Games
Ahh games. Well there’s not much to tell, other than my first round of Petanque, and a tremendous losing streak of chess games to a fine Czech gentleman. The games I’ve been playing have mostly been on my stylishly stickered Gameboy Advance SP. I had to make a lot of tough decisions about what to bring, it had to last for x months and keep me interested on bus rides or shitty weather days. I think I did pretty good.
Sword of Mana
Okay, this took awhile to get into, but it then consumed me until the very end. Square Enix knows what they’re doing when it comes to linear, small platform RPGs. I guess this is almost a reworking of Final Fantasy Adventure but its really a whole new game, and its great. You play as a female or male character who run through adventures together, and apart. Which character you choose affects what you see and do. Fair enough, I figured, I’ll play as the girl and then when I’m done play as the guy. Except I can’t. I got too curious, you see, and so started and caught up with the male character as well. Now I advance the storyline with one character, get to a break and then catch up with the other. It’s kinda funny. It’s also kinda insane. When I finished the game I had a small sense of satisfaction, mostly because I knew that approximately a third of the gameplay is actually hidden/secret quests which are of course optional, and I didn’t really tackle them. I was playing with a pure Monk who eventually became a Death Hand, which is kind of a prestige class. My alt was a Sage turned Priest turned Bishop, super healing class with a lot of offensive power as well. All in all It’s quite FF’y but it’s also very, very strange and unique and I think it would be a great game for the gang.
Metal Slug Advance
I don’t normally play this kind of game, it’s sort of a side scrolling military shooter, but it has some extra elements to it and some great reviews which made me decide to throw it on there. There are still loads of secrets I haven’t found, but I beat the game around the middle of December. I’m not sure if I’m going to unlock all the secrets or not, maybe if it’s a really rainy day. Pretty fun and frustrating though, which is just what I was hoping it would be.
It’s Mr. Pants
I needed a good puzzle game, something quick and dirty and the antithesis of the RPG, and this fits the bill perfectly. I actually saw this game in the discount bin in an Ottawa grocery store with Kyle, but believe me its not a throwaway. It’s not quite Tetris level addictive, but it’s close. You basically have to fit various colored shapes to produce minimum 2×3 pixel rectangles thus clearing the screen of all pixels. It’s hard to explain, but easy to pick up and a ton of fun. Some of the puzzles are ridiculously hard, but once you start thinking in the right groove you wonder how you couldn’t have seen it before. Gotta love it. There’s no real end to this game, but I’ve gotten almost all the trophies now, so what’s left is exceedingly difficult. Lots of fun.
100+ NES Games
Oh wow. Well a long time ago I threw together a bunch of my favourite and friend recommended NES ROMs onto a PocketNES image. Some of the ROMs were Spanish or didn’t work right, but there’s still around 100 classic games I’ve either loved to death or been meaning to play. For the most part I’ve been heavily into Faxanadu, one of my all-time favourites. I think I’m pretty close, but it’s getting goddamned hard. I came very close to beating 8 Eyes - which has a wicked soundtrack and some great game dynamics: you control a dude and his trained falcon. Knowing which levels to start with a la helped with this game, but a weird glitch with my GBA that erased the save game did not.
Lots of Mario and Tetris played, some Kirby, Bomberman and A Boy and His Blob. I got very far in Faxanadu, but lost track of my mantras (written down passwords) so it’ll take awhile to sort that out. Tried to start FF and Zelda, but unfortunately my flakey GBA/PocketNES installation yielded an exceptionally weird save game error, and thus I was out of luck on any RPGs which use save states.
Pocket Music
Brought this one so I could do some composing - it’s essentially a pint-sized 6-channel sample-based sequencer with some tweakability. The lo-quality samples are all very short and limited, but it’s a scratchpad. I filled it up with concepts, themes and a few songs, which was what I had intended. I’ll be resequencing them proper on a more useful platform over the Summer.