Josh brought to my attention yesterday that the captchas here were broken, making it impossible to leave comments or register. In light of that, I disabled the captcha, but over the morning my site got hammered by spam, so until further notice, comments and registering are disabled. I need to upgrade PHP, which I will hopefully be able to get to tonight.

This also reminds me that I need to find a better solution for the same problem on the wiki.

Edit: comments, registering, and the captchas are all back.

I don’t think I ever spat out what I thought about the Nintendo DS games I own and have been playing, and there’s no time like the present, as I sit here pondering new purchases and preparing for another quasi-streak of gaming over the coming weeks (as much as can be fit into my work schedule).

• Advance Wars: Dual Strike — a quite engaging strategy game with more than sufficient depth, and some non-boiler plate (and occasionally also annoying) dialogue. Looking forward to getting deep into this one, it fell by the wayside when I had other things to do, as it is certainly a game for longer periods of play.
• Bomberman — Bomberman. Bought it for the multiplayer, which is Bomberman. Bomberman. You can have up to 8 players playing locally on one DS cart.
• Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin — enjoyable Castlevania action, without too much obsessive item collection. Not by any means easy, either. The dual protagonist arrangement is nice, but the magic user generally is only rarely used as the primary character.
• Children of Mana — fun little hack and slash, although I found the combat leaning to the repetitive, but the differing level designs for each quest or plot-related dungeon romp kept it from being a borefest. Damned pretty, too, and the music is nice.
• Feel the Magic XY/XX — quirky as all hell, and sometimes a bit unnerving in the interaction with the female object of desire. Highly enjoyable in short bursts, though, which is how a game of minigames should work.
• Final Fantasy III — a nice remake of an old NES game never given a chance here for far too long. PC dialogue is shoehorned into the remake and sometimes it shows. The job system is good enough but hard to embrace having already played FFV. Nevertheless, a solid Square RPG, one which can only be described as enhanced for the DS.
• The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass — pretty damned great. My favorite Zelda since Link to the Past. The touch controls are great were it not for some spotty detection (a direction point being interpreted incorrectly as a sword slash and the like). The game is bordering on the easy, but still enjoyable adventuring.
• New Super Mario Bros. — a welcome platformer, feeling like a mix of SMB and SMB3, with slight additions from and nods to SMW, SMB2, and Yoshi’s Island. Mario controls kind of funnily, however, the new power-ups are kind of gimmicky and useless. Thankfully, though, the levels are nothing like the original SMB (despite the title), and the game manages to be fairly challenging at times.
• Pokémon Pearl — it’s a Pokémon game. Bought mainly for nostalgia purposes and to whittle away a couple long car trips (which were instead spent letting others play Portrait of Ruin, mostly), I haven’t played this much. Sounds kind of obsessive, like Pokémon in general. Will have to revisit some time later.
• Tetris DS — pretty flipping awesome. Almost as addictive as the original, with enough additional gameplay modes to keep interest up. Spent a good amount of time playing this online, mostly getting my ass kicked. Push mode is, surprisingly, a pretty clever addition to the Tetris world.

New games to play coming up: Etrian Odyssey, which sounds like my cup of tea, assuming I can find the time to put into it (ah, “hardcore” western RPGs), and an import of Jump Ultimate Stars, which sounds like good Smash Bros. fighting welcome in a world where Guilty Gear Dust Strikers apparently isn’t any good.

RiffTrax are, as expected, amazingly funny. A bunch of us watched their riffs of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Independence Day yesterday, and they were a hoot. A+.

New Super Mario Bros. is pretty fun (welcome to 2006!!!!!!!!!1111). Not the greatest game in the world, but a good platformer. Super Mario Galaxy is supposedly insanely great; I played a bit and enjoyed it, but these new-fangled two independent movement schemes confuse me greatly.

I hadn’t tried the Opera browser in many years, but I must say that I am pleasantly surprised by the overall quality of the 9.5 betas. Still a bit rough around the edges (it is a beta), but with the ability to synchronize bookmarks across Opera installations, I might make a full switch.

Good ol’ Frankenroc from ages ago left some comments on here months ago and I never replied to them. I’m not shunning you, sir, I’m just really lazy. Good to hear from you again and all of that.

Bonesaw is still really cute.

Democrats: Colleges must police copyright, or else

To quote the article:

The U.S. House of Representatives bill (PDF), which was introduced late Friday by top Democratic politicians, could give the movie and music industries a new revenue stream by pressuring schools into signing up for monthly subscription services such as Ruckus and Napster.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) applauded the proposal, which is embedded in a 747-page spending and financial aid bill. “We very much support the language in the bill, which requires universities to provide evidence that they have a plan for implementing a technology to address illegal file sharing,” said Angela Martinez, a spokeswoman for the MPAA.

According to the bill, if universities did not agree to test “technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity,” all of their students–even ones who don’t own a computer–would lose federal financial aid.

The two Democratic politicians behind Friday’s bill are Reps. George Miller from California and Ruben Hinojosa of Texas. Miller is chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and Hinojosa is chairman of the higher education subcommittee.

The peer-to-peer sections of COAA appear to be a revision of an amendment originally proposed over the summer by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to his chamber’s sweeping higher education reauthorization bill.

The fact that this is being proposed by two members of education-related committees is especially sickening. If big oil owns the Republicans, big media owns the Democrats. Neither is forgivable. Oh, and the most amazing part: the proposal is the “College Opportunity and Affordability Act". Nothing says opportunity like conceding the system of federal financial aid is broken, and then breaking it more by tying it to *AA fiat.

Fucking christ.