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

A lot of news takes place in a week: Starcraft 2, the Square Enix party (FFCC trailer via FFCC-news, click to play), and other random crap. In order to stay up-to-date with it all while having a life slacking off I’m going to scatter my impressions of the many recent PC demos I’ve been playing on a daily basis. One game a day.
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Starting with the recent localization of Korean MMO Mario Kart rip-off KartRider. That pretty much summarizes the whole game right there. If you haven’t played Mario kart yet…then I’m sorry, you’re on the wrong webpage. Let me redirect you.

First, I have to be honest. I haven’t played more than 2 hours of this game. I found it really boring and the power sliding broken. Not in a good way, but in a “Why do I have no control?” kind of way. Of course people argued with me saying I had to play it more to enjoy it(ie: earn credits and buy a better cart), but why waste time earning my fun? This game sounds like another Nexon MMO I once heard of. Yes, Maple story. I have yet to play it but I kept hearing how pointless and boring it was. Hmm… sounds familiar. Let me put it this way; racing games have come a long long way over the years, I consider them the most “advanced” genre in all of gaming. So in my opinion, don’t bother wasting your time with KartRider. There are much better racing games to waste time on.

Oh and I now have a feedburner RSS feed! Zero readers FTW!

After much building, rebuilding, and switching between different computers, I finally am back with my second computer. Not only that, I actually went to the new Frys store near me and bought two 512Mb sticks of PC3200 Corsair RAM. So now I have a gig of RAM! Woot! The other two 256Mb sticks will just be lying around until I find a use for them. I could use them seeing as I have 4 RAM slots on my motherboard, but it would bring down the speed to PC2100.
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So getting back to games finally, I have to point out this would normally be E3 week. I’ll miss watching Gamespot’s crappy stream of Iwata making some speech about gamers, seeing the Kentia hall oddities(Note: They all hilariously suck), and most of all - E3 insider’s Famcam. I don’t think too many people know about this, but it’s a guy who walks around with a few cameras strapped to his head, navigating the crowds and booths at E3. It’s like being there yourself(!), but with an over-enthusiastic narrator. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing though, it really comes in handy when he interviews developers. For example: “Oh wow that looks great!” and “I can’t wait to play it!”. Developers eat that up… and spit out more info! It’s very effective. A most notable interview from last year in my opinion was the interview with Ben Herman North American SNK President. No, not as a great example of enthusiasm extracting info from a developer, but just the overall coolness. Or maybe both… I think I heard all the Metal slug anthology details from this interview and even though he says “Uh.. it’s still in development” he basically gave away everything.
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I guess E3 isn’t gone and dead per-se, but I’m not sure it’ll have the same feel to it… kinda sad. Unless… the FamCam can get back in, then it’s alright.

-I’ve been playing a few PC demos lately, look forward to some impressions in my next post!

…Turns out Windows works just fine, it just needed some drivers. But until Abit sends me back my motherboard I can’t play any PC games(stupid Celeron with integrated Intel 82845G graphics card-…er.. chip and no PCIE or AGP slots). I don’t have much confidence in Abit’s RMA either, their forums had a few complaints floating around and the automated Email misspelled -not one- but two words. Some minimal shmups still run well though, and I’ve got my DS to back me up. I’ll give it a good week and a half before I go insane.

I know almost nothing about web design or code, but some messing around with my main blog led to this awesome new banner for my (main) blog. It’s a screenshot of “Negima?!” I took a long time ago of one of the characters looking at her computer. It has some random “Net idol” page/blog, a typical windows desktop, a bit of keyboard, and if you look closely 2ch is in one of the windows. Well representing and poking fun at the stereotypical internet nerd/geek, not necessarily in a bad way, but in a humorous way.

Also, if you right clicked and looked at the URL -Yes, I am hosting it with Photobucket… I could use my friends host if I wanted to. However I’m not going to bother unless I see my blog picking up lots of traffic.

Also, for this DS-X2 blog I finally changed the tagline and the header theme. I hear Wordpress is very “flexible” so I may change more things (such as the theme) in the future.

Well it seems the motherboard in my computer died on Friday. It wasn’t a good day to boot either so I was really looking forward to just sitting back with some NeoGeo. Also I was chipping away at a massive list of freeware shmups over at “Shoot the core!” I highly recommend you check it out. For now I’m using my old PC with Knoppix since I don’t want to bother with partitions or anything. Er… and I don’t think windows from my Hard drive would run on this thing without re-installing. Or would it? Maybe if I feel brave enough I’ll try, but for now I’m perfectly fine with Knoppix. It’s the easy simple solution right now. Unlike my motherboard RMA….

GameCube is coming to an end, it’s sad. It had a good run in my opinion and it’s thankfully going out with a bang. Dreamcast port of Radio allergy by Milestone. Weather it’ll be good or not I don’t know, but I’m a sucker for shmups and it’s compatible with my Hori D-pad -so enough said, I now have it on preorder as my last GameCube game. Also turns out there’s a feature being overlooked too… the music! It’s a mixed bag of opinions on the internet, but I love it. It sounds very similar to my favorite genre of Detroit techno(with a video game touch), and I liked the sample page enough to actually buy it. I actually bought the CD! Whoa! Money! Being spent! This is actually part of a personal movement of mine to buy hard-to-find music off the internet. Such as: I Am robot and proud, and 7th Gate. But enough of that, it arrived in the mail today here are some pictures!

Oh and it came with stickers of all game characters but I didn’t take a picture. What should I put them on? …

Way too busy! On top of my usual boring life, I’ve recently dedicated myself to a unique project called “top secret” by the new acclaim. Look it up in wiki - the company is completely different, but David perry (of Earthworm Jim fame) plans to put it to good use. It’s all about a huge (locked)community developing an innovative mmo for PC. I’m not a mmo expert - heck I’ve only played PSO a few times- but I plan to contribute my ideas and learn a lot as well. Not sure how often I’ll make time to blog, but spring break starts this friday(after school that is) so I’ll definitely be on the computer more for the next week.

*ahem*
Remember this?

April fools?
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April fools again?!
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and no, this is defiantly not a joke.

I’ve been meaning to post some news on my blog. But news has been slower than slow lately…. which is pretty slow if you ask me. So I sit here at my computer pretty bored… just beat R-type Leo by accident - it was pretty short.[…] Ok, you know what? I’ll just post some random links of news I think are interesting today:

-Interview with Nich Maragos about Etrian Odyssey.

-Gamasutra interview with Ralph Baer.

-Homebrew that allows you to blog with pictochat.(I might use that one of these days)

-Pictures of the black360 with 120GB HD.

-New commercial for English training is hilarious.

And last but not least… WTH is up with Boogie? Apparently Wii gamers aren’t good enough for real games now.

I recently missed a few days of blogging. Though I had good reason for the most part. Thursday I was totally into Rhythm Tengoku(heaven) so I played it up to around 12AM/1AM…
I love that game…
Friday I went to a LAN party right after school and returned at 10:30PM or so. Though with all the heavy lifting(my monitor weighs more than my pc) I felt too tired/lazy to make a post.
It’s strange, I feel very tired right now-…wait… oh no wonder! My PC clock is one hour behind!
AHH!

I feel Lazy today, so instead of the random blabber I present: Random videos! Hey - just like my history class! (sad and true)

The first one is the interview with Suda51 I somewhat indirectly mentioned yesterday. You may have already seen it, but if you haven’t watch it!
(Links only for the DS-X2 version. Wordpress blocks embedded videos/content I guess.)

http://gamevideos.com/video/id/10062

Also, a new Retronauts Bonus Stage.

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/10092

I disagree with Chris Kohler about Donkey Kong being the first game visually to tell a story. The story in Donkey was just as subtle as any other old arcade game that attempted a basic story(or even an old 2600/PC game). However, it’s success was probably because it was the first one to do it decently and clearly - I’ll give him that.

Slow day for gaming news, the biggest thing was the rumor of the Black XB360 with a nice 120GB hard drive. But I really didn’t want to post about any more rumors this week…
Instead, I found some other small-quick bits of news:

-Touch detective 2 website! (wallpapers ftw)
-Bomberman story website. I’m kind of skeptical of the differences between this and “Bomberman land touch!”. They seem too similar, at least there’s a big difference between all the four Harvest moon games for DS(which includes rune factory). sheesh
-Chronos Twin info. This was a GBA title way back when apparently. Some more screens and video showed up on that game, which IMO doesn’t look very good. It’s nice to see a very small-scale developer trying something really bizarre with the DS’s unique hardware - but it looks flawed. I mean, playing two characters on two separate screens?…At the same time? No thanks, not really appealing to me. Looks more frustrating than innovative.
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Chronos Twin’s small developer and platform conversion from GBA to DS reminded me of another title called “Western lords” by Blossom soft. (Hey, there’s also an old DS-X2 interview!) Now renamed “Sagrada Guardians”(?), I have also discovered on the site that the game finally has a solid 2008 release date posted! Well ok, I guess that’s not very “solid”… at least we know they’ve made progress. Blossom soft seems to have also joined up with Alten8 on a cell phone game called “Oracle“. After going to Alten8’s site, I discovered that they had just last week(the 15th) announced they were working on DS games! So now I’m thinking Blossom soft could be involved with… even more DS RPG’s? Who knows, interesting stuff going on the the small-time developer world…. and hey, according to Suda51 - this is exactly what the industry needs more of. I’m all for it, just hope these titles aren’t complete crap….