Wednesday, December 21, 2005

NEWSFLASH

Comment Commentary

Solo- Well, this is still high school, so we all have to get all classes done within three days, and they have it set up strangely here. The first day you have your first two periods, the second day you have third and fifth, and then fourth and sixth the third. They switched the two so seniors who don't have a certain period still show up so the school can get money.

John- If there was a "Crackwhore McDuck" I'd be right with you.

Shin- FAIL

James- Do you think Nintendo should invest in a big American marketing sweep? They keep making allusions to Apple's iPod, and a lot of the success there came from memorable marketing.

--

NEWS! I BRING NEWS!

I'll be going up to San Francisco for a couple of days. I leave tomorrow, I am bringing my camera and a laptop, so hopefully there will be zaniness abound.

Also, Final Fantasy IV is fun.
Comments (2) | Permalink

Friday, December 16, 2005

Wrapp'd

Comment Commentary

Alex- B-But.. He needs a gun!

From what I can tell, Bungie's actually put some effort into the world of Halo and keeping everything canon, but that is no indication of the games' quality of storytelling.

Solo- The only real "candy" store around here is run by an old scary Korean lady who overcharges for everything.

John- After familiarizing myself with Japanese in the past I'm kind of used to the sentence structure and all of the tenses, but I understand where you're coming from. Most of my classmates are "WTF" when it comes to the difference between dative and accusative.

It doesn't help that second declension singular is the same for both. [OLOL NERD LAUGHTER]

Shin- Yeah, "don't forget things." That works well. ;_;

Tony- I thought the PS2 has sold more than PS1s.. Or was it just that it reached a certain number of purchases in a smaller period of time than the PS1?

--

Finals are going okay. I had Latin and Biology my first day, which were the "hard ones," I guess.

The Latin final was surprisingly easy ("Which of these does not belong: Cat, dog, slave-dealer, lion"), but we also had to take a chapter test that I had more trouble with.

For such an important test, it was very laid-back in there. Our teacher didn't mind if we talked, people were listening to music when they were done, and she was blasting Christmas music on her speakers in an effort to drown out the oral Spanish exams next door.

I love Latin.

Biology was pretty un-fun, though. I put most of my studying efforts into it, but still didn't focus on certain things enough.

The sad thing, though, is that when I got home I called my friend (who had her Bio final the next day) and told her a lot of the questions, so she would know what to expect. Because of my efforts, she probably got a better grade than me, but that's how it is.

Then today was English and PE. Very, very easy stuff. English was the same old crap (I hate how they always have two really similar answers where either could technically be correct..), and we ran a mile in PE.

I was running miles in 6'15" earlier this year, but I'm down to 6'40" now (And I was REALLY tired after).. So, I feel sort of lazy. I'm losing my tan, too, but such is winter.

Tomorrow is art (no final, just drawing) and math, which I am not worried about. I went and studied in a small group at a bookstore tonight, and after finishing that I finalized my Christmas shopping.

I procrastinated on a lot of my Christmas shopping, so four of the things I ordered did not make it in time for "Christmas shipping," and while it bothers me quite a bit, the gift recipients don't seem to mind as much.

--

Best freaking fast food place ever, specially since you get a free drink if you show them student ID. Huge, delicious $5 burritos that two people can easily share. I've been here two times this week.

--

Also, here is a complete family tree of the Donald Duck lineage. Seriously, I'm disturbed at the thought of somebody actually making this. I mean, God, they have eight generations of ducks there.

Ducks, damn it.
Comments (4) | Permalink

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Gregor McGuffin and his Couch Companion of Mysticism

Comment Commentary

James- And now there's all of these rumblings of "upgraded Cube processors." I actually read a very, very horrible thread on a forum the other day, where a self-proclaimed Xbot was bashing the Revolution for its rumored low specifications and how the PS3 and 360 will be able to give more revolutionary experiences through online play and the involvement of hard drives. It wasn't a stupid one though, he/she was very good at speaking.

Then that graph showing Nintendo's console sales every year constantly declining from the NES, and everyone else was too mesmerized by the magic of graphs to check its validity.

I make too much out of this. I should actually be playing games right now, or even worse, something constructive.

Solo- DO A BARREL ROLL!

Azure- I want to go play Elder Scrolls when I'm done writing this, so I won't make a big rant. :(

Shin- But his pills bounce at a different height than regular Mario's! Can you say high-tier? -_^

John- Yeah, didn't they have something called "Smash Mail" when the original Smash Bros. came out? I don't remember at all how it worked.

--

My birthday is a week from today. Nothing really special or eventful is happening, other than the fact that it's the first day of our winter break, but there's still that excited, childlike mentality of "Almost birthday-ness" lingering somewhere in the back of my mind.

Finals are next week, too, so woot to that. I wasn't so concerned about my biology final until I went to a night of tutoring at the school, where the only thing I learned was that I had forgotten everything else. Nothing else concerns me too much- Latin, of course, will be culture review and remembering some of the more underused verbs, but I have the grammar down.

I learn all of my grammar in my Latin class, which in turn makes my English final easy as hell. So, aside from math, I'm good to go.

--

I attended a very awful Christmas party my dad's workplace was throwing last weekend. The only good thing that came out of it was the fact that I won a crappy little CD player in a raffle.

Fortunately, the CD player had a Walmart sticker on the back of it, so I went and exchanged it for store credit.

But what did I buy for $10? The only thing really available without me having to throw in at least ten more of my own was The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (Not Game of the Year edition, so no Bloodmoon/Tribunal).

So after downloading a few new skins and textures, I'm enjoying it, boring-as-shit as the combat is. In fact, I'm going to go play it right now.

Last thing: How is everyone's holiday shopping going? I'm doing a rather hefty amount of buying for my friends this year (seven in all), but I've only received two of the items. I'll be ordering the rest either tonight or tomorrow, then I'll be able to relax and cry because I will have no money.
Comments (5) | Permalink

Sunday, December 4, 2005

The 1337 Hammer Bros.

Comment Commentary

Solo- I like this idea. I kind of came up with something interesting to talk about this time, though, so I'll just talk about this in the Commentary.

All of this high definition stuff in the next generation of game consoles is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of "unnecessary technology." I realize that it's a natural progression for TV signals to eventually get sharper, but Microsoft and Sony are hyping it as way more important than it should be. If I recall correctly, the little Xbox 360 promotional blurb at the demo kiosks in Walmart have "mind blowing high definition graphics" as the first selling point. Then, after that, comes the advanced user interface, and internet features.

I'm not trying to make this a "graphics aren't important" rant. While it's true that gameplay will forever be king, as long as that is good, good visuals can make a great game even better (Resident Evil 4's level of atmosphere was just as important to its success as the gameplay changes were, almost). But, I'm on enough of a tangent.

So, while it's neither necessary or market-changing technology, high definition has its place, but people make too big of a deal of it.

Azure- cocksdicks lol

Shin- [insert a five-paragraph rant about Azure being a skank here.]

--

So there were statements made about the new Super Smash Bros. for the Revolution this week. Mr. Sakurai (the director of the previous Smash Bros) is involved with the project, despite his leaving HAL, and Nintendo has opened a new studio in Tokyo for the creation of this game. Apparently, a third party is involved with the project as well.

So this is adding to the mountain of Revolution speculation going on. The biggest thing here is who this mysterious third party is, how much involvement this company will have with the project, and if they are someone with their own established franchises (Sega seems to be one of the major guesses), will there be non-Nintendo characters included in the game?

I would prefer Smash Bros. to feature Nintendo characters exclusively. Including other franchises would make it some sort of Nintendo vs. [COMPANY] thing, which I would be fine with if it was some sort of spinoff franchise.

I can't say I wouldn't be interested in some giant, orgasmic, Nintendo vs. Capcom vs. Namco vs. Konami vs. Sega vs. Shonen Jump extravaganza, but doing this would cause Japan to be destroyed in a giant explosion of awesome. Sort of like this:

As a bit of a fanboyish dreaming, though, I would like to see some sort of costume/weapon dynamic with characters. Throughout Nintendo's history, characters have gone through different character designs, and been given different weapons.. I don't see why that shouldn't be incorporated into Smash Bros., as it would sort of add to the "Nintendo's legacy!" theme of the franchise.

I imagine that it could be executed similarly to Jump Superstars. As none of you probably know how the hell it works (unless you remember my delusional ramblings about it a couple of months back), there are different variations of most of the fighters- a stronger level of the character will have certain special attacks and appearances, while weaker ones will have their own specials and costumes.

So imagine, rather than having a regular Link and a Kid Link in Smash Bros., you have the Link "category," through which you can choose a variation of Link. So you could have OoT/Twilight Princess Link, OoT Kid Link, cel-shaded Windwaker Link, each with their own specials (I don't think that any one Link should be more "powerful" than another like in Jump, but balanced..). Then there's Samus with various suits (Varia, Fusion, Light/Dark/whatever).

It could limit the "zomg clone characters" complaint people had in Melee, like with Mario/Dr. Mario and maybe Luigi (as long as the clones are within the same franchise- Falcon/Ganon is the main offender here), while at the same time provide more variety and fanservice for the gamers looking for more depth and throwbacks to previous iterations of the characters.

And of course, there are some characters who really haven't undergone many changes, like Donkey Kong or Kirby, but they could come up with something.

Also, I demand some sort of 2D sprite mode on the side, unless they announce Smash Bros. DS anytime soon.

Wow, no wonder I suck so badly. This whole post just proves that I have too much time.
Comments (4) | Permalink

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

MySpace: Effin retarded.

But that's not the point of this.

I haven't updated in a very, very long time. I guess I'm having one of those crises or something.

It's not like I don't have a lack of things to blow out of proportion and complain about these days, so I have no clue what's going on.

I'll take rant suggestions, I guess. Fire away, you three people that read this.
Comments (2) | Permalink

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Grease LIGHTNING!

Comment Commentary

Mimmi- It saddens me to think of how absolutely true this probably is.

Solo- Once a few of my friends have 360s, and Elder Scrolls IV comes out, I am getting one. But until then, I shall remain dry-humping my DS.

Tony- The big one for me is the severe lack of Splinter Cell. I was hoping I could catch up with the rest of the world and play Chaos Theory on Live.

Lea- I still think it's some weird Japanese fetish.

Shin-

--

My room is unnaturally clean right now.

I can't remember if I talked about this on myOtaku or not, but my parents recently paid the down payment for a very nice house very close to my school. After years of my mom's false alarm moves ("We are SO moving into this house, this is the one, DON'T CONTRADICT ME"), something's actually happening, and due to its location I'm actually sort of excited about it.

Excited enough to actually clean my room rather than just put things on shelves.

I pulled all of my old Nintendo Powers out of my closet, and put them in order. I got rid of a lot of the old ones, but for some reason I kept the later ones. I stopped subscribing sometime last year, and I haven't really looked back. Because of the Nintendo Club or whatever it is, though, I could get three issues free. I might try it out again.

Anyway, the old paper, pencils and random garbage that normally thrives beneath my desk is all gone and in a trash dump somewhere. It actually looks inhabitable, which scares me.

Also, my mom made me move the guitars into my room. It's freaky there.

We should be actually moving in June. This was just for appraisal or whatever else. I don't know how it works.

--

In other news: Threadless.com is having a big, big sale right now.



Yes, all (or most) of their shirts are all on sale for $10. Now, before you shrug a $10 shirt off as "bad quality," let me tell you about my experience with this site.

The way the site works is people submit their designs, and people vote on them. Shirts that get high enough scores get printed, and the designers get some cash as well as store credit. The shirts are all on limited runs, so if a shirt sells out you have to either wait for it to be reprinted or find it on eBay.


I bought this shirt and this one a month or so ago, after doing a Google search for shirt sites. Each was $15. They took a very short while to get here, and I was very surprised by the quality of the shirts. They're not at all the cheap quality shirts you tend to get from other sites, but they're actually made of strong material and have very high-quality prints.

It wouldn't be so mind-blowing if the designs weren't so interesting. I would like to make some designs myself, but I believe you have to be 18.

So yeah, get on buying those shirts. They're good.

I think I may be buying this one for a friend and these two for myself.
Comments (2) | Permalink

Saturday, November 12, 2005

So, so, dynamo.

Comment Commentary

..Oh.

Wait a second. Nevermind. >:|

--

So, the Xbox 360 "Zero Hour" event is some two-day party and rave that Microsoft is doing to promote the 360. It's sort of "exclusive," since you had to enter a raffle to get there, and there's only about 3,000 tickets.

So it's not that big of a deal, since I wasn't going to get a 360 anyway, but this is just soaking in irony:

Behold, quite possibly the biggest launch event for the Xbox 360 is within walking distance of my house! And I can't go- even if I did get the tickets, you have to be 18.



There have been mumblings amongst my "posse" that maybe we should try sneaking in, but.. Eh.

It would be kind of cool to get yelled at by J. Allard in person, though. Maybe I could make fun of his shiny head.

Also, the list of backwards compatible 360 games is up now. It's over 200 games, which is way more than I expected, and as an extra treat every game will be playable in 720p and 1080i.

How the hell do they do that, though? Wouldn't the textures look really poor after being upscaled?

--

I'm going to Six Flags tomorrow. I have to be at school at 7:30. I woke up at 7:30 today, by choice.

Things are going crazy this weekend, then. I stayed home Thursday, Friday was a day out of school anyway, and today I spent the whole day cleaning my room (it still looks horrible). And on top of that, I'm waking up at a reasonable hour.

What the hell, man? What the hell?
Comments (5) | Permalink

Friday, November 11, 2005

In Oo-TAY-roh

Comment Commentary

Cimarron- I thought Nintendo had confirmed that DS's Wifi was 56K-no.

Solo- What about the new sidescrolling Mario? It's supposed to have a bunch of new minigames plus "multiplayer-friendly" versions of the SM64 ones.

Oh yeah, and a badass continuation of the sidescrolling-Mario-universe.

--

The Indigo Prophecy demo was okay. Considering the whole point of the game, I thought it was pretty short. You didn't get to see any real long-term consequences for your actions, other than that bum behind the restaurant, but that was just a foreshadowing anyway.

--

Also,



What the hell? Are farmer tans considered sexy in Japan?

I actually have one because of cross country, but alas, the season has ended, and I'm on my way back to pasty whiteness.
Comments (0) | Permalink

Monday, November 7, 2005

Rock lobster!?

Comment Commentary

Lea- Hell, if I'd learned my dad had that kind of influence on the galaxy, I'd be cheering too.

Shin- Sort of like "eh-hoo," only there's a bit of "he" before the "oo."

You know what? I don't know.

--

So, the Nintendo Wifi site is up now. There's a surprisingly large number of rankings and stuff on the Mario Kart DS page. I wasn't expecting that- all I thought there would be was some information on how it works and a link to buy the dongle. If all of the Nintendo Wifi games have that kind of stat recording, I'll be happy.

I wonder what it would take to "beat" Xbox Live? Is it possible with a free service? Is voice chat really that crucial? Will Metroid Prime Hunters and Metroid Prime 3's online modes be enough to make it a valuable feature, or even a system seller?

I guess we'll find out in time.. At the moment I'm quite satisfied by the things that Nintendo Wifi stand for (and I'm very, very glad that they're screwing 56k users over).

There have been reports of lag, though. I can deal with it if it's just so someone else can enter your town in Animal Crossing, but if Luigi and his kart are randomly jumping back and forth on the track, that won't be so tolerable.

Not that I plan on getting Mario Kart DS. Racing games (kart games, even!) have never tickled my fancy so much.

I'm off to go play the Indigo Prophecy demo now.
Comments (2) | Permalink

Saturday, November 5, 2005

Bitchings about English, anti-Revolutionaries, and the Quest for Ultimate Loserdome.

Comment Commentary

Shin- Doesn't beat the ghetto pirate though.

--

I very rarely understand a math concept until after I've taken the test on it.

It's mostly due to laziness, I think- since my teachers don't ever actually grade our homework, we can pretty much bullshit a score and they'll never know.

This year's been more troublesome, though, simply because my teacher expects more of us. He'll show you an example and expect you to figure everything out about a new concept by yourself, which is a rather rude awakening, but I suppose that's how things are.

So I always do about half of the homework if I don't get it (the answers are in the back of the book, if push comes to shove), unless I'm feeling motivated and take the time to learn all of it. After that I sort of half-ass my way through a chapter until we get a test on it.

That's when the questions are actually being checked, and when there are higher stakes. That's when I put effort into it, and that's when I get the subject matter.

Of course, on the opposite end of the spectrum, I can't remember the last time I've been challenged at all in English this year.

Every year it's the same thing: They assume your previous teachers didn't show you shit, and then you learn all of the same stuff over again. For example, this is my third consecutive year of learning how to cite resources. Example:

The students were subjected to the frantic, unorganized teacher's bullshit, "which undermined their potential" ("Sen's Rantings" 245).

My English teacher this year is the reincarnate of my crazy-ass Yearbook organizer (if you could call that organized). Frantic and unorganized, with what you can infer is a rather shaky social life, we've spent quite some time doing random bullshit with To Kill a Mockingbird while all of the other classes are actually keeping up to the state standards. I wouldn't mind the Mockingbird review had I not spent a straight week writing approximately twenty pages about that shit during the summer.

She gushed over my done-in-45-minutes autobiographical narrative about the Pixies show, for its "sophisticated diction," when I seriously wasn't thinking about it at all (the only editing I did was when I had to rewrite it in pen right before it was due, and I switched a couple of words around). Now we're being forced to write an essay about different theories about the specifics of Edgar Allen Poe's death, which is nothing more than an exercise in, you guessed it, citing resources. We're not even supposed to research- it's "look at four mini-articles in this book and cite them a lot."

So, I wrote a halfhearted thing in about half an hour there too, and now I feel like I'm withering away in that class. It's the only class I've ever fallen asleep in.

Also, all of the pleasant people are in the other class the period before mine, which makes things worse. Not to mention the fact that they actually learn things in there.

--

So the new EGM came in yesterday, ironically featuring an Elder Scrolls IV "Coming this winter to 360" glue-on to the cover, featuring Tokyo Game Show coverage.

So there wasn't much new in there, but it's nice to have a physical copy of things, I guess.

As is my ritual with EGM (especially with shitty issues), I tend to pass issues I've read enough of to my numero uno hombe, if you will, and being the not-quite-gaming-knowledgeable person that she is (though she does enjoy games- I recently got her hooked on Devil May Cry 3, and she's quite into Halo), had little to say of the Revolution controller other than "There's still not enough buttons."

Though I showed her this two months ago and she had similar complaints, but whatever.

So anyway, the point is that in a fit of fanboyish rage I spent all of English and part of Art furiously scribbling Revolution things onto lined paper. It was partly to tell her off, but I also found it entertaining.

I started off with comparing the number of buttons between the Revolution to a "traditional" controller.. For her Haloness I just went with the Xbox 360. I went with the Metroid Prime-ish idea that a D-pad as four face buttons, so that would leave the A and B for shoulders.

Analog stick + motion sensing = two analog sticks, D-pad = ABXY, A + B + Z1 + Z2 = four triggers. The only thing really missing is a D-pad, but most games hardly ever use the D-pad in conjunction with both analog sticks anyway.

Then I went into various examples of Revolution gameplay. I started off with Zelda, since she decided to bring that one up.. But rather than randomly spurt out information I thought about a Revolution Zelda, and what a great way it could be to show off the system's capabilities.

All of the different weapons in Zelda could be applied creatively to the motion sensing.. The hookshot and boomerang are my favorite thoughts, personally, not to mention the sword.

But then I had the question of "first or third person," which I pose to you all.

Then there was Metroid, Trauma Center, Mario Paint, any racing game you could imagine.. Bottom line, it got me way more excited about the Revolution than any article about the Tokyo Game Show tech demos has.

She seemed rather impressed with it too, though maybe a little put-off by the fact that I wrote, "Plus they're making a traditional 'shell' for the controller, so quit yer bitching" on the last page.

--

In Latin today we had an actual "difficult" test, making us translate rather than do the standard bubble-in ones we've had up until this point, but once I was done I decided to draw the scene in Star Wars with Vader spilling the beans about his.. Relation to Luke (Spoiler: He's his dad). But for the sake of not completely wasting my possibly study time, I decided to make the word bubbles in Latin.

Vader: Ego sum pater tuus
Luke: Eheuuuuuuu

..Yeah. Originally I had the wrong interjection for Luke, so he was shouting "hooraaaaaay" instead, but my teacher corrected that.

God, I suck.
Comments (2) | Permalink