I will need to chain myself to my books when I’m not at work, so there’s nothing really to look forward to until after my exam. My only forms of entertainment will be the odd TV show (HIMYM and TBBT premiered last night!), and I will live vicariously through my newsfeeds. Tokyo Game Show 2009 begins on Thursday, so here’s hoping for some interesting gaming news. I was scoping out their site and came across this floorplan. If you look on the bottom right where the international pavilions are, you can see that the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development and Trade will be represented there. If they mentioned I might get to go to TGS, who knows, I may just have accepted their job offer :P The gaming world is abuzz with yesterday’s big release of Halo 3: ODST (apparently there was even some kind of event going down at the Fermenting Cellar), but there are quite a few good DS games I need to play:

• Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box. I loved Curious Village, and this one’s turning out to be pretty good too. Except I don’t really care for the mini-games (the camera/tea/cat stuff is so annoying). I think I’m close to the middle of the game, but I refuse to pick it up again before CFA exam cause it’s super addictive :(
• Scribblenauts. I’ve read so many great reviews, and the gameplay intrigues me so I’ll have to check it out.
• Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days. It comes out on the 29th. I shouldn’t even have to justify why this is on my list.

Aaaaaand I just wanted to highlight a few finance-related articles that caught my interest:

• Finance prof says markets are too reliant on mathematical models, need more “common sense”. I agree! Less math makes the world a better place.
• An RBC trader was fired, supposedly over dating a Ponzi-scheming dude, and is now suing. Also, turns out her male colleagues are really lame with sexual advances (“sensy”?? Please kill yourself).
• Goldman may now want out of their bank charter to lessen regulatory influence. Namely, caps on their nice fat paychecks.

To the best of my memory, I made a list of my obsessions over the years. These might not cover everything, but if I don’t remember it, I guess I wasn’t that obsessed.

• Grade 7-8: Digimon, Sailormoon
  I made fansites for these. The BSSM one never got anywhere, but my shrine to pretty-boy Ishida Yamato actually grew to mediocre success. No, I will never show you either of these. Of course, Sailormoon spawned fanart like no tomorrow. Just look at the artbooks! Bee-yoo-ti-ful…
• Grade 9-10: Final Fantasy (VIII in particular)
  Still love this series, and have a metric ton of graphics/official artwork…etc on my computer.
• Grade 11-12: Lord of the Rings (Legolas in particular)
  I drew some fanart, but I think the greatest feat was actually getting through all 3 books, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion.
  • Minor obsessions: Fruits Basket, Arthurian legends
• First year: These guys, Fly to the Sky
  I loved being able to obsess over them with Lily – we each got a ‘guy’. We literally Youtubed every single performance/video we could find of them. And then made some wallpapers.
  • Minor obsessions: Collectives (you know, those uber-girly ’boutique’ domains with insanely-difficult-to-find navigation. Many are dead with the arrival of Web 2.0, but here are some pretty examples), fanlistings, Jay Chou
• Second year: Kingdom Hearts
  Yyyyyep, more fanart :D

So you can pretty much conclude I was a typical nerd/geek. I find it sad that I don’t have anything to fangirl about these days. I haven’t played any video games of epic proportions recently, and I stopped watching anime a few years back.

• MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV was announced. What the hell, Square. Can we at least see FFXIII first, some time this century?
• Microsoft introduced Project Natal, a motion detecting add-on for Xbox 360, for a completely controller-free experience. As if we didn’t look retarded enough playing Wii.
• Bayonetta looks like a super bad-ass game. Check out the E3 trailer. Yes, her hair is also her “clothing” and it can grow/retract at will and turn into various weapons. And yes, her heels double as pistols.
• PSP Go announced, at an inexplicably inflated price (US$249), but the white one is damn sexy.

In other news, there’s an article in the Financial Times about the waning love affair between the Japanese and their LV swag. The part that surprised me was the analyst prediction:

Yano Research forecast that the market would shrink further this year, falling below Y1,000bn to nearly half the peak of Y1,897bn in 1996 and then shrinking to levels last seen 20 years ago before it entered its era of strong growth.

Personally I don’t think it would shrink that dramatically. I thought the whole luxury goods bubble would leave some debris lying around. Although the boom may be blowing over, but I just can’t believe that at some point in the future there would be zero remnants of it. I mean, not everyone can go back to “Zara dresses and Gap jeans”.

Yoko Shimomura – Legend of Mana ~Title Theme~

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Ms. Shimomura has worked with legendary game developer Square-Enix on a number of titles, including the Kingdom Hearts series. She is also the mastermind behind the music of the currently unreleased Final Fantasy Versus XIII. Personally I’ve never played Legend of Mana, but this opening theme is just so beautifully epic.

Nobuo Uematsu/Aki Kuroda – To Zanarkand

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Okay I know this one’s somewhat overplayed (especially on piano), but it’s still so sad and pretty! From Final Fantasy X.

Nobuo Uematsu – Eyes On Me [Piano Solo]

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Beautiful arrangement. Also enjoyable to learn and play on piano. From Final Fantasy VIII.

Yoko Shimomura arr. Kaoru Wada – Dearly Beloved

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This is a recurring theme in the Kingdom Hearts series. Yeah, it kind of just repeats, but nostalgia practically overwhelms me everytime it’s paired with any sort of KH clips. Also it’s very soothing and makes great background music for when I can’t fall asleep :P

Utada Hikaru – Hikari [Orchestrated Version]

[View post to listen to audio]

I was so happy they played this at Video Games Live. Already a truly epic piece, it sounded AMAZING with a live orchestra. From Kingdom Hearts.

In school-related news, I’ve survived my first week. Not much of an accomplishment, as I have previously survived 7 “first week”s. After this term, I will have two more terms (one year) of school and then be rudely shoved into the real world. I’m also co-op job-hunting again this term so we’ll see how that goes.

Jin and Mark came to Waterloo to visit for a few days. Yesterday I went to my morning class, then had lunch and grabbed ice cream with some fellow mathies. Afterwards, we spent about 3-4 hours just trying to decide what the hell we could do for the afternoon/night. In fact, we dragged it all the way until dinnertime, and Mark had to go home to Markham. The rest of us went for dinner at Rude Native Bistro. Later, we somehow convinced Mark to drive all the way back to Waterloo to join us for some board games. After a while I got really tired and passed out around 2am. Turns out everyone else slept at 6am.

The weather was pretty much terrible all day today so I’ve just been staying in. Still haven’t really accomplished anything. I should probably do some more reading…

Cuteness overload

Oh my gawwwwwd. Is that not the cutest thing you’ve ever seen or WHAT? If that kid was selling those scarves, I’d buy ten. Hit the jump for a video so adorable, you can’t help but squeal.

"I'm sexy"

Since I have nothing to blog about, I thought I’d post a sketch. For you gaming connoisseurs, you will (hopefully) recognize Zack Fair, from Crisis Core. I was working on this maybe half a year ago, and then just kinda left it (typical…). I do hope to finish this some time though. I really don’t like how his hair turned out. I need to learn better pencil-hair techniques and make it smoother. Also his right arm is really awkward. I did some cleanup in Photoshop and it still looks messy and grainy…sigh…

My beef is, I really don’t understand where Nintendo is going with this. I mean, did Nintendo’s marketing department conclude that people actually want these features? Are they trying to replace something (ie. iPhone)? Target new market? How is this an improvement? If I want to take shittacular-quality pictures on the go, I have a cellphone. If I want to listen to music, I have my mp3 player. Hey, what if I want to listen to music while I’m playing a DS game?! Are we going to start seeing DS games that require you to take photos of stuff? In that case, what about old DS owners? Are they going to try to suck more money from us by offering a camera peripheral for Phats and Lites? What about people who have the Guitar Hero guitar grip, or the paddle controller?

Also, Nintendo’s little media summit left some questions unanswered, such as: When the hell is it coming to CANADA?!!?! I was going to get my brother a DS for Christmas, and the rumors of a DS makeover excited me, but North America won’t be seeing the DSi until “well into 2009“, because DS Lite sales here are still going strong. So what the heck am I supposed to do?!

I also don’t think the nearly 40% markup in price is well-justified. The whole package sounds very gimmicky. Then again, I thought the Wii was gimmicky and two years after launch, you’d still be hard-pressed to find them in stock.

Although the DSi leaves me confuzzled, I’m still stoked for the up-and-coming game lineup. 3D Picross + Gyakuten Kenji + Kingdom Hearts 358/2 + Ragnarok Online = drool bucket needed. Yes, you may conclude that all I’ve been doing at work is refreshing my Google Reader.