Making the “Miis” on the Nintendo Wii (Miis are your little avatars you can make) is fun enough to be its own game. So far I’ve made all 4 Beatles, Kevin Smith and more. You can also post, download and browse Miis on the “Check Mii Out” channel. Dude, the Wii rocks.
Tomorrow…
the day…
Rock Band for the 360!
I don’t know how I’m ever going to be productive again. I’m currently addicted to Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii as well as Wii Sports, Super Mario Galaxies is out and I hear talk of many other cool games. I’m still 2 songs away from completing Guitar Hero III on the PS2 and we’ve got Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect coming out for the Xbox 360. And of course Rock Band coming out this week. Plus many, many more. I’m swamped!
We had been planning to get a Nintendo Wii someday but that happened yesterday when a friend of ours had the chance to pick up one of 60 Wiis that Best Buy had received. He didn’t want one but knew that we did so we had him grab it. We should be picking it up from him tonight.
Just what I need! Something else to stop my productivity. We’ve played with our friend’s Wii (saucy!) so we know the fun in store for us. Come visit! Play with our Wii!
So I think the iPhone is very pretty and has some pretty cool “wow” factors. It’s way too expensive though and I read a pretty thorough review that highlighted a lot of the shortcomings too. I really love my phone but lately I’ve really been wanting something that I could use to check my Google calendar too so that when I’m at an audition or something and ask “are you available on these dates?” I don’t have to say “I’ll tell you when I get home and check my calendar.”
A guy on the film shoot today had one. They are very sleek but I really don’t think I would like it anywhere near enough to justify that kind of price tag.
I have a first generation TiVo that I’ve since hacked and upgraded in many ways. I’ve added a second hard drive, replaced the first hard drive, added a cache card and an ethernet jack so it can communicate with my wireless network instead of using the phone. When I first bought it I bought the “lifetime subscription” which has long since paid for itself but is locked to this particular unit. They no longer offer lifetime subscriptions and you can’t transfer it.
They were having a special where you could buy a new HD TiVo for $300 and transfer your lifetime membership to the new unit for $200 (basically buying a new lifetime membership even though they technically aren’t offered any more). I was so tempted, however we don’t have the money to do it and we don’t have an HD TV. It would have been more for prevention of future problems. Eventually I will get an HD TV and HD service at which point our TiVo will no longer be of any use because it will not handle HD quality.
Uhh, bummer. That’s really all there is to this story.
I always wish there were an easy way to keep up with comments on other people’s blogs instead of having to just manually check all their entries to see if there’s any new comments (which is the case for most blogs). For a long time I used a plugin which allowed people to sign up for email comment notification but I think pretty much only Jess and I used that.
Therefore I now have a comments feed as well as an entries feed over on the left there. Use your favorite newsreader (I use Google Reader) to keep up with new comments posted here. It’s all new to me so I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to work but hopefully any time a new comment is posted you will see it in your newsreader.
While we were filming the movie we had taken our Playstation with us to play Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero 2. At some point, something had messed up and we lost all our GH2 save data. I had completed the game on every difficulty level and completely 5 starred Medium and most of hard. I was distressed. For a long time, I couldn’t find the will to climb back on the horse and start all over again.
Then a few days ago, I started my band over and went straight for expert. I don’t know what was up, but I tore through expert like a madman doing far better than I had the first time through expert even though I hadn’t played in quiet some time. Today, all I had left was the final 4 songs on expert. My first time through, I had to really practice and play through each of those songs, many, many times before finally completing them through sniper-like use of my star power. Today, I finished all four of them on my first try. My GH2 mojo has never been stronger.
I just finished finally Guitar Hero II on Expert. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to 5 star most of the songs on expert but at least I’m ready for the upcoming Guitar Hero: Rock the 80s, Guitar Hero III, and eventually Rock Band
I thought I was done with MMOs. I had first started with Everquest after hearing my friends rave about this great new game. Over the years Jess and I played many Massively Multiplayer Online games and worked (or in Jess’s case, still work) for an MMO company! We enjoyed them all but eventually just decided that we didn’t have time enough to play to justify the monthly subscription costs of such games. There was also the annoyance of having to pick which server you played on and inevitably finding out you had friends on a different server after you had already built up a character on your own server and having your friends splintered across different games, much less servers.
We loved World of Warcraft. The only reason we quit playing was purely the money thing. We couldn’t play enough to justify paying $15 a month for each of us when we only ended up playing maybe once a week. We reluctantly decided that we were probably pretty much done with MMO games. Then Jess brings home two free issues of PC Gamer from work. They included free beta CDs for the new Lord of the Rings Online game. We figured, what the hell, play a couple of weeks of free beta in Middle Earth! Then I noticed that if you pre-ordered the game you got some special benefits. There were some cool items in game that you would get but there was also the special “Founder’s” pricing. Instead of the normal $15 a month per account you could either get $10 a month or the “Lifetime Subscription” for $199 per account. “Cool idea” I though, as I had bought a lifetime subscription on my TiVo Series 1 when I bought it (sadly they no longer offer lifetime subscriptions on new TiVos) and it had long ago paid for itself. I thought this was probably the smartest idea I’d seen in an MMO.
At first I didn’t even consider it. I mean, come on, $199 a piece plus the price of the game?That means it would cost damn near $500 for Jess and I to get 2 games and lifetime subscriptions. Absurd. Then the more we played and thought about it, the less absurd it seemed. We had played all those other MMOs where we had paid for the game and the monthly fees probably totaling much more than $500 over time. If we played this game for 20 months we’d break even and after that it was all profit! I know plenty of people who have been playing various MMOs for years and are still playing and paying. We would definitely get our use from this game and since we weren’t paying monthly we wouldn’t feel that pressure and guilt about not playing enough to justify a monthly cost. We could explore Middle Earth as often or as little as we liked for as long as the game exists. This could truly be the One Game to rule them all and judging from the fact that even some of the worst MMOs we’ve played are still going many years later, we have no doubt that LOTRO will have a long life.
So once again, we have been pulled into the world of online gaming. We’re playing on the Landroval server. Look us up if you visit Middle Earth. We’re both really impressed with the game too. It seems to have really learned from the evolution of MMOs and incorporated a lot of the best features and improvements over the years. It’s beautiful too. If you’re a fan of Middle Earth you will certainly geek out over being able to be a part of it, explore it, meet characters from the books and visit familiar locations. It has reawakened my enthusiasm for playing MMOs, which I thought was dead and buried. It still hasn’t overcome the problem of multiple game/server splintering (for example, I still have lots of friends playing WoW who don’t want to switch to a new game and after playing for 2 days we found out some friends of ours were playing too but on a different server so we started brand new characters from scratch so we could be on their server and join their “Kinship”) but overall we are excited about playing.
Just think of it like this: how much do you spend on going out to the movies or out to eat each week (or whatever)? Now if you could pay for two years up front and in return do that as much as you like for free for the rest of your life, wouldn’t that be a pretty good deal? What? Stop looking at us like that! We’re sensible dammit! If you really analyze this, we’re not crazy! It’s genius!
I have always used Bloglines to keep track of all my friend’s blogs and other RSS feeds. However, being a fan of all things Google and only just really discovering Google Reader today, I think I’ve left Bloglines behind.
Don’t get me wrong, Bloglines is great and I can’t really say it lacks in any way but I just found Google Reader more appealing to me in some intangible way. It just “felt” better. Both services also have plugins for Firefox that can alert you when you have new unread posts (Bloglines Notifier and Google Reader Watcher). Now it should also be said that I only use these services in the most basic way. all I want is a central place to view all my RSS feeds and to be notified when one of them is updated so I can’t really say if they’re comparable when it comes to feature beyond the basics. For example I know Bloglines has all kinds of bells and whistles beyond these basic functions but I’ve never touched any of them nor can I say if Google Reader has comparable bells and whistles. Being that I already use many of Google’s other features (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc.), I also find it appealing to have everything I can consolidated under one umbrella (as the long as the services are also among the best options available also). Don’t foret to go into Firefox’s Tools>Options>RSS menu and set your default reader to make subscribing to web pages even easier.
All I can say is that in initially setting up my Google Reader account and checking out the basic needs I have from a reader, I think I have left the Bloglines ranks for the great land of Google.