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

I started my senior year last week on Tuesday, of all days, which just shows how bizarre my school district is. The week started off crappy, got better, got worse, and now slowly evening out by slightly getting better. Unfortunately one major problem looms over all of us this year… they banned electronics! My friends and I were throwing around the idea of a making a wax tube phonograph(analog FTW!) - and I wouldn’t mind going through with it being deprived of music - but I don’t think it’ll ever happen. It seems I’ll just have to run home and cram music into every second I’m at my computer. I should probably get a better amplifier too, I’m currently using an alarm clock as my amp. Speakers would be nice too… I need money.

I spent most of my recently acquired money on this Dreamcast. Totally worth it, but a curse at the same time. If only I had this console before school started. I have no excuses for not turning in homework when I have 15+ hours logged into Grandia 2 already(4 days?)…. and that’s just Grandia 2. I haven’t been posting at DS-X2 either(oh yea I never mentioned that here in the first place, now you know!) and I recently saw all the Level5 stuff on NeoGAF before the internet went crazy with it the next day(thanks to my messed up sleeping pattern). Didn’t feel like posting it and played Dreamcast instead - actually I went to bed, but it influenced the laziness. As my Dreamcast collection grows, so does my homework collection. Here’s what I got with my DC BTW:

-Dreamcast model 2(made in China) - pre October(?) firmware update and speedy samsung(?) GD-rom dirve.(?=not 100% sure)
-Two controllers - Both first party, and with smooth analog sticks in good condition.
-Two VMUs - One regular Grey, the other is transparent green(I love it!)
-Standard AV and power cables.

The real killer is I went out and bought a VGA box so I can play my games in beautiful 480P on my bulky CRT monitor. It looks great and the CRT is easier to flip into tate mode(3:4) than a huge TV. However I noticed some slight screen burning that had apparently been there under my nose the whole time. Not enough to make me get another CRT, in fact my parents already hate my current CRT(Nag: It’s too big! It generates heat! bla bla bla!) so that won’t be happening anytime soon.

Randomness:

Classic.

This year, just like last year, I went to Lake Tahoe for two boring days. Enough said about that, I’m going to make sure I avoid getting sucked into doing that again. It’s been a few days since I’ve returned and I haven’t felt like writing or blogging despite having the chance to blog on time for once. Heck, I still don’t feel like blogging, I’m just going to chill this week, totally be lazy while I still can. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll update with something else.

Go read Dennis’s blog for now, he’s much more interesting than me this week.

August is a month of internet landmarks and anniversaries for me. Probably because this is the time of summer where I have the most spare time in the whole year. My friends forum Inanetalk.com is coming upon it’s first year anniversary, and I’ve been moderating it since day one, so that’s a big one for both of us. But also on the Nintendo forums a few members and I have had a miniature community for 2 years now in the “The OFFICIAL Advance Wars: Dual Strike thread“. Maybe you’ve heard me mention Advance wars(AW) briefly before, and because of this thread I’m still a fan, but I was even more of a super-fan around the time of AW2 and the launch of AW:DS. As soon as Nintendo and Intelligent systems announce Advance wars:DS 2 I’ll go back into super-fan mode like a transformer… or… something else that transforms I guess. Speaking of Transformers, I heard the movie was terrible so I saw the Simpsons movie instead -yea ok I was never considering the transformers movie in the first place, I just needed a transition.

The Simpsons movie was highly anticipated by me because I’ve watched the series all my life for as long as I can remember. The Simpsons even reflect my family in a way, not specifically, but as a whole. I think it may have something to do with the writers of the show growing up in the same generation as my parents. Anyways, for anyone who doesn’t examine the Simpsons like a nerd, I have to say some of the best episodes of the Simpsons aren’t all about comedy. In these cases the Simpsons will follow a -comedy, drama, comedy -pattern. It’s the “drama” and even the way the writers transition out of it that truly boast the genius of the Simpsons writers. I won’t give anything away for anyone that hasn’t seen it, but The Simpsons movie does this very well and the time given to the writers in the movie enable them to totally flesh it out. I’m glad they chose this route too instead of an all-out comedy. Many animated comedy pictures(often CG) really make the comedy primary and the story secondary, having you finish the film with this hollow feeling. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, it’s not just that, it’s that the Simpsons also have a unique style of their own - and unique way of transitioning. If you want a good example, look back at episode 9 of Season 8. It shares many elements used in the movie and I couldn’t help thinking of it the whole time I watched it. All in all it’s a great movie, and I name it the best movie of the year, even better than “Sicko” which I thought was great. I highly recommend it! 9.9999999999/10

On a completely unrelated note(except for the title) I’m taking my drivers test this week on the 8th. I’ve been away from my computer periodically practicing my driving(zomg, in the real world!) and getting as familiar with my(parents) car as much as I can. Thanks to California law once I get my drivers license I can… transport myself. Family as well, but no one else for an entire year. At least I can say I have it though.

By the way I’ve added another NES controller to my collection.

No not really, it’s just a box of official Nintendo power mints. I found this in Cost Plus World Market today and I thought it was cool. The mints aren’t half bad either.

Last week was full of mindless hours of gaming: MAME, World in conflict beta, and Richard Burns rally. Nothing really blog worthy, not even world in conflict, as it seems I’m terrible at RTSs and that’s that. Luckily this week was a tad more progressive. I ordered a new DVD drive(an LG GSA-H54NK) which I trouble-shot(shooted?) for an entire day trying all sorts of things until I realized I was using the wrong type of ATA cable… truly a “D’Oh!” moment. The day before that a friend of mine dropped by my house with an NES advantage of all things. Apparently the car parts place he went to had a small thrift store inside where he spotted this thing. It was layered in black crap(figuratively) and it looked like someone salvaged it from a port-a-potty -not very pretty, but I vowed to clean it up. So over the course of two days I spent about 4 hours with: paper towels, Windex, tooth picks, and Q-tips and restored it to it’s former glory.

See those seams? Oh yea, those where once filled with… black stuff, or what I referred to earlier as “crap”. Oh and if I took a “before” picture the ugliness would’ve broken my camera, so yea, I avoided that.

On Thursday(this week, not last) I went to the bay area all day for a Giants game. It was great, I haven’t been in the bay area for ages and the last time I saw the Giants in person was at the old candlestick park - which I believe they now refer to as “Monster park” since Monster cables bought the naming rights. First thing you notice when you visit the bay area is the marine layer, nice and cool weather with occasional fog. I’m from the lower foothills bordering the valley so I’m used to extremely hot and dry weather. The marine layer is nice at first but as the day progresses it gets even colder and by 6 o’clock you better have another layer prepared(I brought along a sweatshirt). Our seats of the game were in the upper-upper deck but we had a phenomenal view of the bay and we could still see the ball being tossed around so there was no loss(not a bad seat in the house really). I really regret not bringing my camera it was a beautiful day in a beautiful park. On a side note I had some excellent fish and chips for lunch right there in the park. I also had some wonderful Alaskan halibut in Berkley for Dinner later on, I don’t think I’ve eaten that much fish in one day before. Though the best part of the day by far was the fact that the Giants actually won. Quite fast too, the total time of the entire game was around 2 Hours and 30 Minuets!

Great day, now I’m back to sitting in my chair playing shmups mindlessly all day. Or am I?

Back from my 4 day vacation I’ve uploaded a few pictures to show my little venture of the eastern Sierras.

We stayed in a cabin at June lake and from there we would travel on the (very obscure)highways to the places we wanted to go -being kind of in the middle of all the places we wanted to visit. When we arrived on our first day at the lake it was too late to travel anyplace, so we were pretty bored sitting around waiting for the day to end. We(My friend Kenny and I -as he traveled with me on this particular trip) got the idea to explore some of the small town at June lake out of boredom and made a surprising discovery. In one of the buildings we noticed a working Neo-Geo MVS arcade cabinet(w/1 button kinda broken) loaded with King of Fighters 2001. What are the odds? I can’t even find a cabinet loaded with KOF in my own city! This “building” was actually totally not in business, and looked like it was in the middle of being converted to a skate shop/arcade from a… arcade?. The guy let us in without question(as he skated around on a half pipe), all the coin doors were open, and so we just used the happ/cherry switches for credits and played until he felt like “closing” the place. Besides that we mostly played on the road with Puyo Puyo chu(DS) and Advance Wars… to ourselves, knowing a multiplayer match of that would take ages to complete.

Back to the trip though, the first landmarks we visited on day one were Devils postpile and rainbow falls.

We did some roaming around Yosemite that day as well but the real picture worthy stuff was when we stopped along the road to Yosemite at 10,000 feet or so.

The next day we went to the “ghost town” of Bodie. Very eerie and interesting town. Unfortunately we couldn’t get into the stamping mill as it seemed we needed to be part of a guided tour in order to enter. We couldn’t find any guided tours happening so that was that.

(Taken looking through a window of one of the buildings)

The trip was all-round a success though it could’ve been better had I reminded my friend to bring his Dreamcast. Just kidding, my parents would freak if I brought a console with me on vacation…

This week was the last week of summer school and I have been a bit busy… but today was the last day so no more late updates until the actual school year starts again(er.. I hope). E3 also took place this week and I was angry I missed most of the live E3 coverage at summer school this year. However I did at least manage to catch up by looking back at 1UP’s live-blogs - which are hilarious(start from the bottom). One announcement that caught my eye at E3 was Sega’s announcement to bring Bleach DS 2nd to the US. You see, I did a review for the Japanese version about a month ago thinking the game would probably never make it to US shores, and to make it worse the site I did it for hasn’t even launched yet! So maybe it’ll be considered obsolete soon, who knows, but I don’t want to risk it so I’ll link right to the article and encourage you to read it now. (hint for the lazy: It’s good, buy it!) The thing that worries me is the review could have been better if I had used a more thorough translation guide and took the time to look deeper into the card system. But I took a “who cares it’s a fighter” approach and reviewed it pretty much based on the basic elements of gameplay.(so it goes…lol)
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This week I’ve been playing a variety of randomness: Truxton2 , Advance Wars DS, Power Stone, and Blue Wish Resurrection -some much more than others. At school someone loaded the school’s shared drive with Halo1, and so during lunch you can find upwards to 30 people in the computer lab all playing Halo on the LAN at the same time(16 per server of course). Me being not so fond of halo sit-out on the sidelines and watch. I played around with the hardware a bit and got some shmups working, but I came to the conclusion that the graphics drivers are very buggy(Intel integrated… I didn’t even think they made them anymore) and can’t run a Dreamcast emulator despite being dual core(no Ikaruga for me). I wanted to get a picture but the day I brought the camera the computer lab had a class in it during lunch(middle schoolers) so the halo players had all been kicked out.

I’ll be playing a crap load of DS tomorrow though *looks at a clock* -er… today, when I take a long road trip with my parents and one of my good friends. I’m traveling south-east to check out a ghost town called “Bodie”, along with a few other land marks such as Devil’s Postpile and some other randomness I can’t think of. It’ll be fun and I’ll make sure to take pictures! I will Be back on Tuesday. Until then:

-NPC out

I have officially been distracted this week. But for damn good reason: “Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann”!

A crazy anime about -no… I don’t even want to spoil it for those who may want to watch it. All you need to know is that it’s by Gainax and it’s really over the top. Go watch it! Now!

Back to the realm of video games. I was distracted from Yggdra Union this week when I picked up this awesome shump up from… somewhere. I think it may have been NeoGAF. Regardless I found it at the “Shoot the core” database again, where in romanji it’s apparently called “CHO REN SHA”. Which translates to something along the lines of “Super-discharge successively” or “Super running fire”. It’s super fun and that’s all I really care about. Although I decided to look into the game a bit more since I noticed the download site had “X68K” all over the place and a “disk image” download for the “X68K”. Funny thing, just last week I tried emulating a Sting game(makers of yggdra union) that ran on the Sharp X68000 which was commonly abbreviated as “X68K”. Turns out I was right, and upon further searching I believe this game to actually be a homebrew project and not an official game! Which would explain why it’s not on the game list of X68K games at Wikipedia, and why it’s up for download in the first place I guess. ‘¬_¬

Then some google image searching led me to a dude who stuffed a microITX computer in his left over Sharp X68000 case and with S-video out plays this game on his TV. Pretty sweet!(note: page uses Shift_JIS encoding)

I recommend you download it if you like old school shmups and at least play it to level 3(which is totally awesome). Last thing, I liked the name-entry music so much I recorded and uploaded it for all to listen.

OH and Happy 4th!… Yay for shitty “safe fireworks”. Bleh, I’m not even buying any this year.

Summer school started this week and after some schedule mix-up it seems I’ll only have to be there for half the day. Which means I leave at 11:00AM, which is pretty much the same time I would get up if I didn’t have school. Last week though I went out and did something bold, and borderline stupid. I couldn’t resist…

One of these days I plan to purchase a Midi keyboard and a mixer/amp so it’s not a complete waste. Funny thing is I was on the last level of Jet Grind radio before I installed this and the sound only in Chankast wasn’t working after I installed this. I just HAD to have the music working and it’s at least 40% of this game. So after a few hours I got it working by accident, I thought: “screw it I’ll just play the soundtrack in Winamp and run the game” and then I heard the dreamcast start-up sounds. Silly Dreamcast emulator, turns out playing any music in Winamp while the emulator starts up will enable sound. Yea I know, I don’t understand it either -but it works and Chankast hasn’t had another release since 2005, so I don’t care.

Been playing two games so far this week. I finally got back into Yggdra Union for my GBA and I think I also might be done with it -but who knows. the story has me on the edge and even after I complete the stage I’m at right now, the story could totally take a twist in a different direction. I was thinking about the story yesterday and then I blurted out how cool it would be to be part of a barely-surviving Monarchy which fights back against imperialists with a small and badass army. Consider the movie “300″ the closets thing story-wise. I think… I have yet to see it myself, but it sounds similar.

Anyways, I just got a three day trial for Counter-strike source from one of my friends and I’m going to establish some impressions of it finally. Despite how good or bad(..or old) it is I’m totally anticipating and waiting for the “Orange box”. This way I’ll be able to buy it alongside a few other games and Half-life2 which I’ve always wanted to play…

(Picture of me in observation mode looking at my leftover paint, note: I only spray paint when I’m kicking as )

I didn’t even notice it, but last month was the one year mark of blogging for me. Not here of course, but at where I started blogging, at 1UP. Have I been posting that infrequently?

Last week(exactly one week as of today) I finished up my JR. year of High school. It almost came down to the wire, but luckily I pulled it off and so I only have one subject for summer school this year. Though I still have two classes… at least it’s all the same subject. In fact it may end up being the exact same class twice. I’ll make sure to fire up the photocopier if that happens.

This short break before summer school so far has felt like two weeks, almost like a mini-summer in itself. Everyday now I’ve been doing something: practice driving, going someplace with friends, ect. I’ve been to my local Arcade twice which resides in a place called “Sunsplash”. In case you couldn’t tell from the name it’s main attraction is the water park, but it also has a decent arcade. Decent that is - all of the machines are slowly falling apart. If you’re a die-hard fan of the NeoGeo MVS for example you may not want to look at the sad sight of their 4 MVS machines. Original Happ buttons broken, joysticks with faulty springs, some don’t even turn on anymore. RIP MVS’s.
Besides that you’ll love the place if you like light-gun games, this place is silly with them. Though the sight that angers most gamers(and me) is the giant horse racing simulation bullshit they replaced with half the floor space… no one even plays it.
Arcades are sad these days, but if a businessman with some common sense came along I think they could easily bring them back to former glory.

Besides the arcades I’ve been playing a lot of Bleach DS 2 and Jet Grind Radio. Jet Grind emulates surprisingly well and I finished it yesterday -great game. Bleach is good too and I’m going to be finishing up a review for Zero’s upcoming animethoughts.com website. After this I plan to review more crappier hand-held anime games, those are easier.

After positive reviews and lack of a XB360, my curiosity drove me to download the PC DirectX9 version and give it a shot. I’m not a big first person(/over-the-shoulder) shooter person, but I do enjoy a good game of Battle field(1942 DC or 2), Quake3 arena, and even Metroid Prime: Hunters. I dislike Halo because I find it a bit bland, slow, and even a bit broken. Luckily -from what I hear- I think Halo 3 seems to have fixed all that, but this isn’t about Halo or other XB360 shooters -This is spartaaaaa about Lost planet(sorry, I had to).

First thing I did when I got the demo was run the performance test to see if my computer could actually handle this game. Luckily it ran quite well at a solid 60 to 45 frames. The worst being about 26 frames in some areas of the second performance test. I took my own screen-shots for this and even though there’s a huge resolution difference between this and the 360 the graphics are somewhat comparable. Of course getting hung up on graphics is pretty pointless as long as the game runs at a solid frame rate.
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Lost planet not only looks good but plays great as well. The first mission(w/2 acts) is a bug fest where you rip apart the “Akrid” and their spawning holes(I wonder if there’s a in-game term for those…). In a way it feels a lot like Resident evil4 at first: Mindless zombies enemies? Check. Over the shoulder camera? Check. Guns? Check. Moving on to the second mission though you encounter “snow pirates” which actually have AI, good AI too. It’s not broken like James Bond: Everything or Nothing where the AI bots can somehow hear you standing up behind them while around a corner. In lost planet if you shoot at them from a distance they’ll actually look around and shoot if they see you. At the same time you can effectively sneak up on them. Effectively planning your route also seems to actually be worthwhile in preventing you from running out of “T-eng” and getting killed. With that in mind, there’s multiple ways to tackle this stage and the best way(IMO) is to be stealthy. I won’t go too much in detail(this is already a bit late!) but combine the open-endness, with good controls and gameplay, and you’ve got a solid game here.

A few glitches with the music, I had to turn it off. I’m just going to dismiss it as a demo glitch or something. The sound effects were great on their own anyways.

The final thought here is to compare it to the 360 version. “Which one is worth buying?” you might ask. I found the graphics not to be so important -in fact the snow was sometimes very annoying- so if your computer can handle the demo at a solid frame rate like mine, then I see no reason to buy a XB360 for this game. If it can’t run it at all or something then it might be worth it. Whatever you do though don’t go out and upgrade your computer to be the ultimate Vista machine for the DX10 version. Heck, even if you plan to make a really powerful machine it’s not really worth switching to Vista for this game.
Screen-shots below:
XB360 comparison pictures via IGN
Mine: