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

I woke up last Sunday totally oblivious to any game-happenings as I’ve been for the last couple of weeks in an effort to focus on school. Then later on my mom asks me to drive her to Target and I’m thinking: “Hm… wasn’t there something I wanted to buy soon-ish?” Then it hit me!

Though honestly I didn’t expect to just leisurely walk right in at 2PM on day one and buy a copy of the biggest Wii release of the year. No, just like Advance Wars: DOR I lacked a pre-order and chances were slim. I merely got lucky with Advance wars, surely I wouldn’t be able to repeat such luck. Then again I seem to be pretty good at this and sure enough they had two copies left. Woot! But I wasn’t going to open it… no it was going to be a work incentive instead.

Unfortunately I am one of the few amongst my group of friends with a Wii. Yea… so I get this during school:

“Hey man lets go to your house after school and play brawl! We can pick up lunch on our way too! My treat!”

“Hey can I come over to your house after school and play brawl?”

“Lets go to your house and play brawl after school! I’ll even drive you… but you’ll have to tell me where to go since I don’t exactly know where you live…”

Well, at least I had fun. Many people complain the pace has slowed down too much, but with a couple of hours one can easily adjust. Overall the game is worthy of being called a sequel to SSB: Melee and I don’t see myself going back anytime soon. For some of us though, fond memories of Melee may be hard to ignore. I guess you could say Brawl takes a bit of an open mind to fully enjoy. That seems to be a trend with Nintendo lately.

Now for something completely unrelated…

Best Buy is a terrible store, they overcharge for everything. One of my grandparents though keeps giving me Best Buy gift cards and I can’t really complain. It’s very thoughtful and I have to give her (grandma) credit for trying to give me a gift appealing to my technology-flavored tastes. Long story short I find myself in best buy looking at speakers and I know what to look for. Sort of. I try to stay away from generic-self-powered-speakers. I figure if I can’t do that then I try to go with a good brand I can trust. Well thanks to the best buy gift card I broke both of those rules easily. Yes, this was an impulse buy! Ironically(?) it matches up with my other impulse buy from last year! Yep, I have had that EMU-1212m for about a 9 months now. Sitting here hooked up to nothing but my lousy headphones. I figured it’s time to let this baby sing with some proper speakers!

I had never heard of this brand “klipsch”… but I’m happy with them.

Oh man these speakers rock! Even better than the Bose speakers my parents have set up in our “entertainment center” downstairs. They probably paid a lot more for those back in the day too. It took me awhile to find room for the sub-woofer - it’s bigger than it looks. Or maybe it’s just heavier than it looks because it’s made out of MDF. Which - funny fact - is the same material many North American arcade cabinets are made out of… and it’s fucking heavy.

This upcoming week is the end of 3rd quarter for my high school. The pressure’s on! Wish me luck…

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…

New years day I beat portal. A great way to start my new year. With not much happening in the way of news, or at least nothing I’m aware of, it seems I’ve used this winter break almost exclusively for gaming.

I tried playing Team fortress 2 and Half Life 2 after I beat portal. Both programs kept crashing about 5 minutes in though. I thought it had something to do with page-filing and sure enough it seemed to be the case. I had it disabled due to lack of space on my windows C: partition. My own fault really, I reversed my intended values when I set up the partition for Ubuntu(whoops). Anyways my dad suggested a SCSI drive dedicated to just page filing. Uh, sure dad. I don’t have any SCSI drives lying around like he claims to at his work though. On second thought maybe I’ll have him “borrow” one for me(gotta watch what I say on teh intarweb ). As a temporary solution I set up a dedicated USB hard drive with some extra space on it just for page filing. It worked actually… just not to the extent I needed it to. Only got about 380-something megabytes out of it for some reason. I’m going to need a plan B. Besides the SCSI drive I’m thinking about maybe buying some more RAM. 184 pin RAM shouldn’t be that much nowadays…

This reminds me! My computer should be turning 1 year old this month. Wow it seems like I just put this thing together. Oh wait I just did. Haha, yes this thing is very maintenance heavy but I think it has taught me a lot in the process and that’s what is important. A year ago I was clueless on how to start putting together a computer. Now I can do it with my eyes closed(well, not really).

With Portal beaten and the rest of my Steam games acting up I logged some quality time with my Wii. Lots and lots of Mario Galaxy with some Metal slug 6 on the side. My parents keep wanting to have me relocate the Wii downstairs to the living room TV. As much as I would love to get them into games(well I doubt that would ever happen) I know this would cause problems. Back in the days of the Genesis, the living room TV was the one and only available TV for me to play on. They always needed the TV for things such as - get this - watching TV, and it limited my playtime. No wonder I never beat Sonic 2.

Aaaanyways, I think I’ll save most of my Mario Galaxy impressions for… a later date. I will say that I wish I could play it with a Gamecube controller. Waggle? Not really my cup of tea. I’ll give Super Mario Galaxy a break and blame myself however. Who knows, by the time I finish off the rest of Galaxy I may become accustom to the waggle controls. In an experimental twist I plan to play Super Mario Sunshine for a bit immediately after I finish Galaxy.

One last note for the night morning, Tomorrow my winter break finally ends and I go back to school. Should be fun - but we know it probably won’t.

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!

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!