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

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…

Thanksgiving, Christmas, and sometimes random weekends, I was traveling to the bay area somewhat mysteriously. Well now I think it’s about time to fill you all in.

Back in November or so my Grandmother was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Apparently she had been treated for thyroid cancer with radiation in the 1930s(!) and it finally came back after all these years. My family tried to visit her and get together as much as possible after we found out. About a week before my birthday in February or so(I’m not very good with dates here) she died in her home overnight. A couple of days later I received a birthday card wishing me happy birthday with a check for $100. She was still sending me birthday cards from beyond! Actually it was sent the day before she died and it took a couple of days to travel in the mail. Still amazing that through all that pain she was able to make out a card and a check. The amount is worth noting because she would always throw large amounts of money at my sister and I. Even if we insisted she should keep it, as she needed it more than we did, she would still force us to accept it. I was hesitant to accept this check as well but my dad said she would probably want me to accept it. I thought about it: If it was one of the last things she did then she must’ve really wanted me to have this money - more so than usual. Looking back I’m surprised the bank would let me cash a dead person’s check. Something seems weird about that.

I’m convinced what really Killed her though was her “health care”. Her “health care” was “kaiser permanente” which over the last couple of years has gained a reputation for being one of the worst in the nation. As my uncle calls it: “assisted suicide”. It shows too, she had been complaining to my father and her doctor about problems swallowing and breathing for months. The doctor would tell her it was just allergies or some other bullcrap. It finally took a visit to the hospital to get a correct diagnosis, but by then it was way too late. I don’t think my parents are the suing type, but we really would have a case against them.

Now she requested some weird religious funeral thing since that side of the family is in to that sort of thing so we had to wait until just last Monday to start the three day/part funeral. I had to miss the third day as I needed to get back to school, the two days that I did catch though were quite interesting. Many of her friends and barely-related family (to me) attended that I didn’t even have a clue existed. I even met some of my dads’ friends who I seem to get along with quite well. They told me some very entertaining stories about my dad (more on that another day hehe) and how they all felt very welcome in my grandmother’s house back in the day. I really mean back in the day, we are talking the early 60s here.

Overall the funeral was a pleasant farewell, as my dad says: “It’s the end of an era”.

I’ll miss her… and making that two hour trek to her home, getting the typical grandma/relative hug, eating lunch, and enjoying the beautiful weather with the foster city lagoon nearby. I guess what I mean to say is that she had this aura of family and culture to her that I’ll miss very much. Perhaps it’s a bit of the north beach culture…

Quick update! (still busy/slacking off/playing games/saving the “world” )

14th -Valitines day was a boring but interesting day of reflection.

18th -GDC came and is uneventful to me so far. Playing is believing though. *shrug*

19th -Took a Sierra College assessment(English/math) and felt very ill about 5 minuets in. Couldn’t focus and started guessing on some problems I would normally take the time to solve. Somehow still got normal results - perhaps better than my sister. haha!

Nick: 1
Logic: 400082

20th -Turned 18! Woo!(meh) Went to the doctor as well. He took me off my acne medication finally.

21st -Feeling much better without that medication crap. Unfortunately I have lots of work.

Oh and this set is simply kick-ass. Best headphones EVER. Didn’t think there was an RJ-11 to 1/4″ plug out there.

Whoops, did I say I was going to write another entry on Wednesday? I meant Thursday. Because Wednesdays almost always suck. You can’t argue with that logic… *ahem…

Actually, school is kicking into overdrive so I have no time for blogging or other web-related shenanigans… well except for right now.
Times up!
…Nah just kidding.

Gaming is on the back-burner as well. Advance wars has been in stand-by mode for about four or five days now, and still going strong! Who knows when I’ll get back to it. Maybe if I finish this blog post fast enough… hm.

Two weeks from now my school will be - basically - adding a 30min class to my schedule. I say “basically” because it’s actually pretty complicated and some days I may even get out of school earlier than I already do. But given this is me I’ll be stuck staying that extra thirty minuets that is (what they call) the “plus period”. If you click that link you’ll witness some Rocklin High school web designing at its finest. Who knows though, maybe I could turn this time into something productive.

Good’ol Fabrice Lig(AKA: Soul Designer), who I talked to briefly before I jumped off the Myspace bandwagon, has uploaded some short and sweet videos of Standard 9. Which is something Ken Ishii’s website for Standard has yet to do(and I doubt ever will at this rate). Check these out if you like techno!

Edit: BTW I titled one of my previous posts “rapping up jan08″ - and I forgot the w!(w-rapping) Talk about embarrassing!

Finally February is here! Three weeks of January rain will drive you nuts. Only problem now is the humidity was keeping us relatively warm and now early morning temperatures are down to the low 30s(F). So… cold…

Today’s a big election day, something like 22 states are all holding democratic or republican party primaries. By the end of the day we should know who’s running against who for president. I’ve been rooting for Barack Obama but only because I know one of the more obscure candidates who I prefer, Dennis Kucinich, didn’t stand a chance. In fact he dropped out a couple weeks ago. I’ll admit I didn’t know who he even was until a couple of months ago, often confusing his last name with Kruschev. Haha, I blame history class for that one. I have my fingers crossed for vice president. I turn 18 on the 20th(zomg) so I can’t vote in this primary but I’ll be voting in the actual election. But hey, the second I see the Green party pick up some momentum I’m so jumping ship. Sure I won’t be able to vote in the Democratic primaries, but I’ll never forget the party representatives that came into our econ/gov class a couple of months ago. The Green party rep out-classed all of them. He was also the only rep… maybe the only person in the room… that knew what Net neutrality was. I actually somewhat owe him one for being able to explain it a bit better than I was(which was nerve racking in front of axp60+ kids and apx10 adults). The funny part was the Republican representative was some sort of networks engineer (or so he claimed) and was caught completely off guard by the subject.

I’m a bit pressed for time, I’ll update again tomorrow.

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!

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.