My, my. I just spent six hours straight playing a game. It was pure joy.

I just spent six hours playing Choro Q. The PS2 one. Choro Q is actually an unbelievably long-running series, and I know nothing about it outside of this one.

It’s what happened when Mario Kart and Gran Turismo snuck off into a closet at your last party. It’s cartoony, but has more forgiving physics than MK, and it has the customizability of GT. It’s also about $10 anywhere you’d care to get it. I got mine at Fry’s, but I’d been eyeing it at GameStop and other places for a while.

It also apparently has RPG elements and driving minigames. I spent the majority of my time today just racing though. Building up cash, upgrading things, seeing what works for me and what dosen’t. Ironically, though I’ve never driven a manual, I prefer the manual control in CQ. In fact, I’ve never driven a manual in any racing game I’ve played, which includes mostly Mario Kart, F-Zero and Out Run. I’ve never played any of the GT series or any of the “serious” racers. (maybe a race or two in Project Gotham when my friend got his 360. stuff like that is completely lost on me. though now, i think i owe it to myself to give them a shot.)

It seems pretty open-ended, since it hasn’t penalized me in any way for spending all my time racing. I’ve unlocked 3 shops for parts and other doodads (my racing screen features a suction-cup kitty that dangles in response to getting hit or the sharpness of turns; also available are dice, robots, other things)

The cars are perfectly squashed versions of their real-life couterparts. Except the Mini Cooper, which is basically proportionate to the real one. Haha. XD

I haven’t heard many opinions of CQ really. A fond mention on insert credit sometimes, but that’s all. Check out this IGN review that gives the game a 2.0. Then check out this glowing IGN preview. Definitely a not-for-everyone kind of game. In fact, after the first 20 minutes, I was ready to declare it crap. The first race, where you have nothing and move very, very slowly, is pretty dull. And the game dosen’t lead you into its world. It drops you there. I like that.

(CQ is also the name of a pretty-good underappreciated movie from ‘01)

I have not played Silent Hill. I know the movie deviated from its plot. I know that a lot of elements went missing. But the movie can stand up on its own.

Let me also say that I hate excessively scary and gory movies, and it takes a great deal of persuasion to make me watch and enjoy one. I’m a wuss. I’ve probably said that before. I went to see this with my girlfriend, and she was more calm than I was. The fact that I still enjoyed it after that says a lot.

The soundtrack is probably the best I’ve heard in a film recently. It never seems to degenerate into orchestral psychoacoustics that artificially heighten the drama. It has melody and atmosphere and funky industrial clangy-hissy noises that actually work with the music. And that siren. That’s an incredible sound. It sounds like it is actually produced by a bunch of strings doing the rising glissando, joined by french horns as the pitch plateaus. Maybe some trumpets too. And it is mixed really smoothly, so that the instruments’ character is barely given away. If it is even done with instruments at all. Foreboding and beautiful.

If I have any qualm with it, it’s that the ending feels wrong. It’s logical, but it kinda negates everything that went on in the film. And it’s fairly emotionless. Then there’s the tacky animated credit sequence that all game movies seem to have. That’s not really cool, guys.

I know a lot of people hate this movie with a passion. Maybe I just went into with the right spirit. (4 hours of sleep, early afternoon showing, not having played the original, enjoying psychological overtones… possible hallucinations) A lot of folks complain that it’s vague and incomprehensible, whereas I thought it was intuitive and logical. My admittedly non-average brain probably just filled in spots that others’ didn’t. Ohoho.

So yeah. New name. Like with a friend who suddenly decides that he wants to be called something different, new names always take some getting used to.

I told my girlfriend, and she said it was stupid. She told a friend of hers though, a person who owns an NES (for her) and a GameCube (for her kids), and she loved it. This girlfriend-friend is a pretty good example of an outsider gamer. She’s not up on the current ‘cool’ games, though she knows the systems. Her kids play Harry Potter and she plays SMB3. I play SMB3 with her sometimes, too.

At this point, I’ve accepted the name with a grain of salt. I’ll be holding one in my hands someday, and it won’t matter what it’s called. People will get used to it. And if it sounds cool to the outsider gamers, then it has done its job. Maybe we’re too into games to really ‘get’ the name.

So, I left my Electric Blue DS ~Tanuki Fury Edition~ with Brain Age in my girlfriend’s care all week. Surprisingly, she’s actually playing it and enjoying it. It’s not a bad DS game. She says she needs the training.

To put this in perspective, she became epileptic almost 2 years ago. She has been fighting with medication and life changes ever since. The seizures, the drugs and their side effects, the lack of ability to hold a job, attend classes or even drive, all those things have combined to make her feel, as she says, dumb. She plays things like FFXI and Oblivion to pass the time these days. (she’s not a visual epileptic, so video games are not usually bad) While she likes games like these, she admits that they can get tedious and boring and not very stimulating.

She says Brain Age makes her feel better. She likes it. Dr. Kawashima is just pushy enough and just cute enough to make her want to play, but not feel obligated to. She calls me once a night when I’m at work and tells me her brain age. It’s been a week, so we’ll see how long it stays habitual.

I play it occasionally (4 stamps since I bought it, woo), and I like it. It’s the game Wario Ware wants to be when it grows up.

My girlfriend even picked up my long-neglected copy of Nintendogs and played it, adopting a new toy poodle. Just hearing her play it, with it’s cute menu sounds and barking and music, brings back fond memories. Trying to train her dog to respond to her voice was the only bad part about the game, and she admits it.

She admitted it by threatening to throw my DS.

-This is post is late on several accounts and rambles too much-

A coworker of mine is going to E3. Not for our newspaper, but for some thing he writes for… quake something planet or other. Anyway, he offered to get me some swag, so he’s a good guy. I told him to steal me a Revolution controller.

(i wrote that paragraph before the name was changed to the Nintendo WRYYYYYYYYY)

The same day, this post goes up on 4CR, getting me all excited. I knew Children of Mana and all those Final Fantasies had to make it out here, and I’ve been waiting for comfirmation since they were announced. I was starting to get worried. Children is something I want pretty badly, being a Mana freak and all. (note: i’ve been a Mana freak since a few months ago when i decided that Sword actually was pretty good. changed my opinion of the series.)

Final Fantasy diatribe time!
FF6 is the best one ever. Followed by 4, followed by 9, followed by… I dunno. None of the others are as endearing as those. 1 is kinda banal, but okay. 2 is ass-hard and almost not worth it. 3 I haven’t played, but the DS remake looks really cool and I love the Tactics kinda art style. 5 is kinda boring. 7 is alright. 10 is also alright. 11 is online. 12 looks like it could rock my pants off.

But Rocket Slime has to be the best announcement. I couldn’t even remember what the game was; when I first saw it, I was thinking ‘What? Didn’t they give up on Egg Monster Hero?’ But tim rogers reminded me. The name’s kind of odd, and he sums it up best here. But he calls it one of 2005’s best, so that can’t be bad. I look forward to it now.

I’m eyeing LostMagic now. I’m out of both cash and time lately, what with the semester’s end coming up, but I want to get it eventually. It looks interesting. New SMB is still at the top of my buying list, so I can get that the moment it’s out (right after finals, during a week when i won’t be working ^_____^), so I can add to that LostMagic, Children, Rocket Slime and Final Fantasy III. And I know I’ll have to pick up Final Fantasy VI Advance at some point. Perhaps not even to play it. Not that I would not play it ever.

Sonic Rush rocks pretty hard. I spent the better part of Saturday collecting chaos emeralds and discovering the frantic beauty of the Sonic 2-style bonus stages with stylus control, and now I’m stuck on the secret stage figuring out how to beat the boss. It’s a cool stage. It could be cooler, but it’s nice.

Dr. カワシマ has brought my brain age down to 30. Not that it was really that high, though I started at 80 because I suck at pronouncing things. My girlfriend is going to start on it tomorrow, and that will be a true test of how well it works.

I wonder if anything like Cave Story will ever be made by big publishers. Its intimate nature, from being crafted by a single person, is unreplecable. There are so many details, I found out as I played. There’s big things like getting the machine gun or the worm or the spur, and little things like beating the game with the mimiga mask on (which i wouldn’t have even done if it weren’t so cute), and even littler things like Curly’s underwear and Chaco’s lipstick and the Ikachans in the water fight.

And the nuances in gameplay. The machine-gun floating. The fact that I had to play through Hell for almost a month before I could actually beat the real last boss. I have played it inside out, and still, I miss Cave Story.

One person and five years is not a way for a company to make money from a game. But it is a way for a person to make a timeless game. There is always one game that I have to play straight through, at least once a year: Mega Man 2. The last time I did it, it was via NES emulator on my DS. The next time, it will be the same, but on my DS Lite. Cave Story, despite being only a year and a few months old, is the second game I must play at least once a year. I hear there’s a PSP port in the works, and if it’s decent, it’s going to make me think about parting with at least $200 of my money. I know I threaten to buy a PSP every other month, but I mean it this time.

I’ve been playing okay-mediocre platformers (Super Princess Peach, Sonic Rush) because they’re all I can get these days. Won’t someone slow down and dare to be small? Some of the “indie” (read: no publisher) DS games that are being developed (Western Lords and now, Drawn to Life) really give me hope. In the end, they could be just as mediocre as anything else. But I have hope.

I’m glad Pixel is still posting progress updates on his next project. Since I can’t read them, I can only hope that they’re not saying something like “I have no will to do this anymore. I press ahead only out of concern for my fans; however, I feel that this effort will prove uninspired.”

Please no. XD

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I thought this was the coolest way to celebrate Easter, besides, you know, the religious way. I played #3, #2, and #1 from that list.

I also FlashMe’d my DS Phat, and ran Nitrotracker on it. I’m surprised, it’s a really nice piece of software. The touchscreen interface works properly (most homebrew DS apps tend to mess up the touchscreen detection somehow), and it has all the features of a grown-up tracker, even recording through the DS’s mic. I sampled a clean electric guitar and tracked the “Smoke on the Water” riff (i do that when i’m bored) to test it out, and it was impressive. I just couldn’t save, and I don’t know if it’s a yet-to-come feature or a glitch.
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Last night, as I was writing yesterday’s post, I couldn’t stop thinking about Ragnarok Online. I hate the game for making me love it; I love the game for showing me how pointless I believe MMORPGs are.

I still have the excellent Japanese character simulator bookmarked, along with a lot of RO fansites that have closed up. I used to be incredibly well-connected to the RO fanworld. New updates from the Korean version of RO were always frothily awaited, and the fansites were the best way to keep up with what kind of update the international version would get (after a year or so of waiting in most cases).

That’s Rufus Birch, the monk. A testament to an addiction. He’s in Ragnalimbo at level 93 or so. The ultimate goal of the game was to 1.) have a badass level 99 character and/or 2.) have a really awesome-looking character with cool-looking headgear. That headgear was my primary focus. I had a stable of poorly equipped but fashionable characters.
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Pay no attention to the Ragnarok sprite.

Even though I’ve had an incredibly cruddy evening (GBM + toilet = @&^$*!), I think I aughta do a little update on what I’ve been playing. I ordered Legend of Mana and Star Fox Assault via ebay for about $25 each. Not a bad price for two things I’ve been wanting to play for forever now. My current monetary pinch makes these the last two things I might buy for a while, so they better count. How do they stack up?

For the most part, my gaming has consisted of Shining Force GBA in my spare moments at work. It’s a damn fine remake of the first RPG I ever did play. But the other times, the hour between school and work, and the weekends have been pretty good.
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One of my psychology classes had this URL scrawled on the board before class:

www.personaldna.com

I checked it out, since I have to keep myself awake somehow, and it turns out to be a personality-test-type thing. Not a bad one either. I have a love for personality tests. Not the cheesy myspace-style ones. Real ones. The people who developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a temperament scale (also sometimes called the Jung Typology Test or something similar), were INFPs. I’m one too. (sorry to link to such ugly web design. XD)

This one is based on sliders and fuzzy logic, which can work quite well in the right circumstances. The input devices are pretty cool.

Anyway, let’s get to the neuroses! On to the more interesting parts of my results and what this thing means.

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A friend just obtained one o’ them PSones with a Sony LCD screen attached. I always thought they were kind cool but overpriced. A Suncoast store going out of business put one in our hands for about $60.

The screen is really nice. It actually makes most PS1 games look nicer than they would. The colors are bright but not over-saturated (see: new SP, DS Lite). The speakers register a 7.5 on a rock scale that goes to 11. It’s not portable enough, being the size of a couple sandwiches and requiring power and controller cords.

It sits real nice next to my computer though.

The screen is incredibly crisp. It’s odd that, even though this is a Sony-branded screen, it seems better than the PSP’s. It’s free of blurring and ghosting and dead pixels and other sorts of LCD screen pitfalls. The Alundra sprite at the top, or course, dosen’t really look that bad in person. Getting a screen picture is just impossible.

While in my care, this little box has so far partaken in Street Fighter Alpha 3, Jumping Flash and mostly Alundra. On the to-do list are Breath of Fire III and Mega Man Legends. This thing makes me hope that I can get a decent screen for my PS2 someday.

Addendum: Legend of Mana just came in the mail. But I’m heading to work. I played for about an hour before realizing that I had no more memory card space. So, later.