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…

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.

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.

Christmas is over, but the fun has just begun! Still a week and a half left of nothing but messing around with what I’ve received. Got my graphics card back today too so I’m ready to do anything! Orange box here I come! Oh but let me total up what I’ve hauled in so far.

I was right on the money with the Wii. Finally in “next gen”… but I lack games. I plan to go out and buy Mario Galaxy today as soon as I’m done posting this. I was at Target the other day exchanging an extra nunchuck controller my mom had bought, then reminded myself to go buy a Wii points card and classic controller. Saving my Bestbuy gift card for game purchases in case you’re wondering. I own a lot of classic games, and “own” even more of them (that I play with an emulator). Sin and Punishment is pretty much the only reason I bought a points card. It isn’t emulated 100% anywhere else except on the Wii and I think it’s a great game to actually own. That and Blazing Lazers since I could never find(or figure out) a Turbo Graphics16 emulator for my PC. I kind of regret it, it’s not as good as I thought it would be. Even for a late 80s game I think Cho-ren-sha is much more impressive. Not to mention this now leaves me with a useless 200 Wii-points. WTF? Oh well, I’ll put it towards Wii-ware titles.

Another major gift(in my book) is a cell phone! Woo!
Unfortunately it’s very limited in terms of applications(damn you Verizon), but it plays music(yay!), with 2GB of internal memory accessed by a USB cable(yay!), and… sigh… output through a 2.5mm jack(what?!). Yep, same miniature “jack” my calculator uses to talk to other calculators. It’s weird, it’s small, and I don’t like the headphones earbuds(even worse) it came with. If it exists, I’ll buy the adapter. It has a nice long-lasting rechargeable battery at least.

Ok maybe I won’t total up everything I got.

Just one more thing.

Tis awesome. I got the “European version” apparently because it has an extra track on the main CD, and came with the first Disc of Ken Ishii’s Play, Pause, and Play. Which is awesome. Especially since it has my favorite track from Joris Voorn “Incident”.
Ah, some great driving music.