Ouendan 2 came out today. I had pre-ordered a copy at Pink Godzilla so I was checking their site every hour or so today. Once they posted that their shipment had come in, I promptly went and picked up my copy (as well as Rodney’s). I just spent the last hour and half playing through the first several songs on the “Lighthearted cheering” / easy setting.
So far the game hasn’t let me down one bit. It has everything cool from the original Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents.
As expected, the ability to skip song intros is there. But they went a little bit further and made it to where you can now skip the song ending as well. After you’ve gone through all the game play aspects of a song, the last several seconds are spent wrapping up the story and the ending of the song. I never really had the desire to skip this part before but once you’re doing the same song over and over to try and get a better score, skipping the nonessential parts is very nice.

The stats and records part has been improved too. It has all the stats features from EBA plus a few little extras. Not only is there a record of the top score you got on each song, but it also keeps track of the two next highest scores. It keeps track of whether or not you got a perfect too.

The overview map where you navigate around and choose people to help has changed too. It’s not quite the 3D globe that you had in EBA and it’s not the 2D map you had from the original Ouendan. It’s more a mixture of the two, a flat (non-globe) 3D map… with little trains and cars driving through the city!

There is also of course the addition of the blue team. But their introduction is part of the story so I won’t talk about it.

I am looking forward to wasting hours of my life playing this.

According to the ESRB, it looks like SNES version of Street Fighter II Turbo is heading to the Wii’s virtual console. I purchased the original Street Fighter II (The World Warrior) for the virtual console not too long ago. Some people are pissed that they bought the first one not realizing that SF2Turbo would be out so soon. Aside from the fact that both are fun and solid fighting games, they both have nostalgic value to me, and I will gladly get SF2Turbo when it comes out.
I was thinking about it and the funny thing is that I never actually owned SF2Turbo before, at least not the US version.
Back in August of 1993, a friend of mine (Rodney) was in Dallas to see a band. The day after the show he stopped by a video game store in the area and they happened to have an import copy Street Fighter II Turbo for the Super Famicom (SNES). Due to import pricing, this game cost $100. He called me from the store and told me about it. Within an hour, I had rounded up 100 bucks and some gas money. Then another friend (Chris) and I were off. We made the 2.5 hour drive from Wichita Falls Texas to Dallas in what seemed like no time. Normally, that drive sucked (though not as bad as the drive from Wichita to Austin) but at that point in time I didn’t care. I was too excited. After we got to the store, I happily handed over $100 dollars and we were on our way back. The drive back was grueling. The 2.5 hours seemed to take for ever then. Here Chris and I had the coolest game on the planet and we couldn’t play it yet. After we got home it was pure video game nerd bliss. In then end, I spent 5 hours round trip and $50 extra for a game that was:

• In a language that I couldn’t read.
• Scheduled for a U.S. release 8 days later.

Ahh… good times.

There have been a lot of screenshots posted lately for Ouendan 2. This one below made me especially happy.

As you can see, in the bottom right hand corner is the Japanese text スキップ. In Roman characters, that’s written sukippu, which is the Japanese phonetic spelling for the English word skip.
Woohoo!
I wasn’t all that worried that they wouldn’t add this in sequel since it was added to EBA, but the inability to skip the intros was really my only complaint with the original Ouendan.

Exactly 1 year ago, I smoked my last cigarette. It’s weird but it doesn’t suck nearly as bad as I thought it would. Supposedly, I’ve saved $1200.00. I haven’t spent that much on DS games though so I think I’m slacking.
Anyway, thanks to everyone who has supported me. Especially Sarah.

So it’s been confirmed that there will definitely be an Ouendan 2. Sweet!
I don’t know if that means there will be an Elite Beat Agents 2 or not, but Ouendan 2 is a perfect start. I simply cannot wait until this comes out.
The company behind Ouendan and EBA, iNiS, had a panel at Game Developer’s Conference that’s going on this week. In addition to talking about Ouendan and EBA, there was the hint of a Wii game in the works. I have no idea what that would be like or how the controls would work but if its anywhere near as fun as their DS games then I can’t wait to see what it will be.

Source

I finally finished The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I actually hadn’t played it in a few months. I stopped playing before xmas and then got obsessed with other games afterwards. Part of me wants to agree with my friend McMaster and say that I remember liking the Ocarina of Time just a bit better but I think that the two shouldn’t be compared. They both rock in their own way.

In the end, I spent about 84 hours on the game. That may seem excessive to some people considering I am still missing 3 bugs, about 15 poe souls and that I only caught about 10 fish throughout the whole game. But as I explained to a friend of mine, when I play Zelda games, no blade of grass goes uncut, no jar unbroken, no cracked wall unbomed.

Now you have a …

I read an article on 1UP the other day that describes the differences between Western and Japanese game design philosophies. Pretty interesting.

Lately I have been playing the game Elite Beat Agents for the DS. I’ve never really played a rhythm game before and I honestly didn’t think I’d like it but I tried it at a friend’s house over xmas and I have been hooked ever since. I also went and picked up Ouendan at a local import store but I have been too glued to EBA to start it.
Anyway… buy it, play it.
One downside to EBA is that I have found myself humming and singing some of the songs in the game. For example, I just now caught myself singing:

♪ Living in a material world, And I am a material girl. ♪

I ended up getting myself a Wii at launch.
The original plan was to go to a local Toys R Us that was having a midnight launch. Even thought they had taken preorders, they were supposed to have some surplus. I was going to go out there and try my luck with the extras after midnight. If that didn’t work out I was going to go home and then get up early and go by the near by Target, Best Buy and non-midnight launching Toys R us, which all opened 1 hour apart (8, 9, and 10 AM respectively). The actual plan was a little different. I drove out to the midnight launch TRU only to see a line that was wrapping all the way behind the building. I decided to pass on even getting out of the car and went home to regroup.
Click to read more …

I got my copy of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Justice for All in the mail today. I’m glad it was more on the side of 5 days rather than 10. I haven’t played it yet but it does have the language switcher at the beginning. In the package with the game, there was a coupon for 5 dollars off my next order at Play-Asia, a Play-Asia sticker, and for no apparent reason, a small pack of Magic Pop Crackling Candy. Yay!

So I finally finished Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. I had only played the first two cases up until recently, when I got sucked in and just played through the rest of the game. It’s pretty text heavy but still a lot of fun. There were several times I actually laughed out loud.

Unfortunately, this game is hard to come by in the US (in stores at least). If you can’t find a reasonably priced domestic copy online, then there is the option of importing it for cheap. Supposedly the Japanese version of the game has the English localization built in and you can switch the language at the beginning. The sequel to this game is supposed to have this option too. With that in mind I decided to go ahead and just import the sequel, which was released today. It’s being shipped via 5-10 day air mail but for a grand total of just $32.50 (game + shipping), waiting 5-10 days is a lot better than waiting until Q1 2007 for the domestic release in my opinion.

Amusing.

It’s bad enough that they’re charging $50 for what appears to be just a mod for BF2. But just in case my wound wasn’t salty enough, there is this.

Check out (and come pick up) my free stuff.

Nevermind… 1 hour and it’s all gone.

So I’ve changed themes again. Hopefully this one isn’t as visually offensive as the last one. I took the Elvgren theme and just swapped out the images. There’s a tiny bit more work to do but this is pretty much done so don’t expect another update for a few months. :p

My site needed a bath so I gave it one. More specifically, it needed an upgrade. This was brought on by a bunch of comment spam that Sarah got on her site last week. We’ve been using an old version of Spam Karma and for some reason it hiccupped or something and just stopped blocking spam. This resulted in about 5000 spam comments in a few days. If you recently commented on Sarah’s site and your comment is gone now, then I’m sorry, I might have flagged a few valid comments when deleting the rest.
Anyway, in order to upgrade Spam Karma, I needed to upgrade Wordpress, which I hadn’t done since I installed it a very long time ago. I had version 1.2 and the current version is 2.0.3. I had to upgrade to 1.5 before I could upgrade to 2.0.3. I avoided upgrading for so long primarily because I had made so many modifications to the core files when making my layout that it would have been a huge pain to try and migrate it all. Luckily Wordpress has these nifty themes and I was able to find a new theme that is almost as ugly as my original. Most likely I will use a different one when I find one, but right now I really don’t care. The main purpose of my upgrade was to get familiar with the process so I could upgrade Sarah’s. So her site is next. She just needs to find and pick a theme.

I quit smoking last week. Actually 1 full week ago. It is bizarre. And difficult.
Here’s something cool that Sarah found for me. It’s called the quit meter.

May 6, around noonish, in Plano Texas.

fiancé.
finance.
wife.