Tag: gaming

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Quotes and Links…

On my iGoogle page this morning, the following was my link of the day…and I enjoyed it:

“Equations are the devil’s sentences.”
– Stephen Colbert

On another note, Zachary Quinto will be playing Spock in the new “Star Trek” movie that J.J. Abrams is producing/writing/directing… Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about this. I mean, I think the guy, with the proper hair, could look the part, and I know he can do “unemotional acting,” but the character he plays in “Heroes” is Sylar…and that guy is evil. There are certain actors that just seem to play good “bad guys,” and it’s hard to imagine their transition to a “good guy” role. I’ve heard they’re envisioning a trilogy for these “Star Trek” movies, assuming this one does well enough, meaning that this guy could be playing Spock for years to come, but still…I just dunno…

In other news, my boss is still out of town, so I’ll be going home early today…maybe play some “Super Mario World” and “Resident Evil 4,” but I also need to get started writing my Prelim. This document will be a 25-page grant that I have to defend in order to “officially enter the doctoral program” here at SLU, so it’s kinda a big deal. I generally know what I’m writing it on, but it’s a little hard getting the ball rolling. I hope to defend in November/December, so I’ve still got time – that, and I don’t have classes to take anymore, so there isn’t much getting in the way of the writing…

…I just need to get started…that’s all…

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Two videos

Two videos brought to my attention, the first by Stu, the second by Kate…

A Japanese game show featuring “human Tetris”…

…and Will Ferrell having a conversation with his landlord…

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Home stretch, and new Mario…

Well, the Easter holiday was quite fun… We took Edie to Columbia, where she met Pepper (our 15-year-old Cocker Spaniel that eats people….), and it went surprisingly well… Otherwise, we mostly chilled at home and visited with family and friends. We hadn’t been there in about two months, so it was good to get back for a change!

…yet now, I’m back at school… My last regular exam is next Thursday, and my comprehensive final is a week later. Then I’m done with taking classes forever! Next year, I can choose to teach “Drugs We Use And Abuse” to the undergrads, which I’ll probably do, but I’ll be on the other side of the desk – a different experience, to be sure…

Anyway, more importantly, Super Paper Mario comes out today, so I’ll be heading to Circuit City to buy it later…and hopefully playing it as much as possible… 😛

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Wii-tastic

I saw this link at a Wii “fanboy” site and just had to mention it… Apparently, the Wii has sold 5 million units world wide since its release last November (so, approximately 3 months). That calculates out to one console sold every 2 seconds!!! In the other console’s lifetimes, the Xbox 360 has sold 9.3 million (in 1 year and 3 months…) and the PS3 has sold 1.9 million (in 3 months). That also represents a net profit for Nintendo of ~$400m (assuming that it costs ~$158 to make a Wii, then sell it for $250, while the retailer gets $12.50/unit) while Microsoft and Sony are losing money in making their systems.

So yeah, the crazy thing is that the Wii is still so hard to find, as I mentioned in an earlier post…

For the record, I’m getting pretty good at Wii Sports, and I’ve got Super Mario Bros. (NES) and Mario Kart 64 (N64) downloaded to the machine…about ready to buy another Wii game to make use of the controller(s), though… Any suggestions?

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So three months later…

…I finally scored a Wii… I got up at 5:30 am Sunday morning, headed out to a Target north of Saint Louis in Jennings, MO, and read a book for a few hours until the store opened at 8:00. Only one other car showed up early (around 6:30 am), and otherwise, other people showed up within 15 min of the store opening. Anyway, I “easily” got one…that Target was only alotted 8 units, while the Florissant one was given 14 (and the people who couldn’t get one at Florissant had to come to Jennings…). So I grabbed an extra controller while I was there and headed home… They were sold out by 8:08 am… One per minute…

Sadly, however, this week is rapidly getting crazy and I have no clue when I’ll really get to spend “quality time” with the Wii… We got to play for a good 2 hrs yesterday, but I won’t get to play much tonight ’cause I have a brief presentation tomorrow (that I’m not prepared for…), and I have an exam next Monday…but since Mardi Gras is this weekend in Soulard, I’m not going to get much studying done over the weekend, so I’ll have to get it all done this week…

Anyway, I’m glad I finally got my new toy… Pity I suck horribly at Wii Golf and Wii Tennis… 😛

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Review: Silent Hill

So, Josh had me go see “Silent Hill” with him today, a movie based on a popular video game series that first premiered in 1999. If you click through to the Wikipedia description, and go through the various links to each game, you’ll see that some games follow one plot line, and others go in different directions. You’ll also find that each game has a variety of endings…

…such is this movie (i.e. a bunch of parts thrown together). It starts out with a mother, Rose, who finds that her daughter is having nightmares about some place called Silent Hill… She does Google searches to find this place, seeing that it’s a ghost town in West Virginia. Therefore, as any smart mother does (insert sarcasm here…), she decides to take her daughter there… After Rose wrecks the car on the way there, she wakes up to find her daughter missing and ashes falling. After this point, Rose slowly descends into the mystery surrounding Silent Hill and, consequently, hell…

The effects, overall, are pretty good and the story relatively captivating…but only because you think “what the hell?!” throughout and hope that it gets figured out in the end…and while many parts do get resolved, it still leaves you wanting…something… More information? Resolution? A big “hey! You’ve been ‘had’!” from the filmmakers? Who knows…

Regardless, as a scary movie, it doesn’t do so well…at least, I wasn’t scared…although the gory parts made me wriggle in my seat a bit… There weren’t any “jumpy” parts, at least. And while it was an interesting story, unfortunately, it just didn’t make much sense…

…and if you look through the video game information on Wikipedia, you’ll likely see why… It seems that the movie tried taking parts out of each game, and incorporated those elements/scenes effectively (and a few reviewers who have played the game think that the movie evokes the emotion that the game does really well)…but something got lost in translation. I just would have liked to see something a bit more…cohesive…I guess…

Yeah, I guess I’m not really recommending this… It was okay if you like video games and if you liked the series, but as someone who’s never played the game(s), it just didn’t make much sense… I’d wait for the rental…

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A milestone…

So, for those who have ever sat next to me in class, you know I have Solitaire on my Sony Clie (a Palm device, for those who don’t know…).? Finally, I “won” $100,000, which means that the game no longer keeps count, since it can’t go over 5 digits.? Therefore, I must restart the game at $0.? But before I do, I mark the occasion with some stats that have been recorded since beginning the game over a year ago:

Games played: 1227

Games won: 500

Games Lost: 727

Percent Won: 40.75%

Longest Win Streak: 6

Longest Loss Streak: 12

Average Game Time: 1:59

Total Time Played: 1d 16h 52m

Shortest Win Time: 1:20

Highest Score: $100041

…time to reset…

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Craziness…

So yeah, do you remember hearing about crazy fools fighting at Wal-Marts at 5:00 am on Nov. 26th? Well, Brooke and I joined in the fun… We saw that Wal-Mart had a cheap-o laptop for sale at just under $500 in the ad on Thanksgiving day…didn’t think much of it… Well, then I went by Slickdeals.net and saw that the deal was actually $378…which is insane for a laptop that has a decent AMD processor in it, a burner and wireless networking… Brooke is getting to the point where she needs a different computer (since her HP is 5 years old and a 1 GHz desktop will only do so much with WinXP installed…), so we decided to make the attempt…

Well, we got there at 4:50 am…and the parking lot was pretty full. We walked inside and everyone was back at the electronics department in a line…like…40-50 people in each of two lines. One line was for the laptop…the other was for a $50 GameBoy Advance… We come to find out that they only had 18 of the laptops. We didn’t get one. We were back in bed and sleeping by 5:30… 😛

Anyway, the weekend overall was pretty good. Got to visit with both sides of the family and got to see friends in Columbia, so that was really good…hadn’t seen Jeff or Jason in about a year (not my fault… :-P), so good times were had.

Now, I just have to get back in the “finish this semester before your head explodes” mentality…

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Sega Dreamcast: TNG

The Slashdot crowd will have already seen this, but it’s kinda freaky to look down this list, even for the non-geeks.

This website at 1UP.com describes 23 similarities between the launch of the Xbox360 and the Sega Dreamcast (remember that?!)…it continues on to describe 10 reasons why the 360 won’t fail as the Dreamcast did…but still…it’s kinda funny to look at…

…as you read this, just keep in mind that PS3 will still win out overall…but I’m pulling for my underdog Nintendo to the (bitter?) end… 😉

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Sounds good to me!

“Doom is like some kid came over and is using your computer and won’t let you play.”
— Roger Ebert; Chicago Sun-Times

“The phrase ‘worse than Super Mario Brothers‘ should not be tossed around lightly when it comes to feature film adaptations of popular video games.”
— Dan Fienberg; ZAP2IT.COM

“…aspires to be more than just a gory shoot em’ up–though it’d still be a stretch to call it a thinking man’s action movie.”
— Robert K. Elder; Chicago Tribune

“No plot, no surprises. If you’ve played the game, you’ve already had more fun.”
— Tom Hallman; Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“…basically a deadly dull rehash of Resident Evil, which in turn was a third-generation clone of Aliens.”
— Lou Lumenick; New York Post

…dude…when I get back here on Sunday…I’m so seeing “Doom“… 😉