Now that I’m a golf pro, I should be able to tear it up with Tiger Woods, et al. On my last 9 hole round, I finished 7 under par, with a hole in one.
Archive for the 'video games' Category
07
Jan
07
Look for me on the next PGA tour
05
Jan
07
First Mii Contest
After having the Wii in my possession for almost 3 weeks, I finally got to play it when my family and I celebrated Christmas on Dec. 22nd. One of the first activities was creating Miis for myself, Heather and other family members. I spent relatively little time on mine, but got a satisfactory result after probably only 10 minutes or so.
With mine complete, we moved on to Heather’s. This proved to be much more difficult. In fact, we have gone through probably 4 iterations and we’re still not all that happy with the result. So, since we are having little success ourselves, we thought it would be a good idea to have the first subject in the Mii contest be Heather, whose chose her name on the Wii to mimic the name she uses when she posts comments on my blog, namely “Your Wife.”
I had mentioned before that there is a flash interface online for making Miis. However, once I started using the editor on the Wii, I discovered that the flash interface provides much more customizability than the editor on the Wii. So, in order to ensure that the Mii contest produces winners that can actually be used on the Wii, I will restrict entries to the contest to those created using the actual Mii editor on the Wii. Perhaps this will provide impetus for those of you who want a Wii but haven’t yet purchased one to get out there and buy one. Incidentally, this site reports that Best Buy will have a ton (eg. ~150 each) of Wiis on January 15th. So, if you’re still having a hard time finding one, this may be your chance.
For those of you interested in participating in the contest, pictures of my wife can be found below. Continue reading ‘First Mii Contest’
04
Jan
07
Blogging from my Wii
Some of you may know that a web browser is now available for the Wii. This makes it possible to log into my blog and write a post, which is what I’m doing right now. Of course, having only an on-screen keyboard makes the process slower than it would otherwise be. Fortunately, the on-screen keyboard also offers commonly used words that begin with the letters you’ve already typed, as seen in the picture. I wonder if I could plug a USB keyboard into the USB ports on the back of the Wii. That would certainly speed things up. As cool as this is, I suspect that this will be the last blog post I make this way. However, if I had a DS Lite, I could see myself posting periodically using the Opera browser for the DS while on the road.
(Full disclosure: I uploaded the picture from my computer, not the Wii.)
20
Dec
06
Mii Contest?
Once upon a time, my friend Adrian and some other friends from high school had a covers contest. In it, they would pick a song a week and each member of the group would record his own version of the song. This proved to be far too labor intensive to be sustainable. However, in the spirit of the covers contest, I now propose a new contest: a Mii contest. Here’s how I envision it working: each week a real person (alive or dead) is chosen and each contest participant makes a Mii of the person. The chosen person could be a celebrity, politician, athlete, family member, or anyone. At week’s end, each participant’s submission is presented and the blog readership votes on which Mii is best (however that is defined). The winner gets some big prize, like getting to choose the person for the following week.
The Mii functionality of the Wii has received a lot of publicity recently. In fact, a lot of people are reporting that groups of people who have gotten together and intend to play Wii Sports wind up having so much fun and spending so much time creating Miis of all the people there, that they wind up not even getting around to playing Wii Sports. In addition, people have spent a bunch of time creating Miis for all kinds of public figures, like directors and politicians. Not only that, I discovered tonight that there is actually a flash applet that mimics the Wii’s Mii channel. So, even those of you who do not own a Wii could get in on the action.
Anyway, if there is interest in this contest, I would consider starting it up after Christmas, when I get my Wii. If there isn’t enough interest in the contest, I’ll probably periodically post Miis that I make for my own amusement. Perhaps I’ll start with Don Slaught/Chris Isaak…
12
Dec
06
Nintendo update
Just in case people aren’t totally sick of hearing about Nintendo stuff, I thought I’d provide an update. On Saturday I beat Super Mario 64 on N64. I’ve been playing it for awhile, collecting stars, and on Saturday I finally got the minimum number of stars required to face the final boss. There are a total of 120 stars in the game and 70 are required before you can face Bowser to win the game. It took me a long time to beat him, but I finally did. I’m still interested in collecting as many stars as I can, but it was satisfying to beat the game.
In other news, after a lot of searching online, I finally managed to track down an extra Wii Remote. They’re sold out pretty much everywhere. On Sunday, I found that WalMart.com had them, but I waited around, debating whether I should go ahead and buy one. Because the Wii is going to be a gift, I felt like maybe I shouldn’t buy one and just wait until after Christmas. However, a couple of hours after I discovered that Walmart.com had them, I refreshed the page and it said they were out of stock. So, that was a bust. However, it convinced me that I should go ahead and order one if I could find one, since the chance of me finding one in a store around Christmas was basically zero.
So, yesterday, I looked around on a bunch of websites. Best Buy was out of them. Circuit City didn’t have them. Newegg said they were expecting them, but when I checked back later in the day, it said they were out of stock. Target didn’t have them. I could buy them through GovConnection for like $38 instead of $40, but they won’t ship for another 2 weeks or so. There were a bunch of sketchy online stores that had them, but they charged like $20 for shipping. Some of the stores allow you to sign up for an email alert that they’ll send you when they get them back in stock, so I signed up for a couple of those. I got an alert that Amazon had them yesterday, but it turns out that it was actually one of Amazon’s partners and they cost like $48 instead of $40, so I decided to hold off. Then, last night, I checked Amazon again and Amazon itself had them for $40, so I pulled the trigger and ordered one. That’ll complement the Nunchuck controller I got when I bought the system.
Ideally, I’d like to get 3 extra controllers, but they’re $40 each, so if I ordered 3 of them, that’d cost $120, which is pretty steep. That said, I wanted to get at least one extra controller so that when I’m at home over Christmas my family and I will be able to play games together. I think my parents and I will be celebrating Christmas on the 22nd, so I have only 10 days to wait!
05
Dec
06
The early bird gets the worm.
If you’ve been following my Wii posts, you’ll know that it has been agreed upon that I am getting a Wii for Christmas. However, as I noted before, actually finding a Wii to buy at a reasonable price is not easy. So, I watched various websites with information on the Wii in order to figure out which stores would be getting them and when. From the websites I saw, it looked like Sunday, December 3rd would be when it all went down. The preceding night I called around and, from talking to various stores, it seemed like the Circuit City in Somerville was the most promising. It sounded like they had lots of units and a plan for how to deal with the situation in an orderly fashion. So, I set my alarm clock for 4:30am and tried to go to sleep. Eventually, I succeeded.
Continue reading ‘The early bird gets the worm.’
03
Dec
06
In lieu of 1000 words
In previous posts I’ve discussed both my experience of waiting in line at launch day to buy a Wii for a friend and my desire to get one for Christmas. I talked to my mom about the Wii as my Christmas gift and she’s onboard. In fact, she’s excited about trying it herself. Now comes the tricky part – actually finding one in a store. I’ve been looking at this site to track expected shipments and they are all disappointingly small. Whereas on launch day, many Best Buy locations received in the neighborhood of 120 units, the next shipment looks to involve only about 12 – an order of magnitude fewer. Although more shipments are expected before Christmas, I am beginning to despair that I will be able to get a Wii without camping out overnight. If anyone has any suggestions or insider tips, I’m all ears.
26
Nov
06
Wiikend update part deux
So, today, I was working on my Christmas wish list, the central item of which is the Nintendo Wii, and I came across some interesting information that I thought I would pass along.
Continue reading ‘Wiikend update part deux’
25
Nov
06
Wiikend update
I’m sorry about all the Wii puns. They’re just too easy. What follows is some info on the controllers needed to use the Wii’s Virtual Console feature and info on playing GameCube games on the Wii, all of which I learned or experienced this weekend. If you’re a Wii owner or enthusiast, or if you’re considering buying a Wii, you should definitely read this.
Continue reading ‘Wiikend update’
