Monkey Dew

Barry Lane Beyerstein

2007-09-15T01:23:00.000-07:00

On warm early July afternoon, fresh off a job interview, I found myself sitting on the train back home, starting out into places I’ve seen in the past and on a whim decided to take a detour ‘up the hill’ to my old alma matter to pick up a reference letter which had been waiting for me for some months. Up on campus, I retraced my routes that I took daily as a student a few years back. Much has

Frank Miller's 300 and My Computer

2007-03-10T06:05:00.000-08:00

Frank Miller's 300 was a disappointing experience, I left the theatres feeling empty. The pretty comic book images failed to light the fire inside me. The theatre I went to was packed with young movie goers, the target demographic for this film. In 2000, the film print of Gladiator melted right before my eyes halfway into the movie. The audience groaned and I could feel the palpable electric aura

Rome Picks Up

2007-02-12T23:44:00.000-08:00

**Spoiler Warning**I’ve wavered for a bit about Season 2 of HBO’s ROME. After taking 2006 off, the series is back airing its first episode in January. The season premiere was explosive, as expected, then it went into a kind of a lull. The main character arcs got lost somewhere in the latter half of episodes 2 and 3, with the likeable Titus Pullo /Lucius Vorenus friendship being pulled apart as

Hotel Dusk – Final Impressions

2007-02-05T20:38:00.000-08:00

I blogged about the then upcoming Hotel Dusk a month ago and its release has come and gone. Although the game appears to have a limit print run, I was able to snag a copy at my local EB in late January.Hotel Dusk Room 215, is in a word, brilliant. It is a classic noir tale spun into a masterfully designed DS game. The game isn’t perfect. Sprinkled throughout are a series of puzzles each with

The Visual Game

2007-01-11T00:00:00.000-08:00

40 hours in, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is just as good as I had imagined. It is rare in this day and age for hyped products (and Zelda certainly is hyped at least among gamers) to live up to expectations. The game isn’t perfect, and I had wished Miyamoto had listened to his team members for creating a Twilight Princess SP version for Wii owners, but that's really a minor quibble

Hotel Dusk

2007-01-04T23:26:00.000-08:00

If you were to ask a hardcore gamer why they think the Nintendo DS is such a huge hit in Japan and is increasingly pulling away from its rival in the West, they will probably point to the new Mario game, lots of software for big name third parties (specially Square-Enix), and non-games, a new genre of games loosely connected as games that appeal to people who don’t normally play games which has

OFFICIAL: Dragon Quest IX for the Nintendo DS

2006-12-11T21:58:00.000-08:00

At the Dragon Quest 20th anniversary event, Dragon Quest IX, the latest installment to the hugely popular RPG series in Japan has been announced to be a Nintendo DS title!This marks Dragon Quest's return to a Nintendo console in 10 years and the first since Dragon Quest VIThe game is developed by Level 5 (the same team who worked on DQ VIII for the PS2) and will be in 3-D.Update: The game is

SONY: Oops! We did it Again.

2006-12-11T19:47:00.000-08:00

Sony’s PSP marketing has gone off the deep endThe once well oiled marketing machine that sold the RPG to Americans with glossy ads have been reduced to bungling the advertising campaign of the PSP not once, twice, thrice, but FOUR times (at least).There were the ill-conceived ‘fake’ PSP graffiti ads, the ‘White is Coming’ European PSP ads which featured a white woman grasping the face of a black

The November NPD

2006-12-10T21:41:00.000-08:00

The November NPD results was released last Thursday but I didn’t get a chance to make a post about it. Here are the numbers (US sales data only) gathered from official published sources.Nintendo DS - 918KPlayStation 2 - 664KGame Boy Advance - 641K Xbox 360 - 511KNintendo Wii - 476KPSP - 412kPlayStation 3 - 197KThe Wii and PS3 Numbers were not big surprises as Nintendo has already noted it had

Wii Sells out in Japan, Luigi is Arrested

2006-12-04T22:08:00.000-08:00

The Wii was launched in Japan on Dec 02, Saturday this past weekend and all 400,000 launch units sold out within the day according to Nikkei news service. For those following the Wii story, the sell out was unexpected.*Although Nintendo hardware launches have always been met with a sell-out, the launch quantities and the lucklustre performance of the GameCube had left many speculating that once

Where are the Wiis?

2006-11-26T15:10:00.000-08:00

Well I’m not going to go rant for 3 paragraphs about how I didn’t or couldn’t get a Wii last Sunday and haven’t been able to obtain on since despite a restock on Friday, but I don’t have a Wii, but I have a classic controller sitting next to me (for the Virtual console stuff) and the controller gives me a strange sense of what a Super Nintendo controller might have looked like had it existed in

Twilight Fantasy

2006-11-13T18:43:00.000-08:00

The full trailer to Twilight Princess which I alluded to in my previous post is now posted The only reason I did not include the trailer in my previous post was I could not find a decent enough feed from YouTube to link to. So I’ve decided to upload my own copy of the trailer (courtesy of GameTrailers) and put it up on YouTube. The Zelda franchise has certainly come a long way since Ocarina of

The Legend of Zelda

2006-11-12T03:50:00.000-08:00

Over the past week, I have re-watched two amazing pieces of PR video Nintendo released to promote its game. The first video is the game’s introduction, set to a brilliant choral re-imagination of The Legend of Zelda (NES) opening theme with visual allusions to the Ocarina of Time, including a reversed but similar camera movement where the camera speeds along the field of Hyrule as it slowly

Temenos Liberator

2006-08-13T21:06:00.000-07:00

The culmination of about a month and a half of work, and nearly five months of working together as a group was the fight against one of the harder ‘boss’ characters of the game, the Proto-Ultima Weapon.Players who unlocked their access to Al Tieu will have fought a tough battle against Ultima and Omega back to back on the airship, but this Ultima is about five times harder and requires many more

E3 is Dead

2006-08-06T20:13:00.000-07:00

It’s official. E3 as we knew it is dead. Last Monday the Entertainment Software Association announced that the giant industry trade show held every May, preceded by multimillion dollar press conferences from the big 3 manufacturers, and best known to the general public as that ‘videogame thing’ in Los Angeles, has been cancelled.Ultimately it came down to a cost vs. benefit equation. According

The Big Payoff

2006-07-30T22:28:00.000-07:00

About two weeks ago, I had put an order from a prominent import side for Play-Yan Micro, the Nintendo produced but Japan-only media-player attachment for the Game Boy Advance, which also coincidentally works with the DS. I had discussed this in length in this 2005 posting.At around the same time, two other friends and myself in Final Fantasy XI began working on missions for one of the new (rare/

The Art of Animation

2006-07-15T01:08:00.000-07:00

When a piece of art, a movie, or a composition connects with you, there’s that electric moment of first contact. It is at the moment when you catch a glimpse of a film or hear the first notes of an artistic work and for a brief moment you feel pure bliss. The sensation is unfiltered and genuine. For that fraction of a second, you’re unjaded and become a kid again.I had that electric moment

Total War: Rome

2006-07-10T15:23:00.000-07:00

One of the pleasures of picking up well-received PC games a year after its release is the ability to pick up their ‘Gold Editions’ which usually include the 1st expansion and a patched vanilla game and a substantial discount. This is what I did with Rome: Total War. I’ve seen it on the shelves for some time, often retailing for as much as $60.00

Trans-Mars-Rover

2006-06-30T23:00:00.000-07:00

What a disappointment. I’ve waited months to see the sneak preview to the upcoming Transformers Movie and we get something that looks like it is the teaser to another passable sci-fi action flick from Michael Bay. Ok well, this may end up being just that, but still, this is THE TRANSFORMERS live action movie! What do we get? Half the trailer is

Miyamoto's Dark Side

2006-06-23T00:38:00.000-07:00

Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamotophoto courtesy of Impress Group CompanyNext-Generation has a very interesting editorial discussing this very issue. The topic at hand is Shigeru Miyamoto’s influence on gaming. On the balance, most of us can agree his influence is certainly positive, but a question often not asked is has his presence in the industry brought negatives to the table. More bluntly, it

Fantasies are Never Final

2006-06-17T21:34:00.000-07:00

... and blogs are never truly abandoned. A lot has happened since my last post but rather than bore people with accounts of the past, here are a few things on my mind at this point in time in no particular order and no particular significance. These are just things that I thought worthy enough to mention.DSLite - I liked the original DS, but many people complained about the screen vis-à-vis

One More Turn of Civilization

2005-10-24T21:42:00.000-07:00

In a few hours, I should be sitting at home losing myself inside the world of Civilization IV. Fall and Civilization addiction has been a tradition for me for quite a few years now as Firaxis has had a penchant of releasing Civilization games and its expansion packs in three of the last four years during the October-November frame.This fall I get to play with a new game. But it’s actually not all

Nintendogs Day 4

2005-10-17T22:01:00.000-07:00

Nintendogs is a great game. As I noted in my earlier post, the game sold 200,000 units in its first week in North America, it sold a further 250,000 units in all of September, putting its cumulative total on September 31st at 450,000 units sold. In Japan the game’s sell through is fast approaching 700,000 units and the game did reasonably well in Europe after its late launch with 150,000 units

ROME Episode VII: Pharsalus

2005-10-10T17:27:00.000-07:00

It has been several weeks since I wrote a review of HBO’s Rome. That’s not to say I have lost interest. In the weeks since my last entry, HBO announced ROME would be renewed for a second 12 episode season and the first season of the show is moving along quite nicely.I have to admit though at being at little disappointed with the overall direction of the series. I don’t mean it as a deal

Square Fantasies Makes the World Go Round

2005-10-05T22:40:00.000-07:00

What a day. Final Fantasy III, the long rumoured but never shown Nintendo DS game was finally shown to the public today and it will in fact be a complete remake. The tiny press photos published by Famitsu reveal a colourful pre-rendered world with what appears to be 3-D characters. As if that wasn’t enough, Final Fantasy V and VI were announced for the GameBoy Advance/Micro.The announcements come