Taking public transportation to work allows me to witness many things. I noticed there is always one person that smells and looks like they haven’t showered in years. Everyone thinks the whole world wants to hear their phone conversation. And probably due to where I live, I noticed a lot of young females with babies (yay Metro blue line). The one thing that bugs me the most is when I have to listen to someone’s music because their volume is too loud.
Of course, with ipods leading around 75% of the mp3 player market, most of the music I hear are from people carrying ipods. Now before I owned an ipod, I always bought earphones from companies that specialized in…audio. Makes sense right? Spend a bit more money and get better audio quality. Because of that, i never actually tried those trendy white earbuds that come with every Apple Ipod package. My first time listening to it, on a train, was yesterday due to my forgetting to pack my earphones into my bag which I normally do.
All I can say is wow, those are the worst earphones that went into my ears. Not only are they uncomfortable after a while, the music volume is so loud that I had to raise the volume to its max to be able to listen to my music at the sound level I am usually accustomed to. Because of that, when I take off my earphones I can hear the music in the same way I would hear other people’s music when I am not listening to my Ipod. I guess Apple’s to blame for that. Now, I know mostly all the other companies music players have equally horrible earphones in hopes that you would buy better ones. But, Apple has such a huge market for music players they could probably spend an extra dollar or two and make it so the earphones are sound isolating, noise canceling or over the ear earphone.
I figured with all the money I spend on an overpriced product (mainly buying for the awesome community support/development compared to other products) that I’d get a better quality earphone seeing as that is what is transmits the audio from the player itself into my ear. No one likes to listen to someone else’s taste in music, too bad we live in corporate America where its all about the amount of money products can bring in and not as much so about the quality of the experience they are trying to sell.
Recently, I have been playing the game The World Ends With You on the DS. Here’s a synopsis since I am horrible with explaining.
From the creators of the award-winning Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts franchises comes a revolutionary, modern action-RPG title for a new generation of gamers. Square Enix and Jupiter team up once again to showcase The World Ends With You, a trendy and vibrant gaming experience developed exclusively for the Nintendo DS. Featuring an intuitive combat system and exciting multiplayer mode, The World Ends With You is set to immerse gamers into the modern-day culture of Japan.
Story
The story begins as Neku Sakuraba, an unsociable 15-year-old boy, unexpectedly wakes up in the Shibuya shopping district of Tokyo, Japan. While trying to piece together his rude awakening, he receives a strange text message warning him that he will cease to exist unless he accomplishes a certain mission. Although he barely has time to grasp what is happening to him, he commences his assigned task in the mysterious streets of Shibuya.
The game itself is so big, after you beat the storyline it unlocks more content and one of the optional quests would be to collect all your pins (which are the tools you use to fight your enemies) which reminds me of Pokemon. Each pin itself would activate a certain ability (or psych) for Neku to use to battle the noise (Neku’s enemies). If I remember correctly, one of the first pins received was a pin that made flames according to where you touched with the stylus which leads me to my next point…
The battle system is unique as well although frustrating at points (I’m talking to you Neku, move when I tell you). The player ends up controlling two characters at once, one on the top screen (controlled by control pad) and the other on the bottle screen (controlled by the stylus). If you’d been watching me play you’ll see me slashing, tapping, pointing on the bottom screen while mashing the control pad in efforts to beat all the noise out there. I haven’t been addicted to getting 100% content since pokemon, let’s just hope they have some sort of award for obtaining it.