Sunway Pyramid Arcade pics (20/7/2007)

Since I've taken them, might as well post them here. No flash. Yes, some of the pics would look way better. But I was being paranoid of looking like a suspicious character. (or worse, getting on the bad side of the arcade operator!)

Behold! It's Mario Kart Arcade GP! :p

And there are four of em :D

OMG. It's Initial D 4 XD. SABRE is the dude who gave some tips to help me beat LotS for the first time :D

My good friend Zackler taking on Kozo Hoshino. Doryaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!

In-game....

This is Initial D 3 Japanese Ver. heaven. English version? Tadak. :p
(Oh btw, mistake on my part, there was only 10 machines....)

Save the world...deluxe style XD

Character Customization rocks!

This is Kaze, my Initial D 4 character: Last Tuesday (left), and last Friday (right). Yes, the pics dont have the same size because they both are seperate pics, and I was never any good in camera pics :D

I'm pretty happy with the look Kaze has now. Unless something good comes up through the roulette.

Cancelled

A month plus back I posted regarding me and SWATwolf preordering Gyakuten Saiban 3.

Well....

Cancelled.....

I cancelled the order. Both his and my copy. His because he wants to buy other stuff. Me because I have higher priorities now. Not that I would lose anything because being a Japanese game stocks should be plentiful.

As for the Haruhi DVD preorder, it's still on. Coz I want the DVD :p. Though I just hope it doesn't get taxed or I'll end up dead as I only have just the right amount + a little more.

The Gaming Outing (or Initial D 4 ROX)

Having heard that Initial D 4 is out in Sunway, me and two of my friends checked it out at Sunway Pyramid. We went at around 12. That time there was no one playing Initial D 4 so there's me and my chance to play. So I created a card (RM18...OMFG). It is understandable considering it has 150 card plays, able to store 3 cars, and is solid. Meaning you can't destroy it unless you intentionally do so.

The card is better than Initial D 3's that's for sure. :D.

After buying the car, you pick your gender portrait (they are randomly generated, one male and one female), your name (up to 6 letters), your car and the colour of the car.

Here's the details of my card XD

Name: Kaze
Gender: Female (Note: shut up. And the female portrait generated for me looked far better)
Car: Mazda Efini RX-7 Type R (FD3S) (I have no intention to fill up the two empty slots as of posting)
Colour: Black

Then the game starts. There are only six tracks (Lake Akina, Myogi, Akagi, Akina, Irohazaka, Tsukuba). The story is animated and the voice acting is Japanese with English subs (this is the English version). And during gameplay you can actually hear them talk ala ID Special Stage for PS2. (can be turned off, I did because I found it annoying).

And the screen is widescreen. High definition drifting FTW.

The physics are changed completely. It almost mimics Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune, but on mountain courses. In fact, any ID3 skills don't work anymore. Back to square one I suppose. The difficulty is also ramped up. (I took several rounds to beat Takumi on Akina. Grrrrr.....).

In store battle mode works almost like the old ones, but I can't figure out how to turn the accept challengers on/off without going through the main menu.

At the end of the whole ID time, I managed to finish the Legend of the Streets mode once. The game is great but will take forever to adjust to.

Oh and being a new game, it attracts attention. Whoo! Especially in a battle. I racked up 2 wins XD. Blind attack = WIN :P

And while I was looking around, I saw Mario Kart Arcade GP! Not a bad game, and it was great to be able to play it again. I picked up a card as well.

The card is like Initial D 3's. But I picked it up anyway.

Details:

Name: tsukasa (hiragana spelling)
Driver (Kart) : Yoshi
Rank: Super Rookie :p

It's Mario Kart. In full arcade goodness. What else can I say :p But there is no one playing there so it wasn't so fun (they had 4 machines).

Other notable things:
- Seats near the Para Para Paradise machines. For who? Good question.
- 12 Initial D 3 machines. TWELVE! All of them Japanese. And yet hardly anyone plays them!
- Time Crisis 4 Deluxe cabinets. Whee! You don't see this everywhere. :D

The day was fun overall. :P Will definitely go back there soon :D

Thanks for reading.

Limit.

When you are playing something competitively, be it an FPS game like Counterstrike or a racing game like Initial D or even a music game like Guitar Hero, you will always have a limit of your own when you play.

Training or learning on your own does help you improve your game, but eventually when you are at the top of your game, there will be a barrier. This barrier is different for everyone (can come late or early) but this barrier is usually a barrier that is tough to knock down because there is (usually) no more room for improvement. At least for the person.

Maybe for example, you reached a pinnacle by scoring a fast time in Mario Kart, but as hard as you try you never seem to be able to beat that guy who was way faster. Eventually you might beat it, or you might not. It can turn into a psychological mess if you stress yourself over it.

Here's my example, with Initial D v3:

This is...or rather, was my best track/weather condition to play in Initial D v3. And I might be second now, but I'm happy to know that I at least managed to snag the top spot for a short while.

When I first started playing this map, I got an early 2'49"737 (see rank 10), and thats with plenty of mistakes. Even then, I continued to improve and I got what I wanted, a 2'49"190 (rank 5), but it took me roughly 5-6 months for this (as well as buckets of money retrying). I thought I was on top of my game....

Until I got beaten.

At that time when I posted the 49"190 up, I was 1st. It didn't take very long for it to get knocked down to 2nd. And then there's the urge to take back the record. And so began the battle against the barrier.

A huge barrier. I actually thought of giving up because there was hardly room for improvement. The feeling went on until during the last game, I saw a big improvement. And the fight went on until I broke the barrier. And scored a 48"787. :D

Which was #1 for 9 months until it got shot down. By that point I've already stopped so I didn't bother to continue. I might be able to beat it...or...naaaah...

More or less I was inspired to break the barrier because of the feeling of rivalry. (The dude that is #1 btw, is a Sarawakian, from Miri IIRC).

Looking back at Initial D, there were plenty of runs which were not at limit yet, but with Version 4 already out in Malaysia, and the fact that I have better priorities with my money now, makes me decide not to pursue such targets anymore.

And recently, just yesterday, I finally reached the limit for now....for Ouendan 2.

There was no other game has managed to push me to display my best before this. Not Ouendan, not EBA, not Mario Kart DS, not Tetris DS, not Counterstrike, and not even Initial D. It was Ouendan 2 which managed to bring the best out of me. Why? I don't know. And to think I spent MORE time each on all of the other games!

Initial Target: 187000000
Current: 188120370

It was an unexpected one. My calculations told me I would be hard-pressed to reach even 185 million. When I got to 187 million, I thought there was NO way I would be beating this.

And 6 hours later, I managed to push that to 188 million. But futile attempts to increase that suggest that I probably have hit the limit for now. Not the absolute max, but it did take a lot of work. (And I managed to get Zenryoku Shonen on Insane all 300'd too :p). Whether I might be able to push this to 189 million....well...that's hard to say.

So for now, thats my limit for both games....in Initial D, I will never go back to test the limit anymore seeing that the newest version has arrived, and as far as Ouendan 2 is concerned...it's not the absolute best score, but I'll have to work hard to increase this further. But I must stress that although it is difficult to break the barrier once you reach it, learning is a wonderful process, and it helps to break the barrier. There are many more limits in life that I have experienced, but it will take me a very long while to blog it all out.

What are your limits? Be it in gaming, or in life, strive on, and you will be able to set new limits for yourself.

Thank you for reading.

My sister's first S rank.

YMCA Breezin' (Elite Beat Agents)

My sister (12 years old) has her own DS Lite, Light Blue's the colour. Once in a while, she'll borrow my games. And she loves to play Elite Beat Agents and Ouendan. So I see her play, and she gets better and better every time she plays. So it's inevitable that one day, she'll get her first S rank. And it's been a long time waiting, since she got a string of As. An in the end, she did. Although it is a pretty close S...but it's still an S eh?

(Oh, and she can spin the spinners better than me too -_- she beats all my spinner bonus scores T_T)

Ouendan 2 R4 SAV with the Elite Beat Agents unlocked.

For the ones who are not bothered to use the Action Replay codes, I have made a Ouendan 2 sav (for R4 and M3 Simply users). This one just enables the Elite Beat Agents from the very beginning. Meaning you have to unlock the songs yourself.

Click here for the save file :) Enjoy!

Note: If you are not using an R4, I suggest looking for the save-file converters out there in the net. Google for them.

Indian Thriller, with "English (sounding) subtitles".

Some of you have definitely watched this before, but this is worth a repost.

THIS is made of absolute win.

Ouendan 1 - Atsuki Kodou no Hate Cheer Girls S rank ALL 300

I haven't scored an all 300 victory in the first Ouendan before this, but I have now :D

My first all 300 run on the first Ouendan :D

At times like this I wished there was a replay option on Ouendan 1 :(

Moonshell + DPG = Anime on DS?

The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi Ep 12 BTW. :p

I was wondering how Moonshell would work with movies. Moonshell is a homebrew (it comes with the R4, but you can download it for your flashcart if you want) designed to play mostly music, but you can also use it to view images and view DPG videos. Does it work well? Welll....sort of....

First things first, Moonshell has a limitation of not being able to run most video formats. No AVI, No WMV, and certainly no MPEG. So far, I've only seen it able to run DPG formats. And here is where the complications arise:

Converting takes a lot of time. With an AMD Athlon XP 1.8ghz and 1GB RAM, a simple Hare Hare Yukai (remember the TV size full ver dance?), set to the best quality and optimal settings take +/ 20-25 minutes.

The size of the file was only in the end, 4.5MB. But it took THAT long. Not for people with no patience.

Wait, then that first screenshot....

Well, that one took me 45 minutes to 1 hour. But its set to Normal quality. Ultra (best quality) would take more than 1 hour probably. The file size came up to 57MB, roughly 1/3-1/4th of the original file.

Yes, I can STILL see the subtitles :P

As for the quality itself, do not expect anything spectacular. It's only average at best. But for a free player, you can't really complain. If you want something better looking on the DS, you'd be better off going for the Nintendo Play-Yan Micro (review by SWATwolf), which does all these things better.

Thanks for reading :)

And Raikkonen wins again in Britain!

And when all McLaren fans thought they had the Championships in the bag....the last 2 GPs change everything :p

It is too bad Massa stalled during the start of the race :( Otherwise it could and would have been a Ferrari 1-2.

Nonetheless, a great result for Kimi! Congratulations!

Let's hope the next GP in two weeks time would bring more positive results for Ferrari!

Old, but still gold - Ouendan 1 thoughts.

Simple, is it not?

Browsing through my DS games, I had a quick look at this. It's the first ever Ouendan that would end up getting a sequel and a spin-off. Seeing that I had a few minutes to spare, I decided to pop this back into my DS. And man, does it bring back good feelings about it.

The graphics, sound quality...heck..everything was far weaker than what EBA had to offer. So why did I not get rid of this? (No, I'm not selling this, go somewhere else for a second hand Ouendan). I mean, hey, it's a quick way to get a couple of bucks.

One word: "Memories"

"This guy's insane already. Call the men in the white coats"

Whoa, hold it right there. It's true.

This game reminded me of how noob I was. :p

- Tapping the notes the moment it showed up. >_>
- Spinning AND changing direction on the spinners mid way through it <_<>_> <_<>_>

And it also reminded me of
- my first S rank. Loop & Loop on Normal. What? >_>
- the painfully hard song (then of course) of Ready Steady Go (damn you lifebar)
- How awesome this game was (that lead to the purchase of EBA :p)

After playing RSG Insane (yay S rank, boo 5.9 million :( ), I can say that despite the massive shortcomings (lack of replays, bad graphics), it's still a damn good game to play.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to finish the stage (Shanghai Honey go!) I was playing. Thanks for reading :p

The Great LYN Nintendo DS Meetup July Editon

Hm, it's that time of the year again. It's on:

Date: 21st July (Saturday after this)
Time: 1200-1700hrs.
Location: Hotel Armada PJ (nearby Asia Jaya LRT)

As usual, the FAQ.

1) A hotel?
Yup.

2) Why there and not (location X)?
Because according to THE MAN himself A.K.A Mr. Penman:

For a change, we are going to have something different and more comfortable. We are gonna have a Hi-Tea Buffet LYN Nintendo Gathering, it's RM35++ person at Hotel Armada. Currently, there's a "2+1" promotion going on, i.e. if we can get a group of 3, it'll only cost less than RM30 per person.

And as for payment, again I refer you to THE MAN:

Payment
we'll take the TOTAL amount, then divide by attendance on that day. It'll be great, if we can find a group of 3s, e.g. 3, 6, 9, 12, etc.

3) WTF.
Hey, you are paying for good food here. :) And it's free flow too. You can eat until you can't. So....yeah.

4) But what if I DON'T want to eat?
Think of it as lunch? :) (Tagged: I'll leave this to Mr. Penman to answer, as I've run out of a proper answer >_<)

5) What do you guys do in the outing?
Well...besides eating....

We play Multiplayer games of the following:

a) Mario Kart DS (if possible bring your own carts/R4/whatever)
b) Clubhouse Games
c) Tetris DS
d) Metroid Prime Hunters (in case...just..in case)
e) Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan (note, bring your own carts, as there is no download play)
f) Elite Beat Agents (again, bring your own carts if possible)
g) Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii: Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan 2 (and yet again, bring your own carts if possible)
h) Bomberman DS
and more :D

Take this time to show off your l33t skillz in the games :)

6) But what if I don't own Mario Kart DS/EBA/Ouendan 2?
Flash cart users have no excuse :p

But if you aren't, then we can accomodate you with download play. :)

7) Erm...my games are...you know la, not the "real" kind, so can I come?
Yes you can. We don't discriminate against "ahem" users. (Original zealots, STFU)

8) I don't have a Nintendo DS but I'm interested. Can I still come?
If you're coming just to meet up, why not? It's an opportunity for fellowship. However, please confirm your attendance HERE. Please do not confirm by leaving a message here!

Though when we get to play games, there will not likely be a spare DS for you, sorry.

9) Confirm your attendance?
Yes. Coz we need to do reservations for the Hi-Tea. And please honor your reservation. Meaning if you say you're coming, you really come. This is serious business.

10) Any preparations if I'm coming?
Charge your DS/DS Lite. Very important. We don't want you to run outta power. Unless you bring your own charger (and find a power outlet) coz most of us don't.

11) I'm staying quite far away, but since most multiplayer games have the Nintendo WiFi Connection, can I use that to communicate with you guys?
Sorry. I doubt the hotel has free WiFi. Therefore, it's not possible.

12) Any rules during multiplayer matches?
No rules. This is just a friendly meeting. However, I advise and stress that NO cheat devices be used in the outing. Don't spoil the fun of others. We are here to have fun, not rake in wins.

(As far as Mario Kart DS is concerned, note that generally we do NOT do snaking matches)

13) What about behaviour? Any rules on that?
Although I've been told that it's okay to behave normally like previous outings, because we are going to do it in a hotel, please do not put yourself in a bad light in front of other hotel guests. I'm not saying you can't scream and what not, but please don't go overboard. You don't want to get yourself banned from that hotel and you sure as hell don't want to offend any guests.

A special message from Reveur : He says that pwetty girls are invited :P

(But if you want to come, go here to confirm your attendance lah)

Suzumiya Haruhi no Gekisou preordered!

Made of win? OH YES!

Around four months ago there was a concert made of absolute win, starring the casts of Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu anime. And now...in roughly four weeks the 2 DVDs of the show will be out.

And:

Look at the last item. Nyahahahaha.

A good friend of mine happened to help me preorder the DVD (along with his stuff. Thanks :). Life is indeed wonderful with friends :) I can't wait for the end of the month wheee!

Here's the DVD preview on Youtube:


If you're looking to preorder the DVD you can head over to Play-Asia or Yes Asia here. Be warned though that this is a Region 2 DVD so please check if your DVD player works with it (US = Region 1, SEA/Malaysia = Region 3).

Thank you for reading :D

Chuck Norris Commercial

You shall not mess with Chuck Norris.

Woohoo!

Ferrari menang! XD Where are all the McLaren fans on my MSN? XD XD XD

On a roll~ Kira kira no Pop Star @_@

EDIT: Moved to sub-site. Click here.

Pinky Street Kira Kira Music Hour review

Cute ain't it? The title screen I mean :p

No, I didn't pick this up. My good friend picked it up over the weekend when on holiday in Japan so I figured I'd review it. Even if it isn't technically mine >_> but I put quite a few hours into this (Sorry Ouendan 2 :( )

Pinky Street Kira Kira Music Hour, is as is name says, a music game. However, it's no Ouendan with no real life people singing in this, rather you are playing to the instrumentals. Not that it's a bad thing of course.

Once the game started I entered a name (has input for Japanese and English letters, but I did not test how many characters), the blood type (huh?), the type of music I like to hear (there's a selection, and surprisingly "Anime" and "Para-Para" were among them), and finally your horoscope (the words are in Japanese, but the symbol is obvious enough). I'd have reason to believe that this game was targeted more towards the female audience when.....

You are apparently given a "house" of your own in Kira2 Music Hour.

.....the character model looks so much more female. And by the way, I had NO opportunity to select gender.

From what I understand, the game is free roam, somewhat like Ouendan 2, with several locations with different types of music.

Your world map. Small is it not?

So far I've played several of the world locations and the one I liked was the classical music area (the real name escapes me at the moment). In every area you will be able to go into shops to purchase things. Of course, the main attraction of every area is the "music room".

Stages are laid out in a way that you will most of the time end up taking on a CPU.

"You" chatting with the person you are going up against.

The game is slightly more text heavy unlike Ouendan, so you might (or might not) miss out on a few things. Still, it isn't too difficult to play. Gameplay however, you will have to place your DS sideways ala Brain Age.....

The game allows you time to tilt the DS apparently. Btw, the Hori Play Stand proved useful here.

Let the battle begin!

The gameplay is pretty simple. Your objective is to simply outperform the other CPU (who will randomly screw up). As shown in the picture, there are 3 panels. When lit up, they are:

Top being yellow
Middle being green
Bottom being blue.

As the music plays, the upper part of the touch screen (when flipped of course - I'm referring to the black "box" with the green music note) will show the three colours. You are supposed to tap the correct colour panel when the music note (which bounces) synchs with the panel on the box (ala Ouendan's timer circles). The timing is rather strict, and it will be the difference between getting Rainbow (spot on), Kira2 (close) or Good (off but still hit). As long as your lifebar (blue) overpower your opponent's (green), you win! But be careful. A string of mistakes will sink your bar to the wrong end pretty quickly (my full bar sunk completely to the other end after missing two beats in a row. TWO!!!!), especially painful if you are at the end of a song.

On Normal mode, you may also have to slide on the panels if needed. If the panel lits up AND also has a >>>>>> or a <<<<<<<, you will need to slide on the panel according to the direction as well (tapping won't count). You will also sometimes have to slide down on all three panels.

Overall, I say this game is pretty nice. It's no Ouendan, but it's still a pretty solid DS game. The gameplay is a bit too simple, but nevertheless it's still pretty addictive. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to play somemore before I return this :(

You can pick up the game from Play-Asia here.