Does anyone (this is mostly for, but not restricted to, any Portuguese readers) reading this know of a Portuguese-language equivalent of PRWeb, a site to which you can (by paying some amount of money) send a press release, which is then picked by many news sites and aggregators?

Thanks in advance.

P.S. – this is related to my new Nintendo forum, in case you’re curious. See, full disclosure.

This is likely to be of interest only to Portuguese readers, but since there are a bunch of them reading this through Prt.Sc, here goes…

A couple of days ago, NintendoPT, the biggest Nintendo-related forum in Portugal, closed down. I was already thinking (see here if you don’t believe me) about expanding my Nintendo DS forum, NDS-PT, either to add the Wii as an “equal partner console”, or to expand it to a full Nintendo forum, but was inclined toward the former because I didn’t want to compete directly with NintendoPT. But since the latter is no more, there is a big gap to fill, and…

… I am pleased to announce the transformation of NDS-PT into NintenForum-PT, possibly the biggest Nintendo forum in Portugal nowadays. More than 500 members, more than 16000 posts, and no longer invaded by Pokémon fans (who scared many of the NDS-PT old timers away in February, but who then moved en masse to a separate Pokémon forum).

Ah, the eighties.

If, like me, you have a Google News alert for “wii”, yesterday and today you’ve surely been inundated with rumors about a forthcoming announcement at E3 for a hard drive for the Nintendo Wii. Its main use would be for Virtual Console games, since the Wii only has 512 MB of flash memory for them (you can move some to an SD card, but they aren’t directly playable from there).

Their justification? The fact that some time ago it was announced that Neo Geo games would be coming to the Wii, and, as they keep saying, “Neo Geo games can use up to 330 MB”.

Really?

I’m betting they’re taking that number from the Neo Geo common intro screen (you can see it using MAME, on older games), which says “MAX 330 MEGA”.

However, those are not megabytes, but megaBITS. 330 megabits = about 41 megabytes. Still bigger than all current virtual console games, but not more than half of the Wii’s flash memory.

Amazingly, I’ve seen about a dozen news sites repeating that mistake. It seems that nobody researches anything these days; “news reporting” is simply repeating what others already said, using different words so that it looks “original”.

Incidentally, the 330 megabits Neo Geo limit was passed some years ago. The biggest Neo Geo game I have on MAME (King of Fighters 2003) is about 100 megabytes (or 800 megabits).

NOTE: the following is translated and adapted from a post of mine on the Nintendo DS – Portugal forum.

I have it at home, since yesterday.

I’ve been playing with it for several hours, now. Unfortunately, my brother (who is the one who bought it for me; I wasn’t in the country on release day) was only able to buy the basic package: the console itself, Wii Sports, one wiimote and one nunchuk.

I haven’t been able to explore Wii Sports thoroughly, as my TV is in my bedroom, and the bed is in the way. I’m going to move the TV to the living room today or tomorrow, hopefully. I’ve won a couple of tennis games (which is much more fun than you’d imagine), but the “real thing” will be when I can play with more room, and with more people (which will require more wiimotes, and they’re completely sold out right now).

Besides disk-based games, the Wii supports several channels, and can go online. Connecting it to the Internet was extremely easy; there were no compatibility problems with my Linksys WRK54G router, which I already use for the Nintendo DS. The wireless range seems to be better than that of the DS, and it now supports WPA encryption (which I’m not using, though, because of the DS – only WEP there). As soon as you go online, the console updates its firmware, which takes a little while, but no effort at all.

News and weather channels are available on the channel selection screen, but they’re not working yet; according to Wikipedia, they’ll be up and running either this month, or in January. Same thing about the Opera browser, whose release date is apparently December 23.

One of the most interesting channels is, of course, the Virtual Console. Apparently, new games will be released every friday. I’ve already bought a few: Donkey Kong (NES) due to nostalgia (even though it’s a relatively poor version, quite inferior to the original arcade), F-Zero (SNES), Super Mario 64 (N64), Donkey Kong Country (SNES), Sonic the Hedgehog (Mega Drive), Super Star Soldier (PC Engine) and Dungeon Explorer (PC Engine). A special note about Mario 64: I never had an N64, and, though I had already played the game using emulators, and later on the DS, I had never played it using an analog controller (in this case, a GameCube one) until yesterday. And the game really needs one; it’s like I was playing a different game! Moves and tricks that I had to struggle with on the DS come up absolutely naturally here. The N64 version doesn’t include the DS extras (3 new characters, more stars, better graphics), but this game really requires an analog stick…

A couple of PC Engine games support 5 players at a time. Dungeon Explorer is a more complex Gauntlet clone, and Bomberman 93 probably needs no introduction. Since the Wii can only support 4 wiimotes or classic controllers at a time, and up to 4 GameCube controllers, you need to use a combination of both. I have 4 GC controllers, so I will, hopefully, be able to play 5-player Dungeon Explorer after the next lunch here.

One warning: some (not all) NES, SNES and Mega Drive games (not PC Engine, oddly enough) weren’t, originally, properly converted from NTSC (60 Hz) to PAL (50 Hz); they had black borders on the screen, and were about 13% slower than the original versions. Since they’re perfectly emulated here, and the European Wii uses emulated PAL versions, the problem persists. If you’ve played the original versions and were OK with them, you won’t see a difference here, but it’s a pity that Nintendo didn’t do the extra work of fixing this problem… after all, the Wii supports 60 Hz PAL, unlike the original consoles.

And that’s it for now. When they’re available again, I hope to buy Wii Play (which includes an extra wiimote), a second nunchuk, and a couple of classic controllers. As for games, I want Zelda, Red Steel, DBZ: Tenkaichi 2 and Call of Duty 3. It’s likely that I’ll only be able to get most of those next year, though…

Unlike Ricardo, I am — hopefully — getting a Wii this Christmas. In a few hours, in fact.

I don’t have a pre-reservation, and I won’t be here this weekend; I’m going to Barcelona tomorrow morning — and, by “morning”, I mean before sunrise. I could get one there, of course, but the Spaniards have a nasty habit of translating absolutely everything, so I prefer to get it here. Therefore, my brother will try to buy one at midnight, or tomorrow morning. Which means that, if he succeeds, I won’t get to play it until Sunday or Monday…

Why do I want to get one? Well, I’d get it for Wii Sports alone. Zelda is a bonus. I’m also interested in the Virtual Console; even though emulators and roms are easy to get, having perfect versions (some even slightly enhanced, like the N64 games), playable with gamepads on a TV, is something that you simply can’t get — easily, at least — using emulators on a PC.

Unlike Ricardo, I have exactly zero interest in the PS3; if I was going to buy something like that, I’d go for the Xbox360, which has Dead Rising, the Jeff Minter lightsynth, and which Minter is developing small games for. Besides, Sony is one of the few companies in the world that make Microsoft look ethical…

As for Wii games, there are many more interesting ones than it seems. As I said, Wii Sports is a game I still expect to play 2 years from now. Zelda is Zelda. Then there’s Super Monkey Ball, Call of Duty 3, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Trauma Center, Dragon Ball Z: Tenkaichi 2, and, coming sometime in the future, Wario Ware, Super Mario Galaxy, Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles (zombies!), Metroid Prime 3, Sadness, the inevitable Mario Kart, and many more. There will be new games released for the Virtual Console, too; it won’t just be used for past games. It’s a great time to be a gamer.

Since at least the beginning of this week, Amazon.co.uk lists every PC or console game as “This item can only be delivered within the UK”. Other people are also complaining about it.

I’ve bought dozens of games from them during the last few years, and I had been mostly satisfied with their service, but if this is really a policy change (and not a temporary error in their site), it will be very annoying. There are other stores in Europe, but few have such a large catalog as Amazon.

I buy most of my games online, since I my two consoles are from Nintendo, and Portugal is an anti-Nintendo country; stores seem to think that “Nintendo is for kids”, and skip a lot of games, not to mention having them months behind the rest of Europe.

The French and German Amazons are not an option, since i don’t want games in French or German (I wouldn’t even want them in Portuguese, my native tongue. Games, like anything related to computers, should be in English, thankyouverymuch.).

Game.net may be an option. But let’s see if Amazon has really changed their policy (their “we ship to…” page still lists most of Europe as destinations for games) or not.

BTW, Amazon.com (the US one) has long shipped games to the US only. Maybe .co.uk is following suit? If so… I thought one of the great things of the Internet was that you could order products from anywhere; why is Amazon moving backwards?

Nintendo’s ugly duckling grows up is the name of a recent article in gamesindustry.biz. As a happy DS owner, I loved it.

Excerpt:

When the Nintendo DS was shown to the public for the first time, both vocal fanboys and many media correspondents who should have known better were quick to dismiss it as large, clunky, ugly and most of all, a gimmick. It was viewed by many as a rushed and desperate attempt by Nintendo to claw back some attention from Sony’s PSP; at best, a stopgap Virtual Boy style curiosity that would fill in the gap before the arrival of a “proper” new handheld platform, unofficially dubbed Game Boy Advance 2.

Right up to the launch of the device, analysts were down on its prospects, swayed – as they assumed consumers would be – by the power and shiny design of the PlayStation Portable. Even though journalists and analysts alike hedged their bets to some extent, the tone of their comments on the DS made it clear that they expected the PSP to do to the DS what the PlayStation had done to the N64.

And yet…

Here it is, my 7th blog: A Revolution in Gaming.

It’s about the only announced console that actually has me interested – because I’m too old to be swayed by “even more polygons than the generation before!!!”.

Go on, visit it.

Warning: that site is somewhat green.

Finally, and (warning: cheap shot at the PSP incoming!) since the DS is all about games, unlike certain other “media centers which also play games” I could mention , what about some games?

Well, I only have one yet, Mario Kart DS, which came in the bundle I bought. And I haven’t played a lot of it yet (it was late yesterday, and now I’m at work).

Still, some first impressions:

• Graphics, sounds and music are fantastic. Doesn’t look like a handheld game at all. Trust me, screenshots don’t do it justice.
• It’s incredibly fast, with a perfect frame rate. I don’t think anyone can fail to be impressed with at least the technical part of the game, even if they don’t care for the genre.
• Not a lot of racers to choose from – just the “usual suspects”: Mario, Luigi, Peach, Wario, Bowser, Donkey Kong, Toad, Yoshi, and some hidden, unlockable ones. Less than Double Dash on the GameCube, certainly.
• Back to 1 racer per kart.
• The bottom screen is used for the map, and some optional stats. It works very well, since the map is large enough to see everything, including other racers, obstacles, etc.. One of the items in the game is one that “sprays squid paint” on you, and the top screen becomes covered with dark paint, forcing you to “drive with the map” for a while!
• Lots of tracks, though a lot of them have to be unlocked first – except for multi-player.
• Half the tracks are in the “Retro” section, which means they come from past Mario Karts – the original SNES one, Mario Kart 64, Mario Kart Super Circuit (GBA), and Mario Kart: Double Dash (GameCube). They come intact, including the original music for each of them.
• 8 players can play (using local wi-fi) with just one copy of the game (but with 8 DSes, of course), though the players without the cart have to play as “Shy Guy”, a character who wears a mask. I haven’t tried it, since I don’t know anyone with a DS… yet.

Now, what about playing online? Well, after some technical troubles, I was able to… and it’s hard to believe how easy it is. You select “Nintendo WFC”, then choose whether you want to play with people worldwide, or just for your region, or of similar skill levels, or you can use “friend codes” to connect with your friends. After less than a minute, it finds you opponents. Then you vote for tracks, and race in them.

That’s it. And it’s perfectly smooth, no delays, no pauses, no “other karts jumping as the game finally updates their positions”. If it wasn’t for the other people playing differently (one of them was easy to beat, but two of them were extremely good, and basically competed against themselves because no one else could challenge them), you wouldn’t be able to tell you were not playing offline.

On PBS: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked. A wonderful article that all the Hillary Clintons of the world should read.

Apparently, it stinks to high heaven. Who’d have guessed?

Love the reviews.

P.S. – please don’t buy it. Any money that imbecile gets will be used for more censorship and fear-mongering.

P.P.S. – apparently, Jack is now threatening to sue Amazon if they don’t remove the negative reviews!

Those 3 games have arrived, 2 days ago, but due to work (and work and work), I haven’t had almost any time to play them. Still, here are a few initial impressions:

Civilization IV

I love the new interface, presentation and music. And the new technologies narration by Leonard Nimoy is fantastic. However, I haven’t had much time to dwell into the game itself. Most of what I know about it is from reviews.

Civics come from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, though it was called “Social Engineering” there.

Religion is a new concept in the Civ series, and it basically works these way: the first civilization to get to each of 7 particular technologies (e.g. Meditation for Buddhism, Polytheism for Hinduism, and so on) has one of its cities become a “holy site” for that religion (think Mecca or Jerusalem). The religion then spreads through trade routes, including to other civilizations. Cities can have citizens of several faiths, and you can build temples. You can also build missionaries to influence other cities (especially those of other players) more directly.

Both civics and religion are used in diplomacy – civs tend to like other civs with the same state religion, or using the same civics, more – and the other way around. They may even suggest changes to yours – such as Mao asking you to change to State Property. And you can also suggest changes to them.

Religions are, in game terms, the same. Political correctness and all that. Not like Europa Universalis 2, where each religion had particular bonuses and penalties…

Rome: Total War – Barbarian Invasion

Looks extremely promising, but my puny PC can’t really handle R:TW decently. Although load times are better than Medieval’s, the battles are much less smooth. And I have to lower the detail a lot for it to be playable – which, oddly enough, makes it look worse than M:TW (with maximum detail).

One to “devour” when I get a newer PC. Must… get… rich…

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance

Only played through the first 2 missions (including the training one), so I have seen virtually nothing of the game. It’s like Final Fantasy Tactics / Shining Force – either a tactical RPG, or a tactical strategy game with heavy RPG elements. Lots and lots of classes, weapons and so on, with a nice story, and turn-based. Looks great, but I’ll only have anything to “report” after I spend some more time with it. Work, work, work…

Just ordered from Amazon.co.uk:

• Civilization IV (PC)
• Rome: Total War – Barbarian Invasion (expansion for R:TW) (PC)
• Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (GameCube)

Yes, I’m in a strategy mood.
They should be here next week or so…

Really, you have to read this Ars Technica article. It’s almost unbelievable.

Excerpt:

Jack Thompson, a Florida lawyer who became infamous in 1988 for accusing Janet Reno of being a closeted lesbian with a drinking problem and a strong candidate for blackmail, has recently been making waves with his crusade against the video game industry. Earlier this year, he launched a wrongful death lawsuit against Take Two Interactive and Rockstar Games, makers of the Grand Theft Auto series, claiming that the video game was directly responsible for 18 year-old Devin Moore’s shooting of three police officers in 2003.

Jack recently appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes trying to drum up support for his efforts. However, this publicity was apparently not satisfying enough for him, as he went on to try and create more outrage on his own. Attempting to emulate Jonathan Swift, he issued a “Modest Proposal” that offered a US$10,000 reward to anyone who would create a video game featuring Osaki Kim, a father whose son was beaten to death with a baseball bat by a 14-year-old gamer. The game would feature Kim extracting brutal revenge on the video game industry itself, including beating game company executives to death, removing their heads and urinating on their brain stems.

And the best comes after that…

I’ve been in the mood to write about computer/video games – including old, 80s games. But I don’t want to innundate this blog with those posts, so, I’ve created another blog (hmm, that’s a subject for a future “Blogging Tips” article…): The Games of my Life.

In it, I’ll write about games. A lot of nostalgia, but there’ll also be new (or even future) hits. I’ve been a gamer for 25 years, so I think I have a lot of material to write.

Just finished Fahrenheit. It’s not really a hard game. It is, however, a great one.

Amazing direction, voice acting, soundrack, and the first 3/4 of the game are some of the most emotional gaming moments ever seen in a game. The last part of the game, however, feels a bit rushed, and the story becomes much less believable, making me shake my head and say “come on…” a few times.

Oddly enough, I can’t complain about what most reviewers complained about: the action sections. Maybe it’s my natural reflexes, honed by more than 25 years of gaming (and my huge modesty, of course ), but I had no problem with them, never had to lower the difficulty level, and was even able to watch the action and dialogues during the sequences (another thing many people complained about). Nor do I have any problem with the Matrix Revolutions / Dragonball Z fights near the end. They look, sound and play amazingly, IMO.

I just wish that the game was longer (not that it’s a very short game, I finished it quickly because I played it a lot – I wanted it to be longer because I was enjoying it so much.), that the end part was as good as the beginning, and that there were more “what you do now affects what happens later” situations (most are, again, at the game’s beginning).

In short: not a perfect game, but if you like adventure games, or simply good, emotional stories at all, you have to buy this game. Not only for the game itself, but to tell those sequel-obsessed suits that there’s still a market for genres other than FPSs, MMORPGs and driving games. You know, more mature games (and I’m not talking about sex or violence).

One last thought, for those who have played the game and know how its control scheme works: imagine playing it with two Nintendo Revolution controllers…

If you have a relatively recent PC, a Playstation 2 or an Xbox, and like aventure games, or simply great stories, please do yourself a favor and buy this game right now. It’s brilliant, innovative, and will actually make you think (and not just in the sense of solving puzzles)

Tycho from Penny Arcade nailed it perfectly: “an adventure game where you play a murderer and the investigators of the murder set against the backdrop of a Mayan prophecy”.

It plays a lot like “living” a movie – and no, I don’t mean in the sense of the first CD-ROM games back in the 90s, with crappy full-motion video, which weren’t really games at all, but bad movies where you had to do something at some particular times, so that the movie could go on. Believe me, this one is different.

It’s called Indigo Prophecy in the USA, and Fahrenheit in the rest of the world. Most likely, they didn’t want the “Fahrenheit 9/11″ association. The American version is slightly censored – I guess that, after the GTA:SA “Hot Coffee” mod, no (non-Hentai) games can have sex scenes in the US, at least for a while.

… if I did, I could have just met a living legend:

If you don’t know who he is (shame, shame…), here’s the Wikipedia link.

(photo from Aussie-Nintendo)

What is a speed run (or “speedrun”)? Wikipedia says it’s “a play-through of a computer or video game, the whole game or a selected part such as a single level of it, with the intent of completing it as quickly as possible.” That’s their competitive usage.

But I like to watch them for fun and “education”, as well. Especially older games, which I may have played a lot of, at a younger age but which I am relatively unlikely to invest the time into playing again. Some speed runs skip a lot of the game, and/or show a “perfect game”, but others are more “human-like”, and show the entire game. It’s like watching a great player play the entire game for you.

Of course, that would spoil current games, or games I still have the intention of playing through. But, as I said, for older games… it’s fun.

Here’s a link with a lot of movies at The Internet Archive. Some are small, some are huge, but all I’ve seen so far are very interesting… to me, at least.

In the state of Michigan, U.S.A, apparently a law forbidding the sale of “mature” (you know, what in a movie means PG, but in a game means M or even AO) games to minors passed. Even though it’s unconstitutional.

But, surprisingly, the video games industry is fighting back. For a change. About time, IMO.

From the linked article:

The ESA argues that this bill is an effort to substitute the government’s judgment for parental supervision and turn retailers into surrogate parents. Lowenstein said that the industry’s products were being unreasonably and unfairly singled out. He contends that while there is no question that a few games have content that some audiences will find offensive, the same can be said for some content in TV, films, music, and books. Since the government does not regulate the sales of those entertainment industries, it should follow suit for the sale of video games. Ultimately, he concluded, parents, not government or industry, must be the gatekeepers of what comes in the home.

“In 2004, the average game buyer was 37 years old and the average game player was 30,” Lowenstein said. “Knowing this, our industry creates a wide range of content for a diverse consumer audience, just as other entertainment industries do. And, it’s illogical that video games would be treated more harshly than R-rated movies or music CDs with parental warning labels, both of which can be legally viewed and sold to minors. How can you treat a video game based on James Bond any different than a book or movie based on the same subject matter?”

Super Maryo Brothers (“Maryo” because it’s a clone, they don’t want to be sued by Nintendo, of course). Not Flash. Not Java. Freaking JavaScript!

What will people do next?! Port Linux to JavaScript so you can run an entire modern OS inside Firefox?