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Semester Winding Down

Tuesday, April 24th, 2007

It was just shy of 90 degrees yesterday (Fahrenheit). And yes, that means in under ten days the temperature had risen almost 60 degrees (remember it was snowing just over a week ago). It has gotten cooler now, which is a good thing because it was borderline oppressive yesterday.

The semester is winding down. There is less than two weeks left of classes, during which I have a quiz, an exam, and must give a presentation. So I’m busy preparing. I also have to prepare a poster for a department meeting this weekend, and do a second presentation for a group meeting. None of this is super detailed (or important) stuff, but time consuming nonetheless. I didn’t get a great deal done this past semester with respect to my doctoral work, mostly because for about two months my x-ray detector was broken (the repair company is scheduled to ship it back today), but I’ll be working over the summer to make some progress (hopefully).

Not much other news. Pokemon Diamond and Pearl came out for DS last weekend, and we’ve both started playing them. Only this morning I unlocked the GTS, which is a system, that lets players wirelessly trade Pokemon with players anywhere in the world (the first few trades I browsed were Japanese players). The game includes a nifty world map that will fill up as trades are completed, so you can see just where on Earth your Pokemon originated. Very very cool, especially for a DS game. (Note to Adam: buy this game so we can battle/trade Pokemon)

Here’s a shot of my DS library as of last week. Not as good as I’d hoped because I chose bad lighting. The idea for doing this was born online; it seems to be a good way to show off ones collection (DS boxes tile well together)

With 85 games in total (including Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, not in the above photo) I have more DS games than 18 of my 21 total systems. Only for PS2 (with 109) and Gameboy Advance (with 138) do I own more. However, I have been accumulating DS games at a far faster rate – an average of slightly over 3/month – than for any other game system I have ever owned…

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Atari Baby

Friday, March 9th, 2007

So I have a big box of Atari now…the same secret source that provided me with that 25 year old Lego kit supplied it. Here’s a shot of the entire bundle, including Yasuda:

< Yossie Loves Atari And here are some detailed shots:

The first is a historic piece of video game history – it’s Nintendo’s first US release. None other than an Atari VCS version of Donkey Kong, which was released under license by Coleco. Interestingly enough, Coleco’s main US plant was in Amsterdam, NY, only a hop and a skip from where we live now. It was at that very plant that they manufactured not only Colecovision systems but also the product that made them truly famous – Cabbage Patch Kids.

The middle picture is a shot of the Atari game Yar’s Revenge, or rather the circuit itself sans plastic case (it is about an inch square). As a child, Kristin found this in a ditch (or something like that) and it still worked fine. It may even work to this day…

The third picture is a shot of some of the basic programming products in the stash. Two cartridges are shown – one for the VCS/2600 and one for an Atari computer (the 5200?) as well as the keypad overlays. We also have a fascinating programming manual which includes details on how to write a basic program that allows the user to program in machine code (ie. You would use the basic cartridge to write an assembly language compiler).

The big question is how much of this stuff still works? And unfortunately I can’t answer that because not only do we not have a TV with the required inputs, the box didn’t include the necessary output cable for the Atari itself. Furthermore, a fair amount of the cartridges are for different systems than the one we have (a vanilla VCS), which are known to have been discarded, unworking, years ago.

So this box will enter the abyss of my attic, lost to future time, until the day arrives that someone else makes a similar blog entry to this one…

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This One’s For Bernard

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006

Hideo Kojima is one of those handfull of famous game designers, most known for his Metal Gear Solid series. However he’s also made a lot of other games (the awesome gameboy Boktai series included) and is about to release (in Japan) his first Nintendo DS game:

It’s called Kabutore (geddit?) and is a stock-market simulation game. Players buy and sell and whatnot, and the game apparently contains data taken from the Japanese Nikkei index since 2000, so it more or less simulates a ‘real’ stock market.

It’ll never come to America. But if it does, maybe this will be the straw that finally convinces Bernard to buy himself a DS 🙂

To end today’s post, here’s a shot of the awesome 2D art in the recent GBA release Yggdra Union (which is sitting on my shelf waiting to be played):

Posted in Games, Otaku | 2 Comments »

Game Boy

Wednesday, December 6th, 2006

The year is almost over, and the game-buying year is over. Although I know I will be getting some games for Christmas, I will not be buying myself any more games between now and the end of the year. So it seems perfect time to do my gaming year-in-review.

During 2006 I bought 91 video games, for the following systems:

Nintendo DS (31 games)
Gameboy Advance [GBA] (24 games)
Playstation 2 [PS2] (17 games)
Playstation Portable [PSP] (8 games)
Neo-Geo Pocket Colour (4 games)
Gamecube (2 games)
XBox (2 games)
Gameboy (2 games)
Bandai Wonderswan (1 game)

I also bought 2 systems (a white and a pink DS lite, one of which was for KLS). I also paid for 3 months of a World Of Warcraft subscription during the summer (total: $45).

The average price paid per game was a very low $21.67. That is a record for the 13 years I have been keeping records (I originally started records for tax purposes, now I keep them because it’s a pleasing way to keep track of my hobby). This is partially because I am trending towards playing more handhelds (compare the DS/GBA totals in the list above) and partially because the current crop of consoles are nearing the end of their lifespans and retail prices on older games are decreasing.

The least paid for any single game was Y100 (about 90 cents) for Uzumaki for Wonderswan. The most was $60 for the Final Fantasy 12 collectors edition.

16 games were purchased during my Japan trip.

To date, about a dozen of the games I bought this year are ‘unplayed’. Six of these are still sealed in their shrinkwrap. The principle reason for not playing a game is lack of time, but others include a language barrier (in the case of Napoleon and Magical Vacation, two Japanese GBA games), desire to keep the games ‘collectable’ (my sealed Japanese Wizardry GBA games) or because I am waiting to play them on better hardward (2 recent Gamecube games that I intend playing on Wii).

The game I played the most would be World Of Warcraft (over 1200 hours logged on my character, about 400 or so this year). Runners-up would be Monster Hunter Portable (for PSP) and Final Fantasy 12 (PS2), both with savefiles in excess of one hundred hours. I fully expect FF12 to exceed 150 hours when I am ‘done with it’ (ie. killed the god-dragon Yiazmat and the esper-king Zodiark).

The best game of the year…? A very tough question. I’ll answer this in a future post.

Posted in Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku | Comments Closed

Weekend

Thursday, November 16th, 2006

So the Playstation3 comes out tomorrow in America, and if last week’s Japanese launch is any indication it will be a fiasco.

If you’ve been following the interwebs, especially on a site like Kotaku, you may have read that although ~84,000 PS3’s sold in Japan, only about 65,000 games did. That means about a quarter of those who bought the PS3 did not buy a single game. So why did they buy it? To resell it for profits on an online auction site of course!

Yahoo auctions (Japan’s ebay equivalent) quickly filled up with thousands of PS3 auctions, asking for ridiculously inflated prices (2 and 3 times retail). Apparently supply so exceeded demand that now – only a week later – you can pick one up for about retail. Busting the dreams of the sorts of people who paid homeless people to line up for 2 days to get a PS3! (<- true story) Anyway the same thing is happening here. Kotaku has links to stories and youtube videos of journalists going and interviewing people lined up outside American Best Buys and other stores, and an alarmingly large amount are up-front in saying they don't want the PS3 for themselves, they just want to resell it on ebay. I hope the auction prices crash like they did in Japan, and I hope in future companies like Sony come up with a scheme (such as not disallowing bundles) to limit this sort of greedy opportunism.

Incidentally the Wii is released Sunday. I have yet to hear about a single line anywhere in the country; or perhaps people are just waiting until after the PS3 (so the lines may begin Friday)? But Nintendo says they are shipping a lot, and the low price dissuades ebay profiteering as well.

While I don’t have a burning desire to have a Wii on launch (as I still have a bunch of great games in my queue), we’re still planning on hitting the stores (very) early Sunday to try for one. Expect it blogged if we succeed.

Posted in Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku | 1 Comment »