Move over, Wiimote, there’s a new controller in town. A graduate student at NYU has made a controller that helps couples become more … intimate, The controller is a bunch of sensors that fits inside of a bra for women or on the back of underwear for men. The partners touch eachother’s sensors in order to play games. Yes, I’m not making this up.

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I thank nincompoop from NeoGAF for this juicy piece of news. Apparently, someone has found a way to run homebrew on the PSP using Lumines. Unfortunately, none of the current homebrew will run on it yet since it uses a different exploit. They say that they’ll eventually get a downgrader working. Until then, I probably won’t be trying out this exploit for myself. I can’t wait, though. I’ve always wanted to play my PS1 games on my PSP.

According to the thread that I’m leeching off of, the sales of Lumines have skyrocketed. Within 24 hours of this news being released, the sales rank of Lumines on Amazon went from 393 to 30. Right now, it’s ranked 13, haha. Almost an 3,000% increase! I suppose being only able to enable homebrew support through GTA: LCS was a big limitation for people.

I finally did it. Even though all of my characters sucked and I sucked at Odin Sphere in general, I was able to overcome the five Armageddon bosses. In order to do that, I had to replay parts of each of the character’s chapters in order to make some items necessary for my own survival. I’m in awe of the person who beat the last boss without getting hit once. Now that I’m done with that, I can post impressions for the other characters’ stories.

Odin Sphere was the third RPG I beat this summer. My next while probably be either Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne or Pokemon Pearl (I had to take a bit of a hiatus ) Beating this many RPGs is very good for my backlog, since I’ll be acquiring Persona 3 and Grim Grimoire soon. Ugh, I can’t wait.

It’s my birthday. I just turned 19. I didn’t really do much, just went out for dinner. Didn’t even get a cake. It was relaxing, though, since I slept in till about 3 pm.

I’m ashamed to say this, but I’ve basically watched none of the “new” Spring 2007 anime, besides Gurren Lagann, that is. Since Spring started, I’ve watched 12 episodes of Gurren Lagann, one episode of Hitohira and one episode of Murder Princess. Yea, pretty pathetic. I do sort of plan on fixing it. I’m really looking at Lucky Star right now.

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Remember when I got my laptop back? Well, even though they replaced the sound card, motherboard, wireless Ethernet card, and a whole bunch of other things, they forgot about the one thing: the graphics card. You know, the thing that I originally sent it in to get fixed.

Of course, I called them up and after a while, they decided to just give up on fixing the computer. In exchange for my laptop, they will be offering me store credit up to the cost of the laptop. That may sound nice, since the laptop I originally got was bought a year ago (almost.) Unfortunately, Alienware hasn’t really been keeping up with its laptop lineup. Look at their current laptops, all three of them, there is no way that I can get a laptop that is completely better or on-par with mine. I either have to settle for a worse processor (and AMD Turion) or one with a worse GPU (X1400 or a Geforce 7600.)

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I must start this post by saying that this is by far my favorite story so far, although I’ve only played the first three, so it really doesn’t much. Still, out of the three I’ve seen, “Valkyrie” reminded me of a play the most. My, if it had more irony (or any irony,) I would think it was Shakespearean (ok, not really, but you get the drift.)

“Valkyrie” is a love story, through and through. While there is certainly love in the the other stories, they are not quite as strong as the love in “Valkyrie” (and I’m willing to bet that “The Black Sword” has quite a bit as well.) Unlike the other characters, the Valkyrie’s actions are totally dictated by love. Please keep in mind that there are spoilers for the game. Just think of this as if this were an anime episode summary.

Image shamelessly taken from: アカラサマナ

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I just recently started playing a little game called Odin Sphere. Sad to say, I’ve become addicted. At the time that I started writing this post, I had already beaten the first two characters in the game playing a total of 15-16 hours. The funny thing is, I’ve only been playing it since late Saturday night (EST.) That, and I have work until 4 pm. I whole lot of my free time this week has been put into this game; that’s just how much I love it.

The way the game is set up, it’s almost like a play with each individual character starring their own little stories. Even the game refers to its scenes as ‘acts.’ Therefore, I decided to treat each character plot as its own play and give them separate impression posts. Below, you will find the links to each post with the title of their stories. There are some general impressions after the jump.

Story Impressions:
“Valkyrie”
“The Pooka Prince”
“Fairy Land”
“The Black Sword”
“Fate”

After some last minute grinding (to get that final spell for the best singer in the game,) I was finally able to beat Ar Tonelico on Friday (tehnically 4 am on Saturday, but who’s keeping track?) The game gives me mixed feelings though. I didn’t get a really big sense of accomplishment from beating it, way different from the feeling I got from beating Dragon Quest VIII.

Image courtesy of: カグツチ :: [L’ARCHANGE]

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I finally did it; I finally beat Dragon Quest VIII two days ago. I hardly know what to say. I was so surprised when I won since I thought that I was losing the battle. Aaah, such a sense of achievement. I think I’m going to become a DQ fanboy. Word on street is that Square Enix is going to go on a DQ remake releasing rampage. I can’t wait if its true (please, be for the PS2 and not the DS so we can get a nice orchestral soundtrack.) I didn’t record myself winning the game (haha, one of the few times I didn’t record the battle,) but I’ve attached the finally battle with Pisaro from the PSX version of DQ IV.

In other news, I think I’m going to get an actual monitor soon. It would suck to own PS3 games that I could only play at 480i (haha, I don’t own any yet, for now I only play PS2 games on my PS3.) Unless I find something better, I think I’m going to get the BenQ FP241W. From the one review I read (seriously, I couldn’t find anymore,) ghosting was near nonexistent and the display quality was top-notch.

This continues right where the other diary entry left off. You may notice that the amount of detail suffers after the first battle. I’m still exploring on how much I should talk about each move during battles. You may think the first battle is boring, so oh well… Hopefully you enjoy this.

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Those of you with the Japanese PSN accounts might want to check a new demo out; it’s the recently announced Folk Soul. The game’s combat seems kinda meh-ish, but I’m sure that the game is mostly story driven. The devs do call it an action-RPG, after all. Unfortunately, I can’t read a speck of Japanese, so I have no idea what the game is about. I do know, for whatever reason, that the main characters (at least, the girl) can suck up the souls of the enemies she’s killed and use them to attack other enemies.

The demo is pretty easy. I think it goes up until the first boss battle (I’m guessing that it was a boss battle since the music changed, but there wasn’t any story behind the particular enemy so it might have just been a super-strong one.) The visuals are gorgeous, though. Judging from the demo, this game has the potential to be a good game. Not great, but still good.