buttonmashing

Mashing buttons since 1984

Archives for August 2006

Carnivals and Annivesaries

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Listen up, Carnies! The Carnival of Gamers #17, at CheapAssGamer.com is almost upon us. Get your submissions in now so they’re included in this month’s Carnival. I’ve seen the submissions thus far, and they’re good, but we can always use more. Now that the host’s are starting to use more editorial control over what gets in and what doesn’t, it’s good to see the quality material coming through. I hope it continues.

On another note, today marks the 9th year that Mrs. buttonMasher has put up with me and my gaming ways. We’ve come along way from our 1-bedroom apartment where she fell asleep listening to the clickety-click of the mouse while I played Age of Empires with the headphones on. Now she puts up with multiple consoles, stacks of games, the clickety-click of blogging at all hours, and the bright light of the DS at night. At least I got her hooked on Brain Age!

Happy anniversary, shweetie!

I am afflicted

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Before I caught the blogging “bug,” I was an active Epinions user. For those who don’t know what Epinions is, it’s basically a community-driven product review site. Users write reviews on products and services and other members rate the “helpfulness” of those reviews. There is also a way to comment on reviews, discussing what has been written, what have you. It was Web 2.0, only it started during Web 1.0. Anyway, for a while, I was averaging 3-4 reviews a week on the site. For whatever reason, I liked the idea that people were reading (and rating highly) my reviews and that, in some small way, I was affecting people’s purchasing decisions. It was a lot of fun.

Recently, for some reason, I’ve been bitten with the reviewing bug again. I don’t know what it was, the urge to write a review about my new-ish monitor, or my new headphones or something has taken over.

I’m posting this because I even though I doubt this will effect buttonmashing.com but I plan on writing an occasional review or two, departing from the normal kind of content I’ve been putting down lately. I’m also pointing out to see if there are any Epinionators out there among the buttonMashing readers? I know the guys that run NetJak are former (current?) Epinion users and they’ve visited the site a few times, but I was wondering if any other readers out there that are (or were) Epinion users.

The Ultimate DS Library

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Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan

I’ve been playing my DS Lite so often now I should probably change the name of the site from “buttonMashing” to “screenTouching” or something like that. Touching is indeed good. I’ve been speding some time on eBay recently, hunting for some DS titles to round out my library. It got me thinking about what would make up the “Ultimate DS Library.” So I present to you my idea of the “Ultimate DS Library.” (Note that I don’t, as of yet, own some of these titles. But I have enough faith in them that I am actively pursuing a copy of them.)

[Read more…] about The Ultimate DS Library

In my hands…

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MeteosI know I’m over a year late to the party on this one, but I’ve finally scored myself a copy of Meteos. I’m browsing eBay, picking up some of the DS games that have received a fair amount of good word-of-mouth. On the recommendation of agentgray (or is it Nintendaddio now?) and anyone else who’s played it, I’m also looking to get my paws on Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan as soon as I can. I’m working on a new post that will hopefully encompass all that is good about gaming with the DS (here’s a preview — it’s pretty much all good).

Reading through the instruction booklet (which is printed “portrait” instead of “landcape”, giving it a flip-book feel) looks like Meteos is pretty complex. But, like I always do, I’ll just throw it into the machine and dive right into it.

Carnival Update

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After discussing with CheapyD (this month’s Carnival host), we both decided that the Carnival will be delayed a couple weeks, until August 17th. We’re doing this for a couple reasons; the number of submissions is down this month and summer is usually slow for game bloggers anyway. Add to that this oppresive heat and relatively quiet news front (outside of the E3 news) it’s just slow going. So we’re going to combine the August and September Carnivals into one Carnival on the 17th. The rest of the hosts will be bumped up a month and we’ll resume the normal monthly schedule in October, when the days are cooler, the games are flowing and the nights are longer.

So you’ve still got a couple weeks now to work on your Carnival submissions and get them in to CheapyD. As always, you can hit up the Carnival HQ for any carnie questions you might have.