METEOS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well I've just been working loads and stuff, holidays are boring at the moment, not to much going on really but Meteos has kept me entertained for many hours. Been watching Drawn Together it's a reality TV cartoon show and it's brilliant, you should check it out, it airs on MTV and Paramount.

What did he have for lunch?

Leaving experimental code in games is dangerous as Rockstar makers of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas have found out.

Meteos- Nintendo DS
Q Entertainment, a development studio founded last year by Tetsuya Mizuguchi who used to run UGA, a development team of Sega, he made famous games such as Sega Rally, Space channel 5 and Rez. His first game in his new studio was Lumines on the PSP, a game which has met great reviews with it's addictive gameplay and great sound. Now his first Nintendo DS game Metoes has hit and boy is it something special.
The concept is simple,lots of different coloured bloks named Meteos will drop into the bottom screen, using the stylus you can move any meteos vertically, when you get three of the same colour together either vertically or horizontal they will turn to grey blocks and take off taking with them the meteos which are above them, but blocks that are dropping will weigh the metoes that just took off down, so getting another three of the same colour in line after some meteos have taken off will help the meteos get off the screen. There are number of planets each with there own meteos and each planet has different gravity which deters how fast the meteos will take off, in some they will take off fast and some it they will take off slow, in one they just dissapear. Off course the longer you last the faster the meteos will drop, there are items that will drop like drills, different kinds of bombs and an item that will take off your meteos.
Tetsuya Mizuguchi is famous for music in his games an Meteos is no different, each planet has its own track, when metoes are taking off, leaving the screen and doing what ever different sound effects play which goes with the music, the quality of the sound is superb, I suggest playing it using headphones.
Modes? well we got simple which is you set the rules choose the planet, difficulty and if you want a CPU opponent in. Starship which is a course of levels ending with Meteo the game boss. Time war where you can do 2 & 5 minutes challengs as well as a 100 & 500 meteos challenge. Finally is Deluge where you choose a planet and get rid of as many meteos as you can .
There is unlockables as well, depending on how many meteoes of different types you have taken off you can unlock more planets, items, sounds and Rare Materials. Single card multiplayer is here as well as the ability to download a demo to another DS.
Obviously this a puzzle game and has no story as such and it will take you some time to get the hang of this game.
This game is addictive, and fast, you will not see this on any other games console other then DS and it would be impossible to recreate on any existing console due to the speed of the game. If you can only buy one Ds game then make it this one.
Rating- 9 out of 10.

Kirby, Supercard & more

Yesterday I went to alton towers, best ride was Rita Queen of Speed, it was incredible, the fastest ride I have ever been on. First year Uni results, 4 passes, 2 merits and 2 distinctions, to be honest I wanted at least 2 more merits but I passed so thats the important thing.

One day after we get the olympics, terrorists attack London, a tradegy.
Lumines and minesweeper clone for your GBA, don't forget to rename the extension to .gba.

Double review today first up is a hardware review.

Super Card Compact Flash Version- Game Boy Advance
Links
Official Site
Ebay seller
Fan Site

One thing you have to remember about cartridges is that there capacity is measured in Mega bits, not mega bytes, 1 mega byte equals 8 mega bits so a a 1G flash cartridge is actually about 128MB that fits about 4 big sized GBA games. What if you could use a flash card, say a 1GB flash card that would be about 8 Giga bits that would fit 31 full sized GBA games, now you can with supercard.
It comes in two versions, compact flash and SD card. I have the Compact Flash version. The cartridge is the same size of a normal GBA cart and the CF card sticks out of the top, the cart feels weak, its feels like it could fall apart but it has not so far, the CF card does not have any protection by sticking out of the top but so far nothing has happend. The cart supports file browsing and folders. It has a 32MB RAM chip in it which is used to store the ROM being that is being played.
It supports a number of file formats the most populer being GBA roms. The cart comes with software, using the software you choose your GBA ROM and it will out put the ROM along with two save files. First is your normal save file which will save all saved data from the game, but to write this to the CF card you have to press L+R+Select+A, The second is a Real time save, this is just like a save state on an emulater, it will save your exact position to do this you have to press L+R+Select+A. Playing GBA ROMs is pretty good, it plays commercial and public domain ROMs, it does not seem to like ROMs with the hackers splash when the ROM is loaded up, I tryed other versions of those ROMs without the splash and they worked fine, with some ROMs it can slow down at points, Mario Kart is a good example of this but still not everything works, Supermonkey ball did not work at all. Playing GBA ROMs is not much of a problem and feels like your are playing it on the actual cart.
As well as GBA it has a number of emulaters built in which means you just put the ROMs on the CF card and run it. There is Pocket NES which is a perfect speed NES EMU, GoomBA is a perfect speed GB mono emulater. Dr SMS is a game gear and master system emulater, this is not full speed, speed is around about 80% to 90% depending on the ROM. PCE Advance is a PC engine emulater which is not full speed but is just about playable but it does not seem to like US ROMs that much. The ROM conversion software does not support these ROMs, it only supports .gba, this menas you have to take a .sav file and renanme it to the same name of the ROM, then use the emulater to do a save state then use the normal save function to save a game, annoying? yes it is. So for Pocket NES and GoomBA I used the emu file and the ROM compiler to compile the emulater and ROMs to .GBA form then it will support Real Time save and all save states you save will then only need one .sav file, I can't do this with Dr SMS and PCE Advance as it does not work.
The CD provided has a .GBA ROM of the software used in the First version of the advance movie player, this version does not support the crystal engine and can not be upgraded so the movies I had already encoded did not work but the music did and was about the same quality as on the Advance Movie Player. Unlike other Flash Carts this does not work with a PassMe to support DS homebrew but as this product is firmware upgradable you never know what the future holds. One more point is that due to accessing a CF card and rwriting to a RAM chip supercard does suck alot of power so your GBA will last about 6 to 8 hours using supercard.
This product is not perfect but I'm going to give it the benifit of the doubt as I use it loads and love it much, hence the high score.
Rating- 8 out of 10

The Advance Movie player team have made a rival for Supercard named M3, it claims better compatibility, no need to save to the flash card manually, better battery life and DS support with a DS specific version coming take a look.

Kirby Canvas Curse- Nintendo DS
Nintendos pink cloud has made his debut on DS in a innotive and very fun game, a witch has put a spell on Kirby and he/she probably she has been turned into a ball. Using the stylus only you must guide Kirby through the levels dispossing of the enemies whilst collecting stars and coins.
With the stylus you can draw a line and kiby will ride it or you can use the line to direct Kirby in a different direction or to protect kriby from projectile items, Kirby will only ever go the way you draw the line but remember you only have a certain amout of ink which in time will refill its self so don't use it all at once, also by using the stylus you can tap on star boxes which will break them and bombs which will clear surrounding blocks. By tapping Kirby he will shoot forward, you use this to kill enemies or get to somewhere faster. By tapping and enemy it will become stunned which means kirby will just have to roll into the enemy to dispose of it. Some enemies have special abilities so in typical kirby fashion you can copy them by disposing of them, these abilities will replace the dash until you get hit or you click a button to drop it, some power ups include fire which puts out a line of fire thats spins around kirby killing enemies in its path, wheel which will turn kirby into a wheel and will speed and kill enmeies in its path untill stopped by a cannon or a wall, stone which turns Kiby into a stone which is usefull in water. The top screen acts as map so you can see the layout of the level.
The game has 8 stages, each has 3 acts and a boss stage, at the end of each act you have a jump you must dash Kiby along and daw a line at the ledge and get Kirby as far off the edge as possible, I have managed about 800Meters. When you reach a boss stage you have three bosses to choose from, each have a different gameplay style. First you have Block Attack Draw paddles by touching the screen at one point and lifting off at another. These touch and lift points will be the start and end points of a paddle which Kirby will bounce off. You can also swing paddles into Kirby. Cart Run In this boss battle you are in a cart which constantly follows a line drawn by
the generator. You can move the generator by dragging it. The generator will
destroy things it comes into contact with except for food which, if you run
into, will give you a quick speed boost. Hitting two food boosts at the same
time will take you to max speed. Finally Paint Panic This boss battle is divided into two sections. Mimic drawing and paneltapping. For the drawing you connect the dots by dragging your stylus from point to point as instructed to by paint roller. In panel tapping you tap any panel with a star on it as soon as it appears. After you have done a boss next time you have the option to play the boss at a harder level.
The acts have stars, like a typical platformer get 100 stars get an extra life.
Each act has three medals, these are used to unlock stuff like music, different paint textures and even different charcaters, you have to complete the game with these new charcters to unlock some stuff so there is plenty to do, also you can not get to some medals straight away, you have to find a switch somewhere else in the game first.
After you complete a stage it will be unlocked in the Rainbow Run, this contains two modes where you can win 3 medals in each first is time trial. In Time trial you have to get to from the start of level to another part in a certain amount of time and don't worry it is not the entire level. Second is line trial where you have to complete part of the level with using as less ink as possible. This all adds to the length of the game which makes it bigger then all other innotive DS titles, graphics are nice and bright 2D visuals and the music is bright and cheerfull and goes well with the levels, but only 3 bosses? Damn close to perfection. This game is awsome.
Rating- 9 out of 10

TER? PSO:BB stuff perhaps.

A few details on my upcoming PSU Clan. The host will be fragism, with them I get 25MB of space with ulimited bandwidth for free, I have had experience with them before and they are good but their free forum sucks so my forum host will be http://www.phpbb88.com/ which has quick reply mod as well as a shop and many more, again this is free and of course I will get a .tk address.

Name will be The Elite Revolution (TER) as I want us to be an elite bunch of players, clan won't that large but hopefully big enough where we can have a good community. Launch? might be at th end of the year, if it is then I'll do PSOBB support until PSU comes out.
I got and idea for a sub clan which I migjt do or not called Elite DS, this will cater for the Nintendo DS online.
The site it's self will just be for Clan info and news, no Reviews or stuff or that as I want to concentrate on being a clan, doing gaming news and reviews takes focus off the clan and it will all get to much.
So that's it for now.

More kitten goodness but this one has the Rambo approuch

If you imported a PSP, Sony does not want you to have it.
DS sells a Million in europe, nice and quick that was.

I made a new character on PSO:BB a cute little Force named Polo, click on the pic for a larger version.

Also they have put the first part of Episode 4 up today, click on the pic for a larger version again.

The host used for those pictures is Imageshack, you can upload a picture and it will give you code for a thumnail, works well.

I have Kirby: Canvas Curse but I want to play it more before I review it so maybe next time. I also have Another Code:Twin Memories and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory DS.