"Boom shaka laka!"

First, I'm going to list as many commentator quotes from NBA Jam that I can remember off the top of my head:

Boom shaka laka!
The nail in the coffin!
Is it the shoes?
From downtown!
Can't buy a bucket!

If you can remember any yourself, please remind me of the wonderful literary artistry from that game.

Well, I'm sorry to say, but I gave up on Super Mario Sunshine. I got to a point where there were three or four levels that were just TOO frustrating to complete. Yeah, that's right, I gave up on a kiddie game. Hugh, if you're reading this then I know that you're the most disappointed in me, but that's just the way it is.

I started up Tales of Symphonia for GC, and I've put some serious time into it already. It's a pretty good game and not too difficult, though some of the bosses can hand my ass to me in a flash. It's supposedly a 50+ hour game, so it's gonna be a long journey.

I've spent quite a bit of money on eBay lately. I got a MIDI to USB converter for my mom's new Mac to replace the old sound-card dependent one. I won Wind Waker for $18, a DVD boxset of Mission Hill for $30 (I was reminded of it when looking at the Filmography of the voice actor for the main character in ToS who also is the voice of Kevin French in Mission Hill (and Robin in Teen Titans)), and a 36-booster box of Harry Potter CCG cards for $20 (the best deal I could find).

In an effort to clean up the crawl space/storage room, my dad bought 6 heavy-duty shelves. Of course, I wound up assembling them, but I guess I have to earn my keep somehow. At least now I can feel like I did *something* productive this summer. They were a bitch to assemble, but they certainly will help in organizing all of our shit. Once we get rid of our old entertainment center (my brother is going to take it) and our old couches, there will be a lot of free room. I think I'll move my gaming tables in there to be set up permanently.

I realized that since we got the HDTV, I hadn't yet tried setting up a computer to the PC input. I have an old 900MHz Compaq running XP that doesn't really do anything besides get played on by Adam (who now has a job and doesn't come over as often as he used to), so I set it up to the TV. I haven't really done much with it yet, but I've fiddled around with all my emulators and set them up to the right resolution. Along with my PS2 to USB dongle (hehe, dongle), it's a nice little gaming machine now. Unfortunately, it's not powerful enough to run Project64 without slowdown, but everything 16 bit and lower runs fine. I haven't yet checked ePSXe, but I have a modded PS2 so emulating PS games is not a high priority.

Well I guess there's only a month left of summer. I suppose that soon I'll have to get together with my academic advisor to figure out what courses I'll need to take. Fun. Last night I was thinking about how I don't really like dealing with Fibonacci numbers. Maybe if I'm bored I'll try to figure out if there are infinitely many Fibonacci numbers that are prime, or infinitely many Fibonacci numbers that are square. Or maybe I'll play video games. I'm not sure.

Listening to... No Use For A Name - Fields of Agony
Link of the moment... Does this blog have the Buddha nature, Master?

Let's see a BIG turnout next Thursday!

Games night has been rescheduled from Tuesday nights to Thursday nights starting next week (due to Tuesday being cheap night at the local movie theater). Last Tuesday wasn't much of a games night anyways. Chris brought Mario Party 8 as he had just rented it, so a four player game of MP8 ensued (unfortunately leaving multiple people to sit and watch, something I hate doing). After that was over, Dan broke out Singstar for PS2, much to Grant's zeal. The rest of the night was nothing but loud karaoke in my basement (though I did manage to fit in a game of Hive with Adam (I finally won!) and an unfinished game of Balderdash that was quite hard to converse over).

This was quite a shame, since I really had a hankering to play Vegas Showdown which I picked up (along with Nexus Ops) at the border earlier that day. I tried to get a game tonight with the neighbours, but once again my plans fell through as they had unexpected visitors. I swear, I shouldn't even attempt to plan anything anymore, since the universe likes to spite my plans.

My mom's Mac came in the other day (did I mention she got a Mac? Cause she did). I'm in the process of migrating her files to it and organizing them in some fashion (14GB to sort through!). I already threw boot camp on it and installed XP on a partition (for all those files that I unfortunately cannot transfer over to a comparable Mac program). It's really not fun to try to sort through other peoples' messes, so I might just tell my mom to sort it out on her own time.

Super Mario Sunshine is shit. I don't like it, but dammit I'm going to beat it. I have a bad habit of being unable to control Mario while jumping, which leads to MANY frustrating attempts at the same parts of levels. Sometimes he'll want to do a wall jump when I don't want him to, or he won't when I do. Sometimes if I want to turn around and do a small hop, he'll do a crazy backflip into the endless abyss. I've never wanted to bring pain upon Mario as much as I do now.

Well, Traveler is over. Only 8 episodes long. It's a pretty good show, and it's a shame that it's not going to be renewed for a second season (especially since there are DOZENS of loose ends that I won't get to see resolved now). Chanel and I have decided that we're going to start watching Prison Break season 1 (my mom has the boxset) on Wednesday nights since Traveler is over.

Listening to... Opeth - Deliverance
Link of the moment... Quite humourous. Watch it.

SMS or SM64? OoT or WW?

If you'll take note of the sidebar, you'll see that I have completed Suikoden 3 (and it only took 57 hours!). Often, when I finish a game, I already have another one in mind to play, but unfortunately no such game has piqued my interest so far. I've been spending a bit of time on Guitar Hero 2, trying to unlock some stuff. I'm currently trying to five star all the songs no medium (which is pretty easy but time consuming).

I bought a second Wavebird the other day. I couldn't find them at a slew of store, but I eventually picked one up at Superstore for $40. The next day, I was browsing the used games at Rogers Video, and noticed that they (most assuredly mistakenly) had priced the Wavebirds at $25 ($5 cheaper than they were selling the wired controllers!). Unfortunately, I had opened the packaging on the first one, and I didn't really feel like laying down $25 for a third one.

I think in the future I'll play a Mario game and a Zelda game, but I'm not sure which of each: either Super Mario Sunshine or Super Mario 64, and either Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker. Considering I still don't have my Wii online, and since Grant has WW that I can probably borrow, I'll probably choose SMS and WW, though in the future I might have time for the other two. I was telling my friend Gennie the other day how I try to stay at least 2 years behind the times WRT video games. You'll save a lot of money that way. I didn't buy my Wii because I wanted a Wii, I bought it because I wanted a Gamecube and figured that two years from now I'd want a Wii. It's genious, I tells ya.

I ordered Nexus Ops and Vegas Showdown from Amazon.com the other day. The two games are regularly $40, but they were on for $11 each (plus $4 shipping in the US). For that price, I figured it was worth the effort to get them shipped to Grand Portage and pick them up. I had planned on picking up Nexus Ops at some point, and Vegas Showdown has got some positive feedback on BGG. They made it to Minnesota on Friday, so they should be ready to get picked up sometime tomorrow. Maybe I'll try going Tuesday morning so I can break them out at the games night.

I'd like to turn as much of my media digital as I can, in an effort to clear up some space. I have a bunch of CD cases and DVD cases that are doing nothing but sitting there on the shelf. What I'd like is to get a 500GB drive, put everything I have on it, and then sell off my DVDs (undoubtedly illegal, so don't tell anyone). Of course, if I buy a 500GB drive, it'll be SATA. To use SATA, I'll need a new motherboard. For the new motherboard, I'll need a new processor, etc. I suppose I could get an external drive or a drive enclosure, but I think my system has issues with USB 2.0 (vs. 1.1), so maybe not. Well, it's not too urgent anyways.

I played softball last weekend with Sheena, Dan, and a bunch of Dan's friends. It was quite fun. I even got a double when I was up at bat! I was sore for a few days afterwards, but I'm looking forward to the next game (Dan wants to play sports more regularly, but we'll see if anyone actually has the motivation to organize it).

Listening to... THe Dillinger Escape Plan - 43% Burnt
Link of the moment... I'm starting to track game sessions to see how often games hit the table. Geeky, eh?

Board Game collection valued at USD$401

I was doing pretty well at getting to bed early-ish and getting up early-ish these last few days, but due to my not being able to turn down a nap earlier, I can't sleep. I'm still going to get up at 9 tomorrow, but Sunday means breakfast at A&W with the family!

I was curious to know what my board game collection was valued at. Rather than estimating, or even just adding up some prices online, I whipped up a database in case I wanted to do a similar query in the future. I'm also able to sort my games by playing time and game complexity as well.

I've taken all my prices from Thought Hammer, which pretty well has the best prices on every game ever, and they're always well stocked. My valuation of $401 does not take into consideration my thrift store purchases (stuff that TH doesn't stock, like balderdash, pictionary, etc.). Also, the prices I'm using are pretty well best-case scenario, so I paid more for each game than I've accounted for (my valuation is simply how much it would cost to replace all my games by ordering on TH). It also doesn't take into consideration the taxes I've paid, so after all is said and done, I've probably spent closer to ~$550 on board games. Not too shabby.

I've watched a fair number of movies recently. The list includes Die Hard, Wedding Crashers, Clerks 2, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, and Talladega Nights. I guess I've sort of lucked out since there are actually some movies on the movie networks that I've wanted to see.

I've been invited to a softball game tomorrow. I'll know all of two people there, but I guess I should probably go. It's not as though I have anything better to do (although I'll probably be hurting for some sleep tomorrow early-afternoon). A pretty vicious thunderstorm has just started up, so we'll see if it's still raining tomorrow.

Sheena brought up a good point the other day; it would save me a lot of time if I just left my two gaming tables set up in the crawl space rather than moving furniture around every Tuesday. I think I'll do that, but first I'll need to clean up the crawl space, something I tell myself every year. I guess it's really a matter of throwing a bunch of shit out. For instance, I don't think I'll ever have enough of a need for those 15" and 17" CRT monitors (mind you, they'd be nice if I ever had another LAN party...).

I went to six different stores the other day and didn't wind up buying anything at all. I hit up Value Village and the Salvation Army looking for some cheap games, but there was nothing too amazing (besides a really old school Donkey Kong board game that even I had to pass up). I went to the Game Shelf after that. They had an "open games day", which, while I was there, comprised two guys playing Magic in the store. They had a lot of tables prepared for gaming, but until they update their website, I'm not going to try to find out about any events they hold. I think that they're catering to the more hardcore miniatures type of gamer anyways (you know, 40K and Star Wars minis). Their prices aren't all that good. Most of their games are about $5 more expensive than I'm used to. Once you hit games that are over $50 at J&J, they mark the price up quite a bit. Still, given that I intend to buy Martine a copy of Bohnanza as a going away present, they're going to get at least a little business from me.

Now where was I? Ah yes. I went to Cash Converters to see if they had any gems stashed away in their used games, but nothing caught my eye (although maybe I should have bought X-Men Legends 2 for $10). After that was Walmart, where I intended to buy a second, new Wavebird for my Wii, but they didn't have any. They did have the new wave of Heroscape minis a day earlier than they should have, but I don't really need any yet. I headed to Future Shop after that, and they also came up dry for Wavebirds. I was interested to see that Guild Wars (the original) is marked down to $30 from the original $50. If Adam ever gets a laptop, I'll probably have to buy him a copy so that I'll have a reason to play that game again (anything besides more Battlefield! It's all he wants to play, besides tetris). Guild Wars is pretty good for just playing a quest or two at a time, you never really have to worry about experience grinding.

Listening to... Soulfly - Living Sacrifice
Link of the moment... Daily updates on Super Smash Brothers Brawl on weekdays! It's the highlight of my day!