Welcome To Crazy Town

Sorry for not posting yesterday, I woke up not feeling too well. I was super worried it was E.Coli due to my love of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and the fact that several peanut butters had been infected. Luckily it was just food poisoning (hurray…..?) and after about a gallon of Pepto Bismal and some kind words from Marissa, I felt better.

But good news to everyone who picked up Rock Band 2 for the Wii! The music store is up and running, so go and download as many songs as you can fit in your 512mb memory. Actually I only managed to download 4 out of the 20 free songs before I ran our of memory blocks. I had to order a 2 gb SD card from Amazon (they are really cheap plus free shipping!) just to make sure I could still download more. I would get a bigger one except at the moment Nintendo doesn’t support cards bigger than that since you have to pay a royalty, so oh well maybe near when the DSi comes out there will be an update. So that’s about it, I go back to San Francisco in about 11 days (which I’m super excited about) and hopefully my Viewtiful Joe games and SD card come before then. Now time for me to watch the Bleach episode I missed, later days.

Lately, through all my Rock Banding (Mustaches in December/The Baby Killers!) and Mario Kart-ing, I’ve been craving a straight single player game with a story and some good adventure. Unfortunately after looking through what games I had, I seemed to be severely lacking in that genre. Sure I had Kirby 64 and Mario 64 on my Wii, but they had been beaten a few times over (by they I mean Kirby, I can’t seem to get into this Mario game). Not even the first Halo was giving me the type of vibe I wanted (actually I’m not too big a fan of that game. I do think it is severely over hyped). So in desperation I went and downloaded Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past. Now don’t get me wrong, this is probably my favorite Zelda game probably because it’s the one I’ve gotten closest to beating but there’s more than that. Everything from the items, dungeons, and bosses have the perfect mix of usefulness, challenge, and awesomeness. However the last time I played this game was on my Gameboy Advanced, where I think it was better suited. It feels awkward playing on the Gamecube Controller and I refuse to shell out money for a Classic Controller until I absolutely have to. That being said, since LttP wasn’t enough I just ordered two of my favorite games from Amazon: Viewtiful Joe and Viewtiful Joe 2. I owned these on the Playstation 2 and absolutely loved them. The story was strange, the hero was great, and it was hard. I mean it, that game was difficult. Bosses would continuously beat you mercilessly even on some of the easier settings. And I was ok with that. I liked having a game that I couldn’t beat in an hour because it was too easy. So now here I am waiting until they hopefully arrive next week. If they take any longer I might have to get them sent up to me at school.

I picked up Rock Band 2 for the Wii console because Harmonix promised it would have all the same features and functions as on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Harmonix delivered it seems, making a game that no Wii owner should be without. Before I begin I must make to quick comments: 1) I bought the first Rock Band full band kit because it was on sale for $90 and I could just pick up the individual game for $50. Thus I do not have the wireless drums or new guitar because I refuse to pay $190 for only slightly better instruments. 2) The music store still isn’t up so I can’t tell you how fast or slow downloads are…yet. Harmonix promised it would be up in “early ‘09″. Let’s just hope they deliver on their word. The first thing you’ll notice different about this and the original Wii Rock Band is that it logs you into the Nintendo Wifi Network on start up. This allows you to upload your scores to leader-boards automatically, and to play against other people online a lot more smoothly. All the modes are there including online World Tour mode, allowing you to team up with others online to complete the main career. There are several “challenge” set-lists you can do to unlock a few more bonus songs and more get added on with the more songs you download. There are also “Band Challenges”, these will come up randomly during the main career and will ask you to meet some requirement, either for fans or money or both. As of now there are weekly tournaments that will have requirements and you can take part in for the extra money. You can use money you earn to customize almost every aspect of your character. Overall this game is leaps and bounds over the original. If you own a Wii you owe it to yourself to pick this game up as a must own title.

I have to apologize for the recent randomness in my blog posts. With finals coming up soon I’ve had very little time to properly write anything. I hope all my readers (all ten of you haha), will be understanding in the matter. After finals pass I shall start posting a lot more interesting things than plain old text blogs.

Sorry again and help spread the word please!

Being an avid gamer I have had many consoles, both home and handheld, everything from the Atari 2600 to the Nintendo Wii. Now I get easily excited when a new system is announced. When the Wii was first announced, I waited 4 years for the thing to come out. I even waited 12 hours in line for the midnight release! Now a new handheld has been announced (and I know I’m a little late on the news), but here it is:

Sorry for the image distortion but I had to resize the picture. The new DSi, the latest in the DS family sports the same technical specifications as the DS lite but now with an internal hard drive, a sd cardslot, and a new bigger screen. The DSi also has 2 3megapixel cameras, one on the outside and one on the inside. There will finally be a legitament web browser and multimedia player. These two features are on a newly revamped user interface that also has access to general settings, the loaded cartridge, the sd card, a photo channel where you can edit your pictures and send them to the Wii wirelessly, and a new DS store. In the DS store you can download new titles for your DS and store them either to your SD card or internal memory. Initially the store will feature Brain Age 1&2, with more titles available later on. Look out for it in the later half of ‘09.