Category Archives: Games

My Mii’s not fat, he’s just big boned

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Santa brought the kids a Wii Fit for Christmas and we’ve been playing with it since.  If you have a Wii you know that one of the fun things about it is creating a character that resembles yourself, called a Mii.  You can then use that Mii as your character when you play Wii games.  When we first got the Wii we all created our little Miis and made them look as close to ourselves as possible.  I’m not the smallest guy you’ll ever meet so I created my Mii to be as big as possible, but even Nintendo has its limits and my little Mii didn’t look all that bad.

With the Wii Fit Nintendo has decided to really make the Mii match your weight as I quickly found out.  Once I got on the Wii Fit it took me through some tests and then pumped my Mii up to match my weight.  My poor little Mii must have a glandular problem now because he is so plumped up that he looks stuffed and uncomfortable.  It’s too accurate!  Poor little guy.  I guess I better start using that Wii Fit to get my Mii (and me) back down to a more reasonable density.

Five Dice officially on the iPhone

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The main reason I had a jailbroken iPod Touch is because I really liked the game Five Dice.  Five Dice is an excellent version of the old dice game called Yahtzee.  I was hoping that the developer would bring it to the App store once version 2.0 of the software was out and they came through.

This is not the exact same game that was available for free if you were jailbroken.  This version has a lot more polish and the graphics are very professional.  The game play is very smooth and the little touches of animation are pretty slick.  Another big difference is that the game is no longer free – it costs $3.99.

I’m sure there will be people that enjoyed the jailbroken version complaining about the costs, but I think it is definitely worth the few bucks it costs.  The game is every bit as polished as any other professionally developed game and I see no issue with the developers getting paid for their work. 3.99 – what’s that – a cup of fancy coffee or a pack of cigarettes?

Hopefully they will make a ton of money from this little application and put some of it back in to the game to provide over the air multi player capability.  That would be pretty cool.

If you grew up playing the game Yahtzee you should take a chance and spend the few bucks it costs to try it out.  It’s definitely worth it.

Opera web browser now available on the Wii

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opera.jpegPretty cool.  Nintendo, with the little game machine that could, has not only brought in a very cool way of playing games to our house, but they have also snuck in email (via the Mii channel) and now web browsing using the Opera web browser.  Very smart, Nintendo.

Since I am on vacation I took the liberty of trying a few web sites to see how far I could get.  My own site (the one you are reading now) works fine.  Outlook Web Access for Exchange 2003 works great as well.  The Citrix Web Interface lets me login to the interface, but you can’t select any of the icons that launch published applications.  I didn’t really expect that to work, but I  figured it was worth a try.

I’ll have to hop back on it later and see if sites like GMail and Google Reader work.  I can’t say that this would become my preferred way to use the internet, but it’s kind of nice to have it there if you need it.  Right now the Opera browser is free because it is in beta testing, but long term Nintendo should not try to charge for it as I don’t think it would drive people to purchase a Wii.  Keep it free – as in beer.

The Wii does weather

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wii.jpgToday the Wii grabbed our attention because its drive slot was pusling a blue color. When I turned it on it told me about the new Forecast channel and offered to doanload an update. Pretty slick, as we can now check the weather across the globe. Oh yeah, there is a Globe option where you can grab the planet and spin it around as you need to to find the place where you want to check the weather.

Not sure how much I’ll ever use this feature, but it is nice to see Nintendo pushing the Wii to do more than just play games. Rumor has it that we should see a beta version of the Opera web browser out for the Wii some time this Friday, which is slick, but long term they need to come out with a keyboard or a better way to input data in to the Wii as selecting letters one by one with the remote will become a pain over time.

If you don’t have a Wii yet you need to stand in line and get one. Today the extra nunchucks that I ordered showed up and now we can play against each other with a few more games. As soon as the remaining remotes show up we should be able to play a little 4 person tennis. This thing is a blast.

Did you get yours yet?

Looks like the Wii was the easy part

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wii.gifAfter standing in line for a couple of hours to get a Wii I thought I had the toughest part behind me. I was wrong. Since that time I have checked everywhere for additional remotes and nun-chucks and everyone is out of them. I ended up doing what I should have done in the first place, I went to Nintendo.com and ordered 3 remotes, 3 nun-chucks, and a component video cable.

According to the site everything should be back in production the week of 12/18. We’ll see. As much fun as we are having with the Wii it would be a lot more fun if we could all play at the same time against each other.

While at Circuit City today I saw a little video of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance on the PS3. It stopped me in my tracks. The video quality was amazing. I see that it is available for the Wii as well. I wonder how the graphics hold up. It’s a shame the PS3 costs as much as it does and is as hard to get as it is, because it really does look like a decent game console, but I’m not sure it is really that much better than the XBox 360. If I had to make a choice today between the two I would probably go XBox 360.

Now, if I was in the market for a Blue-ray DVD player I would rather get a PS3 with built in Blue-ray player for $600 than get a Blue-ray DVD player for $1000. I can’t wait to see the status of the game industry at Christmas 2007. Should be a very interesting year for video games.

Shooting Rabbids in my dreams with toilet plungers

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24 hours in to owning the Wii and it is really a blast. So far I think the favorite Wii Sport is boxing. Tennis is a close second. This will definitely be a lot more fun when we buy a few more Wii remotes so we can all play at once. I also picked up a copy of Rayman – Raving Rabbids which is pretty funny and a lot of fun to play. There is something satisfying about shooting a bunch of deranged rabbits with toilet plungers. You owe it to yourself to at least go to their web site and check out the rabbids.

If you see a Wii in stores – buy it. You will not be disappointed.

That’s just Wii-tarded

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I’ve been on the hunt for a new Nintendo Wii game console and have not had any luck finding one. So today I got up early and went and stood in line with around 99 other fools at a local Best Buy that was supposed to have some. I was told they opened at 8am, some people were told 9am, but all the employees that were entering the building told us 10am.

I was out there almost 2 1/2 hours when a few Best Buy employees came out and told us that they had 30 Wii’s to sell and that they were going to issue tickets for the first 30 people purchasing a Wii in line. I was person number 31 but thankfully there were a few couples and parents with their kids so I ended up getting ticket number 26. I am now the proud ownder of a Nintendo Wii, or as ticket holder number 29 kept yelling “I’m finally Wii-tarded!”

So far we’ve just played with the Wii Sports game that comes with it but the games are a blast. Nintendo really went after the average gamer and made it a pretty good value. If you go buy an XBox 360 or a PS3 (if you can find one) you are going to spend between $400 – $600 just for the console itself – no games. The Wii is $250 and comes with a game. It also plays all the GameCube games and you can download all of Nintendo’s older games across the internet as well as some games from Sega. Even the controller from the GameCube are suppoed to work with it.  Nice touch.

Now I just need to pickup a few more Wii-motes and the kids and I can play against each other. Great job Nintendo.