Wii! Wii! Wii!

All the way home!
I did wait in line from 4:30 am to 10 am in early December to buy my Wii, but even in February people are still having trouble finding one.

Maybe went a little overboard to buy 4 controllers, but here's some memorable experiences of the Wii overall (not even going into the games).

* Elizabeth's infatuation with the Miis, and her creation of Mr. Luis Ramon.
* Tennis with Michael and Anna, and their accidentally hitting the controllers together between them! (and no harm to the controller)
* And bowling with E and Anna, comfortably waiting on the couch between turns.
* Getting all the surprise updates from Nintendo (Weather Channel, News Channel)
* The Virtual Console and how amazingly easy it is to satisfy the need to have Link to the Past ready to play in about 5 minutes from deciding to buy it!
* Sending Miis back and forth between my cousin in New Hampshire and I
* Tennis with the Malones in their well-divided living room - coffee table perpendicular to TV makes more room)

Star Fox Command

Yet another in the list of "franchises I never played before playing them on the DS and now I love them!"

Have not played through this completely yet, but this is a really fun little game. It's in two parts - the "strategy" mode where you draw the paths of your ships on the touchscreen. Most missions have 4 or 5 teammates, all with differently powered ships and abilities. Then the "battles" where you are actually flying your ship around and shooting at the target enemies, flying through rings, and so on.
I was stupidly stuck here for a while when trying to shoot the missiles after flying through a set of fast moving rings. Stuck because I didn't realize you could be shooting the missile before you even get that close to it. But the spell was broken a little bit - the rest of the functional mechanics are such a joy in this game, and were challenging without being annoying.
But overall I did really like it.

Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand

This was just too tempting - a built-in solar sensor in a GBA cartridge that allows you to charge up your weapon while playing in the sunshine and drag vampires out into the light to kill them, and more!
I ordered it online as it's not around in stores anymore.

I do plan to eventually finish this, and it was fun sitting outside playing the game, but stacked up against other games/books/work etc the pull was not as strong...

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

Phoenix Wright really harkens back to the old-school graphic adventures (and even back to text adventures also).

The game has several cases, where you travel around to different sites to click around and investigate information and clues, before going to court and using that information you've found to find holes in the prosecution's case.
It's also just very wacky in the storyline, and they did a great job of incorporating characters throughout each case as you play through. The last case was designed specifically for the DS and so has much more use of the touch screen (for example, you "dust" for prints by dabbing dust all over the touchscreen with your stylus and then blowing it off through the DS's mic).
There's a sequel coming out in early 2007 I think.

At a party recently I met someone who is in law school to become a defense attorney, and wound up trying to explain this game - where you play as a defense attorney, Phoenix Wright.

It sounded like she was pretty entertained by it!

Played back in Sept.

Trauma Center: Under the Knife

Another of the now "classic" games on the Nintendo DS, I finally got a chance to play Trauma Center (and need to return it to another co-worker).

As Dr. Derek Stiles, you play through several medical emergencies, using various tools such as a scalpel, suturing needle, etc.

As I had heard, this is pretty challenging, and maddening, however, I did get sucked into it for a little bit. I got stuck on one of the cases where you need to excise an unholy number of tumors and keep the patient alive in a very short timeframe.

Biggest interface frustration was the magnification - trying to draw a little circle where I wanted it to magnify never seemed to work.
Online faqs advised to draw it like a backwards "C" - that worked a lot better, but still it seems like it could have been a button on the screen.

World of Warcraft (10 day trial)

A few months ago my willpower broke down and I downloaded the 10-day trial for World of Warcraft, or Warcrack as we have heard it called.
Also, please see this very entertaining bit of WoW machima. Billie Jean spoof!


It was fun - especially when getting into the levels of crafting skill, cooking , etc. and also exciting to finally have some reference points when everyone is talking about WOW.
I was surprised at the relatively unsocial feel at the lower levels. Compared with City of Heroes/Villains, where even a low-level newbie gets invited to team up by others, almost as soon as they venture out into Paragon City.
The low-level time of WoW felt more like a stand-alone single-player RPG, although I did get team invites a little bit. Felt like I couldn't hold my own on a team, and there are so many interesting quests to do, that I wanted to focus on my own and not have to work on all the party's quests.
In CoH/CoV, the fun for me is more in the team-ups and seeing how your powers complement everyone else's. Team leaders in COH/COV also seem to be more democratic about doing everyone's missions in turn.

But we can only have one MMORPG with a monthly fee at once, and we decided to stay with City of Heroes/Villains for the time being. (Now in the fall we canceled out of CoH/CoV as well, saving some cash.

Fury of Dracula!

One of the few new board games we've bought this summer - great production (lots of well-done bits, good looking) and original gameplay, definitely not exactly like anything else we have.

In Fury of Dracula, one player is Dracula, and the other(s) play the four Hunters (Van Helsing, Jonathan and Mina Harker, etc).
The board is a very legible and beautiful map of Europe in the 1800s. (See Revolution below for a much worse European map).

The object of the game is for the 4 hunters to travel around Europe and eventually find and kill Dracula (and for Dracula to evade them as long as possible and to throw his minion vampires in their path to fight while he darts away).
But Dracula is not just standing out there on the map like the other four, he's moving secretly by playing cards in front of him (in his path).

We've played this most often with Dave as Dracula and me as the others - Dave has won in those cases. Dave's nephew played with me once, taking over 2 of the hunters, and while he wasn't able to stay for the whole game, the hunters did kill dracula at the end.

Haven't played in the last few months...

Crazy rapper at SFO

I am sitting at my gate (63) for my flight to LA for E3 and Sarah's party. An Asian guy wearing a wacky white jacket just broke out into rap and he was rapping about going to LA. I am suspicious that he's also planning on going to E3.
Wonder if I'll see him there.
I wish I had the guts to take a picture!

Second Life and Exploratorium cover the eclipse

Earlier this week on March 29, I was in Second Life watching the solar eclipse being broadcast by an Exploratorium webteam in Turkey, to a stadium built for this occasion in Second Life, with my friend Zalpha Alphabeta.
This picture was as late as I stayed up but you can see how dark it is in Second Life.








In this picture you see some of the others sitting and watching the eclipse. I'm in the foreground with the red skirt thing.

Zalpha is in the background with the blue hair and the rainbow colored pants.
Zalpha had also given me a dragon earlier in the evening and we flew around, but not together since I screwed up and wasn't able to keep up!

But it was pretty fun. Quite literally, "Here be dragons!"


This picture was taken earlier in the evening. It took me a while to get the Quicktime playing properly in Second Life and I never got the audio to work at all so I had it playing from the Exploratorium's streaming video on their site.
I don't think Zalpha had seen it on her screen at all.

But pretty interesting all in all if you can't physically get to the eclipse, to sit and talk to people about it in this virtual space.

Metroid Prime Hunters

I was actually told directly by Nintendo to play this, so darn, I guess I gotta!!!

I was frustrated by the initial level even though it's probably painfully easy but then tonight I noticed a door I never saw before and got much further in.
I like the feeling of mystery - you kind of know why Samus is running around fighting things, but you don't have all the data, and the first person viewpoint and really awesome graphics and sound make it more "scary" than Resident Evil or City of Heroes' 3rd person fighting.
The puzzle solving is fun but not too complicated, since you only have the action of either walking over something to gather it, or scanning it for info, or shooting it (if a door or enemy).

I also enjoyed the multiplayer - we played single-cart download play the other night, which was fun.
Me: "oh, you know, I forgot to tell you, you can change into a morph ball form, like this"
Evade: "I didn't know that! Oh that is what that little ball thing was rolling around! That was you! I shot it anyway even though I didn't know what it was!"
At Tapioca Express having pearl tea before walking home (and waiting for roommate to be certain to have left the key) I played WiFi Multiplayer (and lost horribly 7 to 0 to "Cory").

Need to practice a little more or just play with friends locally.

April 2, update:
Just wanted to say, it is pretty funny to get messaged by my two bosses during the weekend because they are sending me their friend codes so that we can try to play Metroid together online and try out the Voice Chat. !!!!
My new Norton protection is protecting a little too much as I am having trouble getting my little Nintendo wifi USB thing to work again, so no play this weekend for me...

on light rail

Let's see if this works!
On light rail on the way to my
company gdc party...
Exciting to show Chris round.
We're at NASA .

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

This game was rated best GBA game of 2005 in one of the year-end ratings lists, I think at GameSpy... and I had never played any of the many Zelda games before either.

What was I thinking? How could I have let all of these years of Zelda go by without notice...
I played this game so much during Christmas break it's not even funny. Just enough challenge to be engaging and not enough to get frustrating (plus I cheated with a well-written FAQ by a guy named Alex).

I'm kind of stuck now and also distracted by Animal Crossing and Resident Evil and work, but it has a place in the GBA slot of my DS until I'm done!

Resident Evil DS - yes I can make it through someday!

Did not expect to like this either, but it's another game I've been waiting for to try out 4 person combat multiplayer, and then got sucked into finishing the single player game.

The multiplayer is interesting in that you only see yourself as a character onscreen. Any other players appear as colored stars moving around. I can see how this makes sense, since if you had 4 bodies in the tight spaces of the game, you'd have a lot of trouble seeing them. But it looks pretty unfinished and elicits this kind of conversation while playing:
"come on, little star!"
"kill that zombie, star buddy!"

And so on. I have played a couple times with co-workers, most fun with the resident Resident Evil fan (master_of_unlocking) but the stars get distracting.

I really do like the puzzle solving, even the limited inventory and having to think about what you're carrying and how to get to the next save point with enough typewriter ribbons to save. Sometimes it even feels like having full pockets in Animal Crossing.
(dropping off health herbs in a storage chest and dropping off cool hats I just bought at Sable's in my house, in order to make room for either ammunition or some new piece of furniture, feels kind of the same somehow).
And the speed might be just right for me. Just a bit faster than Narnia DS, not as fast as a real shooter game.

Aargh and I need to be able to do a decent save file by making it past that hallway full of hunters (big nasty super-zombie monsters) without dying or being poisoned earlier by the spiders...

Dragon Quest VIII - need to return it!

This is the hero of Dragon Quest VIII, for the PS2.

This is really what the screens look like in-game. They are beautiful.

I am borrowing this from a co-worker and will probably bring it back before more time is sucked away - this is a loong game, but I do like it.

It's a turn-based RPG, and I didn't think I was going to like turn-based fighting as much because I didn't like The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age. Apparently this is maybe one of the flaws in LOTR: The Third Age, because I did like the turn-based fighting here, although there is a ton of it randomly occurring as you journey through the land.
I also enjoy the story, the 4 characters on your quest, the British voice acting, making cheese and other items in the alchemy pot...
It's all good so far but I need to pack and move... !

Again, this is a very famous game franchise, especially in Japan where there are all kinds of Dragon Quest media, but I had never played it until just a few weeks ago.
The enemies are pretty hilarious, there are cats that just lick their whiskers for a turn once in a while, instead of attacking...there's the puppet master who can perform an invigorating show that actually beefs up your party instead of draining them...
and there is the very famous ... SLIME:











This is an enemy?
But it's so cute! It's a blue Hershey's Kiss! Can't we take it along on the quest?
Nope, we must either attack it, or run away.
These blue slimes are pretty easy to kill ... mwa ha ha!

The metal slimes, who I have seen only once so far, will give much experience if killed, but they usually run away.

Mario Kart DS

I'm not going to even bother putting a box shot here since Mario is everywhere...
but I do love this game.
I'm not playing it as much anymore with Animal Crossing and wanting to finish Resident Evil DS and Zelda: Minish Cap, but went through a bout of playing.

I also like to play Mario Kart on Wifi, especially at public WiFi points where none of my Animal Crossing friends are online and I feel silly sitting in public, playing my DS all alone.
(Of course, whether online or not, I _look_ like I'm all alone, but somehow it feels better if I can get at least one Mario Kart race in).
I usually lose online, and if I do start to win, the __ers usually quit on me!

Animal Crossing: Wild World - daily!

Yet another very popular game that I had not played, before I bought it for the DS.
I watched someone at work playing the GameCube version and thought "Oh, that's cute, not sure exactly what you're supposed to do...but..."

But I am sucked into this as well, from that first taxi ride into my new town, and the life of servitude paying back my house mortgage to Tom Nook began.

It's a communication game -- you can communicate, in a way, with the animal villagers who share your town, by writing letters that they might understand (what keywords does the game recognize, anyway? mysterious...) and by talking to them in-game.
You write letters to other human characters you've created in your town - my boyfriend and I have two characters each, living in Kenmare: mine are Jax and Marie.
And perhaps the best of all, your villager can visit other towns all over the world, through the magic of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection...and trade flower-growing secrets, buy and sell, do some calm fishing or bug-catching, or just talking.

Dexter from Downtown came over a few weeks ago, admired my new Jacob's Ladder flower, and helped me come up with a less traveled place to plant it, so that it wouldn't get trampled.

So I end up every day...checking Nookington's for new stuff I haven't bought before, talking to the animals to try to get them to give me their pictures, fishing, doing some harvesting, digging up fossils to sell to the museum or donate, and sometimes leaving town for a visit.
I haven't even scratched the surface of making my own patterns...
It's a bit bizarre, but like Nintendogs, it's really not designed to be played for hours and hours at a time, and it will should continue being surprising for at least the rest of the year (unless I time-travel and spoil the surprises...)

The Urbz DS

I got this used as I did not like The Urbz on PS2 that much (I got my free copy as a Maxis employee, excitedly brought it home, and then we, 2 Sims freaks, lost interest in a matter of hours).

So I had pretty low expectations for this, but I was really pleasantly surprised!
The opening was engaging, the character creation was not too unwieldy but enough to make you feel like this is a custom character.
I think they did a great job with the missions - eventually moving you from just hanging out on the top of one building, to being able to roam all over the city.
You usually have various missions in different states of completion, making the game feel much busier.
Keeping needs fulfilled was a bit more of a pain here but it pushes you on a lot of the time because you get caught in the middle of something, needing to sleep or go to the bathroom, so then you just want to keep playing longer to see what happens when that mission is done.

I liked the conversation system here much much better than in Sims 2 DS.

I did get annoyed looking for people I needed to talk to (reminds me now of looking for animals in Animal Crossing who are not in their houses or walking around). Half the time I would be too late once I did finally find them.
But then I found out I could call people on the phone and they would tell me where they were going to be, which made the whole thing a lot less random.

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow - soul stealing for sunpath

Yet another game franchise I had never played at all is Castlevania, and this was a good one to start with.

I sucked at the bosses in the beginning and had to get help on the first one, but I think I'm at least 30% of the way done with the game now and have been charging along (until other stuff came up to distract me).

The collection mechanic with the souls makes it much more interesting to run around and kill all these enemies, level up, buy new weapons, etc. The art is awesome, the sound and music immersive. I didn't even mind the touch screen "trace a seal before you can kill the boss" part, as it wasn't that hard for me. It's getting to the part where you're allowed to do the seal, that's hard for me.
I still don't have the Bat Company soul so I can't fly around, so there must be a lot more of this game left. I resist the strategy guide. I resist!

Advance Wars Dual Strike - love it!

I feel like I have been following a path prescribed by Nintendo for people who buy a DS and Nintendogs and then want more!

I read a bunch of reviews all raving about Advance Wars: Dual Strike... I still remember going to buy it at Best Buy and thinking hmm... is this really going to be fun? or is this a gamble.
It's like candy. Not just in the colorful tanks, ships, little mech soldiers, and other vehicles, but it's hella addictive to beat down the AI in the single-player campaigns
(if you can... I am in the middle of a battle where I have 3 armies against one enemy army and a satellite. I had to fire 9 missiles at the satellite in less than an hour to take it down, but the enemy keeps pounding away at me until I lose! Next time, Black Hole Army!)

We also love the multiplayer "hot seat." Even though this is a 1-DS household, we can still challenge each other to a good game of Advance Wars, and I am much better against my gaming strategy boyfriend than I thought.
A surefire thing for long plane trips together if we keep the DS charged. (or of course bring the books.)

City of Heroes, Anniversary!

A whole year of playing City of Heroes with Urso Brunov,
who is based on the hero of a children's book by Brian Jacques. (See book blog)

Urso Brunov now has a villainous counterpart by the name of, what else, Urso Brutov!
(picture coming...)

City of Heroes is a very fun and time-sucking MMORPG in the comic book superhero genre. I, and especially my boyfriend, are "altaholics" meaning that we don't have a character above level 30 (max is 50) but all 88 character slots (before City of Villains) were full.
I think we now have the extra 44 full too, have not checked.
It's very addicting to start up a new character with a new set of powers, and the game does a great job of sucking you in with the initial few missions:



"Finished my first mission... ding! Wow, I leveled up, now I get a new power... people are asking me to join their team..."
I resisted this game for 3 months - it was a birthday present for boyfriend, but I made the Urso character around my birthday last year and we're still playing.
I also have the villainous "Empress Jadis," an homage to Narnia. Of course, she has ice powers, but I could not find a white robe for her costume.

Goldeneye: Rogue Agent DS... not a keeper

I'm not a big first person shooter fan anyway, and apparently this game wasn't much fun in the original PS2 version, but I wanted to see what the multiplayer was like.
I decided to practice in single player first so I would not be lame running around in multiplayer shooting badly.
I had so much trouble with the controls that I got very frustrated initially. This was before I had discovered the magic of the thumb strap thingie for targeting using the touchscreen, and had thought I was stuck with using the stylus (which was very hard while moving with the Control Pad) or using the ABXY buttons to aim.
I started it up again after hearing about the thumb strap, and was at least able to get through the opening level.
Then I realized I didn't really care what happens to the Rogue Agent... and I would never be able to do very well in multiplayer, and decided to wait for Metroid Prime Hunters. Popped in one of the many other awesome DS games instead...

The DS and the Nintendogs' Demise....

This is not my DS and I don't have this game (yet) but it's a nice presentation! (thank you Grandma Hardcore!)
I love the DS and I've enjoyed most of the games I've played (except for the Sims 2, as mentioned, and also Goldeneye: Rogue Agent.)

I bought a blue DS in the fall a few weeks after Nintendogs came out and I could hear people all over the office at work calling to their dogs and the joyful barks in reply. A bit stereotypically although I had no professional reason to own a DS at that time, I got the DS and Nintendogs...

I had fun with my dogs - it was awesome, I rode BART more often and I loved to walk my dogs, Chekhov and Stormy, every day. They even found the helicopter toy on one of their walks, so I could dive bomb them with it mercilessly.
Chekhov was the best trained...
"was" you say? Why is that in the past tense?
Rest in Peace, my poor Nintendogs, who are no more after the save data in my cart decided to give up the ghost.
The game is now entertaining my co-worker and her fiancee...

Sigh...

The Sims 2 DS - surprisingly not fun

This is the first post of this new blog not because I like this game, because I don't.

It's because this post will soon be at the very bottom of the list, as has happened to the wonderful Finn Family Moomintroll on my book blog.

You'd think I would have loved this game, having worked on the PC version of Sims 2 and its first expansion pack, and maybe I should play it again now that I am addicted to Animal Crossing, which also has a real-time clock, but is so much better.

It just didn't feel like a Sims game to me. I think I was spoiled by the Urbz DS which I had just played and liked much better.
I really liked the "manage a hotel" theme, but I never got hooked in because it never felt immediate enough with the real-time clock.
For example, I had a ton of guests in my hotel wanting to check in, but I couldn't check them in because there wasn't an empty room. I try to build an empty room and it did say it would be ready in 8 hours, but did not realize this is 8 real-time hours! And the game wasn't compelling enough really to keep trying.

One of the most annoying things was conversation with other characters. In Urbz DS and to a lesser extent in the PC version of Sims 2, you actually feel like you need to choose what "topic" you talk about with certain Sims, or they will get mad, you lose relationship points with them, etc. They actually feel more like real people and you find yourself thinking,
"Ok, here is So and So, what were they interested in? OK, I'll talk to them about that..."

In this game, you need to watch the animation of the person you're talking to, and then just pick one of 3 responses (calm them down, for example, was one of them).
It seemed not very intuitive to match the mood of the person with the right response animation, and if you made a mistake, you could not rectify it....

I also thought the initial tasks to do, such as finding someone out in the desert and consoling them, just weren't that fun. It was raining in the desert, which seemed odd, and made me wonder if this was put in mainly because we could not have rain in the PC version?

And vacuuming....