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

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…

This week I’ve “acquired” a Japanese copy of Bangai-O: Spirits.

Allow me to shove everything else aside…

*shoves*

There we go, now lets get crackin’.

Bangai-O on Dreamcast was silly, bizarre, and of course lots of fun. To n00bs of Bangai-o it may seem boring, difficult, and somewhat confusing at first (ex: “why am I destroying these houses?”). Then you discover the magic… of… the R button. Missiles galore! Keep in mind with this move the more enemy fire surrounding your hit-box the more missiles you’ll send back. In the Dreamcast version you could send up to insane amounts… I don’t even know the limit. The highest I think I got was 400 or so.

With the DS version, it’s pretty much the same idea with less missiles. This isn’t to say the game dosen’t have AMAZING animation and explosions - just less of them. In fact when you fire off the missiles at the right time in this game, instead of getting more missiles, you get these enlarged low resolution missiles. I laughed the first time I saw it(”holy crap! lol!”). Even with that the sprites are so much for the DS it starts clipping and slows the game down. Usually if this happens you’re probably about to complete the stage anyways so it’s not a real problem.

Along with the classic missiles and primary fire, there’s three new moves. One is sort of a charge/ram that allows you to blow through enemies, destroyable obstacles, and move certain blocks. Sometimes a level will have random soccer(football), baseball, and basket balls in them. You can ram into these and start a chaotic chain reaction using the game’s impressive 2D physics. Hint: Use this to your advantage to destroy a whole bunch of enemies or certain objectives. Thank me later. The second is this beam-sword-thing that seems pretty useless to me. Yea… unless I’m missing something here. The third is the ability to stop time for about 4 seconds max or so. Pretty useful if you want to fly in and destroy a target/objective that’s covered with tons of enemies.

I haven’t tried every mode in Bangai-O: Spirits yet, I’ve only completed the short story mode. Which this time is only made up of about 17 short tutorial missions. The rest of the stages are in a separate mode which are more scenario/objective based than the Dreamcast version. You could almost call Bangai-O: Spirits an action puzzler, which certainly fits the DS platform quite well when you think about it.

Well besides this preview I don’t think I’ll review this one… I do recommend purchasing it when it releases here in the states though. *thumbs up*

Speaking of purchases, I’ve caved into some internet peer pressure and preordered a game I won’t be able to play for quite some time.

Or at least until I can buy a cheap PS2, which may not happen for awhile. I still want the game on hand until then since I know it’ll disappear from store shelves fairly quickly (and quietly). Now that I think of it, I should probably track down a copy of Luminous(1) for PSP as well… oh boy, I need a job. Maybe I should apply to Gamecrazy?… hm… what would I put on my resume though?…

Nick Cecchi - previous occupation(s): Saving the world from General Gray, and Gold silver. Also is responsible for the downfall of General Morden’s regime. High score: 768730

Whoops, did I say I was going to write another entry on Wednesday? I meant Thursday. Because Wednesdays almost always suck. You can’t argue with that logic… *ahem…

Actually, school is kicking into overdrive so I have no time for blogging or other web-related shenanigans… well except for right now.
Times up!
…Nah just kidding.

Gaming is on the back-burner as well. Advance wars has been in stand-by mode for about four or five days now, and still going strong! Who knows when I’ll get back to it. Maybe if I finish this blog post fast enough… hm.

Two weeks from now my school will be - basically - adding a 30min class to my schedule. I say “basically” because it’s actually pretty complicated and some days I may even get out of school earlier than I already do. But given this is me I’ll be stuck staying that extra thirty minuets that is (what they call) the “plus period”. If you click that link you’ll witness some Rocklin High school web designing at its finest. Who knows though, maybe I could turn this time into something productive.

Good’ol Fabrice Lig(AKA: Soul Designer), who I talked to briefly before I jumped off the Myspace bandwagon, has uploaded some short and sweet videos of Standard 9. Which is something Ken Ishii’s website for Standard has yet to do(and I doubt ever will at this rate). Check these out if you like techno!

Edit: BTW I titled one of my previous posts “rapping up jan08″ - and I forgot the w!(w-rapping) Talk about embarrassing!

Sorry about falling off the face of the earth. I do that every now and then.

Picture inspired by Konbini life.

Last Wednesday I picked up Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, as planned. I cut it pretty close though, I bought the last copy at my local Gamecrazy. I ended up not preordering because… well… I had a feeling I could get away with it. Upon noticing the HUGE amounts of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass throughout the store’s collection I asked the guy at Gamecrazy just how many copies of Advance Wars they had received in total. They received 10, but 8 were preorders. Lucky me! For once being a “Senior” and getting out of school early proves useful.

Well, besides the fact I can go home and make my lunch. I love doing that.
In fact, I think I’ll have to blog about my love for sandwiches one day.
…man I love sandwiches.

Rewinding time even further, about two weeks ago, my dad walks in the door with a crap load of SCSI devices. He went all out: PCI controller, cables, “terminators”, various SCSI pin adapters, two SCSI hard drives, and some truly bizarre removable media drives. Unfortunately my computer is stuffed as it is(I’m totally out of molex connections), so I was only able to - with a lot of work - fit in one SCSI Hard drive. With some help of an XP disk I was able to get it formatted at about 17GB. Before that I looked at it with Linux and I could’ve sworn it was 40GB. Oh well, the important part is that I’ve set it up for paging like I planned.

Boo ya! (…I’m never saying that again)

If you look closely at that high resolution picture you can see the SCSI drive with a badass picture of a Barracuda. Oh yea, it’s a Seagate Barracuda drive. *thumbs up*

I’m not sure whether with has improved my performance in steam/HL2/games or not. At first it still crashed here-and-there and then… stopped. It has been running flawlessly ever since. So finally: Half life 2. Playable. Woot! I got all the way to where you get the gravity gun. Good times. The fan-boat action went on a lot longer than I expected. For awhile I was beginning to think they should have named it “Half Life 2: The fan boat adventures”. Ok that was a bad joke. But just think of the awesome boxart! I’ll spare you a photoshopping of that.

One thing I’ve been forgetting to mention is that the Nintendo Forums came back. …It’s not pretty. With the sale of Nintendo Power to Future Publishing, it seems the community aspect of the forums has been sold off with it. So now the Nintendo forums are nothing more than a Tech Support forum. Ironically they still kept it linked to “My Nintendo” account though. Even more ironic is that I actually wrote the first guide to Wi-Fi and networking on the original forums. Granted, back then I didn’t know everything I know now but it was basic enough to introduce many Nsiders with Wi-Fi for the first time. Wow that was almost four years ago…

Ending on a funny note. I was checking the 5 day weather on the Wii’s weather channel when I noticed it was predicting snow for Sacramento! It never snows in the Northern California valley, even if it’s freezing outside and rainy.

Not much going on besides a few things here and there and school. I’ve been on top of the minimal amount of homework assigned to me so far. Though I did forget to study for a certain test on Friday… whoops.

My gear-head friend has been making me watch Initial D lately, which I loathe(luckily just “stage 4″). I like the Arcade game, sure, I happen to like Eurobeat as well, but Initial D the anime? uuuuhg.

Initial D reminds me of Mark Trail except instead of teaching about the environment it teaches about cars. Oh and if you look closely Initial D is actually animated!(as opposed to being merely a comic strip - which Initial D actually is originally) It’s so badly animated though that if you were to glance at it briefly while walking by you wouldn’t notice. Keep in mind I’m ragging on the general anime-style animations, not the car GCI - which is actually decent for TV-show CGI.

It’s a trap!

I got another a freebie from Verizon a telephone contractor this weekend, a 5 mega pixel camera! Woot! Apparently it was up for grabs so it’s mine now. No optical zoom though. Images look about as good as my parents Kodak digital camera(which is what I was using before). This one’s “Argus” who I’ve never heard of until now, but hey, it takes SD cards and rechargeable AA’s! Oh but shots turn out blurry 90% of the time… Did I mention it was free?

Meow~

Speaking of free stuff I was sitting in one of my early morning classes half asleep when I mentioned to my friend Tyler(yes, him again) that I was approximately 2 dollars short of getting Advance Wars: Dark Conflict(well, without using change). Apparently he has been raking in the dough like a mad baker(that’s a pun!) so he opens up his wallet and peels me off a 5 dollar bill! On top of that he told me I have to review it so, uh, I guess I’m going to review it! Hopefully Intelligent Systems implements multiple save files like in “Dual Strike”. That way I can lend it to him for awhile. After all I owe him one…. or two… or three…

Still a couple hours until the new year and I just want to make one last post. Starting with that flickr album I’ve been meaning to start. The first picture I uploaded was of today’s sunset since it’s the last sunset of the year. Taken on top of one of the many hills in Rocklin(more specifically for locals: “backside” Park Dr. by the Water tank).

I rode my bike thinking I could use the exercise, but wow it got hella cold after I took that photo.

I plan to upload more later. I seemed to have gotten into taking pictures for the blog this year for some reason. I think I’ll get my own camera sometime this year(er… next year).

Sometime in the past - maybe last year, or the year before I can’t remember - my good friend Tyler and I celebrated the new year together playing games all night into the wee hours of the morning. It was fun, but this year he wanted to celebrate it with his Girlfriend(I don’t blame him). So Saturday(I think… man I’ve lost sense of time thanks to this break) he invited me over to play some games. I didn’t stay over too long since it wasn’t a planned sleep-over like before but we played a good variety of games. Everything we played on the 360 somehow seemed too dull for that evening. It could’ve been the size of the TV, plus the split screen. Or maybe it was that every game we played was either not my type of game, or not his type of game. We needed some variety, or more importantly something we could evenly compete in. I ran back home and threw the Dreamcast in a back-back and ran drove back. Ah, now the Dreamcast is quality entertainment. Soul Caliber saved the day, so did some other off-beat games like Tech-romancer, and Ikaruga. An acquaintance from school and I discuss and joke about Ikaruga a lot in front of Tyler. He had never played it before so I showed it to him and… um… blew his mind. The thing about Ikaruga is that it isn’t based on reflex more than it is knowing what is simply going to happen next. Probably should have stepped him through it more. Now that I think of it we didn’t even give two player mode a chance, that would’ve been ideal for teaching him the ropes. Or at least as much as I know about the game, there are people out there that play Ikaruga in ways far beyond my capabilities.

Good times were had, so I have no regrets sitting at home this New years eve.

One thing I forgot to mention the other week was this Dutch Electronica blog I stumbled across a couple weeks ago. Yea, I can’t read it worth crap. But every now and then they post a set from a DJ I recognize and it’s good stuff! Reminds me of a typical Gawker blog. So hey, if you run out of things to listen to go check’em out.

Speaking of electronic music, I stumbled upon a Roland Tr-909(drum machine) emulator for my DS. It’s quite awesome, I’ve been playing around with it on and off today and I love how hands-on it is compared to something on a computer. Now I just need a synthesizer and I could compose something of my own.
Ha- no. But it is fun.

Happy new year!

Listening to one of Fabrice Lig’s newer songs “X-Slaves who changed the world” when I decided to drop by his MySpace page. Then I stumbled upon this really interesting video.

Looks(and sounds!) good!

At first I thought maybe it was something new, I couldn’t find any posts about it at DS-X2… or even via google! In fact, I only found that fab himself re-posted the video at MySpace-video, and this random French GBA forum. So I shot him some questions thinking: Maybe he was developing it himself?

Me:
——————————————————
Hey Fabrice Lig, I was wondering what happened to your Nintendo DS game “Cross Control”. The URL you list brings an “error” and I can’t find any other info on the web about this game.

Who’s the developer? Has the game been canceled? Were you involved in other aspects of game development other than the music? If you can answer, thanks.
——————————————————

Fab:
——————————————————
Hi Nick,
Actually, I have no news about the game, the developpers had some contact with different companies to developp the game, but I think it didn’t happen ? I dunno? Its a bit sad as I tryed some parts of the game, and it was really cool…
Fabrice
——————————————————

Canned I guess. Seems Lig saved the video though! Very cool.

On a completely unrelated note I’ve been challenged to a fight. A Garou: Mark of the Wolves fight, that is. On Halloween my friend and I will go at it, and get this, my friend has been playing it all month long with a keyboard because he’s too lazy to hook up his computer joystick/CP. That’s hardcore LAME. So he’s become so cocky(he’s always cocky actually) to the point were he’s letting me use my awesome Logitech rumble pad against his crappy keyboard. This is either going to be really easy or really hard. Gotta practice either way! Oh and he got Bust-A-move for his MVS, if all else fails, I know he can’t beat me at that.

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.

A little blog drama lama(I’ve been wanting to say that) has set me back this week - I’ll be sure to never let that happen again. Since I only posted about it on my main site, readers of the other ones must think I’m dead or something by now(If I have any). Follow that link and you’ll understand.

Wasn’t much going on this week besides the awesome announcement of Bangai-O spirits and school.

Damn

…Unless you care about me playing old games like Ikaruga, which I finally beat using my Dreamcast and 8 credits. Don’t laugh - as much as I love it I’ve only recently been able to play it at leisure. However you can laugh at the coincidence of Treasure announcing Ikaruga for Xbox-live arcade the very next day. Though we all saw it coming eventually I guess - ever since that leaked beta(ish?) version was reported on. Speaking of Dreamcast while I was at zero’s place I plucked a VGA cable from one of his monitors sitting in his garage(with his permission of course). What did I do with it? I completed my VGA switch! Yes, I bought a VGA switch a week or two ago and I didn’t have enough cable to use it - but now I do! It’s awesome, I can just switch between my Dreamcast and computer on the fly by using this little nob on my desk. Of course I’ve never heard of this cheap-ass brand so I’m a bit worried if it’ll find a way to break itself. One funny sign - and I don’t know, maybe this is normal - is that while putting it together in the dark I noticed it gave off a small blue spark while touching the box/switch. If you wait for tomorrow, I’ll probably post a few pictures of my beloved switch in action, or maybe even a short video. Hmm…

Meanwhile I’ll also be advancing from square one when I take the drivers permit test again tomorrow. Did I ever mention my other one expired? Well it did, and so I’m going at it again tomorrow. Hopefully, just maybe, sometime next month I’ll finally get my drivers license.

Update: Video is up!