Isn’t he cute?  He’s even cuter when he has a little green check above his head!

I took this picture, then another one of my inventory with the key and my game name, which I sent off to the event email.  I hope I made it in time!  I played this game hardcore all week, and now I’m really tired…
Now to get on with my Fright Spinner story and then try to get to lvl 20 and take on the Monster Wrangler event as well!  I wonder how many keys I can get before the beta is over?

Amazing.  Practice really does make perfect!

I’ve been a huge Harmonix fan ever since Frequency, but on Frequency and Amplitude there was always a bar of difficulty I couldn’t cross.  I would ace the single player game on both easy and medium, and then hit the bar in the middle of Hard and progress no further.  In both Frequency and Amplitude, Hard mode meant there might be extra notes you could barely hear in the music, and you had to play 16th or 32nd notes on a single button.  That’s hella hard when pushing buttons on a PS2 control pad.  Also, if there was one especially hard part in the middle of the song, you couldn’t just practice that part of the song.  You had to survive the whole song to clear it, and play all the way through up to the point you were having trouble with to try that again.  It was really a shooter, albeit disguised as a music game, and eventually my reflexes just couldn’t take that much abuse anymore.

I haven’t had much time with Guitar Hero on the PS2, but the DS version has definitely fixed the game and made it more like playing a musical instrument.  When you fail a song in Career Mode, it gives you the option to switch to Practice Mode.  (The option is also in the main menu of the game, so you can start a play session with practice.)  In Practice Mode, you can choose any section of the song and have just that section play over and over until you hit Start to bring up the restart-or-quit menu.  And it tells you how many of the notes you played right!  So you know that practicing is actually helping!

Also notable:  playing 16th and 32nd notes doesn’t suck anymore because you can actually strum on the DS touch screen.  My wrists are most grateful, though my left hand is getting a little bit more exercise than it is used to from fingering all those chords.  I’ve gotten to the point where the game is giving me three finger chords and making me switch from 1st and 3rd to 2nd and 4th “frets” a lot.

Last week, I was stuck on “Breed” by Nirvana on Hard.  This week, I finished Bloc Party’s “Helicopter” and am currently working on “I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night” by Kiss.  I’m averaging one or two songs on Career Hard mode and a whole venue in Guitar Duels Medium each day.  I didn’t pass the Kiss song today, but I did go from 20% to 80% completion in just an hour.  So, I’m fairly confident I will clear it tomorrow.

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.

This has to be the coolest contest idea I’ve ever seen. io9.com is accepting creature ideas based on real scientific research or sci fi speculation, and the winner of the more reality-based category gets a trip to Hong Kong to attend the Synthetic Biology Conference. And the winner of the more speculative category gets their creature drawn by a professional comic artist.

Kinda makes me wish I had taken the more rigorous Biology class in college instead of going with easier Astronomy and Entomology classes. But maybe I’ll learn a thing or two by digging through the BioBricks registry.

★　Guitar Hero On Tour — I’ve been missing out on Guitar Hero for a very long time, and I think it was genius to make it portable. I’m not 100% sure I’ll like the control interface, but this is the most convenient way for me to play Guitar Hero.
★　The World Ends With You — I studied abroad in Tokyo in 2005. Since this game is set in Shibuya, I know I would get nostalgic. Again, the controls are very innovative and I am not sure whether I would find controlling two characters at once to be fun or tedious, but I am willing to give it a go.
★　Taiko Drum Master DS — I don’t think there’s an English version of this yet. I’d really rather import it anyway. I’m a sucker for drumming games.
★　Oendan 2 — Another import, methinks. I still play the first Ouendan game occasionally, but I’m stuck on Ready Steady Go on the second difficulty level. Whether or not I ever unlock the female cheer squad, I need more songs! And I think the spinners were more fair in the second game.
★　Daigasso Band Brothers expansion pack — Again, I need more songs! Another music game I play when I need to meditate. It really reminds me of those mini finger piano toys they made when I was a little kid. Because of both the cheesy MIDI sound and because it is a handheld digital instrument.

WOOT! It turns out you can run the Spore demo in Tiger after all! It involves a slight bit of file trickery. Thank goodness I subscribe to so many RSS feeds and occasionally I even check them. This makes me sooooo happy!

I’ll post some creatures here when I make them.

Edit: So apparently, it’s not the operating system that matters, but the graphics card. So you can run the demo on a desktop Tiger Mac, but not on a Macbook. Sigh. I’ll just have to wait til I get home to my parents house and can try the PC version of the demo.

So first, the bad news.  While spending the night at our apartment last night, my roommate’s sister’s boyfriend’s car was stolen.  (I’m glad for once that my car is a broken-down piece of crap that I can safely leave the keys in without fear of theft as it’s filled with junk that is only important to me, and it is surrounded by nicer cars with new paint jobs. )  Luckily, most of their belongings and expensive electronics had been carried in to the apartment, but still most of the sister’s clothes were out in the car.

The good news is, the police caught the thief within a day of the car being taken.  He was heading toward Louisville, a little less than an hour away from here, when he ran out of gas.  He was being loaned gas money and assisted by a local minister when the state trooper noticed him and confirmed that his story didn’t check out.  His own sister refused to vouch for him and told the police he had stolen cars before.

The punchline is, the thief left a couple of PlayStation games in the car… including Grand Theft Auto.

Here’s the story.
And the hil-AR-ious Amazon customer reviews.
So the facts as I understand them are:

*Majestic Studios is a three person team and it took them nearly a decade to release a slideshow adventure game.  Like, one of the easiest genres of games to create.  Mostly writing and art, very little programming.
*They didn’t create any original art for this game, and barely Photoshopped the assets they stole from successful games such as Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Unreal Tournament.
*They got all this blatant plagiarism past a publisher and actually got the thing released commercially.

The game’s story reminds me of a cross between Myst and maybe King’s Quest(?) but I’ll withhold judgment on that since it doesn’t seem like anyone is complaining about the story.

What I can’t believe is how long it took for them to get to this point.  I haven’t actually done it yet, but I don’t think it should take so long to get an adventure game out there, especially if all you do is write the story. If you’re not making your own art, then creating a slideshow adventure game should be pretty similar to writing a novel.  And once they were actually looking to produce the thing commercially, how did they think they could avoid hiring an artist to create original art for them? In what world is it ok to release screenshots as though they were original IP?

Though, as a game enthusiast and wannabe developer, I take comfort in the fact that stuff this horrible actually gets released somehow.  This should mean that games of genuine quality from newcomers have a chance of being picked up by a publisher.

When I myself have produced such an original game, recalling this story will give me the confidence to start shopping it around, secure in the knowledge that at least I’m NOT the guys at Majestic.

Ratzen-fratzen EA… Apparently I have to upgrade to Leopard if I want to use the Spore Creature Creator. But I don’t want to upgrade because I have read articles saying that it is a bad idea to do so if you only have one working machine and you use Adobe software. (That’s me!) So, if I want to try it I’ll have to make a new partition and do a clean Leopard install. Or fix my Windows box. Which I should do anyway. Sigh. Or I could just wait for the DS version of Spore, which is probably the one I will actually buy anyway because I like the idea of it being portable. I play online with my DS more than I do with computer games, actually.

Jeff Gullett doesn’t think DS cartridges can hold Lucasarts adventures, and Chris Norris says the company has considered porting games to DS or Wii but he doesn’t know if they actually are. Their apparent cluelessness suggests to me that they aren’t really into adventure games.

Maybe Jeff was thinking of Grim Fandango. Admittedly, the games from the mid 90s are larger and might not fit on a DS cart. Those could be ported to the Wii, where the remote is a decent replacement for a mouse.

But the older games such as Maniac Mansion or Loom are tiny DOS games. They would easily fit on a DS cart and could be released as bundles like they were in multi-CD packages in the mid 90s. And with the popularity of Phoenix Wright, releasing more adventure games for the DS seems like a no-brainer.

Maybe they don’t think the SCUMM engine games would sell because they have historically had a niche audience. And that niche audience is already playing them on DS and Gamecube anyway, as the homebrew community already ported the SCUMM engine to both systems.

Still, I think Lucasarts is missing out on a great opportunity to expand their audience. And if they actually redid the artwork for some of the classics, and made it easier to save games, they would get sales from both new and old fans.

Please, Lucasarts, don’t forsake us! Bring back Maniac Mansion!