Blogs about nintendo from Pew Pew Laser Blog

Back Off the Wagon.

I have started a new live of indentured servitude to an anthropomorphized raccoon. Santa Claus brought me Animal Crossing: City Folk for the Nintendo Wii. I did some fishing, paid off my first mortgage, and had my house re-modeled. Would any of you like to visit my town? Let me know - I've got peaches.

For the rest of you, perhaps this will be interesting: Big Fish Games is offering two free downloadable puzzle games for PC, and 50% off any other game. Go to www.bigfishgames.com/borders and enter your email address.

DS Lite Randomly Powers Down.

Last month, the father in law told us that he'd been having some trouble with his Nintendo DS Lite. Yes, this the baby boomer for whom I insidiously instrumented a birthday gift of a Nintendo DS Lite, Clubhouse Games, and Brain Age. He loves it.

Anyhoo, the problem was the the DS would randomly shut down during play, sometimes only after a minute of play. The husband and I theorized that the root cause of the problem could be a bad cartridge, a bad connection socket in the DS, or a problem with the battery. We suggested changes to his DS - playing work flow that could resolve the trouble, or at least narrow down the cause.

It turned out to be battery trouble - dad-in-law tended to keep the DS fully charged, and even play at his desk with the power plugged in. Since giving the battery a more natural cycle of charge and discharge, he hasn't seen any troubles.

The World Ends With You - Aliens.

I've been leaving TWEWY in "talk to other Wi-Fi devices mode" frequently over the past week. I've had good luck on gaining experience from this, though some of the "Aliens" (non-DSes - probably iPhones) are quite weird:

• A Childhood Memory
• An Angry Monkey (some kind of monkey, anyhow)
• An Evil Spirit
• A Psycho Hose Beast
• the one that got away

The World Ends With You.

Recently, I've been playing The World Ends With You, one of Square's non-Final Fantasy RPGs for the Nintendo DS. It's very engrossing; fast paced and highly configurable.

Game progress is broken up into very distinct stages, with clear goals for progressing to the next stage. Within each stage, game play is pretty much up to you. You can spend lots of time exploring, fighting, or even running around Shibuya shopping. Or you can focus directly on the tasks to progress to the next stage. I'm really enjoying the in-game flexibility to do whatever I want, whenever I want.

The game difficulty is also configurable at all times, in a variety of dimensions. And great rewards are available with the increased difficulty settings.

One very unique attribute of this game is the powering up system. Equipment (which grants abilities) earns experience; not just for fighting, but also when the game is shut down, and when it communicates wirelessly with other devices. The DS/TWEWY can detect WiFi communications from other TWEWY players (ESPers), DSs playing other games (Civvies), and non-DS devices (Aliens)! Very fun.

DS Wednesday.

We played Nintendo DS during lunch again today. I won at Clubhouse Games Darts and MarioKart Balloon Battle, but lost at everything else. I'm not such a hot MarioKart racer, and you never know who's going to win Clubhouse Games Bowling, but the Tetris DS loss rankles a bit. My only defense is that it was a boss-based loss. The big boss was very excited with some kind of great news for the company while I was trying to concentrate down a rain of fire and blocks! Ah well. Guess I'll have to practice the Tetris.