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

I lived!(in reference to last week)
For now…
And to top it off last Thursday I finally got my drivers licence! To celebrate I went out with a whole bunch of Inanetalk.com members to the arcade on Saturday. I posted about it here. This is by far my favorite picture, and no, it’s not me(for those of you who don’t know what I look like - warning: I’m ugly).

My game-playing has been at an all-time low, it’s been: homework, eat, *coughsurfewebcough*, school, and sleep(not in that order obviously). That’s my excuse for the late blog this week as well. If I make it out of this semester alive though I have a feeling the second semester will involve more game time on hand. You never know. That’s the way school seems sometimes; either they give you tons of slack or none at all. Summer is really the only time of the year I’m able to relax. Then I find myself doing things on the side to keep myself in check, it’s weird. Wait, what am I ranting about? Lets focus on more important things!

Like this!

I was never a fan of Gerstmann, in fact for the days that I remember watching “On the spot” he was probably my least favorite Gamespot editor. What Gamespot has allegedly done to Gerstmann though is so bad that I find myself rallying behind all the other people supporting him. Even if it was a poorly written review that looked like one of my blog entires written on a late Monday night after consuming too much sugar via ice cream, M&Ms, and six blueberry muffins(holy crap I ate six?) - that still gives them no right to fire him the way they did. I doubt it was even a bad review though, it was merely truthful, and Eidos didn’t want to hear it. As “they” say: Credit travels up, and blame trickles down. It’s not right. He was just doing his job. A job which he obviously takes enough pride in to maintain his position, and stand by his judgment. I think he’s also gained some new respect from me in that light as well now that I think about it.

The eerie part is no one has heard from him yet. I wonder why he’s laying so low? Is it all just a big rumor out of control? Or are two Gamespot hit-men standing by, waiting for the moment he “sings like a bird” to the press? Perhaps their names are Kane & Lynch. …Time Paradox!!

An acquaintance of mine walked up to me on Tuesday and flashed an Initial D Arcade Stage 4 license. This could only mean one thing:

The Sega Lindbergh -was in town!
(to the uninformed: The new Sega arcade platform, think Naomi)

In case you’re wondering, yes, there are not many arcades around here. To compensate the arcade in “Sunsplash waterpark” doubles as my local “arcade”. It seems they get new arcade releases too so it’s not all that bad I guess. When my friend “chase” came over randomly yesterday I reminded him and we sped off to Sunsplash in the classic Miata. Quarters on hand and drifting in mind.

The Initial D Stage 4 cabinet was right at the entrance to greet us when we arrived. It’s a very nice cab, very. Padded seating, displays are WXGA(1366 x 768), and the steering wheels are well built and beautiful. Chase broke a 20 for… some reason…(gave him an insane amount of tokens) so for 20 tokens he bought me a license! Thanks Chase!

Hey guys? It’s not working in my E-reader!

He wrote up some nice impressions too, I’ll link and quote some of them:

The Physics are a little wierd, still. The car I was driving (Roadster, of course) wanted to slide every dang time I turned the wheel with the gas on. Although the “mystery-power-braking” is gone (you actually need time to stop, now), the car wants to automatically countersteer for you. And that “downshift-to-turn” trick still works to a degree, as does left-foot-braking. As NPC pointed out to me, there is a degree of weight transfer, but it is marginal. Overall, in the passes it still feels like youre riding a roller coaster and not driving a car, but less than the previous one.

I really like the license too, it’s not just for looks, it actually stores a good amount of data. It is essentially a 5 dollar memory card with a randomly generated dot-matrix avatar. Worth it if you visit the arcade enough.

I have this week off for thanksgiving! But I have a… *sigh*… insane amount of homework. To top it off I’m going to my grandmas for the holiday(Thursday) so I’m a bit jammed on time. I’ll try and take a picture of the bay though! Expect a really short blog on that one.

The past few months I’ve been puzzled as to why I was unable to load DS games(or really anything) on my supercard. I tried a number of things and after a few weeks I discovered that the way I transfer files to my miniSD card over the network just won’t cut it. It’s bizarre but even thought the file(s) will exist/transfer and show up on the card it apparently just doesn’t write correctly. So instead of writing them that way(with a network printer) I tried using the SD card slot in my mom’s laptop, and sure enough it made all the difference.

My DSLite with some games, a classic DS strap, and a Radirgy sticker. Not pictured: Supercard, for obvious reasons.

With that out of the way I’ve been playing Race Driver: Create and Race, and Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. Phantom hourglass kicks ass so far and just about everyone I talk to agrees with me. Funny story, there’s this girl in broadcasting who I recall playing Nintendogs one day, and then just recently I saw her playing Zelda. Talk about effectiveness, it seems Nintendo really is converting non-gamers… hell girl non-gamers - that’s a difficult thing to pull off IMO. Back to Phantom hourglass: it’s good but I start to loose interest after awhile. I really don’t care about difficulty but currently I feel like the dungeons are kind of busy-work getting in the way of my story. Maybe I’ve been playing too many action games like Metal slug lately. Which also reminds me, my friend with the MVS finally got Metal slug X! Currently we have this wonky temporary CP set-up since we had taken out the whole CP(control panel) for an over-haul, and we just couldn’t wait. Basically I don’t think I’ll do a review on PH because I’ll probably take my sweet time and I know there are other people at DS-X2 who are probably much much further than me. As for Race Driver: create and race, I’m trying to like it but just can’t. It might suffer from small-screen-itis where the game could be much better… with a bigger screen. I say this because the cars start off feeling really slow and then jump to being really fast. It’s weird but I think if I had a bigger screen I could have a much better sense of speed. Either that or the game’s just broken. Now that I think about it, if they had just made the car models much smaller it would give the game bigger screen space(Think: Mario kart), and higher frame rate. Are you listening Codemasters? Really the game is very well polished(love the menus) but from what I’ve experienced of the gameplay it’s not worth the 30(?) bucks. Yea I think I might do a review on this one, I just need to bring myself to play it more. Though ironically this weekend I’ll be trying to allocate some time towards studying for my permit test(zomg Monday). You know… so I can drive real cars.

One last note, it seems my little drama story (which I decided to only post at my main blog) has got me twice the feedburner subscribers! Woo! 8!… um yea, I know. I think it’s a big improvement though. Also, don’t expect me to blog like that again. Well maybe a bonus blog - yea ok - but I still try to avoid personal posts.