Well it’s been a while since my last post, so for you, dear reader, I am making another.

The launch details of the Nintendo Wii were announced today:  November 19 at $250.  I’m a little disappointed.  I was really hoping for a $200 price point. Not that it matters, I’d get it either way, and they’ll probably drop the price next year (or maybe they’ll wait till 2008 for the first price drop I really don’t know).  And it’s bundled with Wii Sports, which.. I don’t really care about.  The launch date also doesn’t mean much to me—I won’t be getting mine until December 25—but it seems like they should have beaten Sony’s launch date (on yours truly’s birthday) of November 17, especially since Nintendo (unlike Sony) can ship enough systems to meet demand.  But here’s my biggest disappointment:  getting a second controller (like, a fully functional one) is sixty dollars (forty dollars for Wiimote, twenty for the nunchuck attachment).  Sure, I’m still not going to be spending as much as I would on, say, a PS3 with no games or accessories or anything.  But as long as I’m going to have Wii Tennis I’d like to be able to play it with my wife, without having to spend more money on her controller than I would on a new game.

I apologize if my thoughts are overly disorganized.  I am feeling quite under the weather and debating whether or not I should tell my boss that I’m taking off the rest of the day as a sick day.  I’m certainly not in a state of mind for something requiring the level of concentration of, let’s say, refactoring a O(n²) algorithm down to a O(n) or O(n log n) algorithm (what I was working on before taking a ten minute break to blog).  But I’ve never taken time off for sickness and I probably won’t unless it’s the kind of sickness where I need to be in or near a sanitary bathroom for an extended period of time.

Recently a few friends of mine have posted their top 20 or top 25 favorite games of all time on their blogs.  Not to be outdone, I have compiled this list of my top twenty-six games of all time.  :)

26. Metroid:  Should I have included this?  I never truly played the game as it was meant to be played.  I just entered the “Justin Bailey” code and explored to see how far I could get.  This was how I would frequently spend several hours in the afternoon when I got home from school.  But this game was more or less my introduction to video games so I think it must be included.
25. New Super Mario Bros.:  I ranked this game kind of low because it is very recent and may not stand the test of time, but the game was fantastic.  It was a little on the easy side—I mean, I managed to get everything in the game without using any FAQs.  But it was great, and I liked that they resisted the urge to include elements like flying from SMB3 and SMW—you actually want to get fire flowers again!  What I’d really love to see next is New Super Mario Bros. 2, such that NSMB2:SMB2::NSMB:SMB.
24. Half Life 2:  Another one that might be higher if it weren’t for the fact that I am just now playing through it, but it has every indication of being a favorite.  With PC games I don’t mind waiting until they are cheaper and patched.  I consider any PC game straight out of the box to be more like a public beta than a final release.  But I’m a console gamer at heart.
23. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles In Time:  This may seem a little out of place, but it was a really fun beat-em-up game.  Not sure how well it would stand up now though.
22. Mario Kart: Double Dash:  This game was lots of fun as long as you played it the right way—two people to a kart.  I can imagine that I wouldn’t have liked this game so much if I hadn’t played through it with Garrison.  It suffered from the same problem as every other Mario Kart though: once you unlock every track you don’t really want to play anymore.
21. Goldeneye 007:  A classic.  Caverns and Frigate were my favorite levels.  I got all the cheat codes.  That was not an easy task—to get the last one I played the same stage (Facility on 00 Agent) over and over for like four hours straight!
20. Unreal Tournament:  The only FPS that I spent significant time on in multiplayer.  Morpheus r0x0r3d.
19. Donkey Kong Country:  The game that pushed the limits of 16-bit gaming to new levels.  I remember being on the phone with Peter as we tried to figure out where the last two secrets were, in order to get the coveted 101% rating.
18. Metal Gear Solid 2:  The only game for a Sony system that will make it on this list, this game was really cool.  I haven’t played MGS3 yet, maybe some day...
17. Super Mario Bros. 3:  What list would be complete without this game?  This was the upper limit of what an 8-bit system could do.  I have to confess that I never beat the game without Game Genie until I played the Super Mario All-Stars version much later.
16. Banjo-Kazooie:  3D platformers never managed to take hold like they did in 2D, but I liked them a lot, and this one was lots of fun.  I don’t really have a problem with collecting five thousand tokens in every level.
15. Animal Crossing:  I would be remiss as a list-maker if I didn’t include this game, even if it calls my sexual orientation into question.  Non-simultaneous multiplayer!  A game that you never really beat, you just sort of get tired of playing it!  Interesting sidenote: my in-laws love this game and have two avatars each.
14. Final Doom:  For those unaware, Final Doom was the Doom 2 engine, playing two complete, 32-level games (TNT: Evilution [sic] and The Plutonia Experiment).  I also loaded the “Ultimate Doom” levels (the original game plus a few new levels).  Anyway, I remember playing this when I was in high school.  Anytime I hear a song from Live’s “Secret Samadhi” album I think of this game, because I listened to it while playing for a while.  I also had a lot of fun creating a few Doom levels, and playing multiplayer with Garrison and Peter.  Of course, this was back in the day when you had to have no less than four phone lines to do a 1-on-1 death match: one for each computer and one for each person so that you could decide when your modem should call their modem.  Fun times.
13. Mega Man X:  I liked the X games much more than the main series, although I do have fond memories of holding “left” on controller 2 with my foot while playing Mega Man 3.  I remember X2 and X3 being pretty good too, but I never owned them, so only X1 is represented here.
12. Roller Coaster Tycoon:  Countless hours freshmen year of college were spent designing wicked roller coasters.  So much fun.  I’ve recently gotten Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, which is the same thing but 3D and you can ride the rides.  Only difference is I have less free time now.
11. Super Mario 64:  The first thing I did was climb a tree.  The second thing I did was jump in the moat.  So much freedom!  It was amazing!  I’d really like to see a remake of this game with modern graphics (kind of like Super Mario All Stars did with the original SMB games).
10. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest:  The best of the DKC games.  Graphics were actually improved from the first game, and gameplay was expanded, and the difficulty went up a little bit to more or less exactly where I would like it to be.
9. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem:  This game was amazing, with an unusually good storyline.  I went back through it two summers ago and still enjoyed the story.
8. Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time:  An amazing game, with innovative controls that allow you to easily do things that look incredibly cool.  Unfortunately the sequel sucked.  Anyone know if the third one was any good?  I never bothered to give it a try..
7. The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time:  Link made a transition into 3D flawlessly.  I can’t wait to play Twilight Princess this year.
6. Metroid Prime:  Another great transition to 3D (despite what Ryan says).  This game really felt more like a first-person Zelda game than a first person shooter.  All the exploration from Super Metroid was still there.  I didn’t like the sequel quite as much because it felt much more FPS-y, even though it was a decent game.
5. Super Mario RPG:  This is the only RPG I’ve ever really played unless you count the “sequels” Paper Mario and Paper Mario 2.  Owning only Nintendo systems has made it difficult to play them..  I really enjoyed watching Garrison play Skies of Arcadia though.
4. Super Metroid:  I remember the day I got this game I played for like six hours straight without a Player’s Guide or anything, made it all the way to that big room in Maridia where you use the Grapple Beam to get across the top of the room to the door going up, and there’s a platform under the door and you can use the grapple beam to spin all the way around it.  I eventually beat this game with 100% in less than three hours to get the best ending.
3. Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island:  My favorite Mario game.  The graphics were a nice break from what everyone was used to, and the levels were really fun.  Too bad the “Yoshi’s Story” pseudo-sequels weren’t very good.  But now they’re actually making a true sequel for the DS!
2. The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker:  A lot of people shied away from this game because of the cartoon graphics, which is really a shame.  This is definitely my favorite Zelda game.  I loved the exploration and the vastness of the world (even if it was all water).

Drum roll please!

1. Super Smash Bros. Melee:  The best game to have in a dorm, hands down.  Junior year of college was awesome because of this game alone.  Garrison and I even organized tournaments.  I put the tournament posters back up on my site today, in case you’ve never seen them.  I wonder.. will we still be playing this game thirty years from now?  The gameplay is perfect and I think the graphics will hold up (unlike.. say.. Smash for the N64).  I am concerned that Super Smash Bros. Brawl will be unable to live up to this game.  I guess time will tell.

Some honorable mentions go out to the following great games, left out to give the list more variety: The Legend Of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past, Metroid Fusion, Metroid: Zero Mission, Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble.

It is now year 20X5 of the history of the cosmos, and something terrible has happened.

It’s that time of year again.  That week in May when I am willing to turn my TV to the abominable G4.  Yep, it’s E3 time!  And this is looking like the biggest freakin E3 yet.  G4 has 3-hour coverage of each day’s events, which I record so that I can watch all of it in 30 minutes, including the fast-forward time (yeah, that much of it is unwatchable garbage).  Sure the trailers are available on the internet, but there’s something about seeing them on TV that’s more appealing.  That, and they have had a few interesting interviews (most notably for me, Will Wright and John Carmack).

So Sony is pricing the low end PS3 at five hundred dollars!!  What are they thinking?  And if you want 802.11b (and HDMI output and a bigger hard drive), you’ll have to shell out six hundred dollars.  I think I’ll pass.  Up until a week ago, I thought BluRay was going to win over HD-DVD, because I thought that the PS3 would be most people’s first high definition DVD player.  Now I’m not sure that the PS3 will be quite so widespread, and I have serious concerns regarding the content of their bloodstream when they decided this price.  Microsoft couldn’t have asked for more.  I’m now thinking maybe I’ll get a 360 some day, after the first price drop (usually comes a little over a year after launch).  I think part of the death blow for the PS3 is going to be their cell processor.  John Carmack said the cell is much more powerful than the 360 at peak performance, but that it would be very difficult to write games that took advantage of this power.  If John Carmack thinks it is too hard to program for, what hope does Joe Developer have?

The big news of course is Nintendo.  Look at all the games they’ve got:

• Super Mario Galaxy:  A really cool looking Mario game set in outer space.  Check out that trailer!

• The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess:  Link is back and he’s not a cartoon.

• Metroid Prime 3:  Doesn’t look like a huge leap forward, but I imagine the Wiimote will make it feel incredible.

• Super Smash Brothers Brawl:  Smash is back!!  With Solid Snake??  Maybe there will be other third-party characters.. Sonic anyone?

• Red Steel:  If they get the alleged control issues worked out, this could be this generation’s Goldeneye.  One neat thing I heard is that to open doors, you twist your left hand (as if using a doorknob).  I thought that was pretty clever.

With most people guessing the Wii will launch at $249 or even $199, I could get Wii and all five games I mentioned for the price of a PS3 with no games.  Seems like a no-brainer. Interesting side note: every Nintendo console system has launched at $199.

Some other games that look stupid hot (off the top of my head)- Halo 3, Too Human, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Spore (I’m looking forward to that one).

Something I haven’t seen addressed:  Link is left handed.  Will I have to swing my left hand to use the sword?  I know that pushing your right hand forward will shove someone with the shield, and that spinning your left hand does a spin attack..  What about Red Steel, do you think you’ll be able to play with your gun or dominant sword in your left hand (if you’re left handed)?  It’s an accessibility issue that developers haven’t had to address before..

Since everyone else is talking about Wii, I thought I’d weigh in.  I guess I’m a member of the group Tycho described as “people who like it because they are ‘above the fray,’” but really I think it is because I never liked “Revolution” all that much to begin with.  I’ve been worried that they were going to turn the code name into the official name, as they did with the Nintendo DS (which I still think is a pretty boring name).

When I first saw it I didn’t like it because I didn’t know how to pronounce it (my first guess was “wee-eye”, like in radii).  Once I got used to automatically thinking “we,” it started to grow on me.  I think a year from now no one will really have a problem with the name.  I mean, really, didn’t you think “iPod” was a dumb name the first time you heard it?  But it seems to have worked for them and no one really questions it now.

The thing that does bother me is the grammar.  Reading a sentence that begins “Wii is” just makes me want to hit someone with a third grade English book.  The term is likewise distasteful as a direct object: “It’s about Wii.”  I naturally want to say “It’s about Uus” or something.

One last thing- I’m going to call the controller the “wiimote.”  I haven’t seen anyone say that in any of the five or six news/blog posts I’ve read about the topic.  I’m so clever.

Today when I was logging out of Yahoo Mail there was an ad for a site claiming to offer a free PS3.  Since this was an expensive-looking ad on Yahoo, I figured maybe it was a little less sketchy than, say, an offer to transfer a Nigerian prince’s money out of the country.  So I clicked it, carefully read the terms and conditions.  Most importantly, I saw “Membership is free and you will never be required to pay for evaluation products.”  It just said I needed to evaluate some products- two “top offers”, two “prime offers”, and two “premium offers.”  Obviously, I wasn’t going to give them any kind of information that they could use to charge me (credit card number, bank account number, etc).  But my name, address, and phone number are already in the phone book, so I wasn’t too concerned with giving out that info.

So I signed up.

Then I went to look at these products I needed to “evaluate.”  The first group had things like Columbia House DVD club and Real Rhapsody music download service, where I would have to sign up for free trials.  Which would require giving a credit card number, but no charge if I canceled within like two weeks.  Well I wasn’t interested, but I wanted to see what some of the third-tier products were.  Check this out:

HAHAHA!  In theory, they would reimburse me for my fifteen hundred dollar purchase, making good on their claim that I wouldn’t have to pay for any evaluation products.  I think I’ll pass.

So I got ripped off on eBay.  It actually happened in November, but I am only just now mentioning it here for the same reason most rape incidents go unreported:  it’s embarrassing to admit you got screwed.  Yes, I just equated losing two hundred dollars to being raped.

When I found out that there was a Pearl Pink Nintendo DS bundled with Nintendogs Best Friends Edition, I had to make that Stephanie’s Christmas present.  But it turned out that the pink system was extremely limited, and they only sold it at Toys ‘R Us and K-B Toys (maybe a few other places, but definitely not Best Buy or EB Games).  So while I could have purchased it in a store for $149.99 in August, by November I could only find them on eBay, where they ran for around $200.  After watching the auctions for a couple of weeks and losing a few of them, I found this one for $190.00 with Buy It Now, and I figured that was as cheap as I was going to find it (and by mid-December they were going for $250+).  The guy (whom I will refer to as “Dick” from here on out) had a feedback rating of 33, which didn’t seem bad, with only one negative comment from long ago when he was a buyer.  On November 14 I made this purchase.  $190.00 + $10.00 shipping + $2.00 for shipping insurance = $202.00.  It turns out that the $2.00 may well be the best two dollars I’ve ever spent.

Well Dick didn’t take PayPal, so I sent a money order.  A week later he said he got it and the day after Thanksgiving (November 25) he claims he mailed it priority mail from Akron, OH.  It should have gotten here by the following Tuesday at the latest.  It never arrived.  I called Dick (who happened to be at home in the middle of the day on a weekday..) and told him I hadn’t gotten it and he’s like “well.. I mailed it.. it should be there soon..”  It never got here.  After three weeks the postal service will let you file an insurance claim for something lost in shipping, but the person who ships it must file the claim.  Turns out Dick didn’t keep the receipt, something they require, so he couldn’t file the claim.  At this point it was a week before Christmas so I got Stephanie a regular Nintendo DS, and I looked around on eBay to find out what I could do.

I found out that if you purchase shipping insurance and the seller fails to provide it, you qualify for eBay Standard Purchase Protection Program.  They will refund me what I paid for the item ($190.00) minus a $25 processing fee ($165.00).  I have until 90 days after the transaction to file for that, so I told Dick that I would give him until February 1st to refund me the money, and that if he did so I wouldn’t escalate the claim.  I explained that if I escalate the claim eBay will reimburse me, but that they would also probably investigate him and his account would suffer or something.  He said he could definitely get me the money by February 1st.

Well today is February 1st and there is no money.  I have sent Dick five e-mails in the last week, none of which he has responded to.  So I submitted my claim this morning.  Hopefully in another month or so I’ll get $165.00 from eBay, meaning I’ll have only lost a net total of $37 dollars, which isn’t too terribly bad.

Oh I forgot to mention that not long after Dick said he shipped my system his name showed up in eBay as “Not a registered user”, which means I can’t leave negative feedback.  What a Dick.

I bring forth two topics of discussion on this grim mid-January day.  First, I built a new PC last week.  Here is a picture of that process that Stephanie captured.  Notice as Punky eagerly awaits the opportunity to chew on any part I do not need.  This was my first time building a whole PC, which wasn’t very difficult.  I thought I had destroyed my processor though.  All you ever hear is how incredibly sensitive the processor is, but once you get the clasp closed down on it, it is pretty much indestructible.  I learned this while trying to mount the cooling fan on the processor.. which involved applying a sizeable percentage of my full body weight to the “snap-in” mounting screws.  But other than that, and the fact that I forgot to put in the shield around the connectors on the back and had to unmount the motherboard to put it in, everything went pretty well.

Second, I am going to discuss Windows Live Local (found, cryptically enough, at local.live.com).  It’s Microsoft’s latest way to compete with Google (specifically, Google Maps).  So far, it’s got the immediate advantage of making much prettier maps.  It also has satellite data of course.  The photos around Charlotte are older than Google’s, but they also have some black and white photos that cover my hometown in a pretty high resolution (albeit without color), where Google just says “no satellite imagery available at this zoom level.”  I guess I should try to get to a point here.  I don’t normally like to side with the “I hate Microsoft because they’re successful” techno-hippies.  If you want to read blogs about that, you don’t have to look very hard.  I’m going to objectively and open-mindedly suggest to you that perhaps Microsoft sucks.  Proof of this theorem is left as an exercise for the reader.

I guess what I’m addressing specifically is Microsoft’s “throw money at the latest tech trend until we have at least ninety percent market share” strategy.  I’m really amazed at the economics of it.. ya know, that it actually works.  I mean, look at what they did to Netscape seven years ago.  And that was competition for lead market share for a piece of software that they give away for free, without any kind of embedded advertising.

The inspiration for this whole blog post is this comment I read in an interview EGM had with Bill Gates (well, the interview was actually with Peter Moore, the Bill Gates thing was a sidebar):

EGM: Microsoft has lost roughly $1 billion a year on the first Xbox since it launched. Was that worth it?

Bill Gates: We knew going into the original Xbox that we would lose...a lot. Or you can say, invest a lot—that’s the nice way to say that. And we knew the only thing we’d get out of that first generation was the learning and credibility that came with that experience.

Read the whole article here.

Can you imagine if you were owner of a company and you told your shareholders “Our strategy this year is to release a product that loses a billion dollars a year, for the next five years.  Then maybe we’ll start to turn a profit.”  I mean, even if you’re Microsoft, a billion dollars is still a pretty significant sum of money.

So give me all your poison

Now I’ve got Nintendo WFC working, after a lot of headaches with my router.  I wrote up a description of what I did on the Nintendo forums, which you can see here, so that hopefully someone else won’t have the same headache.  I seriously hope they make some major improvements to WFC by the time the Revolution comes out.

Without further ado, here are my complaints:

1. “Friend codes” are retarded.  This seems like the same mistake ICQ made when instant messaging was a new concept.  Let everyone pick whatever screen name they want, but everyone gets an annoyingly long ID number.  And if I only had one friend code I’d be willing to let that slide.  But I don’t.  I have one for every single WiFi game!  Which, at the moment, is two (see below).  But if they are serious about this (especially third party support), they should make a system where your handle is something the DS keeps track of, not each individual game.

2. I can’t see which friends are online.  There should be a way to quickly get a menu of my friends that are online, and a way of sending a “hey, wanna play Mario Kart?” message to them.  And, as I said before, this should be done on the OS level, not on a per-game basis.  Currently you have to kind of arrange a play date if you want to play.

3. I can’t communicate with people I’m playing with.  Well, in Animal Crossing I can.  But I still think this should be a system-level feature, not something every game developer must implement.

4. Friend code is specific to game/system combination.  In other words, if I put my Mario Kart in Stephanie’s DS and go online, I’ll have to say goodbye to my friend code when I put it back in my system, and give all my friends a new friend code.  As I said before, if the friend code was handled just by the OS, this wouldn’t be an issue.

Our friend codes!
Mario Kart DS
Kip: 481098-624409
Stephanie: 150386-138145

Animal Crossing Wide World
Kip:  2319-9061-8694  (“Agent 86” from “Ninjäna”)
Stephanie:  2792-3525-8250 (“Darcy” from “Daisyton”)

So Stephanie and I each got a Nintendo DS for Christmas, and we had lots of fun playing Mario Kart at her parents’ house.  So we get back to the apartment where I’m expecting to be able to play on my wireless router.  Turns out, Nintendo isn’t all that good at implementing 802.11b for some reason.  It finds my router, lets me enter my WEP key, and tests my connection successfully. Then I start Mario Kart and try to connect and after about ten seconds my game freezes--the music gets stuck on one note and the screen stops animating and it doesn’t respond to any kind of input.  I went to NintendoWiFi.com, and see that for some Linksys routers you have to set “Basic Rate” to “1-2Mbps” for it to work.  I tried that, and the very first time I connected after that, I could actually connect, but then I couldn’t do anything else.  But it refuses to work a second time.  Some other Linksys routers require that WEP be disabled.  I haven’t tried that, but I’m not about to run my router without WEP.  I’ve also tried disabling port forwarding (the only “special” feature I’ve messed with on the router) without success.

It is very annoying to me that Nintendo actually has to have a list of routers that do and do not work with their device.  This page should not need to exist.  Seriously.  I mean, 802.11b is not some obscure, new, or undefined technology.  It’s been common for something like four years now.  I have a computer with a Linksys card in it, a computer with a D-Link card in it, and a Dell Axim, and they all connect to the router just fine.  Why does the Nintendo DS have a problem?

Update: I’ve checked the troubleshooting guide, which is clearly written for people who don’t know what an SSID is.  It tells me to call an 800 number for my specific problem.  I may try that, although I have low expectations.  I also found some information about specific ports, and found that some routers only work if the DS is assigned a static IP address.  I’ll try those things and see what I can come up with.

And I know about the USB thing, but the point is I shouldn’t need to use it if I’ve already got a wireless router in the house.

Just wanted to update everyone on my current Solitaire rating.  I’m pretty sure you will all be impressed to learn that my top speed for beating the game is now 63 seconds with a top score of 11758.  That is just crazy in my book.  Hope you are all practicing.  Later!