I remember playing the NES in a friend’s house as a kid for the first time after a Christmas in the 80s. Super Mario Bros was the first game we played on the system. I must have been about 8 or 9 at the time though it wasn’t the first console computer game I had ever played. That was an Atari before that. But this was such a leap from watching a square “ball” bounce across the screen and it was addictive, watching this little orange character bouncing around the screen.

And so it was that throughout my childhood, game consoles were a part of it. Mostly Nintendo but not exclusively (I loved my Sega Megadrive and Sonic at the time). I think I’ve owned a Nintendo product most of my life; Super NES, Game Boy Advance, Wii, DS and  a DSi. They’ve all brought me a lot of fun. So of course when Nintendo 3DS was launched I wanted one, partly because of some of the games that were going to come out on it, partly because there seemed to be some cool stuff (maybe) built in to it (like AR for example) and partly because it was Nintendo (yes I guess I could be considered a fanboy).

But the price of the device was way too high for me and then it was getting slammed for weak games at release and the 3D was giving people headaches. I wanted to try it for myself, make up my own mind, but every computer games store I dropped by, never had one available for demo at the time. I admit, I didn’t try that hard, I liked my current DSi.

But now the price has dropped and there is a great bunch of great games coming out for it. I am particularly excited by a new MarioKart and new Monster Hunter game (the concept trailer looks amazing). On top of that so many of the game stores are doing deals right now for 3DS, if you keep your eyes open.

And that’s what happened. A deal on in Game, trade in your DSi (not DS) and get a (red) 3DS for €40. (It’s also my birthday soon so it was a gift from my wife). Sadly I had to give up all my DSiWare games and there wasn’t a way to transfer sounds recorded, though I did copy the photos onto an SD card. Also, the remainder of points I had left on the DSiWare shop were lost too. They were not redeemed when I connected the same account on the 3DS. Arg. But still, I now have a 3DS!

I’ve been messing with it all weekend now, though I don’t have any actual 3D games for it but… I’m liking it. There is a lot of stuff baked in and even without getting any 3D games there is a lot you can do on it.

So let’s talk about the 3D thing first, because we can touch on lots of things along the way. My daughter jokes, calling it the “three-dee-dee-s” and I’ve had conversations with her about the difference between 2D and 3D with her. (I’m such a geek-father). 3D is in the title, so it is important, one of the big features of the device.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure about 3D before playing with the 3DS. It was more the upgraded graphics capabilities that seemed important to me. Seeing that my only other exposure to modern-day 3D technology is 3D movies, I wasn’t expecting much.

When I booted up the 3DS, on the configuration screen, they have this image of a grid and then it says, “calibrating 3D…” and suddenly the grid extends back into space. It’s a neat “oooo” moment. The 3DS menus are very slick and the 3D effect is used well actually. Pretty much like greying out an unused or paused screen, stuff get’s shifted into the background when not in use. It’s a nice visual UI trick.

And you can modify the intensity of the 3D effect. Which turns out to be really useful. I don’t know about you, but when I watch a 3D movie in the cinema, the 3D effects are pretty noticeable at the beginning of the movie but it seems about a third into any movie my conscious mind doesn’t seem to register that they are there despite that I do see them and thusly they loose impact. Occasionally I’d be looking at a 3D image and I couldn’t tell if it’s in 3D any more, but the 3D effect is there. Flick off and on the 3D and it refreshes it in my mind and I can go, ah, yea.

As a side note, when you quit a game, you don’t quit it. You suspend it and the last screen is pushed into the background in 3D while you browse the other icons. When you start another game, it asks you to if you want to kill the suspended game. You can’t run multiple games or applications but… you can access the internet browser, and some of the other built-in features like notifications, game notes, online friend’s statuses and so on I believe. And I could imagine that being quite powerful. I keep a piece of paper with lists of combos for Monster Hunter Tri on the Wii (Monster hunter tri is being ported to the 3DS!), and use my laptop to look up the internet on advice on choosing armour and weapon upgrades. I can now do this from the 3DS without quitting the game I’m playing, in theory. I haven’t used that feature aggressively yet.

Of course my existing DS games do not use 3D so I can’t really comment on actual 3D game play, but all the built-in games like Mii Maker, Mii Plaza, AR, Face-Raiders, etc. all use 3D. So you can get a good feel for it. Moving your Mii around in 3D is nice but not exceptional. It’s just as nice with the 3D slider turned off. You can also take 3D photos which is silly and fun but not amazing. The images aren’t as striking as some of the other 3D effects. However it’s in the 3D camera application that the most striking 3D effect is available. it’s one of the graffiti options where you can create bumps and digs of various strengths over a photo. It’s actually stunning, seeing this dip extend backwards as you scribble or rise up.

But I did I get a small headache. I’ve read about the “sweet spot” for viewing the 3D. Well I found it’s more of a sweet area, not big enough for two heads but big enough that I didn’t have to put myself in any awkward position to get the best of the 3D effect. I used it exactly like I used my DSi to get the full on 3D effect. Tilting the screen left or right does knocks out the 3D effect and it can be disconcerting though you can tilt the screen up and down much more.

As I said, I did get a headache, but it’s quite minor, it passed quite quickly. It’s definitely caused by eye strain, like wearing your glasses wrong (I know what eye-strain feels like sadly). You can quickly increase the eye-strain by flicking the 3DS left-right and breaking and restoring the 3D effect, my eyes would be trying to adjust too quickly. Also looking over someone else’s shoulder at the screen can strain your eyes. Thankfully you can shut it off if you’re trying to show something on screen or if you’re moving a lot while playing.

I have more to say on the 3D but I want to talk about some of the other stuff first, but my opinion of 3D is changing I have to say. It’s more than a gimmick, but it’s not the be all end all of the 3DS either.

So like the DSi, it has a internet browser built in. It also a physical button on the side for turning on/off Wireless (and I think Street and Spot Pass). Which is good on conserving the battery life, I’d imagine. The sharper and bigger screens makes reading the web much nicer than the DSi and I found the keyboard (using a stylus) easier to use too for the same reason. Of course no flash, so no videos. But I had no problem browsing the mobile versions of Twitter and Gmail (Google+ is not supported).  It is what it is and it’s not primarily an internet device. I’d fine it handy at home for checking my mail/twitter because it starts up straight away, but I wouldn’t do more than that.

They have significantly overhauled the eShop compared to the DSi or Wii. It’s much fancier, it has inline trailers (some in 3D) for both items that you can download from the eShop and ones being released in retail shops, prices in Euros, a nice selection of categories such as “cheap games”, “action”, “sports”, “games with Mario in them”, “camera fun” and so on. Sadly no free demos that I could find. There isn’t a huge amount of 3DS specific titles right now but it does inherit all the DSiWare games plus it has a Virtual Console for black and white Gameboy stuff. You can also easily submit reviews/ratings in simple Nintendo style as well.

As I said at the beginning, I couldn’t transfer or get the DSiWare games I had already purchased. Apparently there is a tool to transfer from a DSi to a 3DS, but seeing I was trading in my DSi, that left no way to get them onto my 3DS. A pity. I don’t understand why Nintendo couldn’t have kept a list of the games I downloaded and if they available on the 3DS allow me to re-download. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s a little frustrating.

The eShop is massively improved and really looks like Nintendo are making a real effort here. Sadly I’ve heard some news about how Nintendo treats indie developers and they’re doing an Apple thing with a “walled garden” approach. And they’re only interested in “real” game developers apparently and at the same time fighting constantly to take down homebrew efforts. *sigh* I’d love to have the power to write code for the 3DS myself (I’d love to try doing some stuff with AR for example), just for fun. Ah well.

There is a few free items to download straight off the bat though.

There is a 3D Pokedex for pokemon fans. My daughter is still playing Pokemon Black on her DS and thought she’d get more of a kick out of the Pokemon’s in 3D, but a few minutes play and you go, that’s nice next. Still it’s free and it’s a nice way to show off the 3D to other Nintendo fans.

Also available for free is the Zelda Four Swords, celebrating the 25th Anniversary of Zelda. I didn’t play more than a few minutes. It’s designed for multiplayer and it’s basically dungeon crawling in NES Zelda-like style.

But the best free item is the Video app. The Video app downloads 3D videos to your SD card in the background over Wireless or by Spot Pass. It downloaded a 8 minute animated cartoon, a video of a orchestra and a magic trick. I’ve heard of content deals between Nintendo and Dreamworks and Aardman Animations so some interesting stuff could popup here. Nintendo have been releasing episodes of a cartoon based on Kirby on the Wii, week by week. The kids love it and I did love the stuff Aardman Animations did in Flipnote Studios on the DSi, so this app could be a huge selling point. I’m looking forward to what else it downloads for me.

So with the eShop you can download the trailers of the games shown at the Nintendo presentation at E3. And now I can see how 3D can be used in the game. Seriously the Kid Icarus: Uprising trailer looks amazing with the 3D turned on, clever use of a small sprite in the middle the screen, loads of small objects or one big one, I’ve now added that one to my wish-list. Mariokart 7 also takes an amazing visual turn with 3D turned on.

The Super Mario 3D Land trailer is worth checking out. There is a scene where you have a pyramid style set of blocks, but one appears to stick further out in 3D but not in 2D. The scene twists and you can see that it was an optical illusion and it wasn’t really a pyramid. The 3D highlighted that one of the blocks was a trick. Another scene, you’re looking top down and you have to make Mario jump out into nothing and it sense of depth is exciting. There is also a brief scene showing how the gyroscope in the 3DS is used to aim a cannon to shoot Mario up to a set of blocks.

Hey! Look at that ugly mug. It's me, as a Mii!

You can now share you're Miis as QR Codes and now you can have me on your 3DS, forever!

Built in to the 3DS is an application called the Mii Maker where you create those little Mii characters of yourself. It has a nice feature of automatically filling in details of your Mii from a photograph, which is fun but I radically changed it’s output for my own Mii, so YMMV. You can also download your Miis from the Wii as well and view them in 3D. It’s, well, nice. But it feels like a companion tool to the Mii Plaza application.

I think Mii Plaza and Street Pass feature could be described as Nintendo doing a Zynga/Farmville. Also hats. Yep, hats for you Mii and that’s why you’ll want to play it. You collect other Miis using StreetPass. StreetPass appears to be some way for the 3DS to quietly talk to other 3DSs when you’re out and about. Over the weekend I brought the 3DS with me to Dundrum Shopping Centre, just to see if I would collect any Miis and it did, a whole two Miis, not particularly amazing first attempt.

Once you’ve collected a few Miis you can put them to work in the two mini-games in the Mii Plaza. Puzzle Swap just gives you a piece of a puzzle for each Mii you collect. There there is StreetPass Quest. Here you can use Miis you collect to battle ghosts and monsters. As far as I can tell so far, it’s purely a numbers game. Just beating baddies by the number of Miis you throw at them. But, with each stage you beat, you win a hat for your Mii to wear.

Thankfully if you can’t find places where there may be other 3DS owners, you win coins simply by walking. Then you can buy Miis to battle in StreetPass Quest or buy puzzle pieces.

It’s like Nintendo want you to take the 3DS with you everywhere. The new docking station for charging means you can just pick up without the (minor) hassle of plugging/in out cables. The StreetPass encourages you to just carry it with you when you’re out walking around. There is also SpotPass, which seems to be some internet hotspots have deals with Nintendo and send content to your 3DS, as far as I can understand, though I’ve yet to hit one myself. Is the 3DS feeling guilty it isn’t a smartphone so it offers other excuses to carry it around? Still the Mii Plaza games are entertaining and silly. I’d imagine games like Animal Crossing will benefit from this. I wonder is there a potential for ARG-like events with the 3DS using SpotPass and StreetPass?

Kirby in AR!

There there is AR; augmented reality. You get a set of cards with the 3DS. Dump one on the table, start up the AR game and point it at the card. Now you’ve got little boxes popping up and targets to shoot. You can also have famous characters like Mario appear or your Mii and take photos of them superimposed on your table.

It’s here where 3D is useful. It helps to make what you see on the screen more, I guess, solid. As you move around, the table to shoot stuff, you 3D makes the experience engrossing. While the AR stuff included is a bit gimmicky (I found anyway), it does show it has potential. Face Raiders, another AR-style game built in is a lot more fun. You take a photo of someone, it puts it on a flying ball and you have to move the 3DS around to shoot it. If you have a DSi you’ll probably have tried the graffiti options on photos and seen it change someone’s expressions. Well here it is used in Face Raiders to make faces look angry, laugh or try to kiss you! It also bashes holes in the walls around you that the balls fly out of.

The combination of a 3D screen plus augmented reality software is potentially amazing. Though from the media I’ve seen online, this feature is ignored. There are no games coming for it as far as I can tell. What I would love to see is a physical board game with pieces with gameplay like Atom Zombie Smasher. Imaging laying out a grid like board, then placing your counters/figures that represent your snipers’ or exit points and then you playing a helicopter and moving around the board taking out zombies as they advance forward. Or even more simple board games but enhanced with animations and moving buildings, much like taking the Wii’s Mario Party titles and giving them physical boards.

And it’s this potential for AR with 3D that finally sold me on why 3D was a good idea and it’s not just a gimmick.

And to finish off this post, a few final notes.

There is a new controller on the 3DS, a circle pad. They also kept the classic cross D-pad. Seems a little redundant but I found the circle pad great for Mario Kart, much easier to get those boasts and make smooth motions. And in Contra, much easier to aim diagonally. However there is a little loss of precision. I found I much prefer the D-pad for Bomberman. So perhaps the circle-pad is not a true replacement for the D-pad yet. Also I found playing DS games on the 3DS to be disappointing because the graphics now look a little pixallated on the shaper 3DS screen and after watching the trailers of the new games, I’m only left with envy.

The stylus is different too. It’s fits in the back, a bit hard to pull out if you’re in the middle of a game, but less chance of it falling out. A problem me and my daughter had with the DS and DSi, was that the stylus starts to become loose and fall out all the time. When the new stylus is extended fully, it feels longer than the stylus from the DS and DSi which is nice because the old ones were just a tiny bit too short for my hand.

Battery life is not stunning. Leaving the StreetPass on in Sleep Mode, I got a day out of the 3DS before I had to charge it again. So I’m finding I’m only going into sleep mode when I want StreetPass to be on.

Finally, I’m not a fan of the actual physical hardware. It feels heavier than the DSi and it uses three very different plastics (the top, middle and bottom of it) unlike the more smooth design of the DSi.

My new 3DS in all it's ginger colours!

Overall though, I’m happy to have it and now all I need are some actual 3D games!

Note: I had embedded vids for some of the games I mention, but WordPress seems to have gobbled them up. Arg.

Related Posts:

• Played the Dragon Age 2 demo last night
• The Wii Internet Channel: Google Reader and your MP3s!
• I want a Wii!
• If all web-comments were read like this!
• Would Monster Hunter Tri work as a Tabletop Roleplaying game?

I was moaning about the fact that there isn’t a demo Dragon Age (1) so I could check if it played well on my new laptop. I haven’t really done much PC gaming in years, but I was tempted to try out Dragon Age. Sadly I can’t try it without paying for it so nothing’s happened on that front.

But Dragon Age II demo was released a few days ago and I downloaded last night. I figure it’d be a good test of my new laptop and I good way to see if I might like the original.

So two things. First it does look like a fun game and it promises a big story to get your teeth into. I like the tactical element, pausing to assign commands, trying to use magic and attacks intelligently, etc. but found the camera control a bit wonky in play, probably due to using the keyboard.

Monster Hunter Tri on the Wii uses the same sort of control, where you can control the camera position independent of your character’s actions. Using a gamepad, the control is very fluid and powerful, allowing you to run around a battle, focusing on the big beast you’re taking down. I didn’t get the same flow while playing DA2 demo at all. I also missed the ability to tilt the camera up or down. Maybe I missed what keys to use to do that.

But I think that’s part of my second thing. My laptop is already lower end of the spec to play DA2 at it’s fullest. I had tone down the resolution, detail, etc. to get it flowing nicely, but even then I miss the smoothness I got with playing MHT on the Wii. To be fair, I didn’t buy my laptop to play games. I bought it to use the internet, write, code, watch videos, carry around, and occasionally use for work. In those departments it works great, it’s not a games laptop. So what did I expect?

Well I’m not going to fork out that much money for a high spec gaming PC or laptop that’s already old within a month. I think that’s what put me off PC games so long ago. The big graphic intensive games require newer and newer PC specs and I stopped playing that game years ago.

So yea, DA2 looks like a fun game I’d probably enjoy. But I probably won’t get it (unless I somehow win an XBox or it comes out on the Wii, both unlikely).

Related Posts:

• My initial impressions on the Nintendo’s 3DS
• $29.99 does not equal €29.99, Steam
• Would Monster Hunter Tri work as a Tabletop Roleplaying game?
• I’d go mad for an iPad with but one change!
• A Frustrating Day

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.

Like what excites me in tabletop gaming, it’s the experience I’m after when I play a computer game, be that pure fun or a thrilling adventure. One of the first games I got for the Wii was Resident Evil 4 (I never played any of the others in the series) and the first few hours of play were great. A lovely creepy, mysterious and thrilling experience. I’m not sure how much I’ve done of it, but it’s gotten to the point that the experience has worn off and I’m just playing a game; managing ammo, expecting the ridiculous and impossible twists, the pointless searching of tunnels and out-of-place puzzles. I think this is because I have the time/attention-span of a casual player but the desires of a hardcore player. I don’t play long enough that the experience carries me most of the way. (Zelda has done the same to me, I can’t believe after getting the armour together I have to go explore yet another nine dungeons or something.)

We've watched it twice, once in 2D and once in 3D. The 3D doesn't add much. Still loved it, loads of gamer references

Watching How to Train a Dragon again, the final battle between the Vikings and the great dragon, just reminded me of the trailers and screenshots of Monster Hunter Tri, and it struck me. MHT has a wonderful simple premise. One that would work just as easily as a quick game or a much larger roleplaying experience. Though I’m not interested in computer gaming roleplaying (this isn’t a slight against WOW players or anything, I’m just not interested in it), it occurred to me that it’d make a great premise for a tabletop roleplaying game.

My big chip about tabletop RPG fantasy games is that they are often highly detailed evolved worlds. Lots of rich source to explore when you play. A lot of people love this I know, but I guess I’m a little different. This, to a degree, puts me off because it presents a learning curve to the world. To make a proper character to roleplay means you should, at the least, have a good idea of the world you’re creating the character for. A detailed fantasy RPG makes me feel I should have a strong knowledge of the world before play and, quite often, you have tons of choice. And when you have too much choice, you have no choice, in a way. I could pick up a Lord of the Rings RPG because I’m a fan of the books, but Exalted wears me down. Riddle of Steel has a great combat mechanic, which makes it stand out, but the setting is detailed and dense, putting me off the setting part.

But that’s why I think MHT is fascinating. It doesn’t offer a fantasy world. It offers a premise. You are a hunter of monsters. You have seven (I think) different types of weapons to specialise in (compared to pages of detailed descriptions of medieval-inspired weapons for example). But by using different materials, buying charms, etc. you can make these weapons quite unique. The game starts you in a village, and gets you to hunt different types of monsters (and doing some grinding too) and you learn about the monsters in play. You don’t start with a big list, you build your knowledge via experience. You don’t have tons of choice, you are a hunter and you have several weapon-types to specialise in, but it does offer quite a range of customisation the more you play. (Which was one of the things that attracted me to the game, being able to create a fairly unique character.)

If you had a decent tabletop RPG mechanic for combat fighting the monsters, you could adopt a similar premise. Start small, add bits to the world (new monsters, towns, NPCs) as the players get better. Having such a simple premise would make it easy to layer on top bigger narratives as the players get more confident and attached to the world, suggesting hints of a possible invasion or conspiracies of a far away empire, etc.

Great old school RPG and I had a great character, a young teenager trying to become a warrior... which he did and became scary good!

My GM has gotten himself an job (good for him) and is now travelling the world, so we haven’t gotten to finish our “The Enemy Within” campaign, set in the Warhammer Fantasy world (1st Edition mind you so “old school”). This campaign worked because all of the players rolled up characters instead of creating them. Our initial choices were made by the dice. It allowed us to create basic characters with not that much pre-existing knowledge of the world. The campaign then set us off with our group direction and carried us around the world to the point we learned the world in play.

Anything that gets in the way of experience, takes from the whole thing. Just as with writing, anything that jars the reader from work is bad. You don’t want your reader to be correcting your grammar or laughing when they shouldn’t be at the way one of your character’s talk, how will they take anything else seriously? The same goes for roleplaying books and playing them. And for me the “burden” of a huge setting that I can’t relate it to or hang it on something is really off-putting. Warhammer fantasy is sort like a European medieval/renaissance alternative history (with Elves and Halflings) and it does it well. There’s my hook. Post-apocalyptic settings are also based on the modern world but imagined after the big bomb. Modern day games, such as urban fantasy concepts (like most of White’ Wolf’s World Of Darkness games), I can grok too.

The same also applies to far future based worlds, where the technology and science are so far advanced, they are incomprehensible as anything other than magic. Though I sometimes feel that there is something more interesting in such settings, because they ask the question, what’s going to happen to humanity? But then you’re playing, not a human, or at least not a modern human, but someone or thing so advanced that they are effectively alien.

And that’s the other thing that bugs me some what about fantasy worlds. They often shoe-horn in modern perspectives in very different worlds. Sometimes this can work when the setting doesn’t take itself too seriously, or it’s close enough to the readers world that its easy to get. But it can sometimes lead to claims or appearance of “cultural misappropriation” or it can be used by players to hide anti-game decisions (“that’s what a follower of X would do!”). So personally I prefer human or close-enough to human type characters. I’m not saying you can’t have a game or play a game where characters are significantly different, but there is a point when a human becomes too alien to play convincingly or to have a good experience with as a player, unless it’s down simply for kicks.

In Lost Heroes I make an explicit ruling on this. I say something like: “you can play a human that can turn into a dragon, but you can’t play a dragon that turns into a human.” The difference is subtle.

Okay, this post has become a lot longer than I intended. Must stop rambling. All really to say I think the premise of MHT would make an interesting tabletop RPG game.

Related Posts:

• My initial impressions on the Nintendo’s 3DS
• Just to balance out my previously slightly depressing post about tabletop gaming…
• My first RPG map
• The RPG Blog Alliance
• Is it really coming to the end of Table top roleplaying?

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 could live with all those things, with but one change. The price.

Man I wouldn’t pay more than 200 euros (that’s about 270 US dollars at current conversion rates) for a device like the iPad. Sure I could imagine forking out 300-400 euros perhaps for the top of range one with the 3G feature. I bought a Wii for more than 200, but then I was excited about the Wii and I bought in full knowledge I was paying more than the value that I would get out of it. (Even the Wii does flash, mostly). So I get the fan-boy lust for the iPad, honestly I do.

On the other hand, I forked over quite a lot of money for my laptop when I bought it. Much more than I could really afford at the time. That laptop is now 10 years old and I’m still using it every day to do the internet-thing, write and program and create. It’s starting to show it’s age these days, but it’s still got life in it. I got my value out of it, I’m still getting my value out of it. I’m really not sure the iPad would give me that much value. I couldn’t use it to write. I couldn’t use it to program. I could use it to read the internet, but not interact with the internet as freely as a I do with my laptop (as in I can consume the internet, but not necessarily add to the internet, due to the lack of a decent form of input).

Perhaps, truthfully, I’m just a little bit saddened to hear that the Microsoft Courier device is dead. The signs where there from the beginning though that it was just vaporware, yet I ignored them all, in the hope that the device would be made, I was that excited about its concepts. I’d probably pay more quite a bit more than the top-of-the-range iPad costs to get it.

I heard about the Courier before I heard about the iPad and really I only heard/cared about the iPad because the Courier demo shots and videos were being compared to the then rumour-only “iTablet”. I did hope that Apple, being Apple, would blow Courier concept out of the water with their iPad because the Microsoft Courier made me think that tablet PCs could indeed be the future, the perfect digital companion device. The fact that it was able to handle input via fingers and pen-based so I could get the accuracy of using a pen for writing notes and drawing and it’s model for working (clipping images from webpages and ebooks into “infinite journals” for example) would argument and even replace stuff I do using paper. I use printouts with written notes and paper notebooks with lots of diagrams in my work and I’m not a fancy shoe designer (I’m a programmer). The Courier would be able to handle all that digitally for me and even add more value to it. The iPad would not, in anyway, add value to the things I already do. Sure it might be useful as an entertainment device, but I want a little more I guess. With the Courier, I could have dropped my sketchbook and pens, my large notebook and wads of paper-based stuff and even my DSi and left them out of my “man-bag” that I take everywhere. The iPad would be in addition to the stuff in my bag. It might replace my DSi (I haven’t “played” an iPad yet). But then I can slip my DSi in my pocket when I don’t want to take my bag somewhere.

Or perhaps to put it another way, I bought my Wii because it was cool. It was exciting. Even though, Nintendo operate their own version of the walled-garden and won’t allow games on it that they don’t agree with and as a father and working full time, I knew I wouldn’t have the time to get the real value of it. I have tons of games like Zelda and Resident Evil for it now but none yet that I’ve finished to the end. I have to make time in my precious spare/downtime to use the Wii, so I better enjoy it. The iPad feels like a device, I’d have to make time to use as it has been hyped as a “new category of consumer devices” and I saw one review describe it as “an itch you didn’t know you needed to scratch”. Do I really want to pay so much for another something to consume my time without producing anything?

That’s just my feeling of course, you are free to disagree with me. But personally, I think I’ll have to wait a while until tablet devices really make me excited again.

Related Posts:

• A Frustrating Day
• Timelessness
• I think I found the perfect tablet device for me, just hope it’s not vapourware
• I failed at NaNoWriMo 2011, but it isn’t all bad
• My initial impressions on the Nintendo’s 3DS

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.

Related Posts:

• The Wii Internet Channel: Google Reader and your MP3s!
• My initial impressions on the Nintendo’s 3DS
• Would Monster Hunter Tri work as a Tabletop Roleplaying game?
• I’d go mad for an iPad with but one change!
• Damage Report So Far: Another Family, Another Wii

Okay, this week I have a lot to write about!

My plan was to first write a entry about why I am now using Google Reader even though I had previously decided not to. But then, during last week, I saw this: Google Reader has been optimised for the Wii!

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…

Related Posts:

• My initial impressions on the Nintendo’s 3DS
• Orb, its been great, but I’ve met someone else… its name is TVersity!
• Why I’m not ready to move to Google Reader yet…
• Damage Report So Far: Another Family, Another Wii
• I want a Wii!

So on Saturday while in Dublin City Centre, I wandered by Smyths. Popped in. Walked out with a Wii.

They actually had about four of them on the shelves. My first question to the clerk was, “are they real Wiis?” He laughed. Apparently they are all pre-orders that had not been collected. The clerk claimed they were probably the last ones available in the country. He’s probably right.

Of course, being a dad with a six month pregnant wife, I didn’t really get to play with the Wii till that evening. I was a little bothered that the scart out had to be plugged directly into the TV. I had hoped to chain the input into the DVD player. Our DVD player is chained into the Sky+ box and when you hit power on the DVD player the TV automatically changes to the scart input. This is a tiny nuisance, it just means, if I want to play with the Wii, I have to plug out the Sky+ box and plug in the Wii. There is also a surprising amount of cables too. I have no problem plugging things in and getting electrical equipment set up, but I’d imagine less geeky might get confused about where the IR sensor was meant to go.

Once I had it up and running, I tried to set up the wireless connection. I love my devices communicating and talking to each other. It’s the IT in me. My connection initially seemed a bit hit and miss (problems with my wireless router more so than the Wii) and it took two tries to do a system update. Phew, thats over but it’s nearly a good half hour later.

But that’s when the fun start. You can create little caricature of yourself called a “Mii”. I create one of myself and my daughter. Apparently they can travel to other Wiis but seeing as I have no friends and especially no friends with Wiis, that wasn’t going to happen. You need to exchange Friend codes or something. The Miis are great because they end up being used in games. (More on this in a moment).

Then I downloaded stuff: the Internet Channel (an Opera browser) and Everyone Votes Channel. Both free. There is also the preloaded News Channel (which is okay) and the Weather Channel (I’ll go with Met Éirean instead). They have a games from previous consoles like Mario Kart 64 that you can download. It was so nostalgic to just read through games from the Sega Megadrive and SNES (two consoles I owned as a kid): Altered Beast, The Legend of Zelda, etc. I had played quite a number of the games listed. Need to purchase Wii points though to get any (while the Internet and Everyone Votes Channels were free). Haven’t done this yet, I have a Nintendo “VIP” account that I’d like to use but I’ve forgotten my password and the “forgot password” form doesn’t work on the website. I have a number of “Bonus points” from the Nintendo DS Lite games, I don’t know if I can convert these into Wii points. That would be cool.

As for the Internet Channel, I have a Internet Browser for the Nintendo DS Lite and I used it to quickly check emails and read my feeds on Bloglines. However I find the experience a bit trying on the Wii. The webpage is displayed with a fixed width and you can zoom and scroll around. But when your trying to read your Gmail, it gets annoying that you can’t see all the text from the first line with out waving the remote to the left. Often you end up moving too far left and having to swing back to read the next line. I should probably try the mobile version of Gmail, but you can’t reply or compose emails with that.

So you know a good hour later, I actually decide to try playing the game that came with it. My wife, Sophie, decides to have a look in at it. She had been hearing me giggle and laugh for the last while… and that was just me configuring the box.

There is an initially, “I feel silly doing this” but once your over that your swinging and jumping all over the place. So far, we’ve hit both lamps, whacked the lights in the ceiling, banged the coffee table and the door handle. No damage to ourselves yet. I got Wii Sports with it. Great fun. The Tennis and Boxing I enjoy the most, though the box is a bit unresponsive with the punches and jabs. You use your Miis as your character on screen with other Miis on your console appearing in the background or as additional characters. In the baseball this is great where your team then is composed of your Miis. It’s fun shouting “Go Alice!” (my daughter) when she’s chasing the ball. The trick with the Wii Sports is that it’s fun in groups and for everyone. Playing bowling with my wife, even with the odd swing to the left the ball always seems to take, is a laugh. My six month pregnant wife, swing the remote around whacking the door a good one is even funnier.

On the Sunday morning, I showed it to Alice. She loved the little Miis, recognising herself, “Daddy” and “Maman”. I tried to show her Wii Sports Tennis. She got the idea immediately that the little Mii on screen was under her control. But she wasn’t getting the finesse down to actually hit the ball. She’d serve and swing after the ball had come down again. Initially Sophie, didn’t like the idea of Alice playing but I later found her flicking through the Argos catalogue for games that Alice might better enjoy.

I must admit though, after 30 minutes of playing Wii Sports by myself last night, I wanted a game a little more engaging. Wii Sports is great and I will get around to downloading at least Mariokart too. But I want something more engrossing (but not too engrossing) that takes advantage of the fun-ness of the controller. I guess I better do some research on what’s out there.

Conclusion? Bloodly good fun.

Update #1: Solved my little annoying dilema. I was trying to chain the Wii through my DVD player and then the Sky+ box so I wouldn’t need to plug in a cable to use the Wii. It wouldn’t work. On investigation, I found my DVD player was the culprit. It didn’t seem to pass the Wii signal to the TV. But then I was messing around in the settings for the Wii and under “TV Type”, you can set three frequencies. 50Hz (default), 60Hz and HDTV. So I tried setting at 60Hz and, magically the DVD player now passes the signal!

Related Posts:

• My initial impressions on the Nintendo’s 3DS
• The Wii Internet Channel: Google Reader and your MP3s!
• I want a Wii!
• Would Monster Hunter Tri work as a Tabletop Roleplaying game?
• I’d go mad for an iPad with but one change!

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.

Related Posts:

• My initial impressions on the Nintendo’s 3DS
• The Wii Internet Channel: Google Reader and your MP3s!
• Damage Report So Far: Another Family, Another Wii
• This video will change you forever!
• If all web-comments were read like this!