Been stupidbusy...

Haven't had too much time for games, but here're a few things from the past week:

I think I'm coming up on the last bit of Metroid Prime 2 (six more Sky Temple keys to go), so that'll be nice to get out of the way. It really is a great game, but I'm definitely going with overwhelming on this one. I'm not sure what it is, but it just feels bigger and less streamlined than the first one; I'm gonna blame the light and dark world dynamic... I never did care much for those.

Card Fighter's Clash 2 has been fun, but I think I like the first one better. The sequel has a much more linear and cohesive story to it (drama, character development, plot twists), but I preferred the openness of the first game. What's really killing me about the second game are the reaction cards. Those things can frustrate to no end and draw battles out to the point of tedium. It's a clever evolution for the series and it adds all kinds of new strategy, but I don't think it's for me.

...And I broke down and bought a complete copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga for Saturn. $250 CDN.

Rapture

Honestly, between this and this, I'm pretty stoked :)

I'm not sure if this is an upgrade or not...

I put Windows XP back on the work laptop and gave it to a new employee who will actually need to be mobile, so now I'm on a Dell Dimension 3100. It's a 3GHz Hyper-Threading Pentium 4 with EMT64, but only 512MB of RAM... And we don't have any extra DDR2 floating around the building, so it's back to the old 32-bit Windows XP for me too.

Time To Say Goodbe?

Six coins, over 200 cards, over 100 wins, and over 20 hours later, I think it may be time to move on to Card Figher's Clash 2. Yeah, there're still plenty of cards to collect, but that would involve incessant grinding and gambling, as well as finding another NGPC and a copy of the SNK version of the game to trade with... I'll pass, thanks.

Oh man, was that fun though :) Easily one of my favourite games in recent memory, if not ever!

Big Day

Earlier today, I stopped by some of the game places I'd been neglecting lately and came up pretty big! I got a Dreamcast 4x Memory Card; Eternal Champions: Challenge From The Dark Side for SEGA CD; Castlevania: Bloodlines, Gunstar Heroes, and MUSHA for Genesis; Ninja Gaiden for Game Gear; and Metal Storm for NES. I also found a copy of Jack Bros. for Virtual Boy... Kinda. I saw the manual in a shop, and asked the clerk if they had the actual game. He couldn't find it, but the owner said he had it somewhere. I left my name and number, and hope to hear back within the week.

Oh, and I got a working 64-bit Vista disc, and all installed on the Dell laptop flawlessly! That 40GB hard drive only has about 13GB free after all is said and done though :(

Exchanges

I found copies of Ninja Gaiden Black and Super Mario All-Stars for $13 and $5, respectively.

I then exchanged that Shin Samurai Spirits MVS cartridge, and traded-in my second Puzzle Bobble MVS cartridge, my old copy of Ninja Gaiden Black (no manual, rental stickers), and my "Greatest Hits" copy of Crash Bandicoot 2 for Enemy Zero, Sacrifice, and a non-"Greatest Hits" copy of Crash Bandicoot 2.

And it looks like that 64-bit Vista disc I was using on the laptop at work was bad, so I'm trying to track down a working copy.

Keeping busy...

In an effort to have one of each model of workstation in the organisation imaged and ready to deploy in case of failure, I gave up my pretty-sweet-for-an-office-computer Dell Vostro 200 (Core 2 Due E4500, 2GB of RAM, 320GB HDD) and adopted an odd-man-out Dell Latitude 131L (Turion 64 X2 TL-50, 1GB RAM, 40GB HDD). Hoping to make the most out of this downgrade (plus I hate laptops), I decided to install the 64-bit edition of Windows Vista... No dice though; couldn't get past the "Press any key to boot from CD or DVD" screen. Decided to give Windows XP x64 a go, but it didn't seem to like the SATA controller. I downloaded the ATi drivers and manually extracted what seemed to be the SB600 64-bit Windows drivers, but then it turns out my only options are to slipstream them onto a Windows disc or find a USB floppy drive. Right, so I ended up testing how the 32-bit edition of Vista behaves on our domain. Aside from some issues with our antivirus software, all seems well.

I bought what I thought was an original Japanese Samurai Spirits Neo Geo MVS cartridge yesterday, but it turned out to be an original (and seemingly repaired) Japanese Shin Samurai Spirits Neo Geo MVS cartridge... I already have the North American release though :(

I also picked up a complete copy of Super Wing Commander for 3D0; haven't tried it yet.

Wondering what to do with my remaining 1000 Wii points, I looked into newer WiiWare releases. I narrowed it down to Bit.Trip: Beat, LIT, and Alein Crush Returns, but in the end, decided to go with none... I may just hang on to my points until LostWinds 2 :)

Making a little more progress with that last Virtual Boy I was trying to repair, but I may also have two more from the shop from which to draw parts... I'll keep you posted.

Over 50% of the cards found, and I'm still enraptured by Card Fighter's Clash... Can't wait to get going on the fan-translated NGPC sequel on my PSP ;)

Hrm...

...182.08 works.

Damnit!

I decided to re-install Windows XP on my workhorse PC, and swap-in a 256MB AGP GeForce 7800 GS (which was just lying around for the past few months or so) for the 64MB AGP GeForce3 Ti 200 that was in there. Everything went well except for two things:

1) I decided to install Windows XP SP3 from a redistributable package. Running it from my external drive extracted the temporary files to my external drive. Running it from the D: drive extracted the temporary files to my extrenal drive. Unplugging my external drive and running the package from the D: drive extracted the temporary files to the C: drive... Would've been nice if it just did something sensical like extract the temporary files to the drive it's running from. Weird, but no big deal.

2) The new video card couldn't start with the latest NVIDIA drivers (182.50). I checked the AGP aperture setting, but that was fine. After a few tweaks and driver un-/re-installations with no success, I went with the Windows Update NVIDIA drivers (178.13) and all is well... Grrr.

Catching Up

I downloaded the following XBOX 360 demos overnight and played them today:

Dishwasher: Dead Samurai was surprisingly good! I'd heard it was a hardcore 2D beat-'em-up, and the videos looked pretty cool, but playing it made a huge difference. Aside from the somewhat sparse animation, I don't really have much to complain about (and I do have lots to enjoy) here.

Flock was really slick, but didn't seem like something I'd put a whole lot of time into. It plays like a good game, but not my cup of tea.

Ninja Blade was almost really cool. Easier than Ninja Gaiden, but the quick-time-events? Man, were 90% of them completely useless! Maybe if I see it in on sale...

The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena was pretty much what I remembered from The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay on the PC, and I really liked the original.

Wanted seemed like a waste of a demo. It comes across as a Gears Of War-esque action game, but with worse graphics and a much less epic feel to it. I suspect they may have just chosen a bad scene to present in the demo, but much like the movie, it ended up feeling like a great concept with too many important details glossed-over.

Wheelman was fun, but pretty mindless, and thus very easy. Something I'd definitely consider on the cheap, but probably wouldn't give too much thought at full price.

Oh, and my new Universe BIOS 3.0 EPROM came! Thanks Razoola! :)

Sale!

I stopped by a GameStop today, and noticed they were having a sale (up to 50% off new games; $5 off selected used games; two for $8, two for $20, and two for $30 used game deals), so I came away with Mirror's Edge (new), Too Human (new), Tony Hawk's Proving Ground (apparently used, but it was still in the plastic), Project Gotham Racing 4 (used), Condemned 2: Bloodshot (used), and Dead Or Alive 4 (used), all in original cases (not Platinum Hits), all for XBOX 360, for ~$90 total. Not the greatest deal ever, but not too shabby by my estimations. I also considered picking up The BIGS and The Club, but decided to cut myself off ;)

Finally!

BenHeck has done it again!

Also, those copies of Final Fantasy Adventure and Final Fantasy Legend III that I picked up were the Sunsoft re-releases. Has anyone seen the original Square releases anywhere? I haven't seen them since they first came out... Very strange.

Oh, and I decided to give building my own deck in a go in Card Fighter's Clash... Worked out pretty well until I got a bad shuffle and ended up with no SP and a hand full of ACs :(

He's back...

I bought The Terminator for SEGA CD and Devil's Crush for TurboGrafx 16 today. The former is a surprisingly good platformer! I knew nothing of the game until I saw it in a shop and read-up on it afterward. Dave Perry and Tommy Tallarico worked on it? That caught me off guard, but their influences on the gameplay and music are instantly recognisable to anyone who has enjoyed their work before. The latter game is an absolutely amazing pinball title, especially for 1990. It's one of the marquee titles for the TurboGrafx 16, and still holds up as a great game today.

I've been using "Tetris" for, like, ever.

I went through the first 125 pages of the most used iGoogle themes and came up with the following (in alphabetical order) as my favourites:

Tory Burch

JR

Todd Oldham

Tetris

The rest were mostly a mix of bad art, bad layout, and bad palettes, with a relative few solid designs that just didn't really appeal to me.

Honestly, an epoxy?

I have four Virtual Boys at my place at the moment; I'm working on the fourth one (a Japanese model) for a local game shop. One display is glitchy, but the other is dim... I don't think any amount of baking and re-affixing ribbon cables is gonna fix that. The good news is that the problem only seems to be with the display, and those are pretty easy to replace if the shop can find a spare one (they have a few failing Virtual Boys).

I finally got around to checking out this game shop in the west end of downtown Toronto. They've apparently been there for eight years, but I only heard fo them a few months ago. They're not bad; a good selection with many systems represented, but the staff wasn't the most knowledgable (she tried to convince me that a stained cartridge with a peeling label and scratches was in "mint condition"), and the prices were a little high (about $10~$20 more than the really goos places). I did pick up Final Fantasy Adventure and Kid Icarus for Game Boy though.

Ooh, and I just ordered a Universe BIOS 3.0 EPROM! I have a 2.1 EPROM already (came with my MVS), but I'm gonna keep that one as a back up... And find an EPROM burner to play with :)

Finally, I now have five coins in Card Fighter's Clash, and I'm still having a blast. I don't really care about finding every card or arranging the perfect deck though. I'm just loving the strategy involved in the battles, as I've had some pretty epic matches so far.

Host Master

I bought final Fantasy Legend III for Game Boy yesterday. I've had the first two games in the series since they came out, so I figured I might as well complete the collection... I have no idea when I'll get around to playing it though. I also picked up Sonic Advance 2 for Game Boy Advance (my brother can't find his copy, though I'm sure he had one) from a GameStop... Once I got the four price tags off the cartridge, I noticed some kid's initials written on the back in marker. Then I noticed that the game doesn't work. I was able to get to a briefly animated blue screen once instead of a white screen that chirps, but otherwise, no go. Thanks for covering up cosmetic damage and not testing your games, GameStop!

Oh, and I just finished this. I know that it has been out for a little while now, but it's still good fun :)

Whooo?

New Jak and Daxter, though unfortunately not from Naughty Dog or Ready at Dawn. It's actually from High Impact Games, who made the solid but not-exactly-awesome PSP Ratchet & Clank games... But still, it could be good...

Anyway, SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighter's Clash is awesome, and is the only game I've been playing the past few weeks. I've got ~25% of 300 cards and two coins so far, and I'm just getting started.

Oh, and I answered a craigslist ad selling a "Puzzle Bobble 4 Neo Geo cartridge" (which I'm pretty sure doesn't exist) for $10, which turned out to be a bootleg Puzzle Bobble 1 MVS cart. Regardless, for $10, it's nice to have a back-up for my legitimate MVS cart :)