Holy shit. I haven't picked up my DS in a while; I pretty much only play it on the Chinatown buses, but wow. That would definitely change if Chrono Trigger DS comes out.



According to DS Fanboy, it was posted in a reputable Japanese source, and the Square Enix website shows the above image. No details yet, as to whether it's a remake, sequel, adapatation or what not, but holy shit. Exciting.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 1] [Tags: video games]

After creating my Purple Tentacle, I spent some time looking through Sporepedia, and found a lot of good ones. People have a lot more artistic talent than I do. Here's a batch of Zelda themed ones.



Deku Link:
Wow, he really got this one right. This is definitely my favorite of the batch, the details are perfect.



Deku Scrub:
Another guy who got the Deku look down really well. I especially like the drifted off, sleepy eyes look to it.



Uncolored Link Head:
There's really no way to color that to make it look right, but keeping it white looks cool; it's like a marble bust of link. Heh, there's even the elf ears; good stuff.



Goron:
Doesn't have quite the level of detail that the above ones do, but it's effective nonetheless. I like the choice of pose and the placement of the plating.



Navi:
A very simple idea, but well executed. There were a few similar ones, but I chose this one because of the awesome description: "HEY LISTEN". That's it; perfect representation.



Zora:
This seems like it would be a hard one to do, the Zoras have a lot of curves. Very well done.

I have other themed batches which I'll put up later, that's it for now.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: art, spore, video games]

If any of you haven't played Day of the Tentacle, you're missing out on the best adventure game of all time. This is indisputable. I first played it in 7th grade or so, which was three or four years after it came out; soo fun. I searched, and a few of the places you can download it are here, here, and here.



Watch out, his clone army is already beginning. So I made Purple Tentacle on Spore. Feel free to look at the Sporepedia entry. I wondered if anyone else had thought of the same thing, so I searched Sporepedia for 'purple tentacle', and got 7,298 results. Only a few hundred of those are actually tentacles from DotT; some are Green Tentacle, but nonetheless, it destroyed the originality of my idea. Mine is better than some there, and some are better than mine.

At the moment of this post there are 1,313,780 creatures on Sporepedia. Wow. Anyway, here's another creature that I made, Lucky Horse.



Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: spore, video games]

At the 2008 Blizzard Worldwide Invitational they announced Diablo 3. On a lot of Blizzard.com, a splash screen was appearing and fueling speculation of what would be announced. It was thought to be about Starcraft 2, some WoW update, or about Diablo 3, and luckily it was the latter.



I loved Diablo, played it for hours on end. I never really got into Diablo II, but I think that was more because I was busy with other stuff when it came out, but that was like 7 years ago, so I don't really remember what. Unfortunately it's PC (and Mac) only, and I doubt my computer will have the specs to play it. Well, maybe I'll have to upgrade for it.



These screenshot bits are from the Blizzard site. There is also an FAQ over there. Allow me to summarize:

Q: What will be the b--
A: We will announce that at a later date.

Yeah, they're not telling us much. They've announced two out of five character classes. One is the Barbarian, a returning class, and the other is a new one, the Witch Doctor. It hasn't been announced yet, but I was let in on a secret. Whenever you play as the Witch Doctor, you'll have a special theme song playing in the background. Some people may not like this, but I will be playing as nothing but the Witch Doctor for this very reason.



Head over to Joystiq if you want more information than I've given you here.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: video games]

I was playing around with Spore Creature Creator some more. My newest creation is Dr. Evil Chimp. I wrote him a little backstory, something involving a mad scientist messing with genetic engineering gone wrong. The mad scientist ends up turning into the evil chimp, which you see roaring below.



Unfortunately, this also lead to me finding my first error with the Spore Creature Creator. The image below is from a screenshot I just took. Notice how there should be one creation, yet it's showing 0 items? That one item should be my ape. Frustrating, because now I can't share it on Sporepedia.



Dr. Evil Chimp is so suave looking because he's managed to avoid being captured by Sporepedia. You win this round...



Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: spore, video games]

So, if you haven't heard of Spore, you either don't play video games, or you have been out of contact with the world for a long time. I'm not going to explain it, I'll just refer you to the wiki entry.

The game doesn't come out for a while yet, but they released the Spore Creature Creator today. You can download it here. I downloaded the trial, and played around with it a little bit. (I'm supposed to be doing labwork...)



I made one creature so far, its name is Swaris, and you can check it out on Sporepedia here (man, they thought of everything). There you can vote it up or down, leave comments, and see my description and tags for it. In the image above, you can see it punching at air. You also see its three little children around it. In the image below, it's looking all scary, and look at the little ones imitating it.



They did announce that we would be able to use our creatures in Spore, when it releases. I'm going to download the full version sometime today, which costs $10. It unlocks everything, and I want to play around more. I wish I could play around with the creatures more, but I realize this is only the Creature Creator.

My score so far: 7/10, but I expect this to go up once I download the full version and I'm not limited by the trial.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: video games, spore]

In an attempt to make sure I do more work on Will and Beyond, I'm going to try and do a weekly column: Techy Tuesday. It will be up at some point on Tuesday every week. (East coast time.) I haven't decided on any sort of strict formula for this, and I don't think I will, but it will be techy related.

NES Hacking



Everyone remember their days of NES. Unless you're too young. Or you were deprived as a child. But really, if you didn't have any friends growing up who had one, you were too sheltered, where was your ambition?

Anyhow, the image you see is someone putting an entire NES system in a cartridge. See that indention in the middle? That's where you put the game - yes, a cartridge in a cartridge. The obvious question is what happens when you get two and put them in each other - maybe they make little Game Boys?



Now here is someone putting the NES in a controller. This one's cool because not only does it have a cartridge slot in the back, it comes with 70 games built-in to it. If you have any moral qualms with using emulators and ROMs, then go away stick with that first mod. I wish I had this kind of talent.

Geeky Jewelery



In case you're having troubles declaring your geekdom, here are a couple options. The first option will only work for men. (Because women don't wear cufflinks, right?) I'm not a fan of most cufflinks, I'm usually satisfied with just the buttons that come on the shirt, but for these Wiimote cufflinks, I'd make an exception. They look like they are really well done.



Finally, we have a pair of ethernet wedding rings. In case any of you are getting married, give it some thought. I pitched it to Micah to use these for his, but I wouldn't put money on it. Just imagine, as you kiss the bride, when you lean in, you could connect them, and your geekiness would be immortalized.

That's it. I'll work to get this up every week, and we'll see how this goes. If you have any suggestions (or especially if you want to write a column of your own), feel free to contact me. (webmaster @ the website name)

Godspeed.

[Comments: 2] [Tags: technology, video games, techy tuesday]

I went snowboarding at Stratton up in Vermont this weekend. It was a good time. I went with Dianna and Yan through Ski Klub International. (By the way, I can't believe that I actually just linked to a Geocities site.) Sadly, that was my only trip for the whole season - oh well, I'll make up for it next season. I took some pictures, and I'll put them up sometime this week - probably towards the end of it; things are really busy.

Grad school is piling up with work, which unfortunately gets in the way of sleep. I'm enjoying it and all, but I'd enjoy it more if there was a little less of it at times. I guess that's what it takes though...



I found this Portal wallpaper, and it'll stick 'til I find something better or I get bored with it. So fun. More updates to come later this week.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: video games, ranting]

Do you somehow not have enough distractions in your life? Well then I have good news for you! If you have the internet (well, you are reading this...) and Facebook, yet somehow manage to stay focused, I have the solution to end any unwanted productivity.



Here is the link to install the Scrabulous application onto your Facebook account. You should challenge me to a game; I usually have quite a few games going at once, and I'll make my moves when I'm in the mood to procrastinate. (A lot.) When selecting which image to use for this post, I had quite a few options, but only one had sex on the board, so it was the winner.

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0] [Tags: video games]

Zero Punctuation is a weekly video game review... video. I had heard good things about it, but unfortunately I had also seen the logo for it (seen below). As you can tell, not so focused on the art. Especially with webcomics, if I don't like the art, I'm not going to read it, regardless of how funny it is (examples: Penny Arcade and Cyanide and Happiness). However, after weeks of ignoring it, I decided to give it a chance.



I started out with the first game on the list that I have played, Call of Duty 4. I loved it. You can instantly realize why it is entitled Zero Punctuation. I was able to look past the stick figure art, just because it's so funny - that's saying something. I proceeded to watch the reviews for all of the other games I've played more than 5 minutes of: Super Mario Galaxy, Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Super Paper Mario, and The Orange Box. I highly recommend all of them (I mean the reviews, but the games as well). He (Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw) has been doing this once a week for just over 6 months or so, so there's a decent catalog of reviews to go through.

In summary: funny, short (but not too short) video game reviews read by an Australian (great accents over there).

Godspeed.

[Comments: 2] [Tags: video games]

The two certain things in life are death and taxes. I wouldn't be able to write an article on taxes without using that cliche phrase, so I'm getting it out of the way now and not mentioning it again. You may be rightly wondering why I, a chemist, would be writing about taxes.



Among my many RSS feeds are a few video game blogs, including Joystiq. Where's the connection? The article which prompted this was entitled, "New Mexico legislators consider video game tax for outdoor programs". This sort of tax seems that it would be unlikely to pass, so I wouldn't think twice about it. The only reason it caught my eye is because it looked very familiar. I looked back, and sure enough, earlier this month there was another similar article entitled: "Wisconsin politician proposes 1% tax on video games". These articles were written within three weeks of each other. Looking back even farther, I found: "Let's tax games, proposes Texas senator".



The push in New Mexico is being proposed by the Sierra Club, who tried for this tax last year unsuccessfully. The taxes in Wisconsin and Texas were proposed by democratic senators. Tiered taxes exist already, for instance here in Washington, DC, sales tax is 5.75%, however in restaurants it is 10%. Most states have added excise taxes (I spent some time on Wikipedia) for cigarettes, gasoline and alcohol. These can also be called Pigovian, or more commonly sin taxes.



Should video games receive a "sin tax"? Obviously I'm going to take the side against it, since I play them and would rather not pay more. What are the arguments for such a tax? The Sierra Club's tax in New Mexico would have the proceeds go towards programs that "would counteract the negative effects of video games -- lower academic scores, obesity, and increased attention-deficit disorder." In Texas, the argument employed is that "if school-aged kids are spending a lot of money on video games" or parents are spending a lot of money on games for their school-aged kids" these consumers can spend a little bit more in order to improve their school systems".



I support better schools and outdoor programs to improve public health, but why should video gamers pay more than other people to support these efforts?

[Comments: 0] [Tags: video games, money, politics]