Do you think Ron Perlman is cool? I would think anyone who has taken on the role of a red demon with sawn-off horns and a bad-ass attitude to be pretty cool in my book. Add in the fact that he is the narrator for Fallout games just makes him even cooler.

In any case, did you know he lent his voice for an animated spin-off based on the Mortal Kombat video game series? Well now you do. Titled “Defenders of the Realm”, it ran its sole season of 13 episodes in 1996. Here’s a clip, try guessing which character the future Hellboy was voicing back in 1996:

I couldn’t help but blog about this since I encounter it not once, but twice in a single day. 1UP, in a recent article, pans the series in a single paragraph (here) whereas Retro Game Load 40 mentions the show as part of its cover story on Mortal Kombat.

If there’s something sorely missing from the NDSi, that would be the GBA slot. While it would have been useful to support Slot-2 peripherals like the Rumble Pak and the Paddle Controller, GBA games would have benefitted from either one of the larger screens of the NDSi.

Which brings us the next question, how many GBA games have you got (I can’t think of a better intro, so sorry for the sleigh of hand  )? I’ve got 9 of them, and all of them are Japanese titles:

• Mowaru Made in Wario
• Donkey Kong: King of Swing
• Mother 3
• bit Generations: Boundish
• bit Generations: Coloris
• bit Generations: Soundvoyager
• bit Generations: Digidrive
• Famicom Mini: The Legend of Zelda
• Famicom Mini: Star Soldier

Personally, I find the packaging for Japanese GBA games are a whole lot more interesting compared to their US counterparts, and if language isn’t really much of an issue, I’ll go for Japanese anytime. Feel free to describe your collection in the comments section!

What do you call casual gamers who are really good at the games that they play? My girlfriend is really good at PopCap’s Freeding Frenzy 2 and spent pretty much all night blazing through more than half of the 60 levels available in the game.

I wouldn’t hesitate to call that hardcore. I mean, you’ll require the same amount of concentration, patience and ultimately skillz, not unlike a typical gamer stereotype, to get that kind of achievement.

I see the same thing with some friends of mine who are into Window’s Minesweeper game. They want to mark the positions of all the mines but are obsessed with doing it in the shortest time possible. It’s not uncommon to see them trying to lower their times and have practice runs as well.

The only difference I can see though is that while the typical “hardcore” gamer would be reveling in competition with other fellow gamers, casual gamers going down the hardcore route do it more for the self-satisfaction.

This however might chance if more casual games adopt more community like features like online score boards and multiplayer modes, but hey, with casual being the new hardcore, it does make me feel a little old .

I once had a moron trying to diss Nine Over Ten 9/10 in an online discussion on how small video games related blogs can make money. Said moron was on the negative side claiming its difficult and while I mentioned it’s do-able with plenty of hard work, he replied that he rather not have a blog filled with junk (huh?).

Cryptic sticks and stones aside, here’s tutorial 101 on how to get your fledging video games blog to earn some cash. First up, you’ll need traffic and for that to happen you’ll need to a. have unique content and b. utilise some blog aggregrators.

If you are planning just to recycle news from big video game websites such as GameSpy and Gamespot as well as uber-blogs such as Kotaku and GoNintendo, don’t, as you are just trying to be an aggregrator. The playing field is saturated as it is with these kind of leechers.

The whole point of being “niche” is that you have your own unique selling points, but do make sure that it is something that you like to write about in the first place. I know of a blogger who highlights video game software updates and patches, while there’s another one who blogs about everything under the sun with regards to a certain retro machine.

The use of blog aggregrators is a form of disseminating your blog’s updates to Internet users. The list is long but some notable ones if you are a video game blogger would be N4G.com, technorati.com and digg.com. Since I’m Malaysian, I make full use of Project Petaling Street, Blogged.my as well as Innit to reach out to local web users. Tools like pingoat.com help blast multiple blog aggregrators on your behalf at a push of a button; essential in my book.

The next step would be to sign up with Google Adsense, in order to have ads to appear on your blog. The more traffic you attract, the higher chances of ads getting clicked. Another way to earn money would be to post up affiliate links for products sold on online e-commerce websites such as Amazon.com and Play-Asia.com.

Just to show you how well it can go for a small blog like Nine Over Ten 9/10, the following is a chart on the number of visits and sales generated by Nine Over Ten 9/10 for the past 100 days for an e-commerce site I’m affiliated with. Profit for the year to date is in excess of USD 200.

This pretty much proves that you CAN make some money from a small video games blog, but you’ll need to be prepared to do alot of work from diligently writting posts, utilizing aggregrators and linking up with other blogs. Frankly speaking, I have quite a number of people copying Nine Over Ten 9/10′s format for the past 2 years with a majoritiy of them failing within a year. The reason why they fail is that the owners aren’t motivated enough to persevere.

And regarding the earlier mentioned moron. The last I check he was trying to come up with a blog along the lines of Nine Over Ten 9/10. Looks like it too has fallen on the waysides. So much for a big mouth.

I was at Tony Roma’s last night when I ordered a full rack of beef ribs. The waiter was saying that it was a very big portion, consisting of 5 pieces of ribs, and asked whether I really wanted it.

The thing is, I love beef, and having tried the Roma rack (2 pieces) previously, I found it to be less that satisfactory as the portion was too small. These are reasons enough for me, in the waiter’s words to “go for it”. In any case, the full rack was a disappointment as well, I found it to be small and hardly justifies the nearly RM 70 price tag. Hardly lives up to its reputation.

The only thing that was big on the plate was the corn on the cob. The worse part was I forgot to take home the rib bones for my dog to nibble on. Sorry girl!

I wanted to have something nice for dinner tonight, and my initial choice was to eat at the Ayam Penyet restaurant across the highway from Sunway Pyramid. Unfortunately it was close today (hopefully just today) and since I was already on the LDP, I decided to swing by Sunway Pyramid for dinner.

Wendy’s serves a pretty respectable Caesar’s Salad and I had a bowl of chili (I love this stuff, full of beans and beef, and more importantly spicy!) to go with it. My only video game related purchase was Retro Gamer Load 61 from Popular.

Highlights in this issue includes the making of Resident Evil and the cover story featuring Pac-Man. If you haven’t picked up a copy of Retro Gamer, well, on its own, each issue packs a heck lot of video game goodness. Put a whole bunch of them together and you’ll have an encyclopedia with stuff that you can’t really find on the Internet.

Apparently local forum-going video game fanboys are made up of spam and drivel along with a healthy dash of sarcasm. But surprisingly, these “tough, caustic guys” were also quick to yell “Mommy!!!” and scream injustice when forum moderators decided to ditch (more like wave a magic wand and make invisible) a forum topic filled with spam in a post count enabled forum (click here to read all about it)

Spam posting is a cheap way of getting one’s post count up and while it’s already clear that this practice is a no-no, that thread in question (when it was still visible) was full of chowder. And boy, can these guys bitch and moan! Don’t you have games to play and consoles to fry (in the case of the 360)?

Apparently I don’t.  I was stuck on the first level of Rhythm Heaven for like 5 minutes, having a difficult time getting the pegs in between the square pieces. Apparently I’m either flicking the peg right before or right after the cue.

Maybe the strong cologne from the guy 8 meters away in the airport departure hall was affecting not only my sense of smell but also my coordination. Yuck. But anyways, here’s another bunch of tweets since I didn’t get to blog yesterday evening:

18 hours ago: Skypark Subang is probably one of the nicest low cost airport i’ve been to. Very nice with a touch of class. Puts lcct to shame

18 hours ago: Its pretty quiet here at the airport. Not many flying with fireflyz i guess.

18 hours ago: Big apple doughnuts seem to be food of choice for airport staff at Subang skypark

18 hours ago: Tokyo beat down introduced enemies with automatic weapons. Keep dying all the time

18 hours ago: This is gonna be the first time im sitting a duck (typo: double) propeller plane. Wonder whether would it be noisy.

18 hours ago: There are only like 10 people here at the departure hall. Flight is at 5

18 hours ago: The toilet seats at skypark Subang terminal are all scratched up. What are they cleaned with? Sandpaper?

17 hours ago: Im passing the time at airport with rhythm heaven. Verdict: i suck at it.

17 hours ago: Guy sitting 8 meters away. I can smell his thick cologne. Yuck.

17 hours ago: Skypark is also home to eurocopter. Wonder how they manage with planes flying around

17 hours ago: Preflight headcount. Around a dozen passengers, four with doughnuts from big apple. Omg

17 hours ago: A private jet just took off. Entourage left 5 mins ago

17 hours ago: Reason why im not buying doughnuts like the others coz my gf has some waiting for me. Same brand!

17 hours ago: Super auto saloon sometimi for the ds sucks. Japan has better offerings than this

17 hours ago: Hmm. Passengers exit and board through the back on these propeller planes.

17 hours ago: Around 45 passengers sharing the same flight. Like i said earlier not many fly fireflyz

17 hours ago: By the looks of it, fireflyz doesnt seem to be a wheelchair friendly airline

Ahhh…Scratch Cards, one of my favourite past times during my sojourns to Liberty City. Apparently you can even win a house if you get lucky with this mini game of chance (here). The funny thing was right after playing GTA: Chinatown Wars (and after scratching so many of those damn things), I found something in a recently purchased issue of Retro Gamer that had me stumped on a little appreciated phrase: life imitating art.

I found a strip of scratch cards (lottery tickets) in Retro Gamer (Load 59). Called the Promotion PB5 by Jackpot UK, the fine print states that there’s an overall 1 in 4 chance of winning a cash prize and a 1 in 4 chance of winning a non cash prize. The prizes being doled out for this jackpot include a variety of cash prizes and also a Mini Cooper, LCD TVs, iPhones, Nintendo Wiis (600 of em), Digital Cameras, and MP3 players.

Since participation in this  Jackpot is limited only to UK residents, I wonder what should I with this strip of cards. Should I just scratch them and sell them on eBay if I manage to match the symbols. Scratch that (pun totally intended), eBay doesn’t allow sales of lottery tickets. Or should I just keep em for posterity?

While I didn’t really participate in Earth Hour (I was at a wedding dinner), it did get me thinking about carbon footprints and how as gamers, we are contributing to the global warming problem. After all, all our devices ranging from PCs to home video game consoles such as the PS3 to handheld consoles such as the Nintendo DS require electricity to run.

I Google-ed on video games and carbon footprints, hoping to get some insight on the matter, but with not much luck. In any case, I decided to do some calculations on my own, and based with some formulas and data obtained from the Internet, come up with some numbers.

The three current generation consoles, namely the Sony Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii, are today’s carbon footprint calculation subjects. As a pre-requisite we’ll need to know how many watts each console consumes.

I obtained the numbers from this site, and on average the PS3 consumes (for the sake of making it easier to count, I disregard the decimal point) 186 watts, the Xbox 360 176 watts and the really frugal Nintendo Wii, 17 watts.

The first set of calculation involves converting watts into kilowatt hour (kW.h) using the following formula:  watts * number of hours *  number of days in a month/ 1000.

Let’s start with the PS3, since I own one and I clock-in roughly average of 2 hours on that console per day: 186 watts * 2 hours * 30 /1000 = 11.16 kW.h

The carbon footprint is calculated based on multiplying the kW.h amount by 12 months followed by multiplying the amount with the grames of CO2 generated per kWh. This amount is then divided by 1000 squared in order to come up with tonnes of CO2 created, and this figure is essentially the carbon footprint.

This gets a little tricky as different places employ different means of generating electricity. While you have Nuclear Reactors in the States to do the job (6 grams of CO2 per kW.h), over here in Malaysia, I get electricity from a smokey coal Power Plant. These types are belchers at an average of 980 grams of CO2 per kW.h. (Wikipedia)

With that in mind, the carbon footprint for running my PS3 for 2 hours a day, everyday for a year would be: 11.16 * 12 * 980 / (1000 * 1000) = 0.131 tonnes of CO2 a year. Applying the same set of variables (except for watts) on the Xbox 360 (10.56 kW.h) and Nintendo Wii (1.02 kW.h)and you’ll get 0.12 and 0.011 tonnes of CO2 respectively.

Do take  note that these calculations do not take into account the television and maybe the air-conditioning you have switched on while playing games. It does still feel pretty big though, 0.131 tonnes of carbon dioxide. I’ll probably cut back on leaving the console switched on to download stuff.

What about you?