Pocket Arcade


This is how dates work in the Fatal Fury world.

PS games now installed on my PPC Phone: Dead or Alive, Tekken, Star Gladiators, Ehrgeiz, Real Bout Fatal Fury, Time Crisis: Project Titan, Tactics Ogre, Suikoden II.
It’s no Street Fighter III, but Fatal Fury Real Bout is a darn pretty 2-D fighter, and I love the characters and the action. The fact that you can assign special moves to single buttons makes this totally playable.

YES, Suikoden II. Is it actually playable? You’d be surprised. Will I actually play it on the dinky little screen? Not for long (eyestrain will kill me and battery power is limited), but you can’t beat an addictive RPG for time killing if you’re not in the mood for mindless fighting games. The best thing is, I’ve installed it with a save from the original Suikoden, so NOW I can probably try to unlock a certain sidequest that I wasn’t able to do before. Hoho!

Want MORE PS games to rip… more… gotta catch them all…

Rainy Weekend

It’s been raining and raining and raining and raining all week. All I want to do is just lie in the dark and the cold and just snuggle in and sleep. It’s the expectation of having this desire fulfilled that I look forward to the weekend. Most of the gang will be heading off to windy Tagaytay for a break, but I’ve elected to stay for now. Just want to rest and vege out. Maybe do some drawing. I’ll probably post more art for Samurai Sis very soon, and some other odds and ends. We’ll see. If I can tear myself from the bed, that is. Heh.

Seven Swords


Epic.

What is it with the number seven? Apart from the number five, there's no other number for a group of heroes as heroic as seven. It all started with Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which probably was the template for every other seven-man army film since; from cowboys (The Magnificent Seven) to space warriors (Battle Beyond the Stars), the group of seven has been seen in epic struggles of the few and courageous good versus far greater numbers of evil.

Well, yet another epic film of seven heroes comes to the screen, via Tsui Hark's Seven Swords. The film is an adaptation of the first part of a series of Chinese novels, so we can expect more to come if Mr. Hark has his way. Anyway, Seven Swords is the director's answer to the past wave of Wuxia films, which includes Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero and House of Flying Daggers (each of which have varying levels of goodness for me...).

Seven Swords' premise is classic- in ancient China, the emperor has decreed that martial arts will be banned to preserve the peace. To enforce his edict, armies of mercenaries have been empowered with the freedom to kill and pillage as they please, to bring the heads of any known martial artists (bodies not necessary) to the emperor. Of course, this is not something that can just go about without getting people rightly angry, so seven heroes soon come together to protect a village being threatened by a madman and his army of bloodthirsty killers. Each of the heroes wields a weapon of power- a sword, each with a name like 'Celestial', or 'Dragon'. As you can imagine, these swords can kick butt and they will see a lot of evildoers sliced to ribbons before this epic first chapter of the series is over. Given that Tsui Hark has directed stuff like Once Upon a Time in China and other martial arts classics before, Seven Swords should be something to see.

The film hasn't been released stateside yet, but with the recent successes of Asian films, it's sure to make it over here soon. Look for this in the DVD bins... this looks pretty cool.

Winners

Congratulations to my good friends Dean and Nikki Alfar for winning in the 2005 Palanca Awards! Dean won the Grand Prize in the Novel category, for his work Salamanca, something he wrote in 30 days last November as part of the NaNoWriMo. Nikki, on the other hand, won the 3rd prize in the Short Story for Children in English category for her short story Menggay's Magical Chicken.

And to think I meet these people usually every week and just goof around with them. Heh. Congratulations again, Alfars!

Stylus Shooting


Time Crisis on my Mini (actual screenshot).

Recently I finally got myself a working copy of Time Crisis (or to be more exact, Time Crisis: Project Titan, the PS-only sequel to the original TC) and then ripped and converted it to the ISO format for my mobile phone. And what do you know? It works like a charm. Years ago, I struggled to play Time Crisis on my PS using only the standard controller (I was too scrimpy to shell out for a Guncon), and ultimately failed. Now, I can get back at Time Crisis' pixel perps with my deadly stylus (or just with my finger if I'm too lazy). The game's excellent to play, and despite this seeming to be ultra-easy given that all you have to do is touch the screen to shoot, there's actually a challenge due to the need to be accurate and quick. So far I haven't actually progressed that far yet, but I look forward to those little downtimes when I can step into the shoes of Richard Miller, the Time Crisis hero and kick butt with my pistolus. Well, perhaps after I finish unlocking everything in Dead or Alive I'll have more time. Heh.


There's nothing quite like blowing away shady terrorists with your finger.