I got followed by some car repair place this morning. Obviously a new account, they had one tweet and were following 800 people. What value are you going to bring to me again? Oh, that’s right, none. At least send a mention saying something about your services… it might make me think that you care enough to at least spend 5 seconds thinking about each person you want to have follow you.

While messing around, I made my own version of Totaka’s Song, and am putting it online so that you can listen and say to yourself, “Yep, that’s Totaka’s Song alright.” If you’ve played Nintendo games with any frequency in your life, you’ve probably heard this ditty… check out this excellent YouTube seriesTotaka’s Song for all the dirt.

However, I think there’s a reason why gaming has exploded on iPhone: it allows casual game makers to easily develop and publish games on a handheld pseudo-console. Nintendo has DSiWare, which is a digital content distribution system similar to the App Store, but the speed bumps to publishing on each platform are remarkably different.

To develop for the DSi, you have to fill out an application which states why your company has the experience necessary to develop DS titles (a side note: your company has to have actual offices… can’t be a home office). Once you get approved, you can purchase your DS development kit (no idea how much it costs, but probably a substantial amount). Then you can actually make your game. After that, you have to get your game approved to be distributed as DSiWare.

To develop for iPhone OS, all you need is a Macintosh computer and an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. All the programming tools are free. To test your game on your actual hardware and distribute via the App Store, you pay $100/year to be an official developer.

The difference is astounding. I will probably never make a game on a Nintendo platform (although I’d love to some day), but publishing for iPhone OS is easily within my reach. All I’m saying, Nintendo, is that you might want to take a page from Apple’s playbook here.

Anyway, like I said, Q Games is known for their PixelJunk brand, a collection of four (so far) inexpensive, downloadable titles for the PS3. Aside from the common PixelJunk name (great use of branding, by the way), these games have nothing in common. The first was a slot car racing game, the second was tower defense, and the third was a stylized platformer. The fourth, and most recent (not to mention my own most recent purchase) was PixelJunk Shooter.

As you can guess from the title, Shooter is, at its core, a shooting game. The player is tasked with rescuing miners and scientists who have been working to uncover resources under the surface of an unexplored planet. As you fly deeper and deeper underground, you encounter new and different obstacles. At first, these obstacles consist mostly of lava pits, which can be quenched by shooting through weak cave walls and finding water sources (getting too close to lava raises the heat level of your ship, which can be cooled by a dunk in some water). Further in, however, you come across ice, explosive gas, and a strange magnetic liquid that is attracted to your ship. The fluid dynamics are modeled in a very realistic fashion, and it’s fun to watch the different materials interact. In addition, you can find various modifications for your ship: to allow it to shoot lava or water, or an “inverter” which allows your ship to enter lava, but water causes it to overheat. These different gameplay ideas inject a bit of puzzling into what would otherwise be a straightforward action game, and elevate it from being merely “good” to “great.”

PixelJunk Shooter’s length is just right. The game consists of three episodes that contain 5-6 stages. Each stage contains about four “sub-stages,” smaller areas where you need to rescue all the survivors in order to proceed to the next. A stage will probably take you about 15 minutes to complete the first time. So, extrapolating, you’ll get about 4 hours of unique gameplay for your $10. Each stage introduces new game concepts, and you barely get used to one you just learned before it’s taken away and you have something entirely new to learn. The upshot is that the game feels very content-dense, yet each game concept is under-used so that you don’t get tired of it. As far as bang for your buck goes, I can wholeheartedly recommend PixelJunk Shooter; the price is just about the same as going to a movie (my local theater charges $9), but it’s twice as long and has much better content than any movie I’ve seen recently.

After playing PixelJunk Shooter (as well as a few other PixelJunk demos), I’m a Q Games convert. When I next have an afternoon or evening to kill, instead of plunking out cash for a movie, I’ll be checking out a different entry into the PixelJunk series.

(If anyone cares, let me know what you think in the comments. The puzzles kinda progress in difficulty, but they haven’t been balanced at all, and some of them are pretty bad. There, you’ve been warned.)

I own the GBA cartridge, you cretins, so I hold the moral high ground here. =] It was just getting too frustrating having to constantly refer to a translated script… you really miss a lot of the game, which is a shame when the most interesting thing about the Earthbound/Mother series is the writing.

The “in progress” title screen of Nonogram Madness. Yeah, I decided on a name.

I knew that the bulk of new content in ODST was in the form of the campaign, and was able to get my friends to agree to play through in co-op mode. The campaign’s story centers around a group of ODSTs, who have been dropped into a war-torn South African city. After losing control of the drop pod, your character wakes up separated from his squad mates, in a city that is swarming with alien baddies. Your task is to try to find out what happened to your friends, and make it out of the city alive.

As your character explores the city, he comes across certain objects which trigger flashbacks that tell the story of his squad. For example, one of the first objects you come across is the helmet of an intelligence officer that dropped with you. The ensuing flashback, played from the point of view of another member of your team, ends with a cutscene showing how the helmet got there. You get closer and closer to your missing friends, and eventually reunite and complete your mission.

ODST doesn’t add a whole lot in terms of game mechanics or weapons. Your character can throw grenades farther, and his default machine gun and sidearm are silenced now, but all the stuff you’ve grown to love about Halo 3 is mostly intact. In fact, that statement right there is a pretty good indicator regarding whether or not you’ll like this sequel. If you want to fight Covenant aliens in a new, more urban environment, and learn a bit more about the Halo universe, then you’ll like ODST. If you’re looking for new weapons or a different multiplayer experience, your money would probably be better spent elsewhere.

I personally enjoyed playing through the game, even though I skipped a lot of the extra story content. While the plot doesn’t expound a whole lot into the over Halo story arc, I was definitely wanted to keep playing in order to find out what happened to your character’s friends. The levels are all very detailed and well-crafted; you really feel like you’re totally alone, exploring an abandoned city. The ending was a bit lackluster, but I can forgive that due to the fact that the overall play experience was so good. My next step: play through Halo 3 proper.

Makin’ another game! It’s a nonogram game, inspired by Mario’s Picross (read more details about the whole genre at Game Set Watch).

Admittedly, nonograms aren’t for everyone. I enjoy them, however, because they’re simple logic puzzles that have a visual component… they’re more interesting to me than the straight-up numbers of sudoku. When I explained the concept to Chandra, she seemed interested! It’s my goal to make something that she’ll play through =]