Ninja Threat Causes Elementary School Lockdown.

Look out kiddies. Ninjas are in the woods. Behind your school.

I just turned on EVERY light in the house to take some pictures for you guys now that things are finally looking good in here.

I promise I'll post them as soon as I figure out wtf I did with my camera's USB cable...

Alternate solution has been reached, so here are your hot piccies of my beautiful new apartment.

Starting at the entranceway, the laundry room and the door to the parking lot

The very very tiny undersized kitchen

This is the dining room, with the tabley end showing

The non tabley end of the dining room, which has counters to augment the very very tiny undersized kitchen space.

The Living Room, with a view of the glassed in porch we haven't cleaned in yet.

Another view of the living room with the TV setup included

Closer view of the console covered bits of the entertainment center, on top is stereo brain, Wii, 360. In the shelf is switcher box, PS2 and DVD player. On screen is Season 3 of Scrubs.

Lower bits of entertainment center

My bedroom, don't worry, clean and decent and stuff.

Another bedroom angle... It's small and dark like a cave. Love it. Eventually that mirror will hang from the wall.

Lastly, the office. This is the side with my desk and stuffs:

Kristen's half (she had to go home for a few days, so she's not done yet, but I promise, it'll look nice eventually)

And last but not least, look at this huge walk in closet. It's bigger than the kitchen!!

Anyway, folks, that's it for the virtual tour. We're very excited. Very very excited to be honest. Only rooms I didn't show you were the bathroom (eww) and Kristen's bedroom (privacy, people!) and those look very much like the rest of it anyway. Exciting? Oh yes. And now you know why moving took me like, two and a half weeks.

So my Developer for a Day entry turned out better than I'd hoped!

I'm all moved into the new apartment. The cable guy was here not ten minutes ago to connect the internet. My work project is two days late due to my not being able to leave the house while waiting for the cable guy who showed up super late. I'm exhausted and there are boxes everywhere waiting to be unpacked. My roommate's grandmother had to have surgery today, so she's gone to see her in the hospital and unpacking is on hold until she gets back.

I'll post pictures as soon as things start looking presentable.

Meanwhile... YAY!

You may have noticed I haven't been around enough. Or not. I don't really know if I'm all that noticeable around here anyway.

I'm in the middle of a big move, got all my stuff out of my old apartment and none of it in my new apartment, so there's a LOT going on. As soon as I'm moved in and settled I'll be back to normal, I suspect. Until then, though, you should be able to catch me around here and there on AIM or when I swing through here for a minute.

*waves* See you all soon!

The Wii is mopping the floor in console sales worldwide. Japan has Wii for breakfast lunch and dinner, only seemingly abandoning it for their shiny PSPs and DSes. The US is still in the obscene shortage period, well over a year after its original launch, and Europe seemingly loves the Wii as much as anyone, with sales in just the UK and Germany totalling 3.4 million as of March. [1]

So the world loves the Wii. Where does Nintendo have left to go? South Korea. Korea's a hotbed of underappreciated gamers, where gaming addiction is a valid concern among most of the mainstream media and where almost 90% of households have broadband connections (compared to only 52% in the US and around 55% in the UK and Japan). [2]

In many ways, Korea seems like the Japan of yesteryear; a country with one of the most tech savvy populations in the world that is slowly building a reputation for cutting edge innovation in many fields. With the third strongest economy in Asia, and the thirteenth in the world [3], and a level of tech penetration that's almost unheard of by US standards, the Wii should clean up in Korea as it's done in the rest of the world, right?

Wrong.

Wii doesn't seem to be getting South Korea too excited. With only 35,000 out of the initial shipment of 50,000 sold, it might be the only territory where there was no release shortage.

So what's going on? Is it a matter of imports, has Korea been snatching up Wiis from other territories? Are they just not interested in their own version because their release was delayed so long that they've already purchased their Wiis elsewhere? Or is it that the Wii isn't what a country with a national MMO obsession wants for gaming?

Even being as relatively small a market as they are, compared to the worldwide scope of things, the fact that in one extremely technology driven territory the Wii has failed to perform seems more significant than the attention it's received. Does anyone else think this is significant news? Or just a national quirk that we needn't take notice of?

Some games just stand out in my memory. They're not necessarily the good ones, or the ones I liked most or liked least. Sometimes they're not even games I played very much, but for whatever reason, they're lodged in my memory for good. Sometimes these games defy proper reviewing, because my experience of them was so subjective that I can't translate that into professional evaluation. So I'll do these nifty little features on them. Introducing, Games I Remember: part 1.

Speedy Gonzales: Los Gatos Bandidos

Everybody's favorite speed demon of a Mexican mouse (er, are there even any other candidates for favorite speedy Mexican mouse?) is going head to head with the 'Cat Bandits' in this Sonic clone from 1995. I didn't know this was a Sonic clone, considering we were a one console household, and everyone else I knew also had a SNES and not a Genesis. If I had known that Speedy's rapidly whirling appendages were just one step shy of plagarizing Sonic's visual look, I wouldn't have enjoyed it any less.

Speedy Gonzales is a fast placed platformer that relies on using the shape of the land and the various pitfalls and cliffs to launch Speedy into otherwise unreachable areas. Instead of collecting rings like Sonic's, our intrepid hero collects little gold wheels of swiss cheese which line his pathways suggestively outlining where the player is meant to go. His goal is to rescue the other mice who apparently are not as speedy, and therefore have been trapped by the evil Gatos Bandidos and hidden in fancy metal bird cages all across the levels.

The game has a distinct clean visual styIe that's characteristic of SNES platformers. The lines are very crisp, the colors are bright, and everything has a well finished look to it, that makes it enjoyable to play. The music is fairly run of the mill for low budget platformers, combining everything from the vague latin sound of the village of Sleepy Rock, to the futuristic techno buzz of Galactical Galaxies (redundancy not sold separately!) and the haunted Ancient Keep theme which sounds strangely like Bach's Fugue in D Minor. Apart from a few ear grating sound effects, like the jackhammers in Fiesta City, the elements of the game are polished enough not to detract from the game's real strengths: the platform puzzles.

Like in other speed based platformers, the levels are multi directional and multi tiered. By 1995 the days of running straight from left to right, bouncing on hostiles as you go, were over. It was the era of Super Mario World with its tricky level design and multiple exits. Unlike in the Mario cIassic, for Speedy Gonzales to access the secrets of his levels isn't a matter of clever door opening or switch pushing, but rather it's about strategically using the environment to propel your speedy self into new areas. Jumping in the right hole, bouncing off the right spring, and swinging from the right pole are far more important than buttons or switches. In some cases, switches are necessary, but they usually take the form of rotating signs that Speedy just runs past and sets spinning. These deactivate lasers, raise gates, and reverse the direction of moving platforms in other parts of the level, opening up new areas for exploration. When beginning a level you never know which direction you're going to need to go, whether it will primarily be vertical or whether you'll find yourself running right to left, you simply have to try the routes and see.

Speedy Gonzales: Los Gatos Bandidos is one of those games you have to beat in one sitting. You begin with three lives and three continues, and you end when you beat the game, or in my case, when you die repeatedly with only a few levels left. In the end, this is the reason that Speedy sticks out in my mind as one of the most memorable platformers of the SNES era. Because for the styIe of game it was, with no save points and no level codes, it was long and it was satisfying. While I can play through the game in its entirety now in two or three hours, then my less experienced fingers would spend an entire Saturday wrestling with the Bandidos, and only occasionally would I win. It was the challenge of it, the challenge derived from length, not sheer difficulty that made this game so rewarding for me, and what earns it its place in the list of games I remember.