Here’s the FTM shirt I mentioned in the post below!

Do you hate it when people ask you why you carry around a DS and a GBM? Okay, so maybe you don’t have this problem. Or a GBM. But whatever. I got asked this twice this week. It’s really annoying when people point out the fact that I’ve got one too many things that I carry around with me. Some even seem to be overly concerned with my portable gaming habit. Kinda annoying.

Well, at least one person understood, saying that some things are just better on the Micro, although she hasn’t played one yet.

The Micro is kind of a preview to the Lite. It’s going to have a similar D-pad. I like that D-pad so much that I can’t play GBA games on the Micro and then the DS, because it seems like too much effort.

So, my Threadless shirt came in! I really like these companies that take some pride in what they do. The shirt has nice little touches, like the tag being already cut out, and a nice little Threadless/designer print in its place.

And down near the right buttal area, there’s another logo.

In case you hadn’t seen it before (and because my camera needed a recharge before I could get the front of it, it’s this shirt. It’s a pun, it’s cute, it’s even gotten a laugh out of some people.

The other T-shirt I ordered also arrived! The Feel the Magic goldfish shirt that I can’t find a link for at the moment. It definitely wasn’t up to Threadless standards, but it wasn’t bad. I didn’t run into any other Feel the Magic fans the day I wore it, but I did get a few “nice goldfish thing!” comments.

>t

I’m in a rather writish mood. I’ve got a few ideas to incubate, and hopefully you’ll all get to read them when they arrive at their perfectly rendered final forms. (wink!) I just want to put the ideas down so that I’ll be required to act upon them at some point.

Yet another list post:

• A review of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. In the end, it is a tired Castlevania and a good argument for not repeating the same game form more than three times in a row. I still like it, though. Lame tentative title: Dusk of Metroidvania!
• An argument for portable game design rules, and why not following them will ruin your game, no matter how good it is. As seen on the GC recently.
• A review/valentine for Drill Dozer. I love this game, even if it does come in an ugly oversized maroon GBA cart. I’d play it on a DS lite, where it would stick out a few centimeters with it’s ugliness, and I’d play it proudly like that.
• A rant on why GBA carts have to stick out of the DS lite’s bottom. Couldn’t the positions of the GBA and DS slots have been swapped, allowing the GBA cart to stick benignly out of the top of the unit? I was going to say that buying a GB Micro is completely ridiculous now, since the DS lite will have a bigger screen of equal quality and the ability to play DS games for only $50 more. But now, the GBM has an advantage in its sleekness. It’s still overpriced though. Don’t buy it. XD (oops, i just wrote the rant. crap.)

That’s all for now. Actually working on this stuff could take a while, since my only free time is on the weekends and between classes. And late at night when I can’t sleep, which is the best time for writing.

Here’s what I’ve obtained today! Some of these come from a big game store run earlier today, but they were all gifts. Some were even a surprise.

-A tiny platinum Gamecube filled with gummy candy.
-A superlative portable light that’s meant for the GBA, but I will modify to use on my NGPC.
-One excellent-condition used copy of Alundra meant to replace the scuzzly, scratched, boxless one I have now.
-Used F-Zero GX for Gamecube. Haven’t played it yet, but I sure do love F-Zero.
-Zelda II for GBA, classic NES edition, brand new. The gray cartridge is a really cool touch, but it would have been even better if it were gold. Nintendo are almost masters of nostalgia.
-Drill Dozer for GBA. This game rocks my pants off. I get a distinctively Megamanish vibe from it.
-The Rub Rabbits! for DS. Oh emm god, this is cool. It gives me the same feeling that Feel the Magic did when I played it the first time, which was also the first time I played a DS. The animation is so nice in the intro. It even told me “Happy Birthday!”
-A Threadless T-shirt that should be arriving in a few days. This one!
-A hot bowl of pho! It was 26 degrees outside, so this was great. I still haven’t had birthday sushi, but any day that I can have fine asian cuisine is a good day.

So, hell, I’m 25 now. That means that I can no longer stay in a youth hostel, my brain will be slower to form new neural connections, and my car insurer might lower my premiums and forget about the big wreck I had when I was 16. My hair’s already thinning, but it’s been that way for a few years now. I’m older than most people I work with, but still younger than some. I like my job, which is good, since the field that one is in between the ages of 25 and 35 is statistically most likely to last the rest of one’s life. What else does it mean? I don’t know.

I’m going to go play more Zelda II. I’ll be playing on a GB Micro, complementing the other two guys in here, one of which is playing Boktai 2 on an SP, and another who’s playing Wario Land 2 on an original GBA. Perfect.

It’s time for a pure-speculation attack on the week’s DS news. Pure speculation !!

• As a longtime Opera fanboy who’s really excited about the Opera DS announcement from earlier this week, I hope it will include the one thing that got me hooked on Opera: mouse gestures. Hold R and move the stylus to the left! (or make that L, i need my right hand to hold the stylus.)
• There’s a homebrew Flash (as in Macromedia) player for DS now, and it’s already good enough to run a Strong Bad email! Will I eventually live out my dream of playing Dofus on a DS? (probably not. why am i obsessed with playing non-DS things on a DS? that reminds me, i need to try out Flashback DS.)
• With the announcement of voice chat for Metroid Prime ~Hunters~, it means that it’s time for Nintendo to implement that headphone/funky mic jack combo on the DS. A Nintendo headset better be coming soon, so we can as cool as Xbox Live dorks. (side note: i don’t know who started the thing where you put a game’s ~subtitle~ in tildes, but i blame insert credit for me doing it.)
• Tecmo is bringing PangYa to the Revolution! That’s cool, but will Nintendo then release Really True Swing Golf for it? (will Konami release Golf Golf Revolution? =P)

So, what else is new? Oh yeah, I haven’t been able to clear-coat my white DS back like I planned to. The weather went from 80 degrees and windy to 30 degrees and really windy last night. What happened was that Punxsutawney Phil used his six-more-weeks-of-winter ice breath attack on Feb. 2, and it took 2 weeks to reach Texas. Hooray for weather.

(Puns on ‘myspace’ will never end. =P)

Okay, I officially moved into MySpace. There be three songs up there, two from “Ninety Nine” and one new one. Check it out, friend me, comment me, adore me, share me with friends, whatever.

I plan on putting up new songs when they’re ready, and rotating the songs weekly-ish. And since I get a lot of messages that are like “How do you DO that?”, I’ll blog a little bit about the process and the history of Paniflex.

What’s weird is that I decided to do this after both my local newspaper and the newspaper I work for did features on different aspects of MySpace. Then, my girlfriend and her friends got into it as a kind of way to pass dirty notes about boys and stuff. I decided to join specifically to have some music up there. So, all my friends so far are her friends. It feels odd though, being as introversive as I am and joining a website that’s just for meeting/talking to people.

So have fun! There’s a link in the sidebar now.

To mark this occasion, I wrote a song! I wrote it all within Kammo’s birthday, no cheating or anything. Here it is. It’s called Kamshaft’s Hall of Shotguns.
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So, I was sitting at my desk, playing AC, and a photographer comes over and says “We NEED your DS!” Understanding that it was for a photo, I saved and handed it over. A little while later, I get my DS back (with a few fingerprints), and find out that this portrait is going to run.

The handsome guy is the president of Gamers on Campus, and the picture was for a profile we did on him and his club. While it ran in black and white in the real newspaper (this is from the Web version), you can still tell it’s mine by the white bottom.

More DS painting stuff follows.
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I’ve uploaded a new load of pictures of my newly-whitened DS bottom panel to my flickr. It’s coming together nicely, and it’s a much more pleasant process than the old green one I tried to do! After I get a Lite (can’t resist.), I promise I won’t do anything to it. And this one will be set up to run homebrew and be subject to my experiments.

The Electric Blue DS ~Tanuki Fury Edition~

I’ve added a bunch of notes on the pictures that explain what else I’m going to do to it. For now though, it looks nice.

First of all, I have a new song that I turned out rather quickly last night. Get it here, while you can. It’s slow and constructed of the incidental harmonies between an arpeggio and a simple melody. 3 voices plus drums. Zing!

Second: see right.

Third: My copy of The Gamer’s Quarter #4 arrived today. It’s even better than before this quarter, cementing its position as the currently-published magazine that I like to read most. There are typos in it though, which is kind of annoying. In fact… WES, IF YOU’RE OUT THERE, I’LL PROOFREAD TGQ IN EXCHANGE FOR A SUSCRIPTION! Hm, maybe I should use e-mail instead of yelling. Anyway, it’s still good. Go download the pdf at their site so you can read the Metal Gear Crossing comic. It’s worth it for that alone.