Avatars
One of the fun things with the Wii is creating your “Mii” — that is, an avatar used in some of the games.
While the kids got busy creating some favourite fictional characters, my avatar looks like me.
Here’s mine, seen in Wii Sports Resort, playing table tennis.
Guitar Hero doesn’t use the standard, cartoon-like Miis, but has its own rock music-oriented avatars. They look more realistic, but despite my efforts, I think this one looks less like me.
What do other people create? Your likeness, or something else?
Tags: avatars, Guitar Hero, Nintendo Wii
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It’s the Beatles!
Today’s release of The Beatles Rock Band video-game and the remastered CDs is enough to get me excited about the band all over again.
Not that I’ll rush out and replace my collection of CDs with these new ones, but it’s sorely tempting to buy my the new versions of a few favourites, such as Sgt Pepper, The White Album and Abbey Road, which were the first three I bought on CD, back in the late-80s. [Extensive review of the remastered versions].
I just love the opening animation from Rock Band.
(Watch it here to see it without the added intro bit, and in better quality.)
Even the commercial is cool.
I only just got around to getting Guitar Hero, so I won’t rush to get Beatles Rock Band, and I’d want to make sure the guitar is compatible — apparently it is. I’ll keep playing through GH and look at BRB at some stage later when it’s dropped in price.
Daniel’s Beatle Trivia#1: Favourite Beatle song of the moment: Paperback Writer. Love that riff.
Daniel’s Beatle Trivia#1 2: About halfway through The Inner Light I always expect it to start repeating itself, because that’s what the first copy I had of it (a secondhand LP of The Beatles Rarities) did.
Tags: Beatles
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Wii Sports Resort – For The Win!
Okay I admit it, we fell for the hype, Jeremy and I. The demos of the game at the EB Games Nintendo Experience thing in Swanston Street, and Jeremy’s participation in a Nintendo event at Southland convinced us to pre-order Wii Sports Resort from EB Games. In doing so we gained an extra (so two in total) Motion Plus controller (and a recharger thingy that’s pretty much useless to us because we already have a stock of rechargable batteries — I might eBay that) along with the game for $79.95, not too bad for an RRP of $99.95. Thankfully I didn’t have to attend the late-night launch event to get the bonuses.
I think the first time I’ve acquired software on the exact day of release since Windows 95.
The Motion Plus thingies (which are basically a small add-on to the standard Wii controller) provide the extra precision needed for the game. Adding the Motion Plus to the controller is a little fiddly, but it can be left on for other games that don’t use it — though it changes the feel a little by being slightly bigger and a bit heavier, which I found a little cumbersome for Wii Sports tennis, though baseball was okay.
Anyway the Sports Resort game is a lot of fun. Twelve sports in all (and numerous games within each sport), and I’ll summarise my first impressions:
Great: swordplay, air sports, archery, table tennis (amusingly at one point instead of Match Point, it announced “For The Win!”)
Okay: wakeboarding, frisbee.
Bad: cycling, basketball.
Jury still out: canoeing.
Haven’t played the others yet: golf, bowling, power cruising.
The swordplay in particular is a helluva lot of fun. Playing against other players puts you on a platform and you fight it out until one of you falls off into the water. The other mode is playing a kind of action-movie, battling hordes of other little sword-wielding guys. (Isaac pretended he was Luke Skywalker fending off stormtroopers.)
Anyway, the whole thing is a lot of fun, particularly with two players.
By the way, also recently got Guitar Hero World Tour. On sale nowadays for about $90 including the guitar. Didn’t want the full band set clogging up my house. It’s also good fun, though haven’t yet had a long go at it. I wonder what real guitar players think of it.
Tags: Nintendo Wii
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Geek Idol
I’ve had few real idols; people of whom I could genuinely say “I want to be like them.”
In my early-to-mid 20s, Ben Elton was one of them. Amazingly funny, both on stage and in his writing. I wanted to write stuff that was half as good as his books, but never quite managed to write anything that was engaging enough to last over the length of a novel. My best attempt was The Year 2031, and even that wasn’t terribly long.
Ten years earlier, it was Tony Crowther. He was perhaps five years older than me, and a game programmer extraordinaire, writing hit after hit on the Commodore 64. I loved his game Blagger, and the sequel Son of Blagger, then got through Monty Mole (but only with help from a walkthrough). For a while I was hooked on Potty Pigeon, then Loco, which I enjoyed more than its astoundingly similar-looking followups Suicide Express and Black Thunder.
After that I moved off the Commodore 64 onto other things, and lost track of him and his games.
I suppose I dreamt in some ways of writing my own games and making a fortune from it. Back in those days many commercial games were written by solo programmers, or small teams. These days the gaming industry is dominated by borg-like big development studios, and Suits.
The other week I was in MagNation and noticed a copy of Retro Gamer which featured an interview with the man, as well as a big feature on Pacman. Wow. I was in a rush and made a note to go back and buy it the next day.
When I went back in, it was gone. Replaced by the next edition. I asked if maybe it was lurking somewhere in the shop. Nope. Everywhere else I looked was the same. Gone.
I had a look online. There are quite a few articles about Crowther, but most of them are reprinted from the 80s. I was also interested to know what he was up to these days, and what he thinks looking back at those old games — precisely the sort of thing Retro Gamer does well when they find people to interview.
I could order the mag from the publisher, of course. It would cost 5 pounds. Fair enough. But with 6.50 postage (!) it’d be a total of 11.50, or about $25 — double the Australian retail price.
While I was pondering that, Rae (who had been kindly checking newsagents near her work for it) pointed out I could look on Ebay, which was a brilliant idea. I found a copy for UKP 7.70 including postage, about $16. Much more reasonable. I’m eagerly awaiting its arrival from the UK.
In the mean time, I’ve discovered that Crowther has in fact been assimilated into the borg that is Electronic Arts. One of the games he worked on recently-ish was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which was one of the last games I bought for the XBox.
And me? Well, I did start writing a few computer games, but never quite finished any of them. But I did end up making a living out of writing software.
Who were your childhood idols? Where did they end up? Did you get to be like them?
Tags: Ben Elton, Commodore 64, idols, Pacman, retro games, Video games
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EB Games
Reasons to like and dislike EB Games.
Good — price matching. I walked into the Elizabeth Street store with a printout showing that Big W had Mario Kart $30 cheaper and the guy didn’t blink, and happily matched the price.
Good — unlike many of the staff in the department stores (especially the cheap ones), most of their sales people know what they’re talking about and seem genuinely interested. The same guy was frank when pondering the release of Rock Band 2 — probably another year away so EA can maximise their profits.
Mostly good — preowned games. They’re about the only place you can now buy classic out-of-print (old) XBox games, for instance, and generally quite cheaply. Mind you, for anything recent, the pricing makes it hardly worth it.
Good — that Nintendo area in the Swanston Street store where the kids got to play Wii tennis on Christmas Eve (before they got their own Wii), though apparently now it’s closed for renovation, only a few months after it opened.
Good — range, much better than most places.
Bad — what’s with charging $35 for 2000 Wii points? You’ll pay $30 at Dick Smith or using a credit card on the Wii itself. Yes I guess they’ll price match, but why not charge the standard amount in the first place? I guess as per usual, caveat emptor applies.
Bad — in fact, the odd special aside, the pricing is pretty much RRP, so be prepared to look elsewhere to buy cheaper or get them to price match.
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How fit are wii?
I’m still really enjoying the Wii. The favourite game with the kids is tennis, playing on one side together, though we’re getting good at it and it’s been giving us some pretty tough opponents.
(I can only imagine that tennis purists are aghast at Wii Sports tennis; from the “best of 1/3/5 games” to the explicit explaining of what Deuce is to the always reading out the player’s team score first. Ditto the golf. Do golfers really say “Nice in!” to each other?!)
Baseball I’m not too bad at. I’ve finally figured out how to have a reasonable chance at hitting a home run. Bowling is improving. Golf is still my handicap; I can’t quite figure out how to put just enough power into my shots. I’ve only tried the boxing once, but will again.
The training gives you a mix of all this. But my real addiction is the fitness test.
I’ve been doing it almost every day since we got the Wii. Sometimes I’m absolutely appalling, and get a fitness age in the 50s and consequently feel like an old man. Last night I was 32. But to my surprise, most days it’s somewhere in the high 20s.
Who knows how accurate it is, but it’s nice to think that at least a machine thinks I’m in my twenties.
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Brief things
Haven’t blogged for a bit, so here’s a brief catch-up.
I helped Tony and Rae and family move last week. The inevitable comment that pops up when geeks move house: packing the moving van is like Tetris. Of course, when you get a full row of boxes, they don’t disappear and make more space…
The kids and I watched the early (9:15pm) NYE fireworks a short distance away from the action — Richmond Station platform 4, which unlike the city centre, was not crowded at all, apart from half-a-dozen Connex security guys also watching. They said their shift was from 5pm to 3am. The view was certainly better than from the park near home, where we watched last year, though of course not as good as being in the thick of it.
My Wii fitness level has been up and down, all over the place. The best: 28, the worst: 56. Marita, it turns out, is very good at Wii boxing, knocking-out virtual people with some enthusiasm.
I’ve been playing Scrabble via Facebook with a few friends, mostly local. I was challenged to a game by a friend in Canada, but stupidly, the North American Scrabble is only available in the US and Canada, while the one we have in Australia is only available outside North America… so much for the global village.
Rose would have been 30 on Friday, and the family gathered to pay their respects. It was doubly sobering to see that in the Nagambie cemetery, she now has a neighbour, apparently a local woman in her 40s who also died in a car accident.
On a happier note, the Doctor Who Christmas special will air in Australia on January 25th. You can watch the first couple of minutes here.
A Doctor Who spoiler follows…
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The socks I always wanted
I got the socks I always wanted at K-Mart the other day.
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