Nine Over Ten 9/10

Dad has been to Japan several times and has experienced a number of things over there, amongst them an earthquake and expensive sashimi. One thing that he always mentions (besides the earthquake) would be the speed limit on Japanese roads.

Unlike the speed limit on Malaysian roads which can range from 70km/h to 90 km/h, the Japanese would have to contend with a sedentary and sleep inducing range of 40km/h to 60km/h, with the exception of highways, of course.

Busses and Trains

Now, you can actually experience of driving within this kind of limits on your Nintendo DS with the release of Norimono Oukoku DS: You! Unten Shichai na You! The game takes a feature found in Grand Theft Auto games, which is making money by jacking a taxi, picking up passengers and dropping them at their desired location, to greater heights, minus the criminal aspect.

Norimono Oukoku will have you driving buses, trams, cranes, ambulances, police cars and even more. The objective of the game is pretty simple. The game provides you with a vehicle, you drive the vehicle around town in a GTA-III-ish fashion in a 3D town (complete with other vehicles on the road and sparse pedestrian population which you won’t be able to run over) and complete missions to gain points.

Have Points, Will Drive

There are a certain number of points to be fulfilled in each level, and once done, you get to drive another vehicle. Before I forget, points are deducted if you get into too many fender benders or by hitting the curb too hard. However, you don’t get the stick for traffic infractions such as driving against traffic, going pass the red light, etc etc (funny eh?).

Touchy Feely

As mentioned earlier, the entire game is in 3D, and even though the graphics are a little wash-out, the game handles itself admirably with decent draw distance and constant frame rate. The game features the touch screen as the main means of driving the vehicle. Accelerating and braking are controlled by the D-pad but the touchscreen has the steering wheel.

The touchscreen also plays host to a number of vehicle specific buttons. If you are driving the ambulance, there are buttons to turn on the siren and to open the vehicle’s back door so that the stretcher (and patient) can be taken out or placed in.

A mini-map and a pager round up the rest of the touch screen’s features. Aiding the mini-map in navigation is an on-screen arrow that points to your next objective, which is triggered by accepting your pager calls.

Driving Limits Revisited

Ah yes, regarding the speed limit. The vehicles in the game seem to have the same rev-limiter, in which they chug along at 71 km/h per hour. The horn is pretty useless in the game; and other vehicles on the road seem undeterred by an ambulance (or police car) with sirens blaring, and won’t move over. I don’t know whether the same thing happens in real life in Japan, but people can die because of that.

The gripe about speed and ignorant AI drivers aside, now I’m driving a police car and nabbing people driving slowly in their fancy sports cars. Hehe.

Lost in Translation?

Norimono Oukoku is pretty playable despite being a true-blue Japanese game. Don’t let the long (and rather talk-ie) intro deter you. I would pretty much like to drive a fire-truck next, if there’s one in the game.

Norimono Oukoku is available at Play-Asia now. Click here for details.

Fans of One Piece anime/manga are in luck today as the One Piece Mini Trading Figurine collection has just been released by Zacca P.A.P.

Measuring 30 to 40 mm each, this collection features a total of 18 characters + 1 secret character. Interested? The collectibles costs USD 2.90 each and Play-Asia ships out random characters, although is possible to get a full set sometimes by ordering the total number of characters. Click here for further details.

Have you been to your local bookstore lately? Browsing through the Sci-Fi and Fantasy sections would probably yield a number of books which are video game tie-ins. The usual suspects are Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft and Halo.

The next question would be, as a video gamer, are you ever inclined to read these books? Well, I for one wasn’t, until my brother got me a Halo 3-book set for Christmas, and the books turned out to be an interesting, if not, enjoyable read bar one.

Hello Halo

The three books in the set were “The Fall of Reach”, “The Flood” and “First Strike”, and are best read in the aforementioned sequence. Everyone’s favourite hero in green armour (I’m not talking bout Link) gets his introduction and backstory in “The Fall of Reach”.

Here, you get to know how John, became the Master Chief and that there are other Spartans as well. “The Flood” basically retells the first Halo video game, and it reads like a video game as well. This picture best sums up my feelings for this book:

First Strike shares the same author as The Fall of Reach, and is pretty good, but having said that, you’ll need to read The Fall of Reach to get an idea on what’s going on. With my first batch of video-game tie-ins read and sitting pretty on my bookshelf, are there any other recommendations?

I sure can’t hold water in discussions regarding stuff like Final Fantasy game plots or which is my favourite FF character of all time, those are in the realm of geeks. One thing I noticed is that gamers in this category tend to stick with franchises and are suckers for hype.

Go out and smell the gaming roses, boys and girls, there are plenty of other games to play, experience and write about. Don’t be like the proverbial Malay saying, “Katak di bawah tempurung”, a.k.a Frog under coconut shell, never to experience the outside world.

And when it comes to blogs, I wonder if recycling news announcements from other blogs could be considered substance. I get bored after reading “New Castlevania released” for the n-th time. Here’s a catch phrase: Create your own niche content.

Why so serious?

If there’s one thing you notice about Nine Over Ten 9/10 is that I like talking about the games I play, especially those that are off the beaten track.

The GBA games that I have, especially those from the bit Generations are epitomes of simplicity and while being great casual games, they have no problems in letting a player go all out. In Digidrive (my favourite of them all), the challenge is to sort traffic coming into a cross junction for maximum points, something easier said then done when traffic increases in speed and frequency.

The game tends to make people flustered in no time, and can you keep on directing traffic at that point? The price for getting flustered directing traffic? USD 9.90. Not bad for an imported game. Click here for details.

Another bit Generations game has popped back into Play-Asia’s in-stock list. Dotstream plays like those lightcycles from Tron, and is selling for USD 24.90. I would keep this link bookmarked if I were you. Now, the only thing I need to do is to wait for the price to drop.

I’m actually quite surprised that the game that is taking up my time is one that is text-based and doesn’t need require much on my part. Such little investment and yet so addictive, that’s the way I would describe Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures on Facebook.

Tiny Adventures is pretty easy to play, like on of them Steve Jackson Fighting Fantasy books. Start by picking a character class and naming your new-found hero, you get to start immediately by picking an adventure. Each adventure is a series of events and unlike other turn-based games, you’ll need to wait a certain amount of time for each event to happen (a countdown timer is available) and resolve.

There’s no need for any player intervention, except for clicking the button to see the resolution of an event or to click on a potion (you can bring two potions in an adventure).

When not in an adventure, you can shop for items or sell items that you own. You can view your list of Facebook friends playing the game and provide them with buffs or heal them.

Aside from the simplicity, the other thing that I really like about this web-based game is the artwork. It reminds me of the other game from WotC, Magic: The Gathering.

Do note that the game is experiencing heavy loads from time to time and might become unavailable. This problem is intermittent and you might need to refresh the page again or try playing it some other time.

My girlfriend’s knack for picking rare Series 16 Be@rbricks continued when she picked out the DJ Ozma Artist Be@rbrick (1/48). Admittedly, both of us found it a little weird looking (with the girlfriend calling it the ugly chick Be@rbrick), but no matter, a rare Be@rbrick is still a rare Be@rbrick. Thanks babe.

Thanks to her, I also got the Mint Designs (1/192) Be@rbrick.

P/S: ActionCity stores in The Gardens and 1U seem to yield better results compared to buying at XL-Shop. Pictures obtained from http://www.toycyte.com/bearbrick-series-16

I never fail to notice that TGI Friday’s wait staff would usually adorn their vests with colourful badges. Now (in my best Joker voice), how bout putting these Rockman 20th Anniversary Can Badges on them vests?

These badges, produced by Yujin, are part of a long line of Rockman 20th Anniversary merchandise and Play-Asia has them in stock! Priced at USD 1.49 each, there are a total 23 different badges to collect. Interested? Click here for further details.

For more Rockman merchandise, check out my listing here.

I’ve noted the differences between the box art for Japanese and American versions of games ever since my review of Atari Happy 10 Games (a.ka. Retro Atari Classics) more than one and a half years ago. And time and again I’ve always favoured Japanese box-art with the exception for Konami Arcade Hits

Anyways, I was reading IGN’s review of From The Abyss when I found that the box-art looked rather familiar. Since the review mentioned that game is the English version of a Japanese game released earlier this year for the Nintendo DS, I decided to search for it.

So, here’s the American solution to the dark, evil looking Japanese box art that you see above: add an androgynous looking character in questionable body armour (is he/she wearing nude coloured-pants?) to be front and centre on the cover art.

Anyways, if you need to get this (it did get good scores from IGN), the game is available in Japanese (click here) and androgynous boy on cover version, I mean, English (click here) from Play-Asia.

Did you know that the proper resolution for hooking up a PC with a Samsung R7 32-inch TV is 1360 * 768? This resolution wasn’t on my video card settings (I’m using an ATI 1600 PRO) but after downloading the latest drivers from the ATI site, everything was peachy at last .

With the display settings no longer being a bother, I tested a couple of games:

• Warcraft III and Its Whathisface Expansion – The game looks beautiful (go on, take pot shots at my PC configuration, I’m using an AMD 64 3000 processor, 1.5 GB RAM, 120 GB HDD and a 256GB ATI 1600 PRO Video Card)
• Halo: Combat Evolved – I’m using a multiplayer-only version, which is fine by me, and unlike Warcraft III, this Xbox port supports 1360 * 768! Woot!

Now, time to dig out that copy of Dawn of War I have lying around.

There is a country in the world today whereby its new currency and its inflation rate will put a 39,900,000,000,000 dollar price tag on a 80GB Sony Playstation 3 (based on the USD 399 price tag on Amazon).

According to TIME magazine, Zimbabwe recently released its new $100 billion banknote, which is equivalent to
one U.S. dollar.

With the country’s inflation rate being at 2.2 million percent, the new banknote can get you 3 eggs at a local Zimbabwean market (picture taken from Wikipedia)