Entry tags:
Nintendos and Nintendon'ts
I meant to wake up this morning and head down to Safeco Field for a nice self-indulgent day at the baseball game. By "self-indulgent", I mean, wearing my Pirates Kendall shirt, watching batting practice and harrassing players for autographs, rummaging through the cheap crap in the clearance racks and bins at the team store at my leisure, and getting the best single seat I could snag in the stadium, even if it'd cost $50 and be only a few rows behind home plate.
Thing is, when I awoke to my alarm at 9am, I decided, "WHAT THE FUCK WAS I THINKING?" and instead turned off the alarm and went back to sleep.
So, I woke up at 2pm or so, and goofed off here for several hours, instead. I listened to relevant baseball games for a few hours (damn yooooooooou, Roger Clemens), played a little PP until the rainstorm knocked out my cable modem, and just sort of relaxed for once.
In the evening, I drove over to![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
keevon's new house for his videogames/housewarming party thing. When I got there, a few people (megami, cheesethrower, tadzilla, keevon, and bobsyouruncle) were starting a game of Traders of Genoa, so I went downstairs to see what was going on there, and at first it simply looked like thunderbird8, tanuwa, Jeff, metroid23, and cynic573 were all intently playing games on their individual Nintendo DSes, while some weird music was playing on the stereo, except it turned out they were actually all playing "Band Brothers" together, and *making* that weird music. It was very bizarre. They told me to go up and borrow someone's DS since it'd support up to 8 players, so I got Kevin's and came back down and also connected, and played for a while. It was a lot of fun, if a bit strange. After that, Matt spent a while showing me a game called "Oendan", which is this funky music game that's sort of like a combination of Technic Beat and... gah, I dunno, it's got this weird manga plot on one screen and a really difficult music touch-screen game going on the other.
The upshot is, I really had no idea that the Nintendo DS could do crazy shit like playing multiplayer networked games like that. I probably spent a good chunk of the rest of the evening playing Oendan after a while. I did try out Jeff's crazy $500 Grand Turismo real-car controller on his big-screen TV, which was cool, but I suck at the GT games, especially since my method of playing racing videogames always involves knowing what speed and angle to ricochet off walls and cars at. I played a little Soul Calibur on the XBox with Charlie, but I really suck at all Soul ____ games that aren't the original Soul Edge, unfortunately. I did spend some time on the NES playing Marble Madness, though, and that was good. After that, Thunderbird played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for a while, while Jerrad and Keith and Tada and people played Fluxx, and then a whole ton of people played poker in the basement, and I'm not really a poker person, so eh.
I chatted with Thunderbird about Puzzle Pirates a bit (he was being lame and playing the single player version on his laptop), and ended up leaving around midnight because I was still pretty tired, and I'm going to get up for real and go to the Mariners game on Sunday. It was good to see people from the old Bemani/videogames crowd.
But, now I'm somewhat torn. I was thinking of making a big videogame order sometime soon since I need to catch up on a few titles (speaking of which -- anyone know an importer who has Pop'n'Music 10? NCSX/Himeya/TNJ say they're out of stock), and now I'm wondering if maybe I want to get a Nintendo DS as well. I've never ever owned a handheld game system (despite having 11 consoles or so), but I always figured one of them would eventually break me, and this one is looking pretty close, especially since I could still pick up some of the GBA games that almost broke me when the GBA-SP came out.
On the other hand, even if I got a DS, I don't think I want Nintendogs. I have enough things to worry about *without* adding on a cute virtual pet that might run away from me and come back with fleas.
Thing is, when I awoke to my alarm at 9am, I decided, "WHAT THE FUCK WAS I THINKING?" and instead turned off the alarm and went back to sleep.
So, I woke up at 2pm or so, and goofed off here for several hours, instead. I listened to relevant baseball games for a few hours (damn yooooooooou, Roger Clemens), played a little PP until the rainstorm knocked out my cable modem, and just sort of relaxed for once.
In the evening, I drove over to
keevon's new house for his videogames/housewarming party thing. When I got there, a few people (megami, cheesethrower, tadzilla, keevon, and bobsyouruncle) were starting a game of Traders of Genoa, so I went downstairs to see what was going on there, and at first it simply looked like thunderbird8, tanuwa, Jeff, metroid23, and cynic573 were all intently playing games on their individual Nintendo DSes, while some weird music was playing on the stereo, except it turned out they were actually all playing "Band Brothers" together, and *making* that weird music. It was very bizarre. They told me to go up and borrow someone's DS since it'd support up to 8 players, so I got Kevin's and came back down and also connected, and played for a while. It was a lot of fun, if a bit strange. After that, Matt spent a while showing me a game called "Oendan", which is this funky music game that's sort of like a combination of Technic Beat and... gah, I dunno, it's got this weird manga plot on one screen and a really difficult music touch-screen game going on the other.The upshot is, I really had no idea that the Nintendo DS could do crazy shit like playing multiplayer networked games like that. I probably spent a good chunk of the rest of the evening playing Oendan after a while. I did try out Jeff's crazy $500 Grand Turismo real-car controller on his big-screen TV, which was cool, but I suck at the GT games, especially since my method of playing racing videogames always involves knowing what speed and angle to ricochet off walls and cars at. I played a little Soul Calibur on the XBox with Charlie, but I really suck at all Soul ____ games that aren't the original Soul Edge, unfortunately. I did spend some time on the NES playing Marble Madness, though, and that was good. After that, Thunderbird played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for a while, while Jerrad and Keith and Tada and people played Fluxx, and then a whole ton of people played poker in the basement, and I'm not really a poker person, so eh.
I chatted with Thunderbird about Puzzle Pirates a bit (he was being lame and playing the single player version on his laptop), and ended up leaving around midnight because I was still pretty tired, and I'm going to get up for real and go to the Mariners game on Sunday. It was good to see people from the old Bemani/videogames crowd.
But, now I'm somewhat torn. I was thinking of making a big videogame order sometime soon since I need to catch up on a few titles (speaking of which -- anyone know an importer who has Pop'n'Music 10? NCSX/Himeya/TNJ say they're out of stock), and now I'm wondering if maybe I want to get a Nintendo DS as well. I've never ever owned a handheld game system (despite having 11 consoles or so), but I always figured one of them would eventually break me, and this one is looking pretty close, especially since I could still pick up some of the GBA games that almost broke me when the GBA-SP came out.
On the other hand, even if I got a DS, I don't think I want Nintendogs. I have enough things to worry about *without* adding on a cute virtual pet that might run away from me and come back with fleas.
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How strange, though. I don't think I've ever noticed one of the Pop'n games selling out, ever since 5 or 6.
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We didn't see a single DDR machine in Tokyo, though we saw plenty of drummania, pnm, iidx, guitarmania, etc. Very odd.
Andrew (jet lagged)
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DDR's been dead for the most part in Japan for like two years now anyway... I only know of two DDR machines that should still be there for sure -- one's at MOAI in east Ikebukuro and the other's at Muthos, in Zama City (near Yokohama).
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I just got back yesterday. Yeah, i had heard that DDR had passed through japan long ago, but i figured there would still be machines sitting around at arcades with less turnover. oh well. I haven't played DDR all year anyway because i'm trying to avoid unnecessary knee impact.
Stories will come soon. And cool pictures! Right now i am trying to fight off massive jet lag before my volleyball game in a couple hours. Falling asleep on the court probably is not good strategy.
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