New Kirby Game To Be Released This Year?

Apparently HAL Laboratory is resurrecting a Kirby game that was originally supposed to be released for Gamecube. For those of you who aren't familiar with HAL Lab, they're basically the overshadowed slave for Nintendo. HAL has produced classics such as the Earthbound (right) series, Super Smash Bros. series, Pokemon Snap for N64 and most importantly, the Kirby series.

Kirby's legacy reminds me a lot of Samus'. Despite being so popular on the NES and SNES, Kirby's release on the N64 and Gamecube were...pathetic to say the least. Kirby's Air Ride? Please. I'd be pumped for that game if it had been followed by a proper platformer, which it was on the Wii...kind of. Kirby's Epic Yarn was totally awesome, but it was really just Kirby's "Paper Mario". It had style etc., but it just wasn't a Kirby game. It was really just Kirby being ported into a really tight Indie game, which really isn't a bad thing, it's just disappointing.

But enuff of my QQing. Let me know what you think.

leetz r us Dreamland: Return of Cartridge Gaming

Yeah I've heard it. Your average PS1 disc held 512MB while the N64's cartridge held a mere 64MB at most. Why would anyone return to cartridge gaming, especially on consoles?

I love CD's as much as the next guy, but what about the N64? After the re-release of Resident Evil 2 on the N64, Nintendo proved their system could pull off the same firepower as the PS1(top). Perfect Dark (bottom) is another example.

Let's look at a couple facts:

1. CD use over cartridges is based strictly on memory, but a game developer rarely uses all the space on a disc
2. CD's load times are slower because of required scanning by the console; cartridges load and save data extremely fast
3. Because Nintendo rarely gives priority to elements such as graphics, they really don't require as much space as other companies

I think Nintendo coming out with a cartridge based console would be freaking sweet. There's a lot of nostalgia packed inside those little carts that I'll never feel towards my game disc cases. Maybe Sega will surprise us all...

Region Coding: Yea or Nay?

This afternoon I had my first encounter with the infamous Region Coding. I've heard plenty of talk about how much of a shame region coding is, but I've never had the chance (or rather the need) to deal with it myself before today.

What is Region Coding?

Region Coding is basically what kept Americans from playing Harvest Moon: Magical Melody on their American Gamecube until Natsume released the game in America. To be more concise, and for the sake of just making sense, region coding means you can't play a Japanese game on your American bought console and vice versa. If I buy a PS2 in America, and I decide I want to play Thunder Force 6 (which didn't have an American release), that means I have to first buy a Japanese model PS2.

What does this have to do with anything?

Good question! It just so happens that I picked up a copy of Dragon Ball Z: Super Saiya Densetsu for the Super Famicom at a local game store. Back in 1992, Nintendo had their own version of Region Coding. As it turns out, Super Famicom games work like a charm on any normal American SNES. There's a small catch though. Nintendo molded the casing for the SNES and SFC differently. A normal SNES cartridge fits fine because of two little notches in the case, while the SFC cartridges have no such nicks.

Who cares?

Basically you can play any Japanese SFC game cartridge in a SNES, you just have to tear out the two little plastic pieces inside the cartridge bay. It's pretty easy to do, and there's a lot of videos on Youtube to help you out if you have any other questions.



P.S. The game sucks. Don't buy it.

Opening Paragraph

To the American teenager, writing is more often than not blown off as school work. You write in school, you take English classes, you live the dream. That is, to say, unless you're my sister, who's idea of a fun elective in the university is olde Norse, olde English, or dead-as-a-doornail Latin.

What people like myself (until now) don't realize is that writing is much more than something you either like or you don't like. Writing isn't a school subject, it's a language. Whenever I write for a class, the topic is not something I scrape out of my brain. It's some point of interest for me personally that I never knew existed. Or if it did exist, it was always something I never talked to anyone about. Writing became a person to who I could thoroughly rely on to listen to me no matter what. I can talk and talk and talk to Writing and it never gets bored of what I have to say. Partly because it's a captive audience, and partly because it's not an actual person. Either way, Writing is my friend, and Writing is my captive audience for this blog.

In this blog I will be talking about video games. Straight up. I will blab and blab to Writing about how fun, artsy, clever, and all around how awesome video games are. You, as my potential reader, may listen too. But you don't have to. Writing has to, you don't. Needless to say, I'd be delighted if you took a moment to hear what I have to spam about the oldest to latest video game software and hardware.