For Sunday: "Bringing Down The House"

From Snopes:



The driver and his 10-year old son were apparently (amazingly) fine.

Wii Motion Plus

I watched the part of the Nintendo E3 presentation where the Motion Plus was demonstrated. My first reaction is gee, thanks Nintendo - I really needed another accessory (or peripheral as I would call them, but The Girl mocks me so for it). I've wrist straps, plastic jackets, plastic steering wheels, numchucks, and a charger. I'm eyeing that darn balance board too. Now I've got to get some little dongle too? Does Nintendo make games or just video components to justify some weird plastic fetish someone seems to have.

And watching the Reginator drive a jet ski by leaning forward and twisting his wrists real fast doesn't help that "Wii gaming makes you look like a jackass" feature either.

But of course, the Wii Motion Plus has a very redeeming feature. It will finally give you that lightsaber game you've been craving to play. The real one, where you'll have duels and everything.

Which is pretty awesome.

iPhone Tip: Mail To Blogger

Sometimes I'm so dumb I could slap myself. Thinking that an app that would make it easy to upload posts and images to Blogger was missing from the appsphere, I started looking into way of making a native app do just that.

And then remembered that you can setup your blog to accept email posts quite simply in the settings and that you can just attach images that way. Quick and easy.

HDTV: Evening One

If there was ever a night not to have a somewhat contentious condo meeting about finances, it would be the night of the day your fancy new HDTV arrives. For most of the afternoon I looked on as the new TV merely stared idly at me, wondering what the hell it was doing on a floor without any fancy graphics to display. The old 36" RCA stared idly onward.

As a gadget addict, I rarely maintain the same electronic gizmo for more than a handful of years. Record setters include the PS2 and my old Toshiba DVD player - now both replaced by the PS3. However, nobody has anything on the RCA. I got it shortly after college after landing my first real job working on State Farm's then nascent intranet. That TV has seen girlfriends come and go, the dotcom crash, 9/11, our wedding and a truckload of digital entertainment. Now it waits to be pick up by and hopefully used by a happy family for what I will guess may be more years than anyone would suspect.

By the time we got everything cabled up it was about time to go to this meeting, but I did manage to see GTA IV as it was intended. Details about Liberty City cropped up everywhere, HUDs were perfectly readable and it seemed God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

When I got back, The Girl and Leepus had been throwing virtual people in PAIN enough to start what was referred to as "a vendetta". Once again, details about the game popped into full view that we could barely make out before. Words on signs, details on models, that kind of thing. As Leepus tried to escape the vibrant phosphorous glow of the set, I pulled up fl0w and it was simply hypnotic compared to when we played it last, at the RCA's going away party.

Yes, I held a going away party for the TV. And while on that note, it's true that the title of this blog is now officially an anachronism. But so is "carbon copy" and saying that we should "tape that show while we're gone", so the name will remain the same.

We ended the night watching The Amazing Screw On Head, which the PS3 upscaled quite wonderfully. We tried to push through all of 300 off Blu-Ray but eventually high def fatigue set in.

I'll have a post about the general purchase logic that when into the TV later.

GTA Comes To DS ... Wii next?

I've been largely ignoring E3, but this tidbit that a DS version of the Grand Theft Auto franchise is inbound reminded me of a question:

Why wouldn't Rockstar, with one of the most popular game franchises on the planet, be putting considerable resources to getting it on the most popular platform on the planet? Surely a Wii version can't be far behind.

For Sunday: Dead Space "Lullaby" Trailer

Update: Apparently this trailer was banned by the ESRB and only released in Europe.

iPhone Games

What are people playing off the fancy new App Store anyway? I've heard horribly mixed things about the flagship game, Super Monkey Ball. It also occurs to me that some people may have to embrace a two fold app offer - one that is free as a trial and one that is pay. Getting people to pay a couple bucks off a screenshot can be risky business, as my old cell phone can attest.

I have three projects in mind now, but only one with any code to it. Now I just need time, time, time...

Some Catch Up

Everything has been about three shades of insane lately. The Girl and I have escaped at a friend's behest to the upper reaches of Wisconsin. My cell phone is even on vacation. My brain might be able to reboot at this point.

A bit of housekeeping though:

EA dropped by to say that they are having a sweepstakes to promote Dead Space wherein you win a copy of all the movies the creators felt influenced the game. There are a hundred sci fi and horror titles in the bag (see list) so statistics say there has to be at least three you like.

Alexander from Avatars United wanted to pimp, well, Avatars United, one of the fancy social networking type things for online players. He was flattering enough, so pimp I have.

I've been looped through several emails now about the fact that Slamdance Games will not be in existence this year. There's some grass roots effort to get it running in someone's garage or backyard or whatnot. Personally a bit mixed about this as I'm certainly of the opinion that the more community around indie gaming the better, but I'm still way on the other side of opinion that Slamdance was in the wrong last year concerning the whole Super Columbine Fiasco and can't help but think there's an ounce of irony here. The competition that turned its back on a game because it was too risky for sponsors now can't find the sponsors it apparently needs.

Probably needs a reboot too.