I’ve been playing Mini Ninjas on the PC and it is awesome! The art style really appeals to me, which doesn’t aim to look realistic. It’s colorful and fun and the game just strikes me as being so creative. By far my favorite Mini Ninjas concept is being able to possess animals and use their abilities (like heightened sense of smell), as well as hide from enemies in animal form. I also love that you can pause the game mid-battle. Some might not like this, but to me it just feels more relaxed and fun. That isn’t to say that the game isn’t challenging – it is. But I like knowing that I can go into my inventory, think about what I need to equip to my hot bar (not sure if it’s actually called a hot bar), switch things around, and then get back to the battle. I also love being able to switch between ninjas depending on which is the most appropriate for the task.

When people ask me what the first video game I ever played was, I say Warcraft 2 on the PC when I first moved to the U.S.. Recently it dawned on me that this isn’t exactly true. In fact, the first video game I remember playing was The Lion King. These were the days when we just got a VHS player. It was all the rage in our area at the time. The first movie we got was Anaconda, but my favorite movie in the world at the time – The Lion King – followed soon after. There was this toy, game and video shop in our neighborhood. I remember they had three or four computers set up, where they would charge kids to play The Lion King for about 15 minutes or so. There was always a group of kids waiting to play. I remember sitting in the chair and roaring at the  porcupines, fighting the hyenas, jumping from rock to rock and tree to tree. I also remember the second level, which I think I actually passed only once in the time that was allocated – the level where you had to jump from animal to animal to the “I just can’t wait to be king” theme music.

The game brought back such great memories that I decided to download it. I got it from Best Old Games, along with DOSBox, and fired her up. And holy crap, I’m in love all over again. You have no idea how excited I got to play this game again. Sure, it’s a bit frustrating with the whole “You can only ‘continue’ once after you lose all your lives and then you have to restart the whole game” thing, but it is so worth it. I know what  I’ll be doing my best to pass. It’ll be great to get to the end of the game like I never could in Ukraine.

The Lion King has always been one of the most inspiring movies ever to me. I used to watch it every single day as a kid. For months. And when Lion King 2 came out I would watch that every single day for months, too. It’s only years later that I found out the movie had Christian connotations and themes to it, but I never saw that when I was younger so I don’t really see the movie in that way now.

The song in the first scene always sends chills down my spine. That’s how great it is.

Ever since I got my first debit card I’ve been iPhone-app crazy. More specifically, iPhone-game crazy. So far my favorite paid iPhone games have been:

Sally’s Spa – You manage the customers that come to your spa and expand your franchise all over the world. Finished this one.

Flight Control – Your job is to guide planes and helicopters  to their appropriate landing strips, making sure that they don’t collide with each other.

Zenonia – An awesome Anime-style RPG with slightly different plots depending on your choices as a character. Lots of skills and attributes to upgrade. I’m an Assassin :D

Real Racing – This has got to be the best racing game for the iPhone. Made by Firemint, the same company which made Flight Control. Race live against friends over wi-fi or complete time trials and races against computers and sync your best times with your internet profile, comparing scores against other players.

For the past three days I’ve been participating in Global Game Jam – an annual event where people interested in game development get together for 48 hours and make games fitting into a specfied theme in teams. This is the first time I’ve participated (local Game Jams are run regularly in Perth) and I wasn’t sure if I’d be useful at anything.

The theme this year was:
“As long as we have each other, we’ll never run out of problems.”

And some other constraints that had to be followed were:
1) Game sessions must be no longer than 5 minutes.
2) One of the following must be used as a game objective: clouds, sleepless, destiny.

I ended up doing art for a game called Little Shop of Farters and got to feel all important being called the ‘Art Director’. Fancy :D. The game involved a character farting to get to items in a packed store – the farts emitting clouds.

Here are some of the things I did:

HHRay’s brother is playing Crysis against his friend. The brother is in HHRay’s room and his friend is in the other room and he is totaly kicking the friend’s butt. I’m sitting on HHRay’s bed and the brother’s friend sneaks into the room to get a glimpse of where the brother is on the map.

Oops, game over. The brother just got re blue screen of death.

Some people have been saying this:

So, my BF called me with some info. Some people figured out how to HACK Spore, and recieved the game a week in advance through this hack. So, there’s some YouTube videos of this guy playing Spore. He messes around in Space (wont show other places, sadly). And let me just tell you guys, there is SO much to do in this game! It’s incredibly.

And if you’re one of those people who hacked Spore, you should go shoot yourself and wait like everyone else.

and this:

No, it’s not legal, they released it two days early by mistake.

 

But what exactly happened with the Spore release? I did some digging.

Everything I could find pointed to September 4, 2008 being the release date for Spore in Australia. So why did I have my shiny new box on the 2nd? There were rumors that EB Games released the game early and that they took it off of the shelves for this reason. I actually went into EB Games and indeed – Spore boxes were replaced with Warhammer Online preorders. 

I looked this up on Google but found no useful info – Wikipedia also didn’t say anything about the issue, just stating that the date for the Australian release was to be the 4th. 

So I called up my local EB Games shop and asked some questions, here’s the result (the audio IS edited, there was a lot of fluff talk in between which was cut out):

 

 

I then called EB Games in the city and got a bit of a more indepth explanation – although I didn’t think to record it as I was sure the answer would be exactly the same as that above. Basically, the EB Games employee in the city was aware that they had released the game 2 days early than originally planned. According to him, however, they are allowed to release the game on the day that it comes in – they were told that the game discs would be coming in on the second of September and therefore were able to release it fully legally on the same day. 

And boy, am I glad I preordered it, as the game sold out on the day that it was released.

 

So I’ve been playing my preordered version of Spore since the third  -  well, more like I only got to play it for one day so far, but I’m already up to the tribe stage and lovin’ it. That’s not to say the game is perfect, but let’s just say hours literally flew by without me noticing. I decided to go for the point and click method to learn instead of reading game guides and missed out on a lot of things because of this (the importance of your pack, for example).

Anyway, I played all the way until the Tribal stage without even noticing the time – I already can’t wait to get home and play with my tribe of Lizopians!

:o My mother is a sneaky little thing. I just went in her room to get some socks and guess what I see – SPORE! The same Spore that I preordered and that she said she “forgot” to pick up from EB Games today. That little weasel, I bet she wants to surprise me. Well I’ll play along and won’t say anything about it – I just hope she doesn’t wait too long, I actually want to play a bit of it tonight.

For now, back to Photoshop for me!

(Whee Spore, Spore, Spore, Spore, Spore!)

Meanwhile, Pirate Eye persists :(:(

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I pre-ordered Spore today and my life is now officially complete. Well, I guess it will be when I actually get the game. September 7th will be the best day of my life, until Guild Wars 2 comes out – then that will be the best day of my life hands down.

I’m getting that happy tingly feeling already.

Also, my PHP and mySQL learnings have been put on hold for a couple of days due to doing temp work. After 2 days of living and breathing PHP and databases, I can’t wait to get back into it this weekend.