Here's some facts that I noted on my gaming.

• I played somewhat less games on GameCube once I got Animal Crossing.
• I played somewhat less games on DS once I got Animal Crossing: Wild World.
• I played somewhat less games on Wii once I got Animal Crossing: Let's Go to the City.
  

And now, I'll just say that I've played less Halo games when Halo Waypoint came out.

Now, I'm not saying that Animal Crossing series is that bad. (Complete waste of time, granted, but not really awful, and heck, video games are supposed to be about wasting time.) I sort of like Halo Waypoint too. (Not as kickass as Halopedia, but still.)

It's still weird. I'm kind of paralysed by the fact that games can turn into mundane existence. It's as if I really need some hook to go on - like the music collection or the statue in Animal Crossing, after which I sort of quit playing those games. I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion like a "mundane" game, and have over 100 hours in the clock, yet I'm not bored - there's actually stuff to do in the game.

Bleh, I guess I just needed to ramble about something in a beautiful Saturday morning. =)

The weird thing about me is that I've always been a little bit shy. I'm getting much better, but even now, I'm sometimes a bit shy when trying something new. If anything, I just nowadays find out much faster that this stuff isn't killing me and I'm worrying for no reason - the only hard part is getting around to try something social. I can do just fine, if I get started doing something.

In a last few years, I was a bit shy when I tried Second Life for the first time, but I was fine once I figured out how the application works. I was shy to try out Halo 3 multiplayer, until I figured out that wise people just don't even try the voice chat thingy. (No, I was not scared by the Halo 3 multiplayer. It was the brand new notion of voice chat that scared the bejezus out of me.)

But there has been times when I was completely paralysed by the idea of interacting with strangers in online games. It took me over a year to seek out other people in MUDs. I was kind of shy in Neverwinter Nights persistent worlds back in their heyday.

Long before I was adoring some awesome-looking houses in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and waxing teary-eyed over how frigging awesome the Deepscorn Hollow is (please don't laugh), I was already working on some high-quality player character housing in my favourite games. Specifically, Neverwinter Nights.

Would it have been awesome if you could just return to your character's home after a long and challenging adventure, and drop your loot in the chests or put them on the shelf, then head off to another exciting adventure without worrying about your character's encumbrance limits?

Oh yes, you can do it! You could do just about anything in NWN, except achieve any sort of persistence. Once the module starts, all you have is the ability to save/restore games and export your character; you can't restart the module with another character and expect everything in the module to be exactly as you left it with another character.  You needed external hacks to do that. And oh boy oh boy, did people ever hack in all sorts of weird persistence hacks using the scripting API and some more evil methods like latching another program on the server process (as far as I understood it). Since we're only doing this for single player, we can probably do some more gore-filled methods instead.

So, here's an article that's long overdue. I was going to post this to my crappy lil' Neverwinter Nights site when tons of people were still actively playing the game (they probably still are, I just haven't been checking on them), but I never got around to. I probably did in some form, but never posted the guide on the site and I'm not going to start looking.

Without further ado: a guide on how to create your own persistent houses in Neverwinter Nights.

"Yo dawg, I heard you like animals so we put animals in your Animal Crossing so you can enjoy cute animals while you enjoy cute animals."



Sorry for not posting much to The Gameless Game lately, but major developments are potentially in air.

In summer, it's always fun to play the old games. In my parents' home, I don't have a television in my old room, but I still do have two Commodore 64s, 1541 disk drive, and the Commodore 1802 monitor.

And since Wii has Commodore 64 games, what would be more logical than try seeing what they look like on a real Commodore monitor, right?



The annoying thing is, the copy of California Games for Wii is the first legit copy of the game I've had. I was going to post a comparison screenshot of California Games running on a real C64, but I could only find the Side 2 of the heinously illegal copy. (I didn't Copy That Floppy. I got the stack of disks from the previous owner of the machine, back in the day. Even when I was a kid, I had no idea why the hell these highly competent buccaneers couldn't put the game on two sides of the same floppy.)

Still, my highly unscientific opinion is that California Games on Wii is not quite the same as California Games on a real C64. Even on a real Commodore monitor, the picture qualify far surpasses the real C64. And, of course, the load times are far shorter. And there's no floppies that can be lost. Maybe the folks doing the Wii ports of C64 games could do something similar to the "PAL emulation" modes from VICE...

I played through Assassin's Creed in 17th April - and overall, I think the experience was making me nervous and joyous at the same time. Now here's a game to which I could really develop a love/hate relationship on; it's also a game that is not super-stellar, but I have great expectations from the sequel. Simply put, Assassin's Creed was a paradoxal game.

Sooo... a guy called Pieter synthesizes relatively simple MIDIs to wave files. No big deal, right?

It is, if he first ripped the SoundFont from Animal Crossing: Wild World... and painstakingly tweaked the MIDIs to sound exactly like K.K. Slider's songs.

Not only we have here excellent renditions of Nintendo tracks, but also some other game tracks and indisputably classic songs of all kinds. I was in tears when I hear K.K.'s rendition of Eagles' "Hotel California". (Or is it "K.K. Hotel"?) And I was struck by both the epicness of the Mii choir and the mindblowing harmony of K.K.'s interpretation of DragonForce's "Through the Fire and Flames". (Or, since the picture features K.K: in Smashville, is it "Through The Fire and Foxes"?)

4 days ago, I beat Halo: Combat Evolved (The Xbox Originals release, available from XBL).

I'm a Metroid guy, so the general immature gaming public probably expects me to rip the game to pieces with the sheer hate of the Other Platform. I'm picturing myself as a bit of an intellectual and a snob, so people would probably expect me to hammer the game heavily, verily, for being an Average And Overhyped Example of its Kind.

You know what? To hell with all that. I had fun.

...or an experiment of how many copyrighted properties you can cram in a single picture. But I've never needed more than 20 cups of coffee to snap a single picture from a video game. That's one of my rules.

The screenie is from Animal Crossing: Let's Go to the City. My characters in this series have usually been formed through the ardourous process of "whatever starts making sense". The other day, I picked up a nice head-mounted display, got some detective gear earlier, and today, I managed to somehow turn the hair white. And to complete the thing, went to get some damn coffee.

Though since the Shampoodle girl misunderstood my "CRAZY" direction, I'm not sure if I ended up with Godot (as intended) or Matlock. Well, at least it's got plenty of that lock!

(Originally posted in my deviantART scraps)

I got my Xbox 360 in December 30, 2008, and it's now February 1, 2009 - when my Xbox Live Gold trial was supposed to run out (but didn't, because I obviously renewed it =).So, (puny) 460 gamer points later, it's a good time to ramble a little bit on how a self-professed Nintendo geek has so far survived in the Microsoft world.

The short answer, of course, is that while it has been a little bit bumpy ride, in the end, I'm very happy.