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Wii: Mario Kart impressions.

Well its another month and Another Good wii game comes out. As a big fan of Mario Kart for the SNES, I’ve not really played any mario Karts till i purchased the Wii, I had downloaded Mario Kart 64 for the wii and my reception to that was pretty blah..

Usually when it comes down to games I have an interest in , I tend to stay away from prerelease reviews and anything to do with the guts of the games. I have 2 reasons for doing that, I’d Rather figure out things for myself and I want an unbiased opinion of the game in my mind. Anyways…

Continue reading “Wii: Mario Kart impressions.”

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Honey Dew Donuts… STOP CHANGING Damnit.

Usually when bluesteel and I go for coffee we goto honey dew donuts , which until recently was fairly consistent. but Recently they have pulled certain flavors of coffee that are more popular. Firs they went from flavored coffee to flavored shots, which to there defense was not as bad as dunkin donuts version but still it makes a big difference in coffee taste. Than they pulled one of there more popular flavors for the iced mudslide coffee crap. more over the shots of espresso have gone from 50cents to 1$ , That kind of pissed me off, its bait and switch . get people buying your product than jam the price up when you realize its fairly popular.

the problem here is with each change they are taking the dunkin donuts method of things. automate the fuck outta EVERYTHING , to the point you can NEVER get your coffee right. if you even try to get a coffee thats anything but regular there is a 99% chance that dunkin donuts will fuck it up because its hit a button for regular hit a button for extra , which to different people mean different things. plus having the whole process machined and automated takes away from your coffee.

Honey Dew donuts is slowly following the line that Dunkin Donuts took and thats a dangerous path. Bluesteel and I avoid Dunkin like the plague.

The latest change is the iced capachino, they went from making the mix to a machine , the machine version taste like coco puffs, its rather terrible.

Hopefully more people will notice and Actually complain about it because this is really starting to make some bad coffee there.

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Media… Completely fascinated with bored people .. and there wii’s

I find the media often gets fascinated with some pretty weird shit at times, weither its the next missing garden gnomes, or some star taking a dump… the media is there normally to smell it. Lately with the media getting involved with console gaming, they have been attacking it as the next WMD, to the Media it is something that beats your wife , kills your pets and makes your children into cannibals. When the media is bored i find thats when there at there most dangerous to themselves and others around them. So just doing my normal thing of looking at Fark.com , an article caught my eye and I clicked. the Title of it was “Growing a wii bit bored” from the Calgary Herald. but the dumbfuckery of this one gets to me. its a long write by me but I’ll take a stab at his stab.

read on for my silly take to this article of playing with numbers and attention whoring at its best from the calgary heralds department of pulling numbers outta there ass.

It starts

In an interview with gaming publication IGN.com, the president of Epic Games, which produces the incredible Gears of War for the Xbox 360, dumped on Nintendo’s Wii, dismissing the system that has sold 20 million units as a fad that will soon wane, and saying his company won’t ever be releasing games on it.

“The first time I played a videogame with my parents was on Atari 2600,” says Mike Capps. “The next time I played a videogame with my parents . . . was Wii Tennis. So it’s about bringing people together, families, Thanksgiving, all that. I think it’s kind of like a weird virus because I have not yet found a reason to play with my Wii since then.

“It’s a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, that’s so cool, I’m gonna go buy it. So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they’ve showed it to someone else who then goes out and buys it and so on.

theres so many things wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin. To Immediately just start dumping on something means your pissed off for one reason or another rather than taking a neutral bias to what your writing about. Also bringing the Asshat from epic in on the first line from and interview just starts this article all wrong.. I’m allowed to have bias here… gears of war? I couldn’t care any less for the game. I mean just how many times can you rehash unreal tournament. The comment alone is shortsighted, The reason people get the Wii is it is FUN…

As far the wii being a virus, i think not , Nintendo has realized that power is not everything. Generally i have one rule with gaming, the more eyecandy generally the shittier the game is for fun and replayability. I Do not play a game for eye-candy , I learned that lesson once too many that general focus on graphics tend to kill games, Or make the game so short its not worth it. Balancing graphics and gameplay is the key, people still play D&D… now theres some heavy fricken graphics for ya .. This guy is full of it .. by the looks of it this guy never played anything past Wii Sports. Continuing…

Continue reading “Media… Completely fascinated with bored people .. and there wii’s”

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Console Gaming without a TV part II..(VD-W2 Wii VGA cable)

I do not usually watch TV, the last TV i had I ended up giving up because it just took up too much space. So I’ve always used my PC to watch Movies, Play games and such , until i purchased the Wii. From my last post
Console Gaming and Movie watching

I have tried almost every PC HD TV card under the sun in order to get a better picture/ less lag time out of the display with results fairing for the worse rather than better. One of my biggest problems was screen lag time.. On the HD Cards you had at least a full second of delay while moving the cursor around, on the analog card the lag time was barely perceivable but enough where it was noticeable if you had played on a TV, also If the PC is doing ANYTHING what so ever , you will get graphical corruption in the display thats the fault of the PC not the Wii. As far as using a TV card the display is fuzzy in fullscreen.

Wii On TV Card
After all those cards my thoughts on internal tuner cards for PC’s are they are all piles of shit… But, looking around i saw one possibility the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable from Vdigi I had taken my time on ordering this because I didn’t see any sort of review for this cable. Also being from HongKong and I am weary of Ordering from sites i don’t know. Resellerratings.com had next to No information about them, After much thinking I finally decided to order the thing…

After an impatient 2 week wait the cable arrived in a simple brown envelope from hongkong. Following the USPS tracking site.. Not really worth even tracking because they barely update you on the location of your goods. Anyways the packaging is dead simple , right to the point, you don’t need user testimonials on how it works. Anyways anything with a billion testimonials usually is a pile of shit.

the cable seems to be built of really good quality, Setup is a breeze as long as you understand the basic premise of what your doing. since the monitor your plugging into does not have an analog tuner, you have to use the component cable plug in on a tv

Wii VGA cable closeThe Green RCA jack you just plug into a TV and power on the wii , After doing so you goto your system menu and Display selection of 480i or 480p , You want to choose 480p , but doing this will look like something bad is happening . the screen will look completely fucked, don’t worry here,  because the TV doesnt know how to handle the signal. after this Power down your Wii , Disconnect the Green RCA than proceed to connect the Cable to the monitor , you will need a male to male VGA connector/Wire to complete this action, After that you should be all set on Connecting up to your monitor.

As far as quality goes , the cable kicks ass.

it removed every problem you would have with a TV card and basically gives you the same response as you would get on a TV screen. with the added bonus of You can turn off your PC to play the console if you run your Console like i do.

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So it begins – the coffee wars…

Bouncing around websites when im tired sometimes i just get the What the hell reaction to looking at something…

every now and than i check news sites for anything going on with coffee (hey i am the coffeecommander so gotta check these things), so i see this.

Coffee wars heat up, with McDonalds taking a surprise lead

I had to reread that one.. Just a complete What the hell? so Interested I took the bait and clicked ..

Continue reading “So it begins – the coffee wars…”

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Lets see where this goes… Logitech this is in your hands now. Part I

I’ve always loved logitechs mice and keyboards , I would recommend them to anyone in the past … but now since having multiple hardware failures with the G7 double clicking when your just trying to single click. my confidence has been shaken. Hopefully I wont have to jump through 87 hoops to get this replace but this is chapter one in firing emails off to logitech. I just want a damn mouse that works without being fucking possessed to completely screw up at anything its doing.

Continue reading “Lets see where this goes… Logitech this is in your hands now. Part I”

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Console gaming and movie watching… When you dont have a TV.. Wait what?

When I got my Wii, it was a thought to exactly how i’d play the console since i don’t have a TV so to speak. Eventually I just ended up going to most efficient route for myself. I connect the Wii to my PC via an analog TV Card, it works fine for me. but there are little things you do notice between having the Wii connected to a TV vs connected to a PC through a TV card.

Personally i use my PC as my center for media, Watching movies, playing games(PC), and playing the Wii. I don’t need a super huge screen, having one would be nice but eh… what can you do. I don’t watch enough TV to validate the idea of getting cable or anything, the way channels are these days its just all rehash of programs anyways… what are we on now “survivor 923 – Night with the power out” edition? About the only thing I tend to watch is mythbusters.

The only thing about having the wii through an analog tv card though is that the screen looks a bit fuzzy and lagged a bit. I’ve tried out many digital Tuner cards with no luck whatsoever, Either I have some sort of weird problem or perhaps my pc is getting a bit aged.

I have tried –

  • WinTV-HVR-1600 – This card is ok, If you have an Via Chipset/Nvidia Video card you will run into an overlay problem, easily fixed but …. the Crashes are not, generally HD channels look spectacular but on occasion the software would crash on channels with a low signal or format difference. Using it to play a console through was worthless, Trying to play the wii on this was like trying to play the Wii underwater , You would move the cursor, and the screen would always be half a second behind becoming extremely annoying fast.
  • Pinnacle PCTV HD Card – out of the box the card was purely annoying… the install software DEMANDED to have WinXP Service pack 2 installed, Nothing would progress unless you did that. as far as channels it did not have the problems that the HVR1600 had, but there was a noticeable unsynchronized Audio, For having the Wii hooked up , Again Display lag issues made this card useless.
  • Visiontek TV wonder 600 – based off the ATI TV wonder 600, installation was painless, Installation of software was relatively painless, Operation was terrible. Trying to pull in any sort of digital channels was totally out of the question no matter the position of the antenna NO channels were received. I even Put the antenna outside the window in hopes of seeing some sort of life from the tuner itself, For the Input part of the card for the Wii, This card got the Worst of the ratings – Display lag was far greater than the other cards, Up to 1.5 seconds of display lag which made any sort of console gaming Completely out of the question.

These card were all tried through about a years time, and Likely in the future possibly there will be a Digital HD TV card that will serve my purposes for both a TV Card and a Console hookup. but I have discovered theres a 4th option that would remove the PC completely from the math , which hopefully will remove all my percieved points that i dont like about running my Wii to Tv Card to PC output. while its the cheapest of the options I’ve only heard and seen very limited reviews on this I’ve ordered the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable . This will skip having the PC as an intermediary and plug directly into my monitor , which thankfully has 2 VGA inputs and 1 DVI input.

My hope is this will solve all my complaints about having the setup i do and having a more direct setup which eliminates a device which the console Passes through

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Rant: Gaming and DLC/unlocks for money crap

Back in the day most addons or mods for games were created for users by users to extend a games life , but now it seems that the big 3 have taken the idea. Nintendo, sony and Microsoft are all making room on there plates for these DLC micro transactions for content. Usually I’d not write about these things but in the last year or so its caught on to such a point where its bugging the hell outta me. if you want to know why this bugs the hell outta me click read more to continue.

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Super Smash Brothers Brawl, post Solo Subspace.

had a short post up yesterday but got rid of it in order to put up a better post.

I’ve so far played out the subspace emissary through to the end, To be honest the way the story is told is kinda of amazing in one respect since not one word of dialog is used. that mode alone takes about 8 to 10 hours to complete and for the ability of having a second player join you is really a nice add-on. Also as far as the subspace emisary the stages age agravating but the good agravating where you dont want to eat your controller

So far my online experience with brawl is limited to a few sessions but they are rather enjoyable. Missing from that is chat but thats a double edged sword right there. If you have played any “on-line” game dealing with the never ending stupidity of certain types of people wear on you after awhile. you are limited to a few different statements you can put in while your playing but nothing huge. as for the lack of a full chat – i don’t mind it since its a console. Sure the Wii has keyboard support but it is very limited at this time.

Plus a full chat client would be worse than a cell phone text conversation. “how r u” “am gd” ect ect text shorthand has its places but it gets annoying after awhile.

Until i play out smash brothers brawl online I’m not inclined to make a total decision on how good this game is. really from a single player point of view i find that Nintendo made a really good effort to appeal to many different players in this game.

As far as the hype that brawl had when it was announce for the Wii I intentionally mostly stayed away from sites hyping it up so i could have an as unbiased opinion as possible with brawl, too which in the end i am in glad I took that road. What really surprised me was the use of the Havok physics engine thats used in half life 2. Playing through you can see the physics at work with items and knocking things around which made me quite happy.

As far as this post is concerned though its relatively a beginning post because later.