With a head that feels like it’s going to burst, one grabs on to what one can to survive the days. Under my heading of, “why isn’t this game in the US yet?”, I’ve found the following Idol Master clip on YouTube sufficiently buoyant in cuteness. Now how’s that for a bad sentence? In any case, if this Japanese Xbox 360 game ever makes it to the US, I’ll be picking it up on day one.
It’s kind of sad when kids start calling you old. Yesterday’s soccer scrimmage was, by popular demand, kids vs the old people. So I teamed up with my assistant coach plus a couple of parents to take on 7 girls in a cloud of soccer fury! It was a lot of fun, and I just could not believe the trash talk my youngest daughter was giving me about beating the old people. LOL, a couple of quick (and lucky) goals from me quieted things a bit and in the end you had a 2 to 2 tie score. Take that young-uns!
Besides managing to defend the honor of “old people”, I had the chance to utter a few words that are amongst my favorites from anime series, “I’m not goin easy on you!” And I didn’t, unfortunately, I think I overdid it on myself, and this morning am feeling very zombie like. Sadly, I can’t do anything about the passage of time, but I can, to borrow some more from the world of anime, get stronger. I’m quite pleased that my program of diet and exercise has paid off. I feel a lot better, and I can still move pretty fast. Not only that, my wife says I look better too, which coming from her, is very high praise. I still have a long way to go, but I haven’t hit the limit yet. So getting stronger is still a goal I can reach, though I’ll have to do it without a hyperbolic time chamber!
Okay, Halo 3 topped the Japanese game charts this week. That’s good news for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in Japan and may be a sign of a good future for the 360 in Japan. But if anyone still needs proof that the Japanese video game market is different in a lot of ways, take a look at this week’s top ten from gamesindustry.biz.
1. Halo 3 (Xbox 360)
2. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Toki (DS)
3. Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core (PSP)
4. Tamagotchi DS (DS)
5. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Yami (DS)
6. Bleach Blade Battlers 2nd (PS2)
7. English Test 2 (DS)
8. Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters GX (PSP)
9. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (PS3)
10. Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops + (PSP)
See number 7! English Test 2 on the DS, WTF!!
The thing that grabbed me about this story was what appeared to be a lot of condescending remarks about Japanese consumers. The Japanese digital media company, Transcosmos Inc., is hoping that their upcoming virtual world, meet-me, will be a G rated alternative to Second Life for Japanese consumers who are so “well behaved and conformist”, passive, and not interested in individual creativity. Well, I suppose a Japanese company would know better than I what the Japanese are like. But it still comes off sounding a bit condescending. Perhaps something was lost in the translation but it appears that some folks at Kotaku feel the same way.
There wasn’t any technical information in the CNN article about what platform(s) meet-me is supposed to run on. The picture in the article showed someone holding a Game Cube controller, so who knows? It makes sense to guess that it will run on PCs initially. But what I would really wonder about is how it hopes to compete against Sony’s virtual world, Home on the Playstation 3 due out in 2008. Consoles enjoy much more popularity in Japan than PCs do, so that alone would seem to doom meet-me to a small niche in Japan. In order to avoid total obscurity, I think meet-me is going to have to get out the gate before Home does and steal away many of the Japanese residents of Second Life.
Update: I found an old (June 2007) article in the Japanese ITmedia News that says meet-me will run on PCs and is slated for a winter release. They’ll still have an uphill fight against Second Life and Home, but I, for one, look forward to their efforts. Here’s a link to the Google translated story and my own rendering of the article title.
After a nap, followed by some hemming and hawing, I jumped into the car and went to Chicago’s Microcenter to get Halo 3 at midnight. I was hoping for more of a carnival atmosphere, especially since they were giving away a copy of Halo 3 Legendary Edition to the best Master Chief cosplayer. There were only 30 or 40 people lined up, and not one, not even one, Master Chief! Oh the lameness! Heck, if I’d suspected it was going to be like that, I could have whipped up a passable Master Chief myself!
Game in hand, regular edition, I raced back home only to first get lost on the far south side due to all of the ramp closures on the Dan Ryan Expressway. It’s a little crazy, but there was something almost electric about being out in the night last night. Or maybe it was just all of the blue lights from the very active police presence around the city! I have no idea why so many police were out, or why so many people seemed to be crashing their cars. Maybe it’s like that every night. Sigh, shows how much I get out!
By the time I got home, I only had time to play about half an hour. I got totally pwned in multiplayer. No surprise there because I just jumped in without any preparation to see how badly I would suck if I did that. Next time will be much better because it cannot be any worse!
With Halo 3 coming out tomorrow, I’m once again wondering if I should do something with the old Xbox which currently gathers dust in the living room. An article at Lifehacker has me thinking Xbox Media Center once again.
Soup Up Your Xbox Media Center
I hear that I can install XBMC without a mod chip, so this time I may give it a shot. Still, Dead or Alive Extreme Volleyball doesn’t work on my Xbox 360, but hey, there is a new version! :3
Halo 3 is coming out next week and it now appears that a number of retailers will be open at midnight to sell it. Quite honestly, I don’t think I’ve played more than 3 or 4 hours of Halo, ever! But I love a party, so I may be out there to get my copy at midnight too. Heck, might even take a day off to play it. Why do I get the feeling that a lot of IT workers will be calling in sick September 25th? Worse, still, heavy play is going to make the streets run red with the blood of overheated Xbox 360s. Oh the humanity!
We’re all familiar with the jokes about your online sweetheart turning out the be some old guy or teenage nerd, etc. etc.. And we laugh at the “horror” of discovering that your image is false. But surely there must be some stories where these odd couples in real life become friends/lovers despite that, and not just the ones involving people getting arrested for statutory rape. For reference, I’m thinking more along the lines of the relationship between Tsukasa and Subaru in the anime series .hack//Sign. That series is somewhat vague about what happens after they meet in real life, but clearly they did not recoil in horror at the discovery that they were both women, one confined to a wheelchair no less.
If indeed online relationships are real, then it is highly likely that eventually they are going to profoundly change the nature of real life relationships and what are and are not acceptable pairings. Indeed, the pair could conceivably cease to be the base unit.
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This is a bit of copy pasta of my comments on the Slashdot discussion of Regina Lynn’s Sex Drive commentary on Wired.
It looks like EA Sports hasn’t managed to buy up all of the football licenses just yet. Digital entertainment company Nerjyzed Entertainment Inc. is releasing a black college football game for the PC. I have no idea how good the Black College Football Xperience (BCFX) is going to be since the press release has more info than the BCFX web site right now. But if it’s got those cheerleaders in it, I’m all over it! Seriously though, if this does well, I’m sure Electronic Arts will come a knockin. It’s scheduled for release on November 23.
After watching on the sidelines for well over a year, I finally bought the Pink DS I’ve been wanting. Birthday time is just around the corner and I knew there was no way I was going to be getting this kind of present. It just never happens… So I decided to treat myself! :3 I also picked up a couple of games that I’d been wanting to play, Cooking Mama and Phoenix Wright. I haven’t had a chance to play Phoenix yet, but I did spend an hour of pure fun with Cooking Mama. What an awesome game! I haven’t had this kind of sit down, pick up, and play fun, since Parappa the Rapper came out on the PSOne ages ago! Who’d have thought making digital sandwiches and fried chicken could be so much fun?
Tony Stewart won the Brickyard 400 (that’s what it’ll always be to me!) as was promptly fined for swearing during an ESPN interview afterwards. Yay Tony! I didn’t see the whole race, and I wish I’d seen the swearing, I love Tony being Tony! But I definitely do not love the ESPN coverage which to me seemed colorless and devoid of chemistry. I don’t know what they’re doin, but it definitely is sucking some of the fun out of watching the race. I should check and see if I can get MRN around here and then turn the TV down a little bit…
Crying? In NASCAR? No Way! There’s no crying in NASCAR! LOL! Just kidding. After breaking a 5 year 166 race winless streak to beat Kyle Busch by 0.005 seconds, Jamie McMurray can cry all he wants to! Just don’t make a habit of it like Carl Edwards’ backflips or something. Oh heck, why not? Anything that can help you get into victory lane is just fine, and I’m sure Jack Roush would agree with that! Crying is winnin’! Congratulations Jamie! Awesome race!
One of the nice things about the California races are the late starting times relative to the central time zone. This allowed me the chance to go to Chicago’s Pride Parade and get back home in time to witness one of the most exciting race finishes of the year. I had the great pleasure of watching Juan Pablo Montoya bag his first NASCAR Nextel Cup win and make a bit of history in the process! Montoya was able to conserve enough fuel while holding back challenges from Jamie McMurray and Kevin Harvick to win the road race at Sonoma. In doing so became the first Latin-American driver to win a NASCAR Cup race! He also joins Mario Andretti and Dan Gurney as the only drivers in motorsports history to win races in the highest levels of stock car racing, U.S. open wheel racing (CART, Champ Car or Indy Racing League) and F1. Montoya was one of the favorites to win the race anyway, but as any race fan knows, being the favorite and actually winning the race are often two different things! So congratulations Juan! If he keeps this up, he’ll walk away with Rookie of the Year, but there’s hardly anything “rookie” about this guy!
It turns out that the Destiny’s Child game I mentioned here earlier, has been announced by Square-Enix! Yeah, that’s SE of Final Fantasy fame. Why Square? Oh why? In all fairness of course, the game could be great, but it does seem a bit off of Square-Enix’s usual fare. But hey! Change can be good! You know, I think I’d like to see John Carmack try his hand at a dating sim too!
F1’s first black driver Lewis Hamilton is on fire baby! He just picked up his second straight win holding off all challengers to win the US Grand Prix at Indianapolis Motor Speedway! I don’t really follow Formula One racing at all, but if this guy keeps it up, I may just have to make some room in my schedule for it. Hamilton is already being referred to as the Tiger Woods of Racing, which I guess is okay. But I just wonder if he would have gotten the chance to race at such a high level if he’d been born black in the US rather than the UK. No matter, I’ll be keeping an eye on him!