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

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.