Turbo-blog

This post isn't gonna be very informative. Just a sign of life to announce things to come. I'll be moving by the end of this week and my access to the outside world will be a little shaky for a while.

Plenty of good things to look forward to. I'm having a great time at work, and I've finished Castlevania DS afew weeks ago. Now I'm back into Super Princess Peach.

I also purchased Big Brain Academy. The games are more interesting visually than Brain Age hands down (BBA actually has COLOR!). The two games definitely complement each other well. I think this is the birth of a new genre. Until enough people agree on a better name, I dub thee "Brain Training Games"!

And now it's off to bed for me. See you soon (enough).

Lil' Nintendo Rant

I've been reading up on the Wii forums on Gamefaqs recently. I'm surprised by the small number of fanboys and trolls present there. Then again, I don't spend much time reading there. Still, some comments I read made me wanna post a link to this article I stumbled upon afew weeks ago. The author might be clearly making fun of fanboys, but the FACTS about Nintendo he states in there make perfect sense to me.

Today I learned that the WiiConnect24 service that'll allow you to download a MASSIVE chunk of gaming history onto your Wii will also offer some independent games, not unlike Xbox Live on the 360. I hope this is a sign of future benefits for indie gaming. Though I had felt it for a while, Costikyan's article "Death to the Game's Industry" was what really made me understand how and why independent movements in art usually spring most of the new ideas (Would you like to know more?).

Speaking of new ideas, even though Nintendo fanboys tend to give Nintendo a little too much credit for its past innovations, there's just no denying the amount of things console gamers take for granted that were started/standardized by Nintendo. Here's a quick list:

• D-Pads (Popularized by the NES, Sega made it out of the gate just behind)
  
• Shoulder Buttons (Started with the SNES. Sega quickly shouts "Me too!" afterwards)
• Analog Stick (Standardized by the N64. Sony shouts "Me too!")
• Rumble feature (Standardized by the N64. Sony shouts "Me too!")
• Motion detection (2/3rds of the "next gen" consoles will have them. Microsoft will probably follow. Announced by Nintendo months before Sony could... well... you know.)