Last week was full of mindless hours of gaming: MAME, World in conflict beta, and Richard Burns rally. Nothing really blog worthy, not even world in conflict, as it seems I’m terrible at RTSs and that’s that. Luckily this week was a tad more progressive. I ordered a new DVD drive(an LG GSA-H54NK) which I trouble-shot(shooted?) for an entire day trying all sorts of things until I realized I was using the wrong type of ATA cable… truly a “D’Oh!” moment. The day before that a friend of mine dropped by my house with an NES advantage of all things. Apparently the car parts place he went to had a small thrift store inside where he spotted this thing. It was layered in black crap(figuratively) and it looked like someone salvaged it from a port-a-potty -not very pretty, but I vowed to clean it up. So over the course of two days I spent about 4 hours with: paper towels, Windex, tooth picks, and Q-tips and restored it to it’s former glory.
See those seams? Oh yea, those where once filled with… black stuff, or what I referred to earlier as “crap”. Oh and if I took a “before” picture the ugliness would’ve broken my camera, so yea, I avoided that. 
On Thursday(this week, not last) I went to the bay area all day for a Giants game. It was great, I haven’t been in the bay area for ages and the last time I saw the Giants in person was at the old candlestick park – which I believe they now refer to as “Monster park” since Monster cables bought the naming rights. First thing you notice when you visit the bay area is the marine layer, nice and cool weather with occasional fog. I’m from the lower foothills bordering the valley so I’m used to extremely hot and dry weather. The marine layer is nice at first but as the day progresses it gets even colder and by 6 o’clock you better have another layer prepared(I brought along a sweatshirt). Our seats of the game were in the upper-upper deck but we had a phenomenal view of the bay and we could still see the ball being tossed around so there was no loss(not a bad seat in the house really). I really regret not bringing my camera it was a beautiful day in a beautiful park. On a side note I had some excellent fish and chips for lunch right there in the park. I also had some wonderful Alaskan halibut in Berkley for Dinner later on, I don’t think I’ve eaten that much fish in one day before. Though the best part of the day by far was the fact that the Giants actually won. Quite fast too, the total time of the entire game was around 2 Hours and 30 Minuets!
Great day, now I’m back to sitting in my chair playing shmups mindlessly all day. Or am I?
Back from my 4 day vacation I’ve uploaded a few pictures to show my little venture of the eastern Sierras.
We stayed in a cabin at June lake and from there we would travel on the (very obscure)highways to the places we wanted to go -being kind of in the middle of all the places we wanted to visit. When we arrived on our first day at the lake it was too late to travel anyplace, so we were pretty bored sitting around waiting for the day to end. We(My friend Kenny and I -as he traveled with me on this particular trip) got the idea to explore some of the small town at June lake out of boredom and made a surprising discovery. In one of the buildings we noticed a working Neo-Geo MVS arcade cabinet(w/1 button kinda broken) loaded with King of Fighters 2001. What are the odds? I can’t even find a cabinet loaded with KOF in my own city! This “building” was actually totally not in business, and looked like it was in the middle of being converted to a skate shop/arcade from a… arcade?. The guy let us in without question(as he skated around on a half pipe), all the coin doors were open, and so we just used the happ/cherry switches for credits and played until he felt like “closing” the place. Besides that we mostly played on the road with Puyo Puyo chu(DS) and Advance Wars… to ourselves, knowing a multiplayer match of that would take ages to complete.
Back to the trip though, the first landmarks we visited on day one were Devils postpile and rainbow falls.
We did some roaming around Yosemite that day as well but the real picture worthy stuff was when we stopped along the road to Yosemite at 10,000 feet or so.
The next day we went to the “ghost town” of Bodie. Very eerie and interesting town. Unfortunately we couldn’t get into the stamping mill as it seemed we needed to be part of a guided tour in order to enter. We couldn’t find any guided tours happening so that was that.
(Taken looking through a window of one of the buildings)
The trip was all-round a success though it could’ve been better had I reminded my friend to bring his Dreamcast. Just kidding, my parents would freak if I brought a console with me on vacation…
This week was the last week of summer school and I have been a bit busy… but today was the last day so no more late updates until the actual school year starts again(er.. I hope). E3 also took place this week and I was angry I missed most of the live E3 coverage at summer school this year. However I did at least manage to catch up by looking back at 1UP’s live-blogs – which are hilarious(start from the bottom). One announcement that caught my eye at E3 was Sega’s announcement to bring Bleach DS 2nd to the US. You see, I did a review for the Japanese version about a month ago thinking the game would probably never make it to US shores, and to make it worse the site I did it for hasn’t even launched yet! So maybe it’ll be considered obsolete soon, who knows, but I don’t want to risk it so I’ll link right to the article and encourage you to read it now. (hint for the lazy: It’s good, buy it!) The thing that worries me is the review could have been better if I had used a more thorough translation guide and took the time to look deeper into the card system. But I took a “who cares it’s a fighter” approach and reviewed it pretty much based on the basic elements of gameplay.(so it goes…lol)
…
This week I’ve been playing a variety of randomness: Truxton2 , Advance Wars DS, Power Stone, and Blue Wish Resurrection -some much more than others. At school someone loaded the school’s shared drive with Halo1, and so during lunch you can find upwards to 30 people in the computer lab all playing Halo on the LAN at the same time(16 per server of course). Me being not so fond of halo sit-out on the sidelines and watch. I played around with the hardware a bit and got some shmups working, but I came to the conclusion that the graphics drivers are very buggy(Intel integrated… I didn’t even think they made them anymore) and can’t run a Dreamcast emulator despite being dual core(no Ikaruga for me). I wanted to get a picture but the day I brought the camera the computer lab had a class in it during lunch(middle schoolers) so the halo players had all been kicked out.
I’ll be playing a crap load of DS tomorrow though *looks at a clock* -er… today, when I take a long road trip with my parents and one of my good friends. I’m traveling south-east to check out a ghost town called “Bodie”, along with a few other land marks such as Devil’s Postpile and some other randomness I can’t think of. It’ll be fun and I’ll make sure to take pictures! I will Be back on Tuesday. Until then:
-NPC out
I have officially been distracted this week. But for damn good reason: “Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann”!
A crazy anime about -no… I don’t even want to spoil it for those who may want to watch it. All you need to know is that it’s by Gainax and it’s really over the top. Go watch it! Now!
Back to the realm of video games. I was distracted from Yggdra Union this week when I picked up this awesome shump up from… somewhere. I think it may have been NeoGAF. Regardless I found it at the “Shoot the core” database again, where in romanji it’s apparently called “CHO REN SHA”. Which translates to something along the lines of “Super-discharge successively” or “Super running fire”. It’s super fun and that’s all I really care about. Although I decided to look into the game a bit more since I noticed the download site had “X68K” all over the place and a “disk image” download for the “X68K”. Funny thing, just last week I tried emulating a Sting game(makers of yggdra union) that ran on the Sharp X68000 which was commonly abbreviated as “X68K”. Turns out I was right, and upon further searching I believe this game to actually be a homebrew project and not an official game! Which would explain why it’s not on the game list of X68K games at Wikipedia, and why it’s up for download in the first place I guess. ‘¬_¬
Then some google image searching led me to a dude who stuffed a microITX computer in his left over Sharp X68000 case and with S-video out plays this game on his TV. Pretty sweet!(note: page uses Shift_JIS encoding)
I recommend you download it if you like old school shmups and at least play it to level 3(which is totally awesome). Last thing, I liked the name-entry music so much I recorded and uploaded it for all to listen.
OH and Happy 4th!… Yay for shitty “safe fireworks”. Bleh, I’m not even buying any this year.
