Wed, 29 Nov 2006
Boundaries
After deciding that I'm getting a bit too weird in the afternoons, possibly because of having too much caffeine during the day, I'm trying to cut back a bit. Not going cold turkey, but nothing stronger than one cup of caffeinated tea in the mornings. And if I have coffee before noon, it has to be decaf. It seems to be working rather well. I find I'm sleeping better, and getting up in the mornings with little to no difficulty. Of course, this may also be because I'm making an attempt to go to bed at a reasonable hour as well... In any event, yay.
Other than that, the week's been fucking hell at work. This place is the exact opposite of my last job, where I loved my co-workers, and the work that I did, but the company just got more and more frustrating to work for over time. Here, I love where I work, but the co-workers make the job really difficult sometimes.
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Tue, 21 Nov 2006
First iimpressions
Well, I was amazed, but pleased. When I pulled into the parking lot of the EB Games at about 7:30, there were only two other people there, waiting in their cars. One of them, fearing the worst, had actually got there at 1am, and slept in his car overnight. It was especially weird, considering the Best Buy around the corner had a nearly full parking lot.
The actual waiting was pretty friendly. More people started showing up a bit later. I had brought my DS in the hopes that there would be a crowd of people, and there was eventually one multiplayer game of Metroid Hunters or something similar. A first person shooter, in which I got pwned. We eventually learned there were eight extra consoles for those that hadn't pre-ordered, and there were about 20 people in line by that point. The EBG guys handed out Take-A-Number-like stubs, a bunch of us went to a nearby Timmies for something to warm up with, and everyone else dispersed.
I got home with my purchase around 11 or a bit before. Waiting in line just over three hours was way better than I expected. Setting the thing up was fairly straightforward. There were a few bits that I was unclear on, but the manual was clear and easy to follow. I like the construction of the box. It's about twice the size of a Mac Mini, and marginally less rounded on the edges. There are two panels on the side (or the top if you stand it up on its edge like you see in all the ads) for plugging in GameCube controllers and memory cards. Just beneath the CD slot, (an opening like you see for Car CD players rather than a tray for desktop CD players,) is another panel that flips down to reveal a sync button (for finding other controllers, called Wiimotes,) and a slot for industry standard SD memory cards.
I'm pretty happy about the feel of the interface. Overall, the Wiimotes perform very well, though I'm having a bit of a problem with finer motion control. The nunchuck attachment I had a lot more problems with, in terms of motion sensing, but the feel of the Wiimote in one hand and the nunchuck in the other wasn't too bad. I found that smooth steady movements worked much better than short jerky movements. This was especially true in the Wii Sports Golf game. But the Bowling game in particular worked very well.
I haven't had much of a chance to play the other Wii games. I tried the Zelda game a bit, but there's so much story and control-learning to get through that I didn't feel like working through to get to the actual game.
I was also fairly impressed with some of the non-game features. Thingo and clan dropped in briefly to check it out, and Zebula had fun playing with the Photo Gallery/Doodle channel. You can stick an SD card into the Wii that was used in a camera device (cell phone, organiser, etc) and display the photos on the Wii, as well as draw or do some very basic photo editing. The online Wii store was also fairly painless. I bought 1000 points for 10USD (plus 14% tax. Did it know how much to charge based on my location?) then immediately spent those points on SuperMario64, which downloaded as a ROM file onto my Wii's flash drive.
So yeah, so far, pretty slick.
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Sat, 18 Nov 2006
What's the opposite of a banner week?
Last week (the one before this past week) was not a good week. Not at all. Some problems with Dare (not related to her health, at least, thank goodness for small mercies) as well as an incredibly demoralising meeting meant that I was terribly unmotivated and rather unhappy for pretty much the whole week.
Luckily, last weekend helped pick things up a little. I got to hang out with lots of different people, including finally getting to meet Shatton at a Nintendo game day held at Jorge's where I determined that Akamaru is going to become the next Hokage*, and managed to hold my own playing Tetris.
This past week, I've mostly just been tired. That's as much my own fault as because of any external sources. I haven't been going to bed at very reasonable hours in the past week, and of course it's been that much harder to drag my ass out of bed as a result. At least last night I got a chance to hang out with a bunch of fun people, even if I didn't get to bed until after 4am. Yikes!
Going to try to go to bed earlyish tonight though. EB Games called me this afternoon and told me that along with the games and extra controller I pre-ordered, they had some extra Wii consoles (which I didn't pre-order), so there is a slim, but non-zero chance of me scoring a Wii, if I line up bright and early tomorrow morning.
*Believe it!
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