The Geek Life Notblog

More vidya.

Matt and I have been playing Smash Bros. Brawl online pretty regularly. We played offline before but I was under the mercy of his controllers of choice – the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. With a little patience and practice I could just barely eke out some sort of satisfactory performance, even a few wins, but without a Gamecube controller I felt like Thor without his hammer. I needed to play with power. So, online I’ve been doing that, whooping Matt left and right and it’s been a great old time. But when he plays as Ike…

Things begin to happen.

He wins. I can’t let that happen. Not anymore.

Meanwhile, I finally hacked my PSP. Sony built a nice piece of hardware but they forgot to support the thing with decent software (I can’t keep playing Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops forever). They also forgot a way to protect the scratch-happy screen, the analog nub is a joke and their selection of PSOne games available to download on their store network is also laughable. Oh wow, Tekken 2 and … Crash Bandicoot. Joy. Where’s Resident Evil 2? Where’s Chrono Cross? Y’know, great games that tons of people would pay money for? Meanwhile, Nintendo updates their Virtual Console on the Wii with three new games every week and these past few weeks have seen some stellar additions. Secret of Mana, Mega Man 3, Earthworm Jim, Gradius 2 … Not that all the Virtual Console releases are great (oh gee, another version of Street Fighter 2?) or that Nintendo isn’t guilty of their own moronic tendencies (Wii Music) but honestly. What is Sony thinking? What are they doing over there? Working on Home? Yeah. Great.

So, since Sony won’t give us anything it falls upon us, uh, liberators of the internets, to free the PSP of its binding firmware and actually give the poor thing something to do besides play Yoko Kanno songs and movie podcasts. Turns out the thing’s a wizard at emulation – Game Boy, NES, Sega Genesis, Game Boy Advance and some SNES games. My dreams of playing Contra 3 and Kirby Super Star – motherlovin’ Kirby Super Star, the holy grail of sweet, sweet, wonderful Kirby games – are dashed like so many Waddle Doos and Dees thanks to godawful frame-skipping and horrendous, well, emulation problems I guess. I don’t get it. But Chrono Trigger, Super Mario World and Earthbound all seem to work fine which is terrific since they’re, well, legendary! At least, that’s what I hear about Earthbound. After 13 years of trying and trying (I just couldn’t sit down and do it) I’m finally going to play that sucker and see what the big deal is about. And after that I’ll move onto Mother 3 and see what the big deal about that is.

Of course, this opens up the door to piracy… Luckily, the PSP hardly has anything worth stealing. The good games, I already own. And that’s pretty much all there is to that. Apparently, now it is possible to play PSOne games by ripping the ISOs from the CDs I already own onto my PSP memory stick. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Now I just gotta find out how! Hopefully I’ll be shooting zombies with Claire Redfield and hunting Frozen Flames with Kidd while on the caaaaan in time for the weekend.

Woo!

Y’know how you’re put on the spot and you can’t think of a reply fast enough? George from Seinfeld had that problem a lot and I did today when talking about Pokemon and Mirror’s Edge in today’s podcast. Matt asked what the big deal about Pokemon is. Well. It’s FUN, for one. It’s a deep, challenging RPG with over 300 characters you can mold and build to suit your style, there are tons of items and moves and secrets, a welcoming community to trade characters and items with, online play. Certainly there’s a nostalgia factory – the property’s been around a good, long while and is never going away. And it’s portable. It’s like asking what’s the big deal about Tetris? Whats’ the big deal about beer? C’mon. What more do you want? We’re obviously not changing each other’s minds here.

And Matt’s response to my query if he played the Mirror’s Edge demo out now: “It’s a jumping game. [or some similar snarky thing]”

So is Super Mario Bros.! RRRRRGGGHH. Try the demo, man. You too, Jess, you can download it on the PS3 through the Playstation Network Store. It’s the most unique thing out there. Every game out there looks like some brown, realistic shooter. Mirror’s Edge has primary colors. Do you remember the last time you saw those in a game? That wasn’t from Nintendo? It’s thrilling. The art design’s terrific, the music, the controls are different and weird and fun… the thrill of running away from armed pursuers. It’s completely different, emphasizing running and climbing and leaping over regular ‘ol SHOOTAN. It’s like the rooftop chase in Bourne Ultimatum or Casino Royale. And yes, you can see your legs if you look down. Try it out for PETE’S sake.

So yeah, in the feeble, limp words of George Costanza, “the jerk store ran out of you!”