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

I really want “The orange box”. Hell I need the orange box(LAN next next fri in the works). It’s bad enough I’m falling behind the times(no next gen system!), but when I miss a release of three great games, for the price of one, on a platform I own(PC), it’s just sad. Sad it will be, since I’ll have to pass it up. Yes that’s right, I have to save up my money(read: very limited) for that blasted holiday. Sure I could spend it now all on myself and give nothing. However, capitalism class economics class(which I have been very busy with this week) has taught me to look at my opportunity cost. The way X-mass works is you give… and then receive. So the loss of spending all my money on myself and not others? Potential gifts baby! Gifts that would most likely exceed the amount of money that I have now - a value not worth even posting(though I’ve never actually withdrew money from my bank before… I might want to practice that one day lol). There you have it, NPC has a plan to get with the times! Woo hoo! I just won’t have the orange box until December or so…

Remember last august? Inane-talks birthday? Yea I lied, it’s actually tomorrow, here in November. I have a strange habit of mixing up the two months, and I’m aware how absurd that sounds but I’m just clumsy like that.

We’ve even got an Inane 2.0 thing going on since we moved from PHP to SMF. Funny thing is the new template was originally somewhat lighter but members said it was too bright for viewing at night (of all things) so we changed it. We’re looking to expand our membership everyday so feel free to join!

School has been kind of surreal lately, I think it has something to do with me being a Senior. Well… except what happened on Thursday. I was walking to my first class thinking about you-know-who, when all of a sudden she walked around a corner right in front of me! Freaky! We both kind of frightened each other and gave this “gasp!” look to each other. I don’t know what to make of it, I must admit I haven’t stopped thinking about her. Though I’m adopting the “Good things come to those who wait” philosophy for now. I figure the balls in her court now, it’s her decision to like me or not, I’ve done my part. “Though doesn’t she already have a boyfriend?” you might ask. I know her friends fairly well and I’m thinking about doing some investigative work by asking a few questions. Plain curiosity is forcing me too anyway. I have a feeling it’s someone not from my area because I never see her with anyone but friends.

Oh and I posted a story I wrote in English on my main blog. I think it may be too geeky for many people to understand.

I did a lot computer work the later half of this week, ending with today(hopefully). Long story how it started, but I took advantage of the situation and am now successfully dual-booting Ubuntu! This is what? The third time I’ve had to back-up and reinstall this year? I’m just totally immune to it now, really the piece(s) of data I value most would have to be my Firefox profile. For those of you who may not be knowledgeable about the inner-workings of Firefox, all your cookies, history, bookmarks, ect. are saved to a profile. You can actually manage more than one, but since I’m the only person who uses this(my) computer I’ve never bothered experimenting with that. So as long as I have that backed-up I don’t really care about what programs I loose(being that all other types of files can be easily backed up and retrieved - even some programs!). Besides that I’ve been very busy with school as usual. My Mom(ok, I’m aware how teenage I sound right now) has been ragging on me constantly to: “stop fixing your computer and get back to work”. But I can’t really work on her stupid laptop… with that lousy keyboard… uhg. Then I remembered she just so happened to have brought me another KVM switch that day(in addition to the one before), and I got to work!

Her work, Verizon wireless, gave it to her for free
- in case you were wondering

This was only temporary until I got back from school the next day and finished backing up my Hard drive(pictured). After that I was able to ditch the nightmare of multiple KMV switches and format the crap out of my hard drive. And format the crap out of it I did. Lets see if you can follow this:
-Formatted and installed windows
-Partitioned and installed Ubuntu
-Windows didn’t like booting from the partition
-Killed the grub trying to fix windows boot, and got some disk read error at post screen
-Reformatted yet again and installed windows on it’s partition
-Set up windows and booted onto the Ubuntu live CD
-Fixed the grub and got both booting - YAY!

Ok It’ not that hard, but it was a pain. I booted off of the XP disc at lest 8 or 9 times during the span of this whole ordeal. Ubuntu live CD though is quite nice, might I add.

*insert picture of hot girl here*
“Man, I’d like to boot off her live CD!”

I had to do that. Sorry.
I blame the delayed daylight saving time(kicks in tonight, finally).

Ubuntu is awesome, download it!

Listening to one of Fabrice Lig’s newer songs “X-Slaves who changed the world” when I decided to drop by his MySpace page. Then I stumbled upon this really interesting video.

Looks(and sounds!) good!

At first I thought maybe it was something new, I couldn’t find any posts about it at DS-X2… or even via google! In fact, I only found that fab himself re-posted the video at MySpace-video, and this random French GBA forum. So I shot him some questions thinking: Maybe he was developing it himself?

Me:
——————————————————
Hey Fabrice Lig, I was wondering what happened to your Nintendo DS game “Cross Control”. The URL you list brings an “error” and I can’t find any other info on the web about this game.

Who’s the developer? Has the game been canceled? Were you involved in other aspects of game development other than the music? If you can answer, thanks.
——————————————————

Fab:
——————————————————
Hi Nick,
Actually, I have no news about the game, the developpers had some contact with different companies to developp the game, but I think it didn’t happen ? I dunno? Its a bit sad as I tryed some parts of the game, and it was really cool…
Fabrice
——————————————————

Canned I guess. Seems Lig saved the video though! Very cool.

On a completely unrelated note I’ve been challenged to a fight. A Garou: Mark of the Wolves fight, that is. On Halloween my friend and I will go at it, and get this, my friend has been playing it all month long with a keyboard because he’s too lazy to hook up his computer joystick/CP. That’s hardcore LAME. So he’s become so cocky(he’s always cocky actually) to the point were he’s letting me use my awesome Logitech rumble pad against his crappy keyboard. This is either going to be really easy or really hard. Gotta practice either way! Oh and he got Bust-A-move for his MVS, if all else fails, I know he can’t beat me at that.

I’m a really bad student… This week I finished one project and was handed three more. Not pretty. Sometimes I’m not really sure what distracts me, but I’m usually pretty good about not playing video games with homework to do. My friends say I’m lazy and I don’t put forth enough effort. I guess the consequence of failure doesn’t motivate me…

I delayed this post on purpose however, because I knew I was going on a hike today(something different I could blog about). I hiked the Sutter Buttes, the world’s smallest mountain range.

Unlike the other places I have been in the past(usually national parks) this is actually privately owned by a couple of rancher families. Twice a year it is opened to a small group of people led by a non-profit organization. Once in the spring, and once in the fall.

Info note: The “mountain” on the far right with the antenna on it is(click for high res) the tallest at 2,117FT - and is the one that qualifies the Sutter Buttes as a mountain range.

The hike wasn’t too bad, but our guide was a bit… lost at times? Slow at times too, people would often go ahead of her only to find themselves going in the wrong direction. haha

The hiiiills~ are aliiive~, with the soooound~ of- no.

I took a crap load of photos for some reason. Probably because I look at these hills from the higher points of where I live occasionally but have never been able to visit.

Also, I find it fascinating how these hills stand out of the valley floor. Truly a geological anomaly.
…
Really nice weather helps too.

I was just waiting for a WRX to come screaming by while walking on some of the back roads.

That’s it for today I guess. Did we learn something today? Great! Now do your homework!

I’m one to talk…

I missed blog action day on Monday, because I like to keep updates weekly(sorta). I got a friend to post about it though. That gets me off the hook, right? Well I put all my required high school community service into cleaning creeks, planting trees, and labeling storm drains - so don’t think I don’t like to help the environment, I really do.

My save clover valley armband, next to my classy rotary phone

Picture transition! Oh yes, just linked two subjects with a picture. I believe my rotary phone is a 70s era Western electric(AT&T), with carbon mic, a hold button, and four line switches. Ooh yea! Unfortunately an analog phone has it’s disadvantages in this modern digital era… no pound key. Whoops. “If you are using a rotary phone please hang up” is what I got on Thursday as I tried to use it in a conference call. Now I know better… yea… dial with the cordless, and then switch back to the rotary.

I guess I never mentioned it before, but I played most of the Trouble Witches demo a few months back and loved it. It’s a bit on the Otaku side, but a solid, well produced, shoot’em up. Now Studio Siesta(the dev) has announced it will be making an English version called TOMBOYISH ☆ WITCHES(their caps and star, not mine) for us gaijin. Great! But… I liked the old name better. Oh well, I’m so buying it. Speaking of Shoot’em-ups, what’s up with everyday shooter? A lot of the 1UP crew has been talking about it ever since… what, GDC? I know one friend with a PS3 and he doesn’t touch the thing(don’t ask)… so he probably didn’t buy everyday shooter off of PSN. If there was a PC demo I would like test it out because I’m really curious about the appeal. To me it just looks like another geometry wars mixed with elements of REZ and every extend. But apparently it’s more than that. Well, I usually prefer my shoot’em-ups scrolling and vertical anyways(with some exceptions of course).

That’s it for this week I guess, really brief. I now await someone to point out my excessive usage of the word “but” in that last paragraph.

The past few months I’ve been puzzled as to why I was unable to load DS games(or really anything) on my supercard. I tried a number of things and after a few weeks I discovered that the way I transfer files to my miniSD card over the network just won’t cut it. It’s bizarre but even thought the file(s) will exist/transfer and show up on the card it apparently just doesn’t write correctly. So instead of writing them that way(with a network printer) I tried using the SD card slot in my mom’s laptop, and sure enough it made all the difference.

My DSLite with some games, a classic DS strap, and a Radirgy sticker. Not pictured: Supercard, for obvious reasons.

With that out of the way I’ve been playing Race Driver: Create and Race, and Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. Phantom hourglass kicks ass so far and just about everyone I talk to agrees with me. Funny story, there’s this girl in broadcasting who I recall playing Nintendogs one day, and then just recently I saw her playing Zelda. Talk about effectiveness, it seems Nintendo really is converting non-gamers… hell girl non-gamers - that’s a difficult thing to pull off IMO. Back to Phantom hourglass: it’s good but I start to loose interest after awhile. I really don’t care about difficulty but currently I feel like the dungeons are kind of busy-work getting in the way of my story. Maybe I’ve been playing too many action games like Metal slug lately. Which also reminds me, my friend with the MVS finally got Metal slug X! Currently we have this wonky temporary CP set-up since we had taken out the whole CP(control panel) for an over-haul, and we just couldn’t wait. Basically I don’t think I’ll do a review on PH because I’ll probably take my sweet time and I know there are other people at DS-X2 who are probably much much further than me. As for Race Driver: create and race, I’m trying to like it but just can’t. It might suffer from small-screen-itis where the game could be much better… with a bigger screen. I say this because the cars start off feeling really slow and then jump to being really fast. It’s weird but I think if I had a bigger screen I could have a much better sense of speed. Either that or the game’s just broken. Now that I think about it, if they had just made the car models much smaller it would give the game bigger screen space(Think: Mario kart), and higher frame rate. Are you listening Codemasters? Really the game is very well polished(love the menus) but from what I’ve experienced of the gameplay it’s not worth the 30(?) bucks. Yea I think I might do a review on this one, I just need to bring myself to play it more. Though ironically this weekend I’ll be trying to allocate some time towards studying for my permit test(zomg Monday). You know… so I can drive real cars.

One last note, it seems my little drama story (which I decided to only post at my main blog) has got me twice the feedburner subscribers! Woo! 8!… um yea, I know. I think it’s a big improvement though. Also, don’t expect me to blog like that again. Well maybe a bonus blog - yea ok - but I still try to avoid personal posts.

Some days I don’t know where I am. Figuratively of course. This weeks post was highly delayed because I planned on posting my broadcasting project, only to find it fairly difficult to export. Or actually I played back the exported/compressed file in windows[VLC,zoom]: Nothing. Played it back on a mac[quicktime]: Bingo! Screw imovie and it’s compression techniques(codecs..), my next project(which will be actual reporting - sorry) will have to be done in final cut. imovie is too… weak.

Continuing on my last post a bit, I opened up my last Nintendo Power(or as we know it). Sure there were obvious hints that the NP staff was being booted out the door(editor’s note) but I question how far in advance. I say this because there were at least 2 or 3 places in the magazine where they still encourage you to visit the Nintendo forums - which have been inaccessible for about 3(?) weeks now. I have a feeling we knew almost before they did! Quite sad.

Now let us celebrate Sin and Punishment finally coming to America! Yay! Ok, I still don’t have a wii. But if you have a wii I highly recommend you purchase/download it. Just remember: Change it to normal, and don’t bother with easy. The game leaves out some of the insane stuff if you put it on easy. Sin and Punishment is an easy game on it’s own - compared to most other Treasure games. If you’re not into Treasure games already this game(well, and Gunstar) will change that. I heard they even improved the graphics a bit. *insert “tighten up the graphics” joke here*

Ok, last on my list here for today is the fact I finally joined myspace. “ZOMG Nick joined MySpace!?” is what you’re thinking, right? Because I swore to never ever join MySpace, but I caved recently… I have my reasons. Blog will totally still be here, MySpace is a terribly designed website and is nothing compared to my little template-tweaked blogspot page. So anyways, here’s my page if you know me you can send a friend request or something. But if you’re some random internet-troll guy looking for more friends on MySpace don’t even bother. I’m very strict about approval of friends… and in case you’re wondering I sent a request to Ken Ishii - he’s a DJ and I like his music, so yea. If you have no intentions of ever joining MySpace, don’t have an account, ect. ect. - then I encourage you to click the link anyways for some awesome dZihan & kamien music.
Sliiiding~

Is this goodbye? My internet roots? Wiped from the internet for good? 14,503 posts gone up in smoke? This is where it all started for me, all my (geek)knowledge and obsessions spawned one way or another from here. I can only hope they’re making some sort of major move or upgrade, but seeing as Nintendo power(the main drive behind the forums in the first place) is now being sold to Future publishing I don’t hold out much hope. Worst part is I never liked Future publishing, I always hear about how many mistakes they make. Also, if(at least) my account isn’t linked to my subscription anymore I might just drop the magazine and support the good guys over at uncle Ziff.

I’ve got nothing on TGS here, in fact I avoided posting anything over at DS-X2 about it. The rule: post one thing, might as well post’em all - and I’m not doing that. I’ve got school to work on…

Speaking of school, I’m adding a few more touches to the video for broadcasting and so I’m not sure when it’ll be ready. This is pretty much a one man operation so I’ve got to take my time and make sure it turns out the way I want it to. Also, I promised I would take a video of the blue spark on my VGA switch for someone, but I filmed it and it didn’t seem to show up on camera very well(or really at all). Bummer really, but it’s nothing special, my VGA connector probably could use some grounding of its own. I’m not going to bother really…

Halo3 launch is upon us, and I’ve been invited by multiple friends to come over and play it(as they know I don’t have a 360). Bungie even admitted the second one was rushed and broken. As result they’ve taken their time with Halo 3 and I think it shows. Looks a lot better than previous versions by far(and I’m not just talking graphics), and I’m actually looking forward to it.

A little blog drama lama(I’ve been wanting to say that) has set me back this week - I’ll be sure to never let that happen again. Since I only posted about it on my main site, readers of the other ones must think I’m dead or something by now(If I have any). Follow that link and you’ll understand.

Wasn’t much going on this week besides the awesome announcement of Bangai-O spirits and school.

Damn

…Unless you care about me playing old games like Ikaruga, which I finally beat using my Dreamcast and 8 credits. Don’t laugh - as much as I love it I’ve only recently been able to play it at leisure. However you can laugh at the coincidence of Treasure announcing Ikaruga for Xbox-live arcade the very next day. Though we all saw it coming eventually I guess - ever since that leaked beta(ish?) version was reported on. Speaking of Dreamcast while I was at zero’s place I plucked a VGA cable from one of his monitors sitting in his garage(with his permission of course). What did I do with it? I completed my VGA switch! Yes, I bought a VGA switch a week or two ago and I didn’t have enough cable to use it - but now I do! It’s awesome, I can just switch between my Dreamcast and computer on the fly by using this little nob on my desk. Of course I’ve never heard of this cheap-ass brand so I’m a bit worried if it’ll find a way to break itself. One funny sign - and I don’t know, maybe this is normal - is that while putting it together in the dark I noticed it gave off a small blue spark while touching the box/switch. If you wait for tomorrow, I’ll probably post a few pictures of my beloved switch in action, or maybe even a short video. Hmm…

Meanwhile I’ll also be advancing from square one when I take the drivers permit test again tomorrow. Did I ever mention my other one expired? Well it did, and so I’m going at it again tomorrow. Hopefully, just maybe, sometime next month I’ll finally get my drivers license.

Update: Video is up!

A bit late this week as usual… or does that mean I’m on time? Maybe my slogan should be “updated every 8 9 days!”
…(uh, no)
School stuff as usual(uhg) though if you remember the creepy Dynamo MVS cab from two weeks ago, I spent part of my weekend with my friend taking it apart. Not completely… yet. Well our main goal is to basically replace the wonky control panel(CP) with something we craft. Also, being that it uses the CP to slide out the Neo-Geo board we plan to make a little shelf inside complete with a little service door on the side(for changing cartridges) to replace it. He also wants to paint the cab black and red but I’m thinking some dark blue… yea we always get way ahead of ourselves.

It’s been pretty boring the last couple of days though homework is starting to pick up the pace(yay?). As a result being music-deprived at school I’ve been listening to tons of music as projected - mainly Ken Ishii. I got my hands on his compilation CD of other artists called “play, pause, and play”. There are these two tracks back to back that really stand out: “Joris Voorn - Incident” and “Hystereo - Winters In The City”. I found a youtube video of Joris Voorn’s “Incident” live but… um… the sound is too loud for the microphone so it’s all distorted. Here’s what it should sound like. Oh whoops, did I accidentally upload both songs and a Winamp playlist file, conveniently putting the two awesome songs next to each other just like on the CD? My bad.

Speaking of microphones(I had to transition somehow), Broadcasting 2 is finally getting off the ground and I’ve begun production of my little show/package for the morning announcements. If it turns out any good(who knows..) I’ll upload it to google video and post it here. What is it you ask? Secret… nothing game related though.