neurological dryer lint

contra 4 showed up while we were out of town. it's a total homage to the classic NES/SNES series with barely anything new (besides the grappling hook that takes you to the top screen). it's as tough as the reviews say - as merciless as the originals, with ten lives, five continues and one-hit kills. basically the idea is to play through it a million times until you manage to not die by the end of the game - not really my idea of fun anymore. sure it was fun in 1988 but now it just feels dated for a new release.

sony finally opened up their PSP store where you can buy old PS1 games and load them onto your PSP. sadly the app that pulls it down and stores it on your device requires that your device be turned on and in USB mode the whole time - so for a 350MB download that takes 30 minutes, you just ate a decent chunk of your battery life.

that said, the whole process was smooth, i picked up the classic castlevania: symphony of the night, the spiritual predecessor to my DS fave dawn of sorrow. SotN is the first in the series to have RPG elements - leveling up, buying items, upgrading weapons, etc, and i'm enjoying the experience. i'm not sure what planet i was on when the original playstation came out - i think i was too busy hanging out on IRC for most of high school - but i had no awareness of the existence of the console or most of the games until i hit college. that void in my memory still surprises me - it's not that i wasn't into gaming then (although unlike now, it made you a social pariah... or maybe that was just being in scouts)... i guess without ubiquitous web coverage of everything, there's a lot of stuff you miss?

so who dey, huh? not sure who that team in the orange jerseys was today but it was encouraging to watch them play and to see chad getting his groove back. how about coach coward and boomer knocking his endzone celebration at the half? apparently these guys forgot what it means to have fun in a football game, how pathetic.

speaking of, i finally caught the HBO documentary on the ohio state/michigan rivalry. solid, although felt like it could have been a 90-minute or even two hour feature instead of one hour. they focused mainly on the ten year war, obviously because the woody hayes/bo schembechler competition is the most iconic historical period, but only talked for about three minutes about recent years with coach tressel - i don't even think they mentioned lloyd carr. it was a little slim on highlight footage and scores, which would have been more appropriate IMHO. in any case, it's entertaining for fans of either side (good or evil).