the realm of computers, I’ve finally got my hands on some quality Taiyo Yuden CDs. Such a bad-ass find. More details here, but I’ll post the underside color comparison here:

-Sony “music” CD-R. (Actually a Taiyo Yuden disc)

Notice the beautiful blueish-green dye?

-Sony “supremas” CD-R (actually a piece of crap)

I kid, it works just as well… for now.

I’m also happy about finally getting my EMU-1212m sound card working in Ubuntu GNU/Linux. I had to go through a lot of crap to get the driver installed. Luckily Mike stepped me through most of the process until he found this thread on the Ubuntu forums which laid it out pretty nicely. Before I was using my on-board realtek sound chip which was supported out of the box(being very common on motherboards) but every now and then didn’t feel like playing sound from any flash objects. This new alsa driver for my 1212m not only works all the time, but plays everything I throw at it with no errors. I can even look at a primitive mixer by typing “alsamixer” in the terminal! woot!

Ok I’m tired. School tomorrow.