Some hilariously awful video game voice acting.

Here’s a screenshot of the current wallpaper on my G1. It’s from the upcoming MMORPG from NCsoft called Aion. I haven’t played the game yet, but the artwork is very cool. They have a bunch of other wallpaper at their website and all of them are really nice!

We’ve been playing DDR Hottest Party 2 on the Wii for a few weeks now and loving it. There are some really cool songs in it, but this one is my favorite by far. It’s been going through my head since last night. (Hit the HQ button to listen in higher quality)

(Don’t stop till we leave the ground)

Now that we’ve come this far

We’ve got a place here where we can leave our fears behind

Far away

We’ve got a secret place where we can leave our fears behind

I’m really looking forward to this game. I’m a little tired of Fantasy MMO’s, so I am hoping this Sci-fi MMO is worth playing. I loved Star Wars: Galaxies first came out and would love to relive the experience!

One of the things I like about my G1 phone is that it makes a great alarm clock. I have such a difficult time setting the alarms on regular digital alarm clocks. There have been several times when the alarm on these clocks would go off and I can’t figure out how to silence them so I just unplug the whole thing. My GE clock is particularly awful. I swear I want to smash that thing with a sledgehammer!

But back to my G1, which is kept next to my bed every night. I set the alarm (excellent UI, btw) to go off each weekday morning at 5:50am. But the really cool thing is that you can choose among many ringtones and alarm sounds, or even your own songs that are loaded on the SD card. I have found the perfect wake-up alarm for me, and that is the Animal Crossing tune that comes on at 5pm during the games. It’s totally soothing and eases me out of my dream-state and immediately puts me in a good mood. In fact, there are a lot of great Animal Crossing tunes that would work perfectly for this, like the main title theme. Just do a search for Animal Crossing midi files and you will find them. And speaking of Animal Crossing, if you have the Wii version and want to trade friend codes, send me a message!

This looks so good! Trace Memory for the DS is one of the only games I ever finished (it was short), and I loved it. The music and overall feel of the Wii version looks perfectly aligned with the DS version. I am really looking forward to the Wii sequel!

I’ve been “playing” Wii Fit a bit more regularly lately, and have been enjoying it a lot. What’s really cool is that it’s got a good mix of activities for the entire family. The kids love the balance games, especially the ski jumping and the running, while I like the yoga training the best. I try to do a few yoga poses mixed in with some strength training, and then maybe a balance game to try to break a record. Speaking of records, the leaderboard is pretty cool. Koa loves to see his name at the top in some of the activities, and I am hanging on to first place in the Short Run, at 104%. Mariko is leading the Hula Hoop activities, and Bay is really good at the tightrope walking.

My favorite yoga poses are the Sun Salutation and the Tree Pose. The Sun Salutation really stretches my legs and gets the blood flowing. The Tree Pose is difficult for me, but it feels satisfying to stand in that position for a while. My left leg is so much more stable than my right leg, for some reason, although my right leg is getting stronger. In most of the yoga poses, the Wii shows you how your balance is doing in real time. This is kind of cool, but also distracting. I find that I do better if I don’t focus on the balance indicator too much.

I still have a bunch of activities yet to unlock, but I am getting there. It’s fun to keep up with the body test too, to see how my BMI and weight are changing. I set a goal to lose five pounds in a couple months, and I am getting there. I haven’t been so diligent about doing Wii Fit consistently, but now that the school year is starting and the family routine will be more predictable, I think I can work it in to an everyday thing. Even if I don’t lose weight, the morning yoga poses really get me ready for the day. If you can find Wii Fit in the stores, I highly recommend it!

A few weeks ago, with the help of my friend Tony, I started to get interested in the new MMO, Age of Conan. Since it wasn’t out yet, I decided to start re-reading the Conan stories by Robert E. Howard. I first got a used copy of the Ace Fantasy “Conan”, which features some great stories, including The Tower of the Elephant and The Thing in the Crypt. The beginning of the movie Conan the Barbarian, where Conan is being chased by wolves, then falls into the cave and finds the sword, is loosely based on The Thing in the Crypt. The original story is much better, of course, since (spoiler alert!) Conan not only finds the sword, but the skeleton of the sword’s previous owner comes to life and he and Conan have a classic fight scene. I haven’t read all the stories in this paperback, but keep it in my camera bag for times when I have a few free moments.

Last week I picked up The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, which is a larger compilation of early Conan stories, written by Robert E. Howard himself. Many Conan stories were written by other Fantasy authors, and supposedly many of them were pretty bad, so I felt good reading these original stories. Howard’s writing is straightforward and refreshing, getting right to the meat of the stories. And the stories are great! There’s tons of action, of course, but the settings and characters are so fantastic. The world that Conan lives in is brutal and savage, filled with warriors, thieves, and sorcerers, all wanting wealth and power. Conan is no different. In some stories, he is a simple thief, in others he is a fugitive, and in others, he is King Conan of Aquilonia. The stories are not in chronological order, and Howard didn’t write them as a Conan biography. He wrote them in the same manner as someone would retell parts of his or her own life, taking stories from here and there. It’s actually pretty cool to read them in this way. Although Conan’s status changes, his basic outlook and determination is constant.

Now that the Age of Conan game is out, we have been playing it a bit, and I think it is a great MMO. The graphics are really awesome! A nice change from the cartoony WoW style (which I like too). I have just left the starter town of Tortage, and traveled to the cities of Old Tarantia and Khemi. They really capture the feeling of the books. I read that the people who created the game did a lot of research into the Conan stories, and it really shows. I had read a passage the other night about how the city of Khemi looks, and when I visited the game version, it was spot on. Besides the overall atmosphere, the combat in the game matches the brutality of the books. Age of Conan is the first major MMO to receive an M (mature) rating, for its gore and nudity. There really is a lot of blood being spilled in combat, and occasionally your character will pull of a “fatality” move, where your opponent dies a fantastic death, sometime with his head flying off. It’s really kind of cool. (There is a setting to turn off the excessive gore and nudity, if you want) My main character is a ranger, whose main ability is archery, but also has some cool melee skills. It’s a really good game, but of course as an MMO, you gotta be careful not to play too much!

By the way, I am a huge fan of the first Conan movie, which I feel is a classic. It also captured the feel of the Robert E. Howard stories quite well. One thing that I noticed is that the archery in the game feels very much like Subotai’s archery in the movie. I like that.

If you are into Fantasy novels at all, I totally recommend picking up a Conan paperback. It may seem a little cliché, but Conan is one of the true originals of the genre. It’s kind a strange to think that these stories were written back in the 1930’s because they are still so fresh! And Robert E. Howard lived in the Hill Country of Texas, by the way. In fact, his vision of Cimmeria (Conan’s homeland) was largely based off of the Hill Country landscape. The biggest difference is that Conan’s Cimmeria was frozen, while the Texas Hill Country gets super-hot!

Nintendo’s Wiiware was just released, and the launch includes some cool games. Lost Winds look particularly fun!