Issue 37 of GamesTM is out now with more Olly goodness. In this one I actually got to write something of substance so you can find my Great Retro Gaming Moment (Rainbow Road from Super Mario Kart) on page 147 and my Why Don’t They Remake (Unirally) on page 148. Since I have 1.5 pages that means I control 0.833% of the magazine, so soon it will be mine!

It’s actually not a bad issue with some good stuff on Liberty City Stories and the new Prince of Persia, but the fact that they review Ouendan (8/10) and have stuff by me pushes it into must-have territory.

My making up for lost time with all the DVDs that I missed while saving continues, with the Oldboy, Grave of the Fireflies, and Mind, Body & Kick Ass Moves that arrived yesterday joining the Deadwood Season One that I bought on Tuesday, and soon to be joined by The Simpsons Seasons 5 and 6, Firefly, The Fly: Collector’s Edition, Mallrats X, and Land of the Dead Unrated which are all somewhere in the postal system at the moment. It feels good to have a backlog of movies to watch again.

The one in that list which might surprise some people is Land of the Dead, which was only released here theatrically on 23rd September (incidentally, we were the last country to get it, behind even countries that needed it translated before they could get it released – somehow they wonder why people import so many DVDs) and isn’t even out in the States on DVD until 18th October, but it seems that PlayUSA have performed some kind of alchemy and got it in the post twelve days before release. I was impressed when they got Fellowship of the Ring to me ten days before release but they’ve outdone themselves on this one. I was thinking of going to the Halloween event at Harbour Lights (the same place we saw Howl at the weekend) where they’re showing a double bill of the original Dawn of the Dead and Land of the Dead, but fuck that when I can sit at home and watch them without a bunch of Romero fanboys.

I’m also seeing Serenity on Friday night so impressions should be on here forthwith. The last sci-fi film I saw in the cinema was Revenge of the Sith so I need something to burn it out of my memory. I hope no-one in it screams “NOOOOO!” or I could have a relapse.

Today is my 20th birthday, and as I write this I’m in the middle of my third hour of lectures and seminars today, with another five and a half to go. Including breaks between lessons I’m stuck up at uni for over ten hours and won’t get home until 9pm at the earliest which has me pissed off – that amount of time would be bad any day (unfortunately I’m going to have to suffer it every Tuesday for the next thirteen or so weeks) but especially so today.

I just got money from people which is usually more appreciated than anything else with me, because very few people apart from me have any idea what exactly I want. I’ve taken some of it and bought Deadwood Season One on DVD and another load to finally pick up a retail copy of World of Warcraft so that I can go back to playing the trial account from PC Gamer that I was playing obsessively for a couple of weeks. I’m thinking of adding Everybody’s Golf on the PSP to that list on the way home, but at this rate I’m going to be too tired to even think about anything as strenuous as that. Back to work…

I’m sure it’s one of the signs of the apocalypse when one of the latest Internet phenomena actually shows some talent and won’t make you want to kill yourself (let me remind you that the Crazy Frog started life online as The Insanity Test), but the latest file to crash web servers the world over is the trailer to a life-affirming dramady about a boy who wants a father and a man who needs a muse, Shining.

OK, it’s not. It’s a trailer for The Shining, a film that’s less life-affirming and more life-ending, with more fellating furries than father figures (ooh, alliteration). It really shows the power of editing and according to the story behind it, they guy’s getting a lot of job offers from what started as a simple contest entry. I love it.

Today is the last day of the month and that means payday, and as this is my first pay day in a long time when I haven’t had a holiday to save up for (although it looks like I might be going back to Japan for the PS3 launch next spring), it was a good excuse to splash out on some new games, backlog be damned. I still have several PS2 games and a pile of handheld stuff from Japan that I either haven’t even opened yet or have barely even touched.

Anyway, I picked up the newly-released Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow for the DS (out in the US on Tuesday, I believe) which I’ve only played for a few minutes so far since I prefer to play Castlevania games when I’ve got some time to sit down and sink my teeth into them (pun fully intended). What I can say from playing up to the first save point is that it seems as good as any other 2D Castlevanias and graphically makes some nice use of the extra horsepower that the DS has over the GBA, with some little inconsequential effects like steam on the characters’ breath when they’re out on a cold night. The touch screen is used to draw seals to do things like open doors and deal the killing blow on bosses. One fun little touch (sorry, another pun) was how instead of entering your name for your save file you actually sign your name on the touch screen which I haven’t seen done before and thought was pretty cool.

The other game I bought was Fahrenheit on the Xbox, known as Indigo Prophecy in the US for some reason. The UK version is worth getting just because it’s uncut, as the short delay to the release was to excise the sex scene from the US version in the wake of the fallout from the Hot Coffee “scandal”. The game can be a little bit pretentious, as it thinks it’s a movie (the main menu even says “New Movie” as opposed to “New Game”) when it’s actually more like a Shenmue QTE mixed with a “choose your own adventure” novel, but I’m impressed so far. It’s an interesting premise and a fairly unique and occasionally audacious execution (not to mention some impressive visuals), and even though it’s supposed to be a fairly short story there are enough endings that it could make multiple playthroughs worthwhile. I’ll have to play a bit more of it before I can give any deeper impressions but it seems like I’ll have a good time with it.

Wow…writing about something as fast moving as the enthusiast development community and expecting it to remain accurate for any length of time is always going to be folly, but I didn’t expect yesterday’s post to become outdated this fast. In days we’ve gone from a minor buffer overflow being discovered to a fully functional technique to downgrade a 2.00 PSP to the 1.50 firmware, allowing homebrew software to be run on any PSP currently on the market. It’s a deceptively simple technique (the buffer overflow makes it execute a version of an existing version changer which makes the PSP think it’s a 1.00 while still being 2.00, which then means it will run the 1.50 update and overwrite 2.00) but I tried it on my white PSP which shipped with 2.00 and it works perfectly.

I’m sticking with 2.00 on mine for now just because I like the elegant functions of the added features over their homebrew equivalents and I’d prefer a way to run homebrew applications natively on 2.00, but at least now I’m safe in the knowledge that I can drop back to 1.50 in the future if a real homebrew killer app appears. Kudos to the guys who finally made it happen.