The ROM of the Japanese versions of Pokemon Black and White finally leaked on Saturday morning - I was anticipating it leaking on Thursday but it appears that /vp/ had failed me.

So with that, I have been busy hacking away, trying to understand the various structures and data in the game. With Stephen managing the Psydex code and database side of things, and Mike trawling other sites for much needed contextual information, and of course the miscellaneous help from #psypoke, we've been able to get a lot of information up on the site in the past two days (of course, not everything has gone as smoothly as it should have, but oh well). Kudos to all who have helped!

Last Monday, I suddenly had the urge to eat moon cake, so I looked into various Asian supermarkets to see what was on offer. We happened to do a flat shop at Pak'n'Save Kilbirnie that night, so I checked out the Asian place next door. Unfortunately, they had sold out of the lotus paste with egg, but I decided that I would try a different kind of moon cake - one I had never tried before.



Pandan moon cake! So goooood. I love moon cake.

It's finally October and the year has gone by so quickly. Winter is technically over, but today's blustery conditions tells me otherwise (Thanks Wellington). Even typing this now, I can hear the wind howling outside, bringing a chilly southerly to sweep the streets of the city.

Anyway, Hot Wheels™ Battle Force 5™ has supposedly been sent out the door, which means we're just sitting tight and waiting for feedback. We're still playtesting this - it's really good and I like the story mode, but it's easily clockable in a few hours. The theme music is cool though! Rugby League 3 on the other hand is still there, just waiting for publisher dramas to resolve. Meanwhile, most of the programmers have been pulled onto research and development projects.

On the Pokemon front, HGSS was released a few weeks ago and I've been busy hacking away. Apart from the standard Pokemon stats, attack information, level-up attacks, breeding moves, trainer information, etc, I've also managed to learn from Eevee at veekun how to parse sprite data, which is something completely new for me, and provided a good challenge over the weekend. There's still things I don't know but I'm learning!

It's been a very busy week in terms of the two websites which I am responsible for.

Firstly, the Ignite Youths website was released to public eyes at the beginning of the week - a result of some awesome collaboration between myself and Reuben.

Secondly, Pokemon Platinum was leaked three days early, much to my surprise, so I moved into emergency mode and started hacking for information as soon as I could. That involved ringing the flat during work hours and getting Andrew to email me some of my programs. ¬.¬

In any case, Psypoke's got some great information for the time we've spent on it. I've been browsing some other websites and they're very far ahead in the game, but I know WPM from PokeBeach spent 28 hours continuously playing the game. I wouldn't be surprised if SPP had some slave doing the same for him.

The period between Christmas and New Years always seems so blah. It's like something's meant to be happening, but nothing does. ¯\(º_o)/¯

Anyway, we had an awesome feed on Christmas day. We had cheese platters (with some pickled onions, yum!), chicken nibbles, roast pork, glazed ham, potato salad, hot salad, green salad...and then for dessert we had these custard things in pastry cup...things. That were really really nice, so it's all good. And we also had a 5-layer rainbow jelly that took 5 days to make.

Since Christmas, I've been trying to get my sleeping habits back to normal after waking up at 4am to go to the airport. I think I'm back on track... kinda. Oh, and Sam arrived safely, so that's good too. \o/

I've been playing a lot of DS. Namely Pokemon...I've been breeding Larvitar and I finally got a good one ¬.¬ Anyway, that's half of my team, I need to get an Abra, Machop and Staryu now. Sigh. I wish the game makers would stop being so freaking stupid over IV Breeding and just make it some kind of max(father, mother, random) function. I also played Mario Kart DS over Wifi with PT, and that was lame, because he got a Blue Shell at the last course and pipped me to win the race. But all in all, we tied because I won the first two and he won the last two, so I'm not too fussed, and I fail at MKDS anyway so it doesn't bother me.

Lastly, I have also been hacking Pokemon ROMs. Yes h4xx0r lolz. I've been looking at the trainers' Pokemon. So far I've figured out level, dex number, item held and moveset. There's another number that I'm not too sure about...Weng Hao hypothesised it to be some kind of AI difficulty, and it makes sense, but I don't know of any way to test it.