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weblog entry excerpts for March 2006
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03.01.06: Happy First Birthday to Clark! posted by Joe
Tomorrow, March 2nd, 2006, Clark turns one year old.
At least, according to US East Coast time.
You see, since he was born in Korea, his March 2nd, 2005, happened fourteen hours before "ours" did. So, in actual chronological fact, his birthday is now.
What I find most interesting about all this is that for the rest of his life, assuming he lives somewhere in the EST zone, he will always actually be fourteen hours older than we think he is. [continue reading "Happy First Birthday to Clark!"]
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03.03.06: Universal Fighting System! Probably Not What You're Thinking! posted by Joe
Yeah, see, it's a card game. Feel free to bail out now if you thought I was suddenly into some kind of bloodsport.
I recently picked up the Penny Arcade UFS boxed set. The UFS family of games are slated to hit later this year, featuring Street Fighter and Soulcalibur, and for some crazy reason they decided to debut the game with a learn-to-play 1 on 1 set featuring Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade. I liked the presentation - two custom deck boxes, one for your Gabe deck and one for your Tycho deck - but I think $30 is a bit much. Most games sell one-player starters at $10, or a two-player set with a pair of half-decks for a maybe a buck or two more. But two full decks at $30 is well beyond the curve, even if you add in those spiffy deck boxes. $25 probably would have been a fairer price, but I gather this is intended to be a low print run collectible. [continue reading "Universal Fighting System! Probably Not What You're Thinking!"]
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03.04.06: Two New Mac Users. posted by Joe
While we're talking about Penny Arcade, check out Friday's newspost and comic.
I've been reading them for years, and they've always thrown off a more or less anti-Mac vibe. They've kvetched about the iPod's price (which I wholly agreed with until Apple started giving the iPod more to do, like the photo integration, color screen, slideshow output, and now video). Gabe has openly asked Mac fans to explain what makes them so great, because, as an artist, he's about the last one alive that still uses a PC for design work. And as I recall, that convo also ended with a sour note about the price. There is a recurring character who is a Mac fan and was originally this spacey, ADD hippie... but lately has morphed into an angry, screw-PCs beatnik.
But there has been a sea change. From Tycho's Friday newspost: [continue reading "Two New Mac Users."]
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03.06.06: Ninja Ape Assault 2: Dead Amp posted by Joe / all entries in Farewell to the PS2
released July 2003, purchased July 2003 click here for my review written in August 2003!
This is an underappreciated title. It's easy to pick up, unashamedly silly, and has plenty of replay value. You're sent into various themed worlds looking for errant monkeys, which you catch by stunning them with a light saber and then scooping them up with a net. The gimmick is that all your weapons are controlled off the right analog stick... which will probably be the first time that you aren't just using the right stick for camera control.
There's plenty of unlockables, great voice work, lots of variety... and I still would bet that you won't find more than six people in your lifetime that have heard of it, much less actually bought it. I'm not saying it's the greatest game in the world, but if you're still wasting money on Crash Bandicoot and the small army of licensed mascot platformers... well, it is possible to find fun games among all that drek.
I wonder if the Monkey-With-An-Uzi on the cover did them more harm than good.
Memory Score: It's not a franchise I obsess over, but I know a good game when I play one.
[continue reading "Ninja Ape Assault 2: Dead Amp"]
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03.07.06: Pictures from the tol party... posted by Joe
We rented a facility that is part of a small local park for Clark's birthday party. It's actually kind of a weird building, because it was plainly somebody's house once upon the '70s and is now on county park property. There's two largish rooms and a kitchen. We set up a receiving table, a food table, and a Clark table in the main room... and used the other room for eating seating and to run the looping slideshow.
Yes, I used iPhoto + iMovie + iTunes and made a Clark slideshow. I'm not proud of being some kind of Apple iLife toady, but it happened. More on that after the pictures. [continue reading "Pictures from the tol party..."]
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03.09.06: Metroid Lament posted by Joe
I've been slowly playing Metroid 2 lately, mainly because there's not much else going on right now. I have every intention of picking up Chibi Robo, but I feel like I ought to finish Metroid 2 first.
Thing is, Metroid 2 isn't exactly gripping me. Part of the problem is that I've been jumping into it a little too late at night and for play periods that are a little too short. Since there's so much backtracking - and so much travel back and forth between the light and dark worlds - I usually end up wasting the first half of any given session trying to remember just what in the hell I was doing. [continue reading "Metroid Lament"]
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03.12.06: Atheism and the DCU posted by Joe
The opening scene of Infinite Crisis #5 shows a slew of heroes attending a religious service, presumably seeking solace in the face of the Earth-shattering cataclysm going on around them.
Almost by definition, this is a stupid thing to include in a super-hero comic, particularly inside a fictional universe as broad and detailed as the DCU. Number one, there's an awful lot of concentrated power wasting time in Gotham Cathedral that would be better utilized out there stomping Alex Luthor's mad scheme.
But number two, how can any of these guys consider themselves religious, given what they do for a living? [continue reading "Atheism and the DCU"]
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03.14.06: Assemble. posted by Joe
I watched the Ultimate Avengers DVD over the weekend. I think I picked it up just out of sheer curiousity, since I'm not a huge Avengers fan. The Avengers are, quite frankly, a haphazard collection of b-teamers. You have the core three - Captain America, Iron Man, Thor - and then a bunch of hangers-on. And actually, I don't think much of Thor either. So there you go. My point seems thoroughly proven in that Marvel's current New Avengers book has added moneymakers Wolverine and Spider-Man to the team.
But I wanted to see just how Marvel would handle a direct-to-DVD animated feature. Plus it was cheap, $13.
It's not horrible, I'll say that. It certainly suffers from Too Much Setup, but you can't really fault it for that since it's the first damn movie. The animation is fine, better than standard TV fare but nowhere near a theatrical release. [continue reading "Assemble."]
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03.22.06: DDRsky & Hutch: Play Commando 2 posted by Joe / all entries in Farewell to the PS2
In light of the theoretical PS3 launch date, I'm going to artificially extend the regular Farewell to the PS2 feature. Starting next time, we're going to switch to bimonthly and only cover three games an entry. This should get us into August or later!
released September 2003, purchased September 2003
We enjoyed several DDRs back on the PS1, but I'm not sure why I waited for MAX2 to get one for the PS2. It's not like there is a great deal of change between versions.
This game sparked a serious DDR-as-exercise phase, to the point that I set up a permanent DDR area in the basement. This series will kick your ass, even on the "low impact" exercise setting. The game tracks your burned calories and such, which looks pretty impressive in rather short order. You might recall the media suddenly realizing that DDR exists about this time, and half-assed stories slugged "a video game that IMPROVES your HEALTH?!?!?1//1/1/!??!?1" all over the place.
I'm looking forward to DDR morphing into more of a lifestyle thing, where you can use your own music and regularly download new songs and dances. It could become a huge exercise tool if they would evolve it outside of pure video games.
Favorite track: "Love at First Sight" by Kylie Minogue. Yes, it's in iTunes.
Memory Score: You have to get two dance mats. It's a given.
[continue reading "DDRsky & Hutch: Play Commando 2"]
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03.28.06: Game Review / Trapt (PS2) posted by Joe
This is a bit of a downer for me, because I was a big fan of the series that spawned Trapt: the Deception franchise on the PS1. Despite the uber leet name change, Trapt is the fourth game in the series. Starting with the unrefined Tecmo's Deception in 1997, the series hit stride with 1998's Kagero: Deception 2, and kind of limped through 2000's Deception 3: Dark Delusion. And in 2005, we have the half-assed next-gen edition, Trapt for PS2.
Why the long break between games? The Deception team was kept very busy on a new and justifiably awesome franchise, the Fatal Frame series. Obviously, poor Trapt did not get the attention it deserved.
Execution aside (pun intended, you'll get it in a minute), it's a fabulous concept... its nearest cousin is probably the Dungeon Keeper series (1997 and 1999) for PC. You have the run of an old castle, and you set booby traps to kill the various invaders. Of course there's always some grand plotline of dubious morality and a fair amount of existential hand-wringing... but at the core, you're setting up traps in order to kill people in the most spectacular way possible. [continue reading "Game Review / Trapt (PS2)"]
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03.28.06: The High Stakes World of Competitive Tetris posted by Joe
One of the nice things about playing Tetris DS online is that nobody is out there cheating at it. I mean, what could you do, set it to only give you the long pieces?
Tetris DS is actually about the easiest version of Tetris I've ever played anyway. Not only do you get the "ghost piece" function, which obliterates any need to shift your penetrating Tetri-gaze anywhere away from the crucial bottom half of the dropfield, but you also get to see the next six pieces that are coming. Not to mention the hold feature, where you can stash a piece for use later. I don't know when these ideas became standard, but it sure beats the original B&W Game Boy bust-yer-ass-blind Tetris. I sure hope Nintendo threw another token check at Alexey. [continue reading "The High Stakes World of Competitive Tetris"]
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03.30.06: Drop the Bob-omb. posted by Joe
Just read the unedited version of Nintendo President Saturu Iwata's GDC keynote speech. He starts out with a clever switcheroo, where you think he's talking about the Nintendo-Sony rivalry but he's actually making a point about Pepsi vs. Coke.
Then he tells the story of the upcoming Brain Age DS game, which is based on a mental exercise fad currently gripping Japan. He has this to say about the initial meeting he held with the professor who kicked off the brain improvement fad:
I’m sure some people at Nintendo wondered how I could spend so much time on the kind of meeting on the very day of the DS launch, but I think it turned out to be a good idea.
On the day of the DS launch. Can you imagine Peter Moore or J. Allard or any other Xbox tool saying that? Blowing off a launch day just to do some fact-finding research on a quirky-ass non-game game? [continue reading "Drop the Bob-omb."]
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