Today I took a fully charged Nintendo DS Lite and played three games until the battery light turned red. Status of each game below:

I’ve reached the end of my sightreading streak in Guitar Hero: On Tour. Every music game I play, I measure how long I can breeze through the songs before I find one I have to practice to clear. This time, I cleared out all the songs on both Easy and Medium. Then I failed the OK Go song on Hard with 50% completion. Sigh. I am most comfortable playing on Medium, as the songs feel like the real guitar parts, just minus the complex strumming and using three or four fingers for chords. My favorite songs are Spiderwebs by No Doubt, Knock Me Down by the Chili Peppers, and the Stray Cat Strut. And I used to hate playing Blink 182 in Amplitude, but in Guitar Hero it is fun because you can actually strum properly rather than just pressing a single button over and over.

The DS is the perfect system to play Guitar Hero on, and I love the Guitar Grip because it fits my tiny left hand much better than the PS2 guitar controller ever did.  The only problem is that it is rather easy to slide it out of the GBA slot while playing, but that doesn’t happen too often.  I forgive the designers though, because it’s so nice ergonomically and now I can comfortably reach the blue fret.

Just when I was getting upset at hitting my own personal bar, I realized there is a whole other single player mode. Guitar Duels works like a battle of the bands, like multiplayer in Amplitude/Frequency but with a computer opponent. Some of the items are really creative too– set your opponents guitar on fire so they have to blow into the mic to put it out (this also ruins their guitar playing posture so they will probably lose the next phrase too), or send a crazed fan so they have to stop playing and sign an autograph on the touch screen (and it varies each time too! t-shirts, autograph books, purses…), or flip the screens so they can’t use their items and have to look at the other screen to read the notes. The most annoying item is the broken guitar string attack. There is nothing worse than having to stop playing to restring your guitar, which you do by touching the tiny circle at one end of the board and dragging it across the touch screen to the other tiny circle.

I was starting to get frustrated with the learning curve in The World Ends With You, but then I realized that you just have to take the time to level up your pins before a major battle. A lot of RPGs let you learn really slowly and just blindly use the same attack over and over for the first three levels, but this one expects you to put a lot of effort into leveling before the first boss battle. When you get a new pin, it starts out weak and you aren’t used to using it. But after it levels at least once it becomes really useful. I still haven’t gotten any A or S rankings yet, but I’ve gotten B a few times. I also really approve of the interface for switching pins and other equipment. It’s set up like a cellphone interface, and it just feels so natural to manage so much information that way.

And when my hands start to hurt, I switch to Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime. I’ve just gotten the pot that allows you to do alchemy, and I’m about to head back up the mountain to find the five slimes yet to be rescued. This game is way too easy, but the tank battles are so fun that I think maybe I should keep the game around and hopefully I will find other people who own it and want to play multiplayer with me. Someday… Sucks that it is multi-card. I think all multiplayer DS games should be either single cart or global wifi. Multi cart local wifi never gets used by me.

Whoa, check it out! Panoramic image of a Yayoi Kusama exhibit:  http://www.mediavr.com/kusamaqt.htm

(Try not to navigate it too quickly, it’s not for those who are prone to motion sickness!)

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who often uses multicolored dots as a repeating motif in her work.  She committed herself to an asylum and only leaves to attend her art show premieres.  She likes to wear bright colors and wigs to match her art.

I just watched Casino Royale. Not the Casino Royale you are thinking of, but the 1967 one with Peter Sellars, Woody Allen, Larry Niven and Orson Welles. Basically, the Austin Powers before Mike Meyers made Austin Powers. It’s up on Hulu, and it made me very happy.

Whether or not this movie would make *you* happy depends on two factors: 1) What generation you were born in, and 2) what your expectations are. If you are expecting either a serious James Bond movie or something as blatantly funny, lewd, and fast as Austin Powers, you won’t like this movie.

The comments on Hulu reflect this– half of them seem to be from boomers and other people older than me who thought Austin Powers was vulgar and stupid and Peter Sellars is God, and the other half are from whippersnappers who thought it was stupid and a poor excuse for either a Bond movie or a comedy. I half agreed with all of them. There didn’t need to be any sequels to Austin Powers, and Peter Sellars gave a brilliant performance in Casino Royale. But I laughed more at the first Austin Powers movie. Casino Royale is very much an old school madcap comedy, and I have mixed feelings about the genre. Madcap comedy as a style is beautiful to watch, and the gags made me grin. But most of the gags did not quite make me laugh, with the exception of the sock garter slingshot (resulting in Peter Sellars pants being down and him falling over them at the end of the scene). That is hilarious and amazing to me because that particular gag could not be used in a movie these days. But most of the physical comedy in Casino Royale is too much like the dumber Benny Hill skits that have been rerun too many times on Comedy Central.

This is not a funny movie, though some scenes are nearly as funny as the old Pink Panther movies. No, what I found amusing in this film were the characters created by Sellars, and by Woody Allen, who played the villain. Sellars turns James Bond into an elderly and celibate stutterer, while maintaining his elegant appearance to torture all female agents he meets, while Woody Allen takes the evil out of villainy as he plays Bond’s neurotic nephew who doesn’t want to take over the world so much as to just change the rules so he can get laid. A few of their lines were hilarious, and their entire delivery was brilliant.

There are also a lot of very beautiful women in this movie doing very silly things. I highly recommend it to anyone who has an appreciation for the psychadelic visual style and who can be patient with the over the top madcap presentation of the first half hour. After the introduction of the elderly retired Bond, and the weird Scotland castle bits, it just gets better and better.