Dean(ish)

Wow! With savings like that, I could save up to buy more air!
Read the rest of this entry »

This video is a guide through the Nintendo Museum exhibition from earlier this year in Japan. It’s an amazing look at the rich history of Nintendo in their never-ending quest to entertain the masses. I really enjoyed seeing things like Nintendo’s Lego-like Mii-ish toys, the original pre-NES Duck Hunt, and the Famicom Disk System - things I never got to play with, but I probably would’ve. This video was made as a pilot for Points, a new series of videos by Jason DeGroot that focuses on not games, but gamer culture.

If you like the music in that video, you’re not alone - I dig it too. It’s made by the producer of the video, under the moniker 6955. From what I understand, he makes all of his music with the Game Boy Camera accessory. Yeah, crazy.

In addition to his own gig, 6955 is doing all of the music and sound effects for a sweet looking game still in development called Fez, which is being developed by a small studio in Montreal called Kokoromi. I originally found out about this game (and 6955) on 4 color rebellion, which sent me on the link-clicking goose-chase that is the internet and has blossomed into the post you see here today. Check out the trailer for this sweet looking game:

Based on that trailer, Fez looks like it’s gonna be a great game. It’s part platformer, part puzzler, part wtf-I’m-manipulating-space-zomg - what’s not to love? The art style’s a throwback to the 2D 8-bit/16-bit days, but it’s actually completely 3D which is just awesome. Plus, it’ll have new old school music to go along with it. Long live old school!

BTW, to those of you who may subscribe to my blog (all 2 of you [if I'm lucky]), you may have noticed that I’ve been away from ye ol’ blog for a couple months. I should be gettin’ back into the swing of things.

—————-
Now playing: Spoon - Don’t Make Me A Target

Stare at that for a while and tell me it’s not creepy. You can’t; it’s damn creepy. It’s like when Pennywise the Clown winks at Jonathan Brandis in Stephen King’s It, but worse, because you kind of expect a certain level of creepiness from a clown - not from a baby.

It’s been exactly one year since I wrote a post about my worries of losing Sierra to her biological mother. I’m happy to say that my fears never came to light. In fact, in some respects, it’s been the complete opposite: we’re adopting Sierra, and her mother hasn’t been heard from since that fateful court appearance.

Becoming a parent - an adoptive and biological parent - is finally starting to kick in. As the due date for our new baby comes closer, in addition to the date (still undetermined) for Sierra’s adoption ceremony, the words “daddy” and “mommy” are becoming more common, yet are still a bit unfamiliar. Sierra is becoming more confident in calling us by our respective parental identities, but one area that Christina and I need to work on is referring to each other by the same.

One of the goals I set for myself this summer was to get Sierra to read a book, without help, before she starts 1st grade on Sept 4th. She’s not quite at the level where she can read a book completely by herself yet, but I’m pretty sure that we’ll be able to get her there by the time school starts.

It’s funny to think that we’ve had Sierra for a year and a half. In some ways it seems like she just came to live with us; in other ways it feels like she’s been with us all along.

As gaming evolves, complexity and emotion become the name of the game. This game, BioShock, puts you in a role of (potentially) tremendous guilt - do you save the little girls to be the hero, or kill them to take their power for your own gain? Sick, yes, but also extremely interesting.

I’m really looking forward to the openness of the game, including how you want to upgrade yourself. As you go through the game, defending yourself against (or savagely attacking) both machine and man, you can biologically modify your character to grow magical abilities like command lightning bolts and shoot bees out of your veins. Seriously - bees. You can even alchemize your own bullets and hack into security systems to make enemy machines your ally.

I was really looking forward to Metroid: Prime 3, which comes out just a week after BioShock. Unfortunately, I can’t afford both, so I need to make a choice. They’re both in the first-person shooter genre, but never before has a shoot-em-up offered so much open-ended freedom as BioShock. For that reason, BioShock is sitting at the top of my wishlist right now. (Plus, I can always rent Metroid: Prime 3 and buy it once I’m done with BioShock; it’s much harder [dare I say, practically impossible?] to rent PC games.)

BioShock comes out on August 21 for both PC and Xbox 360.

Here’s some gameplay footage: