I want a Nethack DS. But it seems that for the moment, Children of Mana, which is turning out to be quite fun, will suffice.

I bought a Nintendo DS and Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin yesterday. After months of pressure and “it’d be kind of neat if"s, I finally caved. Part of it was to screw around with homebrew some time, part of it was to one day explore the Game Boy Advance library I missed out on because my last handheld (the GBA itself) was nigh impossible to see, and of course, part of it was to play some DS games.

I’m fairly impressed so far. It’s a nice little system, and it definitely reminds me of those nostalgic hours playing SNES as a kid; not so much the games themselves — Portrait has no direct analog in the SNES days — but the straightforward approach to providing a game and its features, and just letting you go play, and not watch cutscenes of distracting “check out our justification for $600 of hardware!". It’s possible that sense is just due to the games I’ve been playing: the vampire hunting romp and Trauma Center, which is on loan from Aaron, along with Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (which I suppose now I am compelled to play) and Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime (which certainly sounds odd). Also, my mom has insisted I borrow her Final Fantasy III.

On the horizon, I’m sad to admit I’m looking forward to the Final Fantasy IV remake, which hopefully will be a good treatment of perhaps my favorite console RPG. Other games on a short “to check out” list (either for the future, or past releases) are Bomberman DS (which Aaron rightfully said, when I told him of the multiplayer capabilities, “one of us has to buy that now"), Dragon Quest IX, Final Fantasy Tactics A2, Guilty Gear Dust Strikers, perhaps even Star Fox Command and It’s A Wonderful World, and — dare I? — The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.

Not that most of this is terribly interesting or exciting for readers, but you are forced to put up with my list, and worse yet, that is all I have to say today. Aside from my media PC project beginning to frustrate me.

Hmm. I’m in La Crosse tonight and tomorrow, in order to hopefully move the last of my stuff out of here and finally be done with the place. I don’t have high hopes for that, however. There’s a lot of crap here, and even with my mom helping, it will not be easy to do in a day. I wish I could reasonably go to the apartment manager and say “you know what, keep the stuff in the apartment, and the deposit — I’m out of here” and drive off to the sunset (er, wait, wrong direction), but I don’t think they’d take to that very well.

Otherwise, though, things are good. TDS is still a blast to work at, although the development environment is not without its frustrating moments (namely a buggy Eclipse and a Fedora Core 6 kernel I cannot get DMA working on for the life of me). The first play of my Star Wars: Saga Edition game went pretty well, even with the party in only half force. As I type, Peter is in Port with parts of the gaming table, and by this time tomorrow, the last (oh please be the last) of the parts requiring significant tools will be done, meaning I’ll finally be motivated to move forward with finishing the thing. Maybe still in time for Aaron’s thingy ding with the computers and the LAN? That would be a shocking bit of good fortune.

Sunday is a Ren Faire, if I’m free and not dead on Sunday morning. I really wish I was done with La Crosse.