Nintendo DS

Atlus was kind enough to share some info with me about their upcoming DS RPG My World, My Way, and I'm passing it along to you.

Launching February 3rd, My World, My Way is the story of Elise, a spoiled-rotten princess who finds that the one thing she can’t have is a boyfriend. Why not? Because the boy who has captured her fancy is an adventurer, and he’ll never settle down with a bratty girl who has everything handed to her. Naturally, the first thing Elise does is set out to have adventures of her own in order to land that boyfriend, once and for all.

The story is absolutely on the comic side and far from the usual RPG fare, and the mechanics follow suit. Eagle-eyed readers will notice the "Pout" option and PP points in these screenshots. In a strange twist, Elise is such an effective pouter and tantrum-thrower that she has the power to affect change over tons of things in the game—everything from skipping random battles, to completing quests just by saying that they’re too annoying to finish legitimately.

For readers who crave their RPG a little off the beaten path, My World, My Way is definitely one to keep an eye on.

And as I'm sure most of you know, Atlus RPGs can be notoriously hard to find after their initial release. Don't say I didn't warn you, K?

I've been playing The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for forever—well, sort of. I got stuck and put the game down for a while, maybe a couple of months. But when I picked Phantom Hourglass back up again, I couldn't get unstuck. And I didn't even know why I was stuck in the first place.

Why so serious?

HIGH Getting to be The Joker is probably a dream most comic fans have—Lego Batman allows you to cross it off your list of life goals.

LOW Being stuck in an area for half an hour, unsure of how to progress because the game's awful platforming mechanics had me convinced that the jump I knew I needed to make (and failed at multiple times) wasn't the correct one—and it turns out it was.

WTF Killer Moth? The Mad Hatter? They really scraped the bottom of the barrel for some of these villains.

A guy in a go-kart, on a highway, swerving through traffic, tossing banana peels in front of cars in adjacent lanes... You'd have be nuts to attempt this... or you could be none other than everyone's favorite French practical joker, Rémi Gaillard—I don't know who he is either, but he does a mean Mario impersonation.

This is ironic and funny to us, but no doubt embarrassing for Nintendo. Here is a company that limits its games by way of complicated friend codes, weak online features and even its hardware like Wii Speak so as to keep the horrible realities of the online world away from its (apparently) fragile and corruptible userbase. But within one of the special press-only Animal Crossing: Wild World (NDS) cards, you find a racial slur... created by one of the people (its unclear who) hired to play the DS game.

A pre-played version of 2005's Animal Crossing: Wild World for DS, sent out to media outlets to encourage connectivity with the recent Animal Crossing release for Wii, contains at least one shocking addition, reports MTV Multiplayer. Importing the saved data from the DS cartridge sent by Nintendo into Animal Crossing: City Folk introduces a host of changes into the game, including one, suddenly no longer E-rated character, Baabara, who now greets players with: "How are you, Ñ---á?"

An article in the November 2008 issue of IEEE Spectrum Online describes how Guitar Hero is being used to help "train" artificial arms for amputees. It's part of the Revolutionizing Prosthetics (RP) 2009 project, sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). One of the RP 2009 project's goals is that:

[i]n four years, DSO [the Defense Services Office] will deliver a prosthetic for clinical trials that has function almost identical to a natural limb in terms of motor control and dexterity, sensory feedback (including proprioception), weight, and environmental resilience. The four-year device will be directly controlled by neural signals.

Drawing a Line is About as Fun as it Sounds

HIGH The aesthetic and core concept are pretty adorable.

LOW The difficulty of later levels is ridiculous.

WTF In a game all about drawing lines, why is it so hard to connect or erase them?