I just finished watching episode 7 of Macross Frontier and it left me totally in awe of the series. Macross Quarter’s transformation scene and the way it pwned (excuse the net speak) the alien mothership rocks.

Not only that, the soundtrack is really good. I was looking for a translation for the song Diamond Crevasse when I bumped into Gabriela Robin’s site instead. It has both the Japanese text AND Romanized versions of Diamond Crevasse, at this link.

For those of you wanting to buy the soundtrack, you have a several, if not disparate, choices. There’s Iteza Gogo 9 Ji Don’t Be Late (Macross Frontier Outro Theme), which contains both Diamond Crevasse and Don’t Be Late (from the first episode). There’s also Triangler (Macross Frontier Intro Theme) EP (which is out now) and the Macross Frontier Original Soundtrack coming out on June 4th!

I totally forgot that I have the Japanese edition of Space Invaders Extreme sitting pretty in my Nintendo DS games library until Jonathan commented in my previous post. So how does it play with the Paddle Controller?

A little better compared to playing Arkanoid DS (where it was moving too fast like Hammy on caffeine – watch Over the Hedge and you’ll get my drift), but this time, the Paddle Controller is too slow. You can see that minute movement is pretty jerky and this being Space Invaders, you’ll find yourself needing to anticipate your moves sooner to avoid getting boxed in by enemy fire.

Forget about side-stepping shots at the last moment, the Paddle Controller is simply too slow. You are better off using the D-pad. Coincidentally, the D-pad is used as the fire button if you have the Paddle Controller connected instead, so there’s no switching from Paddle to D-pad on the fly when it comes to movement.

One minor detail that I notice is unlike Arkanoid DS (or Mario Kart DS post-patch), you can’t use the Paddle Controller while in Space Invaders Extreme’s menu mode.

I think it’s time to put the Paddle Controller back into its box. And say “Welcome back, D-pad!”

To put it simply, Nodame Cantabile is classical music’s answer to Ouendan and its ilk. From what I can garner from the game, most of the action takes part in different portions of a school. The game is abit text heavy when it comes to talking to characters, but gamers are only face with choices whether to accept, or decline a challenge.

When I was in secondary school, the frequency in which I upgraded my PC was determined by id Software’s game releases. When Quake came out, I managed to get my hands on a second hand 486 DX4-100 MHz processor. The release of Quake II got me going the Pentium way, with a second hand Pentium 200 MHz processor.

Second hand stuff were considered pretty valuable back in the day, reason being that new parts were expensive and not easy to come by. By the time Quake III came out, I had a brand new AMD K6-2 rig overclocked to over 560MHz and a Permedia 3D OpenGL graphics card with 4 megabytes of video RAM.

This trend of upgrading my PC has continued until last year, culminating in a rig that could run Quake 4. Having gone through so much (games and CPUs), what does a through and through PC-based FPS-games player like me have to say about Metroid Prime Hunters, a first person shooter (FPS) for the Nintendo DS?

A phrase muttered by a friend when he watched me play this game basically sums it all: “It’s a revolution!”. Now, to elaborate. Metroid Prime Hunters is the first FPS I’ve played on my Nintendo DS. As an FPS player who loves nothing more than to “shoot anything that moves”, this game works for me on so many levels.

The controls, which combine the use of the stylus, d-pad and the left trigger button, are so intuitive that they transplant the accuracy of the mouse/keyboard combination most often found in PC shooters. This is important as nothing breaks a game more than poor controls and MPH’s control scheme avoids this pitfall by being intuitive and very easy to get into.

Graphics wise, this game is stunning for a Nintendo DS game. Unlike the newer Tony Hawk game, which was pretty with it’s cell shaded look, MPH stuck to conventional textures but with a graphics engine capable of rendering eye-candy reminiscent of Quake III, just grainier.

I’ve just started playing the single player portion of the game and I’m already loving it. This game is also WFC enabled, for worldwide online play (more on that in another article) and has support for the Rumble Pak.

Since this is a pretty old title, you should have no difficulty finding this title in the secondhand market. Age doesn’t affect this title as it is still the definitive first person shooter on the Nintendo DS.

So you decided to get Winning Eleven DS, more for its price rather than the fact that the game is in Japanese. Having experienced the single player game, you feel ready to head online and trash some real opposition but before you can do so, you hit a snag. How do you go online in the first place, given the screens are in Japanese?