This morning’s highlight was an email in my Inbox from Play Asia, saying that Gyakuten Saiban 4, a.k.a. Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney has shipped!
To me, the Ace Attorney series is, by itself, more than enough reason to buy a Nintendo DS. I just can’t praise these games enough, with their quirky humor and old-school point & click adventure gameplay. It also helps that the western localizations are absolutely brilliant.
Now for one of the longest weeks of my life. 
If you look at the post below this one, the date will say (as of now) “7 months ago”, which can be a bit worrying. 
But, indeed, something has just changed around here, and this blog is not dead, so a new post is in order.
What’s new? Well, you have probably noticed the new logo, but there were other changes “below the hood”, to WordPress, K2, and several plugins. I also changed some of the fonts and text sizes; not huge changes, but I find that the text is now a little more pleasant to read. I also changed my author name back to “Dehumanizer”, as it’s the name I use in several gaming forums, and it is more common to use an alias in a gaming site than one’s real name (which isn’t really a secret — just check out my other blogs).
Other than that, the “big news” around here is that I intend to resume writing on this blog again. Really. No, I have not lost interest in games and the gaming scene in general, or in retrogaming. It’s just that I’ve been… distracted by other things. I’ve also been working (mostly…) at home for the past year, but now I am employed again, and, oddly enough, I find that blogging from work “feels” better to me than doing so from home. I hope I can do that and not let it affect my work.
One tiny problem is that I haven’t had money to buy many new games for the past year, and most of them were for the Wii or the DS. My gaming PC is still the same, and it would probably explode if I installed a new game on it…. or at least make it look like a slide show. But, hey, many of my posts in the past were about retrogaming, and people read them and commented on them, so there’s an interest in those out there. And those Spectrum or C64 games are, as everyone knows (or should know), timeless.
So, expect new, regular posts in the future, including reviews of classic games, comments about the gaming scene and gaming news, and personal stories about how particular games came into my life. Who knows, there may even be a real new post as early as tomorrow!
According to World of Spectrum (also seen on Slashdot), the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was released exactly 25 years ago.
I don’t need to tell you how important this little black rubber-keyed beast was to me, during my late childhood and early teens. It was my first “real” computer (technically, it was my father’s, but…), and not only did I spent thousands of hours playing hundreds of games on it, it was also the computer I learned to program (BASIC) on, when I was 9 or 10.
It was a time that seemed magical, with endless possibilities. I still remember the afternoon when my father introduced that (at the time) weird thing at home. I didn’t know it then, but it would be one of the most important and enduring influences on my life.
Twenty-five years. Doesn’t even seem that long ago.
And people are still creating new games for it… who’d have thought?
For the last few days, the only cartridge inside my Nintendo DS has been this game: Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, by Infinite Interactive, authors of the Warlords and Warlords Battlecry series.
From everything I’ve seen, this game has had very little promotion, and has been relatively hard to find. But most reviews have been quite good (either 8/10 or 9/10), and most people online speak highly of the game as well.
If I was to concisely explain to someone what the game is like, I’d say the following:
From IGN:
After rumours that a Wii version of Resident Evil 4 was appearing on the release schedules of Japanese retailers, the latest issue of Famitsu has confirmed the tittle-tattle and gives a few details about the Wii installment.
Imaginatively titled Bio Hazard 4: Wii Edition, this updated version features new Wiimote-specific controls. These include using the remote to aim weapons, moving the control to reload and using a knife by waggling the controller.
According to Famitsu it also features Ada’s missions from Resi 4 on PS2 and comes with a trailer for the upcoming Umbrella Chronicles, which is also on Wii.
A Capcom representative was unavailable for comment at the time of writing.
I hope it includes true widescreen support as well. This is a dream come true.
EDIT: More details (though no definitive confirmation yet) here and here.
EDIT2: According to Famitsu, it is indeed confirmed, at least in Japan… and does include widescreen. Yes!
Yet another EDIT: More info here.
Have you thought about how great it would be?
And Capcom could produce it in an instant. They’d just have to:
- use all the content from the GameCube version
- add all the extra content from the PS2 version, updated to have GC-like graphics and lighting (otherwise, the extras would look visibly worse than the rest of the game)
- add widescreen mode (I think the PS2 version already includes it)
- add wiimote + nunchuk support.
Advantages:
- it would look better than most current Wii games (including Zelda: TP and Red Steel)
- most of it is already done, so development time and costs would be low
- the game really begs for wiimote control.
Me, I’d buy it in a second, even though I already have the GC version.
There’s not a lot to say about the recent class action suit against Nintendo.
What the news media are reporting is that the wrist straps are “faulty”, which, during play, caused them to break, which in turn made the wiimotes “fly out of the user’s hands”, breaking TVs and possibly simply injuring people.
In reality, this is not more than a bunch of dishonest idiots trying to get rich quickly without working, and taking advantage of the ease (and chances of working) of stupid lawsuits in America. If you can’t produce, steal from those who do.
Just a few facts:
- Nintendo warns users repeatedly not to let go of the wiimote while playing. Indeed, they might not have included the wrist strap at all. They did so as a courtesy, because they knew some people would get too excited while playing.
- Anyone who lets go of the wiimote is not following the usage instructions. In a sane world, this should cause the suit to be thrown out immediately.
- Nintendo has already offered to replace straps. Again, they didn’t need to do this; they could simply say that, if users follow the instructions, straps won’t even be needed. But they are being nice.
- This suit has as much merit as someone sticking a fork in their eye, and then suing the fork’s maker for not putting a “Do not stick in eye“ warning on it. Companies should make safe products, yes, but they aren’t responsible for stupidity. It’s revolting how people can be stupid idiots, and be rewarded for it.
- Finally… You’ve got to see this comic, and this one as well.
Since I bought my Wii, a site I’ve visited regularly is The Virtual Console Archive, which has news and reviews related — you guessed it — to the VC.
However, in one of the last posts, there’s so much ignorance that I’m not even sure it’s a joke or not. I believe it isn’t, however. The post is called Commodore 64 games to join the Virtual Console, and it includes this gem:
All in all quite underwhelming news. The Commodore 64 isn’t even a console! The games have dated too much for them to be worth downloading unless they were 50 or 100 Wii Points at the most. At least that way you could spend your change on a novelty bit of nostalgia and fill up yet another of the 48 channel slots!
I don’t even know where to begin.
Isn’t a console? So what? I’d see it as “the VC isn’t limited to console games! Cool!”. Besides, the C64 was turned into a console in 1990 (by then, it was admittedly too late, and it wasn’t successful), simply by removing the keyboard and disk interface.
Have dated too much? I can’t believe this one - either this is a joke, or the reviewer never had anything but consoles in his life. The C64 compares favorably to the NES! Better graphics, better sound, and more varied game genres. In fact, a lot of C64 games were converted to the NES, and the ports were usually much worse. The C64, meanwhile, could do a Super Mario Bros. perfectly well. If C64 games were to cost “50 or 100 Wii Points at the most”, then they’d have to give NES games for free.
Really, to suggest that the C64 is more “dated” than the NES… Ah, youngsters, these days… 
Oh, and one more thing: unlike what the news (and I’ve seen it in other places, too) suggests, this is not “C64 games coming to the VC”. This is a company (System 3) releasing ports and remakes (of their own games, and Epyx’s) for the VC (and they’re releasing some for the DS and PSP, too). The Virtual Console isn’t just a means for playing old console games; new games will be released for it (much like the Xbox Live Arcade), and in this case some of them are remakes or ports of old games. It doesn’t mean that we’ll be regularly seeing new C64 games there, among NES games, SNES games, and so on.
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