My current avatar for the game is female. Much prefer to watch her slay monsters than him, don't you think?
I’ve been playing Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii over the last week. Still working through the offline game so far. There has been a lot of hype about this game, but it matches up to what I expected, which isn’t the same as what is hyped. I debated with myself if I would get my money’s worth out of it as it appears to be a game that requires a bit of a time commitment (and a bit of “grinding”, something I swore I’d never waste my time doing), but in the end, it was watching How to Train a Dragon for a second time with the kids that changed my mind. Read More…
Yep. There is one change that would make me buy an iPad.
No it’s not implementing Flash. While I can live without Flash, I dislike the motive behind Apple not supporting Flash. And Flash games too, some of them are fun. But no, it’s not the lack of Flash.
It’s not that Apple are becoming the next “Evil Empire” with their vendor lock-ins, walled-gardens markets, their worrying editorial powers (no porn on the ipad/iphone? Shouldn’t that be my choice?) or forcing app developers to do things their way. I could accept all those limitations with just this one change.
It’s not the lack of camera. Sure the camera would be nice, imagine video conferencing with that sort of device? That would indeed be “awesome”, to use a popular American adjective. You could even take snaps of documents rather than carry those documents around. But the camera, I could do with out. Sure wasn’t I using mobile phones before they had cameras?
It’s not the lack of an SD slot or USB ports either. Seeing now I trade stuff between my devices like the Wii, my old Palm, my DSi, my mobile phone, my digital photo frame and even different PCs using USB drives and SD (and micro SD), I could get by, particularly because I’d probably be forced to use iTunes to transfer my videos and photos and it’d have to convert everything from mp3 and divx to Apple based right?
I hate virtual keyboards. That tech is old, my Palm supports a virtual keyboard and I never used it. I’m forced to use it on the DSi and it drives me nuts. Pen based input is only slightly better but not great. I can text like bloodly bejesus on my phone, but I wouldn’t write a blog post or compose a long email that way. It’s a pity it doesn’t have pen based input. That would be a huge plus but it’d have to be decent though, it would have to be accurate enough. The Palm and DSi work great, but when it comes to drawing or writing I find them a bit frustrating, turning my bad writing into an barely readable scrawl and the delay between the pen and when it appears can hamper the free-flowing nature of drawing. But at least then I could write and annotate ebooks and stuff I manage to get on the device, or draw on-the-fly maps for gaming sessions.
I’ve been using my Wii to play videos and music streamed from my PC for a little while now. But I started to get quite frustrated with the playback of some high quality videos, like my bought downloads of Sanctuary. Don’t get me wrong, orb is great user-friendly application. Easy to get up and running. I honestly thought that it couldn’t get any better.
Well, I came across TVersity, which does the same thing as orb, except it isn’t as user-friendly. It took a while to get up and running, installing the right video codecs for divx and mov, etc. It also doesn’t have many of the fancy features of orb. I do miss the play-lists, “resume last stream” and some other nice tricks of orb. But the quality of playback of divx and mwv is just so much better. It kills the PC, I’m serving content from but at least now my wife is willing to use the Wii to watch her latest downloaded episode of some American drama about a hospital.
Google Reader on the Wii is pretty nice. (I’ll write about why I like Google Reader another time). The layout is done well, so it easier to read feeds on the TV. The “2″ button pulls up the list of your subscriptions, which is very handy, except occasionally the Wii gets confused and thinks the 2 button is the shortcut to go to “column view” and it gets hard to switch back. The other bugbear is that if you visit a site outside of Google Reader and you go back, then when you bring up your subscriptions with the 2 button, it’s blank! It’s not substitute for a PC based browser but for a quick fix during a TV ad break, it’s nice.
In general, I’m not a big fan of the Internet Wii Channel. I have the Internet Browser for the DS and for a handheld that little browser is great. The Internet Channel on the Wii is built using the same technology and concepts it appears. On the Wii, all Internet pages have a fixed width so you can move around the screen, much like the DS Internet Browser where you can view webpages in full as well as in a handheld mode. But I find it annoying on the Wii. The Wii remote is not as precise as the DS styles. It’s all very awkward and makes reading webpages, designed for a PC browser, painful. Imagine a blog with posts to the right of the page. You have to move the screen over to read them, but you might end up moving a little too far and missing the first few letters of each line. It makes reading anything but a plain webpage with large font and big margins, uncomfortable.
But the Internet Wii Channel has one really useful feature. Video. Go to YouTube, watch the clip in full screen! But there is a catch here. The Flash version installed is an old version. I’ve tried other video sites and they don’t work and you can’t install the latest version of Flash. However there is still a very powerful use of this feature.
This weekend, I discovered Orb, which has been optimised for the Wii! You just install an app on your PC, create an account and then on the Wii, using the Internet Channel, open your Orb account and then you can watch any videos on your PC and listen to your MP3 collection! Surprisingly simple to set up if your using Windows XP.
I did have to do one change to get good video quality though. The Orb webpage performs a “speed test” before streaming video and for some reason it was getting dismal speeds. The video stream then was very low quality (because it thought it was a low speed connection). I set a fixed speed of 1meg and the video stream became very watchable. Occasionally blocks and artifacts when too much was happening on screen but otherwise very good. BTW you can stream your DivX videos and they’ll play on the Wii.
As far as I understand how Orb works, it’s just a web interface that give you a list of the media on your PC. You can configure where Orb looks for content on your PC. When you open Orb webpage and open some media, it actually creates a connection between your PC and where your streaming the content, not via the Orb servers. Which means when I use my Wii to listen to my MP3s, they are streamed only across my wireless LAN, not the Internet.
I don’t understand how Orb makes money. It’s a free service. I haven’t seen any ads yet or mentions of paid subscription. It simply works. So now I can stream music and video to my TV from my PC. Bloody great. My fandom for the Wii continues…
I had planned to get a Nintendo Wii after Christmass. It was to be my one gift to myself this year, an expensive luxury item that won’t get the value for money out of.
It’s now April, 4 months later, and I don’t have one. So frustrating. I should ordered it in some shop, somewhere, but it just seems so much hassle. I know that I’m not going to get the time to play it. Arg. Time to get it… not sure it balances out the time I’ll get to play it!
But then I saw this video:
[I feel all shiny and cool right now. This is the first time I've added a video to one of my blog posts! I bet this won't make the RSS feed though.]
A two year old playing Wii Tennis. Pretty funky!
Only last week I introduced my daughter Alice (who’s nearly three years old) to Google Earth on the Desktop PC. With screams of “I want to do it”, she grabbed the mouse and started shoving it forward and backwards, getting pretty frustrated that the map wasn’t moving (she wasn’t get the click-and-drag concept). Yet, the way she was trying to control the mouse, reminded me of this video. It’s pretty cool to able to think that your toddler could potentially play the same computer game as you and, as a parent, not feel guilty that they aren’t getting any exercise.
Come on Nintendo, give me one please?
Update #1: Seems the video embed code doesn’t work nicely on LiveJournal, so if you want to see it, come on over to thedeadone.net to see it.
