Monthly Archives: June 2004

Full Spectrum Warrior

Little warning: Bought FSW this Saturday and for the first time the German version seems to be German only (i.e. I cannot change the language of the menues / subtitles to English). This pisses me off somewhat as you cannot return an opened game; and I have thus ordered a copy from the UK.
Anyone want to buy my German copy of the game off me? 🙁

Mario Golf and PSO III

Picked up “Mario Golf” and “Phantasy Star Online Episode III” for the Gamecube on Saturday. Haven’t played much (PSO III is way too expensive online compared to XBox-Live — so I doubt you’ll see me there), but both of the are a nice change of pace from all the racing and FPS games I’ve been / am playing. Mario Golf (Eurogamer review) looks surprisingly nice and is easy enough to pick up.
PSO III in contrast seems rather complicated (not having read the manual) and I’m not entirely confident I have completely understood how it works…

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story

After being really bored yesterday, I decided to watch “Dodgeball” yesterday (in spite of Ben Stiller). It’s allright, but I just wish that Miramax had the balls to finally release “Shaolin Soccer” which is so much better (though equally predictable). If you liked any of these, you should definitely watch Ping Pong (whose Region 2 release has English subtitles) and Waterboys — a film about an all-male synchronized swimming group ;).

iTunes Music Store

I had an extended romp through the newly opened (in England, France and Germany that is — not really an “European” launch) iTunes music store. It is now obvious to me why there is quite a bit of buzz about it. The prices (and more importantly the terms of use) are fair, the selection is decent (by far not perfect — especially the omission of independent labels hurts. Also some artists only seem to feature a subsets of their albums); but what is IMO most important is the ease of use and the excellent integration with iTunes: It is actually fun to buy music. To proove the point, I ended up buying Natalie Merchant’s “Ophelia” album (which I found via the “Thick as Thieves” track in my library)…

Linux Bluetooth

It seems that Marcel Holtmann’s work on the Bluetooth-side is making nice progress. The bluez-userspace package (which was updated last week in Debian-unstable) now natively supports BT-HID devices (i.e. mice and keyboards). So far, I had used a self-compiled cvs-checkout of bluez-libs2 and -utils2 that provided the necessary daemon that got the mouse working. To get the new package working, I compiled a patched Debian 2.6.6-mh3 kernel (which is really easy to do thanks to the packaging system / support scripts), rebooted, “inaccessible root device”, remembered to use --initrd for make-kpkg and all was well.
I just hope that Marcel’s patches make it into the next official kernel (2.6.7)… 😀

Dancing Stage Unleashed

I’ve been trying to get my hands on “Dancing Stage Unleashed” (or “Dance Dance Revolution Ultramix” as it’s called in the US) pretty much since it was supposed to be out in the beginning of March. But is is very hard to get a hold of a copy (and don’t ever think about believing Amazon’s 1-2 weeks dispatch estimate). Finally, somewhen in May, a local shop had a copy of the game — but no dance mats.
I then decided to import the game (and dance-mats) via Amazon.co.uk. They even had a package deal for the game and a dance mat for 30 quid. Unfortunately, the estimated 1-2 weeks turned into 4-6, and then 2-4 months. Which brings us to last week, where I decided to order the game and two mats separately (“usually dispatched within 24h”). They managed to send the stuff three days later, and I actually got a copy of the game on Saturday. But no mats! I just hope they turn up soon so that this odyssey will end! 😉
Moral of the story: Konami Europe has major supply problems, the game is too low-key outside of the US and Japan or Amazon just can’t get their shit together (unfortunately no other online-stores had the mats or they wouldn’t deliver to Germany). Or maybe all three of them.

Update: The mats arrived the same day (Monday). And I’m a lot worse than I thought… 😉