games – rich text

Awesome Pontiac ad

Rich — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:24:12 +0000

This ad is awesome. (Shame it’s for the G8.)

(Via everyone and their dog, it seems. I think I saw it first on BoingBoing Gadgets.)

Never trust anyone under 30

Rich — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 18:08:00 +0000

So as of yesterday I’m in decade number 3.

I thought that turning 30 would feel weird, like a loss of freedom or the extra weight of adult responsibility, but while I do sort of feel that I’ve lost an excuse, things feel alright. Much of that is my father’s doing — my parents separated when I was 7 and they were 29 and 30, and they had shared custody, and my father had a blast in his 30s and I was there for it, so I don’t see any reason why things would have to get boring for me. And having Candice around to share it with makes it even better — I think I’d be a lot less confident about this whole 30 thing if I was alone. But Nyxie makes everything better, so that’s no huge surprise. I’m still one of the youngest in my department at work, which helps a bit too. Besides, I’ve already started my midlife crisis, so I could at least get the numbers up there to match. It doesn’t hurt for motorcycle insurance prices, either.

My birthday inconveniently fell on Wednesday night this year, which is Nyxie’s rough day of the week and not exactly a great one for me either, so we celebrated last weekend. Nyxie cooked me dinner — phyllo-wrapped dill-marinated salmon, latkes, and French beans — and baked me a huge pumpkin zucotto, the size of a large mixing bowl. We’re still working on the zucotto a week later. So good, but so BIG, especially after a lot of fish and latkes!

Nyxie bought me We Katamari, the sequel to Katamari Damacy. It’s so great. The one weak point of the first Katamari is that it was a lot of the same kind of rolling up things, so you could really only play so long at a stretch before you’d had enough. The new one mixes it up without making it not about rolling things up: rolling underwater, at high speed, against the clock, and in a lot of specific situations that are a lot less annoying than the “roll up the biggest bear you can find” that just about had me ready to throw the controller through the television. I’m probably about half done already (six cut-screens in) and the first one took months of dabbling to finish. No spoilers in the comments, please! She also bought me this octopus shirt, but I’m a dork and threaten to buy myself things a couple of weeks before my birthday, and she had to tell me at the end of October that I shouldn’t buy that shirt because she had already ordered it, so I’ve had it for a while now. Woops!

Mom swung by quickly last night to wish me a happy birthday and give me a present of a pair of Sennheiser PX100 headphones (and a pasta pot, because I had mentioned that the teflon-coated pasta pot she had given me years ago was starting to de-teflon!). I’ve been listening to music at work through these Denons that I bought ages ago when I wanted something to block out Metro and traffic and library noise in Montreal, but they’re way too warm and clampy to wear for a whole workday. The PX100s are fantastic. Great open-backed sound and I can hardly feel them on, and they fold up so I can slip them in my laptop bag easily to keep them with me.

Dad, Golda, Kieran and Sarah are coming up to Ottawa from Belleville the weekend after this coming one to take me out to dinner because this coming weekend Nyxie and I are heading to Nova Scotia for her brother’s wedding reception. I get to meet the whoooole family, eek! It’ll be good even if it’s a bit disconcerting because a lot of her older and more distant relatives probably won’t make the trek to Ottawa for our wedding next summer. Still, I’m looking forward to getting back Sunday night! I don’t mind my birthday spanning nearly a month, though.

I dug me a hole

Rich — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 15:22:00 +0000

Few things:

There are multiple vendors of train simulators.
You know how you can buy semirealistic controls that clip on your desk for flying flight simulators? Well, train simulator enthusiasts don’t have to feel left out.
You know how sometimes you see on Slashdot or wherever a post about some guy who has recreated a 747 cockpit in his basement for a flight simulator? Well, train simulator enthusiasts don’t have to feel left out.
Have any of you tried a train simulator? I can’t imagine. It’s bad enough knowing that some people fly autopilot-navigated cross-Atlantic flights in flight simulators.
What’s dorkier than a train simulator? Backhoe simulator! (Requires Shockwave Player. Don’t try that link if you need your other browser windows/tabs; it works about 75% of the time for me, and crashes the browser 25%.)
Uncle Mark’s Gift Guide and Almanac (PDF linked from that page; obviously it was really important for him to have exactly that font) is quite possibly the best example of MIT Syndrome that I have ever seen.
Tim Hortons is now advertising “Hot Smoothees” [sic]. I can’t figure out exactly what’s in them and I’m kind of glad.

up up down down left right left right a b a b wtf

Rich — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 05:38:00 +0000

Nintendo’s controller for their next-generation console, the Revolution, appears to be a remote control. With an analog stick on a dangly spleen.

While I am glad that the last thirty years of innovation has led to the inclusion of a power button on the controller (why was this hard?) I’m having a hard time getting excited about controlling games with a TV remote and analog spleen. Only one analog controller? The GameCube controller was such a great design, too. What the hell, Nintendo?

The GameSpot article on the controller is here.

Edit: Apparently the controller also has some sort of spatial awareness thing going on, so you can control the game by moving
and tilting and rotating the controller in space, too. Sounds like we get to rediscover gorilla arm.

Confused about MotoGP 3

Rich — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 15:44:00 +0000

Anyone know the deal with Namco’s MotoGP 3 for the PS2 (not to be confused with THQ’s MotoGP 3 for Xbox and PC)? It’s available new on Amazon Japan for ¥7,140 (~$US 65), but only from third-party sellers on Amazon US starting around $US 50, and is on Amazon UK for £9.99 (~$US 17) from third-party sellers but with a different cover. I haven’t found it anywhere locally. On eBay it’s listed as “rare” and seems to go around $US 40.

WTF? Are those two the same game? Why is it so rare in the US, expensive-but-not-rare in Japan, and cheap in the UK?

Evil turtle

Rich — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 10:11:00 +0000

According to this CNN article this turtle has the image of Satan on his shell:

but I think someone’s a bit confused, because it’s clear to me what’s on that turtle shell:

Yoshi! Of course, there’s the possibility that we’re both right…