gosp

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days
I just really don't get it, but I'll admit I only got a bit into the game before dropping it in favor of something more interesting. First of all, I never played the other games in the Kingdom Hearts series, so I have no idea what's going on. I have no idea who these characters are, and Square-enix did a horrible job of making the story interesting for people like me. The missions are repetitive and you can win most battles by closing your eyes and jamming A until everything's dead.

The biggest annoyance is that I don't even know if anything's advancing at all. I can see that I'm leveling up, but each of those panels means I'm taking another panel away for no noticeable increase in power. The only time your power really increases is when you get a new title and can buy new things from the store. The only problem with that is, I have no idea when that will happen so I'm feeling like all my tedious grind is going without a reward. I stopped playing this half way through because I couldn't justify wasting my time with a story I didn't care about and gameplay I didn't find interesting.

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks
I loved Phantom Hourglass, and I like Spirit Tracks too, except for two parts:

TRAINS. Why would anyone think this is anything but a step down from sailing? I'm confined to the tracks. The train moves so slowly. I would love to just set my course and go do something interesting for the five minutes it takes to get up there, but there are cows on the track or snowman that want to throw their heads at me. Tedious. Annoying. What happened to the horseback adventures from the ocarina of time where you got wherever you wanted within 60 seconds. Less once you started teleporting places. Also: what's the point of those demon bomb things? They make it so I have to take a slightly less efficient course to my destination. There's nothing clever about them. It adds nothing to the game play. I was deeply disappointed when I saw there was no Action Replay code for 2x train movement (there was in Phantom Hourglass).

STATUES. Or rather Princess Zelda's giant phantom thing. It's awkward to control it. There are four buttons on either side of the DS that are being used for nothing useful. Why not just use those to facilitate switching? Because they don't want to use button for game play at all. Take a break, the way we've got now could be so much improved in every way if you just made it a simple button push to switch between Link and Zelda.

I will be finishing this game, though. I'm still disappointed.


That's all I've got for today. Who else hates a big title game.

I'm able to program. While I've never really studied the topic, I do have an interest in Computer Science. Until now, I've only really interested myself with mathematics and data structure type things. I've pulled up an archive of ACSL problems which I've done without any notable problems. I can balance a binary tree or reverse a linked list and all the good fun stuff like that.

I've never ever experienced anything outside of the command line.

So now I want to start some stuff. I've created ascii pong in PASCAL and ascii tetris in Cpp. Now I want to get into some actual game programming.

I've never used a book before, my prior experience comes from my brother saying basically 'figure this out' and so on.

I figure I'll start with a 2d platformer of some sort, as that seems simpler than anything else. I can figure out collision detection, I'm sure, but my real problems comes with graphic display and manipulation.

So... any suggestions on what I should look up? What I should read?

I got a Hori Screen Protector. The top one went on great. The bottom one, not so much. You see, the cut was at the tiniest of angles, so that I could line it up with one side and the top corner, but then couldn't get the other top corner on. I took it off and set it (face up) on the table so I could make sure I was doing it right. I then took it and aligned the bottom corner first, and that worked.

Except now it's covered in dust.

It's not horrible, but it can be seen on dark screens. Anyone know how to get dust off sticky stuff?

I got the rumbleram pack with my M3 instead of the GBA expansion.

What's the best/cheapest solution to remedy this situation?

From what I understand, the M3 Real comes with a rumble/ rumble+ram pack, however, it's for the DS Lite. Would I be able to swap the insides of the cartridge with a normal GBA cartridge, Like was possible with the M3 Perfect Mini? Would that, then, allow me to play GBA games?