Twitter is down.  It’s down a  whole bunch.  I am admitedly not a software developer so I’m sure there’s some level of nightmarish logistics behind Twitter that I can’t understand but it’s seriously nuts how much it’s down.  It makes me want to punch something.

On the other hand, I really shouldn’t complain.  Twitter is effectively free.  they charge no fees nor do they run advertising.  How the heck are they making money?  Outgoing links?  Do companies like Amazon and CNN “donate” money for alowing them to create accounts to keep viewers informed?  Actually, that last idea may not be too off.  It would be a decent sort of model, push a bit of revenue towards a simple, popular web service and in rturn you get some traffic.  Sure, it would be free anyway but why not keep the cash goign to keep the service up anyway?

Except it’s not up 70% of th time.  There’s this huge joke about the “Fail Whale” image.

Anyway, I’m addicted here now and I NEED MY FIX.  I could shift away but I just havn’t found the same appeal in Pownce or FriendFeed or Plurk.

Looks like the Wii is getting a new 3D Castlevania game.  What’s even more wierd is, it’s a fighting game.

Sounds like it’s kind of like a Soul Calibur rip off to me.  Also 3d Castlevania just doesn’t work.  This is a aseries that needs to stick to it’s 2D roots more than any of ther series (with the exception of it’s SciFi kindred Metroid.)

They don’t call them “Metroidvania” games for nothing.

Thanks to GoNintendo.com for the heads up.

Apparently the “Transformers Countdown Fist” has been spotted at a My Little Pony convention.

You can see the full image here…

This fist appearing at PonyCon can only mean one thing…

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen will be My Little Transformer themed!

Expect lots of balls awesome CGI Transformers battling alongside CGI Ponies next summer!

Time to get around to some Animated reviews. Despite that I have not watched any episodes of Transformers Animated, I ended up buying 5 of the toys while down at Botcon. The best part is, I got them in actual stores so no lame “dealer mark ups”. Thanks to Despotes for the suggestion that we drive south across the river into Kentucky. This first review however came from northern Cincinnati near the crap hotel I was staying in. The first toy of my Animated experience is Bulkhead.

It’s kind of sad to say but Bulkhead is definitely the biggest shelf warmer of Transformers Animated. The photo there, with the twenty Bulkheads on the shelf, that wasn’t the only scene like that we found. This was echoed at K-Mart nearby, though the K-Mart also had two Megatrons. I imagine most people are waiting for the larger Leader Class version. This guy really is probably the most fun toy of the ones I’ve picked up. Note, he’s not the “Best” but he’s certainly the most fun.

So, for tradition, I’ll start with vehicle mode. Unfortunately, there isn’t much to say about his vehicle mode. He’s a large stocky military vanish thing. The toy has quite a bit of heft to it and it’s all around pretty solid. There aren’t any gimmicks or special features really and he holds together almost too well.

That out of the way, the transformation deserves several comments. This line has been plagued with quality control issues and Bulkhead seems to get quite a few of them in his transformation. The stubby little legs fold out from under the front cab area easily enough. Next you’re going to want to pull down the back section to reveal the fists. The next part involves splitting open the outer shell just behind the front cab. Like I previously mentioned, mine holds together a little too well, and it takes some prying to get it apart. When apart, the arms seem like they are supposed to be spring loaded so they flip forward on their own but it doesn’t always work properly. Next, compressing the back half of the van to the back of the robot is suppose to auto transform his head but it doesn’t work too well either (see video). Finally, I get the impression that there is supposed to be some kind of mechanism in his back that causes the shell “wings” to pop into place on their own but it doesn’t work at all and it takes a great deal of force to get them to pop into place. Basically, there seems to be a lot of quick auto transform style gimmicks and none of them work.

The robot mode brings in the fun. For starters, I just love his design. He’s very unique and originally I had decided the off proportions bugged me but in person they give Bulkhead a ton of personality. His body is simply enormous next to his tiny legs and I like how his head is effectively embedded onto the top of his chest. Both arms have claws instead of hands but at least he’s not one of those “guns/propeller hands” Transformers.

In his hands, he’s got two action gimmicks, and they don’t hinder the toy in any way. I still can’t help but feel that both gimmicks would have been better served by both being in the same arm however. His left arm, has a friction activated ball missile attached to a string. The idea is that it’s a ball and chain flail. It doesn’t go very far but it’s fun to shoot. I like the mechanism that fires it as well. there is a lever you pull on the side of the arm which forces the ball missile out with friction. The other arms features an uppercut action. Press a lever in his upper arm and the front part springs up. Like I mentioned before, I feel that combining these two gimmicks would have worked better. You could launch the flail, then the spring loaded arm could have flipped the ball up. It’s a bit of a wasted opportunity but it doesn’t really hurt him any.

Overall, I like this guy. I think part of it though may be “Initial Newness”. I know at first everyone was rather impressed by him in my little group at Botcon but we also hadn’t any of is seen any of the animated toys. I know a lot of people are waiting for the larger version but as I haven’t yet actually watched the show I can forget that he’s supposed to be considerably larger than everyone else. He’s generally a pretty solid toy even with his possible transformation flaws.

There have been a number of games in the past about various historical figures. Usually they’re of the genres you’d expect–edutainment, action, strategy. But even though the role-playing genre would seem to be a good fit for learning about the great people of the past, it’s unusual to see an RPG that follows someone’s life. Thus Columbus: Golden Dawn, created by traditional toy-maker Tomy, is of an interesting concept. Unfortunately, the execution doesn’t live up to it.

Columbus takes you through most of the life of Christopher Columbus (the explorer, not the filmmaker), from the youth who dreamt of sailing the seas to the man who discovered the New World. Columbus takes place in phases, starting with simple tutorial missions; then progressing to exploring the Old World, which is the meat of the game; then ending with getting a royal commission and travelling to America. The actual gameplay involved is standard for an 8-bit console RPG, with a few twists that I’ll touch upon.

Unusually for an old RPG, Columbus allows you to play the game in two different modes, the Normal Mode and the Historical Mode. The only real difference between the two is that the Historical Mode is timed, starting you in December of 1465 as the newly-inspired 14-year-old and requiring you to beat the game by the end of 1492. Time ticks off based on the number of steps you take, in practice meaning that you’ll want to minimize backtracking. Columbus is fairly simple, though, not least because you can go nearly anywhere on the world map at will from the beginning, so this isn’t a major challenge. There’s also a mode where you can practice the sailing missions that monarchs give you, but it’s not that useful.

Columbus begins (after an optional tour of Genoa, Venice, and Rome) when the explorer-to-be becomes an apprentice aboard an old, rotten pirate ship named the Santa Maria. Here Columbus is introduced to combat, which is similar to that of the Lunar games; that is, map-based like a strategy-RPG, but much less complicated and styled like a traditional console RPG. Combat can be very slow and annoying at first, since both Columbus and the enemies can move only one space at a time (though Columbus speeds up a little at Level 20), and you won’t get a ranged weapon until sometime later.

Once Columbus reaches Level 2, his apprenticeship is considered complete. He’s given the Santa Maria and sent to Lisbon to attend its famous school for ship captains. Here you learn how to voyage on ship by travelling to a random destination without stopping. Along the way you get attacked by sea monsters much like the earlier combat, but you also get attacked by pirate ships. These are fought on a top-down map of the sea where you try to avoid being hit by a cannonball (which would easily destroy your pathetic vessel) and either run away or grapple the enemy to attack the pirates on board. In addition, there are storms that force you to dodge whirlpools and flotsam that will damage your ship.

After completing school, Columbus is allowed to leave Lisbon and is set basically on his own to begin the main part of the game. From here Columbus can explore all of what classically was considered “the world,” which is to say nearly all of Europe, North Africa, and small parts of Asia. To help him do so, he can hire sailors to crew his ship (thus increasing his attributes in sea battles) as well as up to two mates who will help him fight directly. To do these things, however, he must become a good enough captain (that is, reach a high enough level) to impress these people. That can be really hard to do due to one of the game’s biggest flaws, which I again will get to later.

The object of this part of the game is to become famous enough to convince a king to give you a ship capable of sailing across the Atlantic Ocean. There are a number of kings in the game, some of which have better ships than others and correspondingly require you to be more renowned before they’ll let you have them. You can become famous by doing simple sailing missions for the kings, but it’s much easier to travel around and defeat powerful monsters that can be found in various non-random encounters found all over the world and within its dungeons. In the process you’ll find the four secret villages in the Old World, at least two of which are necessary to visit in order to get the items needed to complete the game. Once you get a new ship, you’ll cross the Atlantic, which is pretty quick and involves a visit to the lost Temple of Atlantis and a lot of sailing.

Though this is an interesting idea and what you have to do appears to be varied, in reality Columbus is a pretty tedious affair. The most obvious problem is the enemies. From the time that you complete the tutorial missions to the time that you get the royal ship, they never change in type, number, or strength, though at least you get different kinds of monsters in different kinds of terrain. Since the monsters have to present an average level of challenge over this entire part of the game, this means that at the beginning the game is excessively hard, especially before you manage to get two allies and some better weapons and armor, while at the end the game is pretty easy. This is exacerbated by the fact that while leveling up does not increase your attributes very much, it only requires around 7000 experience points to get to Level 99, and the average survivable battle gives you around five to eight XP at first and twenty or more XP later.

Another problem is that it can be pretty hard to find out where to go. You get no obvious direction other than “get famous,” and there are plenty of places to go. Fortunately, there are items and people who will give you plenty of clues, but even then they can be vague. A related problem is that every treasure and hidden village in the game must be found by using a standard of old console RPGs, the “search” command; there are no traditional visual cues such as treasure chests or weird patches of grass. So it’s a little ridiculous when the only useful clue about the location of the Dream Village is that it’s “in Scandinavia.”

Worst of all, though, is that it all just gets samey after a while. Getting from one place to another often involves long journeys, and the random encounter rate is pretty high. And that’s not mentioning the storms, which each take a minute to get through and appear about as often as the enemies when you’re on the sea. Furthermore, all of the game’s locations aside from the world map itself are composed of different combinations of the same elements, so dungeons, towns, and castles all look like clones of each other. Even the Temple of Atlantis, which being the last dungeon of the game seems like it would be treated with more concern, looks like a generic castle with a darker color palette.

Superficially, Columbus: Golden Dawn looks a lot like Rainbow Silkroad or Uncharted Waters, but it’s not nearly as good as either of those games. In addition to the boring gameplay, the graphics and sound are average and there’s no real story or characterization, which doesn’t leave much to recommend it aside from the unusual premise. On the bright side, it’s fairly short. Tomy is not known for making video games and after Columbus: Golden Dawn, it’s not hard to see why.

I’ve made a few interesting observations about play styles recently regarding Pokemon. Primarily, this is between myself and my son.

is philosophy is to load up with as many level 100 Pokemon as he can on the GTS. If a Pokemon doesn’t work out for him immediately, he’s off trading it away fro something else. He has zero collecting desire when it comes to the critters himself nor does he have any concept of completing the Pokedex.

Basically, he doesn’t care, he just wants to win.

I beat him almost every time we play each other. Sometimes I let him win or take it easy on him enough that he comes out on top.

Meanwhile, I have meticulous plans laid out on just how I plan to acquire one of each of the ~500 different Pokemon. I need to catch this, breed that, train up on of these, breed a few of this to trade. That sort of thing. My primary party, while not set it stone yet is well planned and while I change things up from time to time, I don’t give up on something just because it doesn’t work immediately. For example, Alakazam and Scizor will always be party members, they can destroy many foes very easily. Meanwhile I’m also experimenting with Gabite and Blissy.

I also am exceptional at playing off of a Pokemon’s weaknesses and one hit KOing people as a result. I’ve tried to push this knowledge to my son but he doesn’t always get it. Why can’t your level 100 Charizard beat my Level 73 Blastoise? Maybe because fire is weak against Water.

Then there is a third variable that’s come up recently. My youngest daughter wants to get a DS with her birthday money stockpile. She was playing my son’s Pokemon game last night and wanted to play only with “Cute Pokemon”. I picked a few out from my son’s meager Pokemon cache such as Pacharisu and Chimchar and she was delighted by these.

Back to my son, eh also doesn’t seem to quite grasp the whole evolution egg hatching concept. My son wanted me to hatch her a Blissy Egg.  I told him that a Blissy egg would hatch into a Happiny, and that the game gives you a Happiny egg anyway.  I don’t need to breed my Blissy.  So then he was speculating on which level Happiny evolves and was disappointed to learn that it evolves through Happiness levels and not regular battle levels.  I understand his disappointment.  Happiness Pokemon are extremely irritating.

I can actually relate to my daughter’s philosophy somewhat. I want to build a super team one day with all of the Pink Pokemon I can find. Jigglypuff and Skitty and Blissy and such. I think it would be hilarious to beat people with a supped up Skitty, it’s such an adorable Pokemon.

I can’t help but wonder how her game would turn out if she had her own copy.

I’ve been waiting of this to come out from the moment I finished with Diamond. Now my main goal will be to finish my National Pokedex in Diamond before this is released in the states.

Here’s a link to Pokemon Platinum’s teaser site.

Thanks to Old Man Musings for the heads up…

Oh what a weekend. Where to start. I suppose a food place to begin is to apologize for the lack of any “live video”. For starters, once there I had completely oped against the laptop/ustream live streaming idea because it was inconvenient. Then I couldn’t for the life of me get my phone to send any email. It must be running in some weird roaming mode that’s incompatible with my so ervice. I’m sure they will (already have by the time I post this) all spill out some where on the road on the trip home.

Why already have?

I get to the hotel and I can’t for the life of me get the internet to connect. This sucks because A) I NEED to log on remotely and take care of a short maintenance task at work. And two, I can’t make blog posts. My only means of blogging anything has been Twitter through my Blackjack. . I’ve gained at least 3 followers from it though.

On the subject of the hotel. I recommend against the Travelodge in Sharonsville. The internet access doesn’t work. I made my reservation for Friday two weeks prior to this event. I call the place up at like 9 PM Friday and make sure they are going to hold my reservation if I arrive late. The guy on the phone looks up my name and says they will have my room. When I finally arrive at 1:30 AM, a very rude foreign guy who hardly speaks English tells me my reservation had canceled automatically at 6PM and now I’ve got to pay 10 dollars more per night for an upgraded room. I realize it’s only ten dollars and I didn’t bother to argue at that time of night but the fact is I had CALLED AND MADE SURE at a time that was ALREADY PAST THE EXPIRATION of my reservation.

So enough bitching about the hotel, on to the trip itself.

Friday, After mowing the lawn and dropping my kids off at school, I head out on the road for the 5 hour drive to Cincinnati, which I can never spell correctly no matter how many times I correct it. Somewhere along the road I realize “There is a time change, I’m going to get there are two thirty not one thirty and the zoo still closes at five. After some debate I decide to go ahead and hit the zoo anyway. I can’t get into the con and I need something to kill two and a half hours. I’m glad I did because it’s a very nice zoo.

I should just mention I love photographing at zoos. I’ve started a small hobby of trying to see how many different zoos I can go to (4 Large ones so far and 1 small one). The Cincinnati Zoo doubles as Botanical Gardens which means there are gorgeous flowers everywhere. Also the animals were more active than I’ve seen at many zoos, especially the apes and monkeys (I’m sure the nice weather helped). I took a ton of photos which can be found in this Flickr Set (Eventually). I’ll add more once I develop my film. I broke out my old Minolta and man, I had forgotten how nice to looks when you look through that glass.

Anyway, around 4:50 as I’m finishing up photographing the penguins, I get a call from Naladahc. He and his group and going out for dinner and they wanted to see where I was at. I told them I’d meet them at the hotel.

A half hour or so late, I’m meeting up with 75% of the “Non professional Transfandom Blogging Community”. I’ve never met someone I only know vie the internet before. It’s very interesting actually. I’ve read stuff they have written, I’ve seen photos of them, it actually is almost like meeting up with someone you know in real life. For the most part, no one really felt like a stranger and the whole environment was pretty comfortable. It makes me wonder what it would be like to meet up with Rob or Shannon, a couple of people I’ve known via the Final Fantasy fandom for nearly twelve years now. I have known those two longer than I’ve known any non family person in my entire life.

Anyway, dinner was very entertaining and it’s fun to watch how other bloggers operate. This first group consisted of Naladahc, Giga, Mr. Terrific, Teresa, and a friend of Naladahc and GigaMutt, JKNotRowling. We went to an restaurant which was located across the street from the hotel. After the food we headed back to the hotel for some very very uneventful “room trading”. Which lasted about ten minutes before we all landed in the bar downstairs for a few hours of crazy yacking and general mayhem. It was a lot of fun.

I left around 12:30 ~ 1AMish and had the previously mentioned trouble at my hotel. The next morning, I managed to completely sleep through my alarm clock by twenty minutes, something I NEVER do, which was kind of odd. After cleaning up I headed out to find gas and a Wal-Mart to buy some breakfast. This turned out to be a totally awesome idea when I found a lone Transformers Animated Bulkhead and a pair of the Optimus vs Megatron two pack. I picked up the two packs for my fellow bloggers and bought the Bulkhead for myself.

I should probably explain for anyone not familiar with the situation. The new Transformers Animated toys aren’t slated for a mass release until June 23^rd which is ridiculously stupid since the cartoon has been airing since like last December. Hasbro decided to do a “test market” campaign which happened to occur in the same town as Botcon, where 90% of the real hard core Transfans are going to be. Basically, they saturated the market, then everyone came in and bought up everything either for themselves or to resell to dealers or on ebay.

I never expected to find any of these toys arriving 2 days late after everyone knew these had been in the area for at least a month. I’ll continue with the story of Animated toys in a bit.

Saturday was the actual event. After arriving back at the hotel to find everyone gone, I realized I had no idea where the con actually was (It was apparently not in the hotel itself). Turns out it was across the street at the Duke Energy Center. After waiting in a reasonably short line for maybe ten minutes, I had dropped down my ten dollars and was in the dealer’s room.

This room was actually very much like the one I’d seen at Anime Central back in 2002. It’s like going to a flea market or craft show only everyone is selling toy robots. As expected, most of it was priced more than I was willing to pay. After meeting back up with the group, which also now included Despotes and the guys from the About Heroes podcast,I did quickly find my first purchase, a tenth anniversary Beast Wars Megatron. I’d never seen one on the shelves and it was only fife dollars over MSRP, I went ahead and made it my first buy. Next, I found one of the items I’d been planning to buy, Encore Skylynx for only 60 dollars, 40 dollars less than I’ve ever seen it listed for online. I also later would pick up a World’s Smallest Thrust and two Revoltechs, Rodimus Prime and the Patlabor Ingram.

We took a break at one point to head down to the panels. After sitting through half of thevery boring Club Panel, we were allowed to stay over and thus got decent seats for the Hasbro Design Panel. Oh man, worth the trip alone. I was twittering the whole time and most of my thoughts can be found there. I’m going to do a whole separate post on the subject though.

After the panel we headed back to the dealer room for a bit. The line for autographs was dwindling so like a complete dork I decided to go ahead and get Tara Strong to sign my copy of Final Fantasy X-2. She was obviously very bored during the whole event and I swear she was text messaging on her cell phone while some guy was yakking with her. Like a boob, I had dumped my Beast Wars Megatron in my car when we had taken a break for lunch without thinking about David Kaye being at the con signing things. Oh well, I’m not really a huge autograph person anyway.

Around 5PM, the con was closed for General Admission. Depotes, Giga, Omar, SpiderBen, JKNotRowling and I all decided to do a toy run for Animated toys. Sadly, we found nothing at Wal-Mart, TRU and Target nearby. Not really surprising through. We headed back to the hotel and dropped Giga and JKNotRowling off. The rest of us decided that since we weren’t going to the Botcon dinner, we’d continue the hunt. Despotes has a brilliant idea to head south across the river into Kentucky.

Apparently Transformer fans are afraid fo water and won’t cross bridges. Actually maybe they avoid bridges due to a fear of Trolls (LOL Internet humor is TEH FUNNIES). At the first Wal-Mart we found Prowl, Bulkhead, and Lockdown and a Prime. I picked up Prowl and Lockdown. I then proceeded to break the hand off of my Lockdown in the car because, I’m a genius.

Next we hit a Target with no sign of ever carrying anything. Third was a Toys R Us overrun with Bulkheads. I tried to post a photo from my phone but as previously mentioned, email wasn’t working.

After the TRU we hit a K-Mart which had almost everything in mass including two Voyager Megatrons. Megatron is probably the best figure in robot mode. I’m not doing reviews here though, I’ll leave that for later.

After one more uneventful Wal-Mart, we headed out for some Hooters for dinner. Good stuff.

Back at the hotel room, we mostly just sort of hung around talking. Some people went down to the bar. Crazy Steve, and a couple of other scratchbuilders were there talking about resin casting, molding and kitbashing. Interesting stuff. If I had more time it might be something I could really get into actually.

Once everyone had landed at the bar again around midnight I opted to go ahead and head back to my hotel. I really wanted to continue hanging around with everyone but I was also getting pretty tired.

On Sunday, I decided not to return to the con. I’d bought all I really cared to in the dealer room and the only panel I wanted to attend was the second design panel. I had a reasonably long drive ahead of me and I could get back at a reasonable hour this way.

Comments on the Hasbro panel as well as reviews of the five animated toys to follow later.

I’ve packed my clothes and any Camera equipment (though mostly cameras are for the possible Zoo trip).  I’ve set up everything I might want in advance.  I think I’m set.

I’ll most likely go with Youtube vs Ustream (original plan) due to the previously commented “weight issue”.  I can upload video to Youtube via my phone anytime and with the memory card+adapter I can even use high quality, off my camera, video and not crummy Cell video.  More likely I’ll do both though and upload any camera videos at the end of the day.

Youtube channel can be found here.

I I get ambitious, Ustream channel is here.

Youtube is getting a bit overdone these days so I may use Vimeo instead.  I’ll probably put out a constant stream of Tweets anyway.

As for plans for the trip.  I guess I’m mostly winging it.  I’ve decided to take my copy of Final Fantasy X-2 and tote it around in my nerdbag in case I get the chance to get it autographed by Tara Strong (Rikku).

I’d like to visit some of the panels possibly but I am pretty sure that package members get first serviced in that area so I am not counting on actually getting in.  Otherwise I’ll probably just hang out with whomever I can find to hang out with.

I leave in the morning.

Botcon is next weekend.  For some reason I still don’t know if I’m overly excited for it.  At least the base trip isn’t costing me much (About $200 for hotel+Gas+Admission+Food).

I’m still debating on if I want to find someone to pick me up Botcon 2005’s set at the member price or Black Rodimus.  Hell I don’t even know mow much a black Rodimus will be or if they will even be selling it individually.

I figure I’ll end up with 3-400 in spending cash for the convention, I don’t need to blow half of it on some convention toys I’m not sure I even want.  Especially since I’ve been considering picking up Encore Skylinx, which is another hundred.

I’ve seen people making lists of “what to look for”.  I’m not even sure of what I want these days.  I guess my only real goal is to buy at least one “World’s Smallest Transformer” and at least one Revoltech (Transformers or not).