Okay, so I got fed up with my picture gallery. After all, I have a limit of 200mb of disk space. Flickr is great, but free memberships are limited, so I decided to upgrade. With the upgrade, I have uploaded most of my most recent pictures to flickr.
Archive for December, 2006
If you have a Nintendo DS, you should get Animal Crossing. It is quite an odd game, and the premise sounds very boring. You have a small house in a small town, and you have to pay off your mortgage. You can do this by selling fish that you catch, acorns that you gather, fossils that you gather, fruit that you pick or insects that you gather. Are you excited yet?
Well the game is great because of how much content there is. You can collect a humongus number of items, and all of the events in the game are real time. The store closes at 11pm, and the weather always changes. Play in December and you can buy christmas trees and make snowmen. Play in the summer and pick fruit and enjoy the sunny days. Play in the fall and gather acorns etc. Also, people are constantly moving in and out of town, so everything always changes.
Basically, it is just an engrossing game. You only play for a little at a time, but you have to constantly play. And it never stops! There always seems to be a larger mortgage that you can pay off, and there are always new fish to collect, and new items to buy and new insects to find.
Anyways if you still are reading, here you can find an amazing review of the game. This person has spent waay more time than he probably should have on this game. Although it is unexpected, this game is great.
As a final word, this was successful on the Gamecube but makes a lot more sense on the DS. This is because the game is perfect when portable.. just check up on a few things whenever you have a spare moment and you will be active in the game. With the gamecube it is much more of an effort, and it just isn’t as casual. Now only to get this to work on my DS-X :-\
After having my Nintendo DS for a few months, I saw an article about the DS-X on Gizmodo (you can find the article here). Basically, I wanted to be able to consolidate all of my games onto one cartridge, and to be able to try my hand at development. I wouldn’t want to do anything very advanced, just wanted to be able to poke around. I also wanted to try other homebrew programs. For example, you can use MSN messenger on your DS (MSN lets you draw instead of forcing you to type).
Anyways I eventually bit the bullet and bought a DS-X from modchipstore.com. It took a few weeks for me to get the chip because of manufacturing delays, and then my chip stopped working after a few days! Luckily, the tech support was amazing and I was able to get it working again. Now I’m happily using it. It flawlessly plays all of my games, except for animal crossing. Hopefully the developers will fix this soon, but I’m happy enough swapping out the cartridge for only one game instead of all of them. Also, I’ve had to start over all of my games. Too bad there is no way to transfer my saved games off of cartridges. In any case, it is also fun to try the games again from the beginning.
I’m now looking into exploring what to do with my DS-X beyond playing my games. It is VERY easy to use (just treat it like a USB stick), and it becomes even easier with the DS-X Manager. Apparently the DS-X has a powerful skinning engine. I’ll look into messing with this, and into making a simple game. Well, first just to get something to load on my DS, and then maybe a game or something. I’ll see how easy it is 
If you were wondering, here are a few things that I found out that I was curious about at some time:
- Yes, it is as easy to use as it seems.
- If you keep the LEDs on with low power, they will have no noticeable effect on battery life (RGB controls for each can be found on the settings screen)
- WiFi / Download Play / Any Multiplayer works fine with the DS-X
- The community support for the DS-X is pretty active
I’ll be looking into what I can do with the DS-X more over break. Meanwhile, buy one! Also read that review I mentioned, it is really interesting and has a lot of pictures.
