I found a cache of old movies in the garage today while I was cleaning. They were out in the garage for a reason, so now I’m trying to get rid of them. How’s about $1.50 each? Let me know if any of you want them... Oh, the DVDs are widescreen, the tapes aren't unless noted.
VHS
DVD
I’ll admit it... I’ve started feeling the pull to the Nintendo DS. Two games that look very good, Canvas Curse and Meteos, both came out for the system last month. Then there’s Jam with the Band, a tasty sounding music/rhythm game coming out sometime this year. And, I REALLY want that Advance Wars game!! Crap, I think it’s only a matter of time before I’m lugging that silver monster around...
Oh yeah! There's a blue one now! I'm so easy...
I rode my bike to work today and you didn’t. Well... unless you’re Billy because he (you?) did too. Or if you ride your bike to work someday in the future after reading this post and then come back and read it on that day, then I guess you can say “I rode my bike to work today too” because I didn’t really say what day I rode it. The point is, I’m cool and you’re lame. Ok?
Five days... It took me five days to talk myself into making the DS plunge. The deal was too good and ending soon AND I had a bunch of games to trade, and a super trade in deal. I was practically forced into it! Here’s the deets:
I traded Ratchet & Clank 2, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Syberia, Splinter Cell, Parappa 2, Final Fantasy X, PGR, Paper Mario, Sly 2, and Sphinx. If I renewed my Game Informer subscription for $15 (which I wanted to do anyway) then I got an additional 50% on my trade ins... which I did. So with the additional 50% I got $81 for my trade ins. Minus the $15 for the magazine, and I still had $66 to put toward the DS.
To sweeten the deal even further, they were running a deal where you get Super Mario 64 DS for free ($30 value) when you buy a new DS. So, I ended up paying $84 total for the magazine subscription, the DS and Mario 64.
I'm pretty happy with the deal, now let's hope I'm as happy with the system!
On Saturday Kara went to a coworker’s wedding out in The Dalles and Monica took Kalin camping for the weekend. That left me and Billy to hang out girl-free all day. So, we went to the mall... And while we were there, we split a Cinnabon... Yeah...
BUT, we also did dudely things like: played catch for about an hour, watched shows about Lance Armstrong and Barry Sanders, drank beer and watched the Mariners beat the Angels. See, we’re guys... right? Oh, and by the way, the Cinnabon was to die for!
The last week or so, people have been talking about finding thrift store treasure on the Spielfrieks board that I frequent. That got me excited for trying to find some treasure of my own.
Last week, Kara & I went around to the local thrift shops to see if we could score some goods. Though we didn’t find any games, we did find a few still sealed puzzles that we bought at very low prices. These puzzles just didn’t fulfill my desire for the long lost game treasure that I sought.
So this weekend we decided to go garage sale shopping in the hopes that we might strike gold. We got up early and looked up garage sales in the Seattle PI. I got a list of them in our area and turn-by-turn direction from sale to sale. Our plan was to drive from sale to sale with our eyes on the lookout for other sales in the area. This plan ended up working very well, we found quite a few sales and picked up some good stuff. The first thing we found was a word game called Razzle for $2.00. We’ve played a few times already, and we really like it! It’s like a speed Boggle kinda game, where you are racing against the other player to spot a 4 or more letter word. The funny thing about this game, is Kara does really well at it when we first start, but after a little bit of playing, I start doing REALLY well.
Anyway after that sale, we went to a few more and spotted another sealed puzzle for 50 cents. It’s hard to pass that deal up, so we bought that too (we now have 4 puzzles to do, and we got them all for $10.50)... not too shabby! So after that sale, we saw a big sale, and there we bought Myst CD-ROM. Grim Fandango has been going well, so I thought that it’d be cool to get another puzzle game.
At another sale, there wasn’t anything good, but an old man (whose sale it was) offered this little BBQer for FREE! Well, I had to “buy” that, it’s still in Kara’s trunk. We went to a few more sales, but didn’t find much, so on our way home, we spotted one more sale. This was a big block sale, stuff on both sides of the street. I was looking through the crappy games when I spotted an old copy of the game Acquire! I opened it up, and there were tons of pieces to count. I asked the guy if all the pieces were there, and he said “well if they’re not, you can come back and get your 50 cents!!!” I was shocked at the price, so I said “well, at 50 cents, it’s worth the chance” and bought it.
We left and I counted the pieces, and found that there was one piece missing, but there were extra pieces, so I was EASILY able to replace the missing piece without it effecting gameplay AT ALL!!! Note: there turned out to be NO missing pieces, the “missing” hotel marker was just stuck under the plastic tray. It fell out one day while we were playing it... VOILA a complete game! Since then, Kara & I have played it 3 times, and it is a VERY cool game!!! The first 2 times we played open holdings and I WASTED Kara. The 3rd time we played closed holdings and this time Kara won. (my opinion is that closed holdings make the game MUCH more interesting). Closed holdings adds a large amount of the unknown to the game which makes mergers much more scary!
So, I have successfully found the treasure in the mess of junk out there, and only for 50 cents!! Funny thing is I wouldn’t have minded paying $20 for this game, if I had ever played it before! SO now that I have played it, I even think about buying the new version just so we can play the game with nicer components. But wouldn’t that ruin the point of finding it for cheap in the first place?
So tonight Jeremy & Christy are SUPPOSED to come over tonight... I’m not counting on it even though Jeremy has confirmed... If they do come over, we’ll finally be able to play Time’s Up again! That game is SO fun!! I must RAVE to Peter about that game next time I see him!!! Maybe I’ll even go over and play at his house this Tuesday... depends on what Kara thinks... But hopefully tonight we can play Acquire along with Time’s Up! Then supposedly Geoff is coming this Thursday? We’ll see! Maybe I can get Phil & Nolan over on Wednesday & Geoff, Jerm, & Christy over on Thursday.
I rode my bike to work again today, which makes it six times that I’ve ridden either there or back. It’s a little over 10 miles from door to door, and it’s a nice way to start the day. The newly built west leg of the Springwater Corridor is the backbone of the ride and the sights are a nice blend of buildings and wilderness. The path follows the Willamette River and there’s this spot just south of downtown that looks awesome. I'll have to take some pictures some day, but let me try to describe it.
At the spot, there is grass and trees on the bank, maybe a few houses on the hill across the river but mostly just trees. Then as you look north, you see the river wind around both sides of Ross Island. Above trees on the island, you can see the Portland skyline and the many bridges high in the sky. Beautiful!
The only downside to all this bike riding is the money I wasted on this month’s bus pass. TriMet prices the pass so that it is JUST BARELY cheaper than tickets IF you ride the bus everyday. So, if you miss two or three days, it’s cheaper to just use tickets for the whole month... I guess I could get SOME use out of the pass by putting it in my spokes. VROOOM!!
This is the last of the retro posts.
So last night Jeremy & Christy came over (one hour late, of course) and we played 2 games of Time’s Up. First game was boys vs. girls (boys won) then couples (me and Kara won). We had some fun clues, but the names seemed easier this time than the time with Phil & Nolan.
I can’t bring myself to buy mp3s. That doesn’t mean I still download illegal copies of songs, those days are long gone. But paying for them doesn’t seem like a good solution either. I mean 99 cents per song is just too much and even $10 per album is more than I can bring myself to pay for a chunk of bits. So, I pay the extra three to five dollars and get a hard copy with a nice case and a pretty book.
BUT... for not buying mp3s, I’ve acquired more than my fair share of them, and legally too! A lot of these music sites offer free trials or sign up bonuses and they all like to email me their offers. So I sign up, get the free songs and then cancel.
Today I was an eMusic subscriber for two hours... I got 40 free songs so I downloaded both discs of Belle & Sebastian’s Push Barman To Open Old Wounds, B&S’s Fold Your Arms Child, You Walk Like a Peasant, and four songs from Isobel Campbell’s Amorino.
MSN Music did a ‘buy one song, get 5 free’ a while back... I got the six non-instrumental Belle & Sebastian songs from Storytelling.
Sony’s crappy Connect site gave me 10 free songs, I got all of Weezer’s Green album.
The first time I was a temporary eMusic subscriber I got a bunch of CCR songs.
Keep those offers coming and I’ll keep being your freeloading bastard customer!
On Tuesday night TJ & Michelle came over and we played a few Sid Sackson games: Acquire & Can’t Stop. Acquire is quickly becoming one of my favorite games; the gameplay is so simple, but the decisions are difficult. I love that there are three different sets of information to consider when choosing what to do. First, there is the current state of the board, obviously open to all players. Then, there is the share holdings of each player, this is closed information but fully track-able if you can remember what each player buys throughout the game (I can’t, but I usually have a firm grasp of standings in the hotels I’m involved with). And finally, there is the secret information of the six held tiles that each player has. These six tiles are like insider information; you can buy shares based on the potential growth that they represent. So, each player does his own thing based on their unique view of the game, and a surprisingly complex economy springs to life. Adam Smith’s invisible hand like I’ve never seen it in any other game. And did I mention I got it for 50 cents?!? I mean, 50 CENTS! C’mon!
I was playing with my site’s database today and I decided to look up who is the most prolific commenter... well, it was me at 143 comments. Billy wasn’t far behind with 139 comments, then Scott with 67, Tony with 51, Nate with 44, and Kara & Reese tied at 28. Let the commenting arms-race begin!
When I first informed Kara that I had bought a DS, she gave me a look... She knew I was thinking about getting one, but I was pretty undecided because of the cost. As I told her, I defended myself by launching into how I managed to get 195 dollars worth of stuff for only 84 bucks. The accountant was once again satisfied with the ‘good deal’ defense.
In the 15 days from then to now, she’s transformed from a begrudging co-owner of a DS to a DS maniac!! Super Mario 64 DS has some nice innovative mini-games that grabbed her initially. She played them for a week or so before complaining that they get old rather quickly. I reminded her that they were just extras to the Mario game, and not the focus of the cartridge (unfortunately Mario 64 is not her kind of game, so I was unable to put something else in front of her to grow her appreciation of the system... until last Monday.)
Last week we met my mom & sister for dinner downtown. I was killing some time beforehand in EB Games and decided to buy Meteos (one of the games I bought the DS for). What a fantastic puzzle game this is! It’s insanely fast paced, and really could only be pulled off with a touch screen. AND... Kara loves it! There is a “Time War” mode where you try to earn as many points as you can in a set number of minutes, and it’s become a real competition between us to hold the #1 spot for each category.
I claimed the top spots at first, when I was just playing around with the different modes. Kara came to me later and announced that she had crushed my scores. I haughtily informed her that I wasn’t even trying when I made those records, and that I in turn would beat her scores... Well, I did, but it was much harder than I expected. Then on the trip up to Seattle, Kara played and took all 3 of my top scores away again! So, this afternoon I struggled and finally took them back, only for her to take them back once she got home from work. I’ve once again claimed the top spots, but the competition is starting to get rough! The great thing is, if Kara wasn’t fighting me on these modes, I’m sure I wouldn’t have put much time into playing them. But you get such a rush when the 2 or 5 minute game has finished and you quickly dart your eyes to the upper screen to see your score. An involuntary hoot of joy or a groan of disappointment issues forth depending on your performance. And if you were sucessful, then you go tease the other person about how awesome and undoubtedly unbeatable the new record is.
We’ve had Meteos for exactly one week, and we’ve already racked up over 15 hours of play time! I’m sure that we’ll eventually get tired of playing the game (or we’ll make ridiculously high scores that neither of us can beat) but there are still DS games I’m ready to play. Kirby: Canvas Curse is already out (the other DS game I bought the system for) and has already attained the Kara Seal of Approval™ (she played the demo at EB Games and enjoyed it). Then there is Advance Wars: Duel Strike, without a doubt, the system seller for me. That game doesn’t come out until 8/22, but the wait will only make playing it all the sweeter.
And then there’s Nintendogs... I started reading up about it in hopes that it might be a good game for Kara. It looks to be a definite Kara game, but I’ve grown mighty interested in it too! And the terrible thing is, it comes out the same day as Advance Wars! Why terrible? Because I’ll be fighting Kara for the DS even more than I already am. This is the constant double edged sword of getting your wife into games... instead of her nagging to stop playing games and start paying attention to her, she’s tries to get me to stop so she can play instead! I’ve started pushing the 2 DS idea... I don’t really want to shell out another 150 bucks, but it does sound like a lot of fun to play multiplayer Meteos. And there is supposed to be wireless features to Nintendogs, and I KNOW there is excellent multiplayer for Advance Wars (though, that is most definitely not a Kara game; I’d have to find someone else to play with... Phil, come home!!)
Anyway, the DS is officially a successful purchase for us. The touch screen creates some very nice new experiences and the first class Nintendo created games take full advantage of the innovative control possibilities. I also think I timed the purchase almost perfectly. Before Meteos & Kirby (both shipped in June), there really weren’t any games for the system that I wanted. Now, there are both those games, two more in less than a month, and Animal Crossing, Mario Kart, Castlevania, Jam with the Band, and Zelda on the horizon.
Now if only they can make a version of the hardware that doesn’t look so clunky...
I've had my iPod for 5 months and it's officially official, 20 Gigs is more space than I can ever fill up. I have around 100 albums on there, or 1246 songs, or 3.5 days of music... and I've only used up 4.74 Gigs. I'm only at 25% capacity! And I wouldn't even be there if I didn't have a number of illegitimate albums ripped from friends' CDs.
Had I paid the full $250 price tag, I'd feel pretty stupid right about now; all that empty space just sitting there laughing at me. But since I didn't (thank you Tivo!), I'm very happy with it. Lately I've been listening to a random shuffle of all 1246 songs, which leads to some unique sets... No Doubt, Linkin Park, Aimee Mann, Metallica, Belle & Sebastian. I'm so confused, should I be happy or angry?
I finished Blue Mars yesterday, which means I’ve wrapped up Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. It's been a while since I first started the trilogy (late March) and it certainly feels that way too. These books plod, and I mean plod, their way through two centuries of the future history of Mars. The books have no overarching climax, or even a per-book climax, so it often felt like reading a history book. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it definitely didn’t make for exciting reading.
The books contain many subsections, each continues the story from a different character's perspective (third person) with a focus on that person's insights and interests. The characters, the first 100 colonists to Mars, are quite a varied group which makes for interesting interaction as they set out to make Mars their home. As you would expect, some of the colonists are more outspoken than others and over time they become the leaders of the group. The books tend to follow these leaders, while other colonists are left as names and faces in the small crowd. And thanks to a conveniently developed medical treatment, the human lifespan is greatly increased which allows some of the characters to live through all 200 years of the trilogy!
So, the characters land on Mars, set up shop, and start working on making the planet habitable. And that's it... There are many things that happen along the way, but it all unfolds more in a real-life way than a fiction story arc kind of way. More people come to Mars, some go back to Earth, people die, babies are born, times of peace and science, times of war and revolution, natural disasters, human disasters... on and on it plods.
Besides the colonists, there is the title character of Mars itself. A great deal of time is spent describing the Martian landscape and its slow reaction to the colonists’ efforts to change it. The seemingly endless geological descriptions often slowed my reading pace to a crawl, but in the end I think it made me appreciate the outcome more.
And that actually sums up how I felt about the whole trilogy. It wasn’t an exciting read, but it was thorough. And, perhaps because of its thoroughness, it felt very rewarding to read it in its entirety. Plus, it wasn’t all dry science, the characters were a joy to get to know and grow old with. By the end of Blue Mars there are only a few of the original 100 colonists alive and even they don’t have much longer to live. So, the end of the trilogy really coincides with the end of the people you’ve grown to love. A bittersweet goodbye as you’re proud of them for accomplishing an enormous task, but sad to know that you’ll never hear from them again.
Chris recently picked up a PS2 for Katamari Damacy, but quickly discovered that it’s a pretty short game... So, now what? Well, I told him I’d make up a list of wacky Japanese games to play until We Love Katamari comes out, but once I had it all typed up I figured the rest of the world could benefit from my sagely teachings! Here it is:
Alright, here's the wacky Japanese games list I promised...
Space Channel 5 - this is a rhythm/memorization game (think Simon). This game puts a goofy grin on my face like no other game. I mean, the "story" involves aliens that are terrorizing society by making people dance! Our fearless heroine, Ulala, must dance off with these aliens to save the people (which once saved, dance along with her, ala the opening scene of Austin Powers). Throw in Michael Jackson and you've got heaven on a PS2 disc. (actually 2 discs, as the PS2 version also has the sequel included).
Mister Mosquito - You play as a mosquito, on a mission to suck blood from the various members of a Japanese family. The gameplay is only so-so (like a flight sim game, where you target various body parts and divebomb) but the cutscenes and dialog are crazy. Don't pay too much for this one, but it's worth checking out.
Mad Maestro - You are a burgeoning conductor, ya gotta build up an orchestra to play some kickass tunes. Another rhythm game, but with a unique spin where you must consider not only timing but how hard you press the buttons. Weird, but cool. And some seriously wacky stuff takes place on the screen as you play your concerts. Another one you should be able to find really cheap.
ICO - Ok, so this one isn't wacky, but it's Japanese... Plus, I wouldn't be much of a friend if I didn't tell you about this game. It's truly a masterpiece of gaming, graphics, and ambiance. You play as an outcast boy that has been left to die in an abandoned castle. You meet up with an odd girl, and together you both must try to find a way out. The gameplay is mostly platforming with some spatial puzzles (push blocks around, etc). There is some fighting off of monsters, but for the most part it's very downplayed (no health, no combo moves, etc). This game is a work of art, very beautiful settings and stunning level design.
The nice thing about this list is none of these games will cost you more than $15! Enjoy.
Jake
