malvasia bianca

It turns out that getting to my local Target at 6am wasn’t good enough to get me a Wii. Sigh. I guess I’ll get a copy of Bully to tide myself over until I manage to find one.

I finished Okami at the end of last month. This left me with a three week gap to fill before the Wii release; what to do? I’d been thinking about Lego Star Wars II, but, for whatever reason, that wasn’t grabbing me at the moment. FFXII was tempting, but I’ve been thoroughly annoyed by Final […]

Some random comments, after four weeks of Netflix membership: One movie at a time works if you’re sure you don’t want to watch more than one movie a week, and if you don’t mind missing occasional weeks due to shipping vagaries. Neither of those proved to be the case for us, so we’ve switched to […]

Okami is an amazing game. In some sense, it’s quite derivative: it’s working well within the Zelda genre (complete with sonic homages to its predecessor), so it’s not as novel as some recent games, but there’s more than enough new presentation in the game to keep me happy, combined with a thorough rethinking and improvement […]

I would seem to be in a quiet mood these days. Not feeling much like blogging, not feeling much like programming at home. Maybe because I’ve been programming a fair amount at work; I was worried that, with the new larger group, I’d have almost no programming time, but now that things have settled down […]

As a Nintendo fanboy, I must of course comment on the Wii launch news. Packing in Wii Sports makes sense for their market-broadening strategy; wouldn’t it have helped if they could have included a second wiimote, though? The controller prices are exorbitant. I wish I didn’t have to wait until November 19th. The news that […]

Having added extra memory to my Mac (1.5GB, instead of .5GB), and having finished the other games I was in the middle of, I went out and bought a copy of Civilization 4 on the Saturday of labor day weekend. I opened the box, gazed with pleasure upon the technology tree diagram, popped it in, […]

Both DDR players are pretty amazing. But I really love the first one. Go creative commons. Hot library smut. I think my favorite is the Hague. Gender and pitch. (The course sounds cool, too.) I am speechless.

I would not be the person I am today were it not for Mario. At some point in grad school, a friend of mine gave me an NES (during the mid 1990’s; I was a bit behind the times), and the original Super Mario Bros. and the third in the series completely blew me away, […]

(Yes, I know that none of my readers care about this. Sorry.) Two recent news items: In the last week of August, the top 10 bestselling games in Japan were all for the DS. I can’t remember ever seeing the top 10 bestsellers all being for a single system. Sony now says that they’ll only […]

I used to like first-person shooters – in the distant past, I seem to recall having enjoyed Doom, Marathon, System Shock, Dark Forces, and GoldenEye, for example. The last few times I’ve played FPS’s, though, they really haven’t done much for me. I’m not sure why the big change – part is probably that I […]

Project X: Cup Noodle clearly has to go on today’s one-click list. Jackson Pollock. I would seem to be getting into interactive flash sites. House of dominoes. The Foundation replacement saga. Quite a storefront. Our money is badly designed (and getting worse). Nice manhole cover, too. A much longer talk than I usually tolerate on […]

Guitar Hero is a music game that comes with a guitar-shaped controller. There are five “fret buttons” on the neck, and a strum button on the body. (It’s somewhat inconsistent on the model it uses – sometimes it pretends to be a guitar with a single string and five frets, and sometimes it pretends to […]

My first computer was an Apple ][+. I can’t remember exactly when we got it; some time around fifth grade (1982), I suppose. I used it through the time I graduated from high school (1989); I got a Mac (SE/30, woo-hoo!) when I went to college. I have very fond memories of (among other things) […]

I’m mostly done with Brain Age now: I’ve unlocked everything, and while I think I’ll finish all the sudoku and might still do a few more rounds of some of the other exercises, I’m starting to get bored of it. (But I still want to try to get 12 on Low to High, or get […]

God of War is a quite well done beat-em-up. Basically, you wander through a mostly linear, pseudo-ancient-Greek world, beating the crap out of tons of monsters that appear in your past, occasionally taking a break to either solve a bit of a puzzle or fight a boss monster. I’m not sure that there are any […]

I think I made the right decision to give up playing go: I just don’t want to spend one evening a week doing that. But I was just looking at a picture of a game in Hikaru No Go (nine moves into the Ota vs. Akira game), and memories came back. It can be a […]

This will not, I think, be the most useful discussion of Knights of the Old Republic, simply because I can’t help but viewing the game through the lens of Bioware’s latest, which had the benefit of a couple more years of experience. With that warning in place: Fun game. I kind of nibbled at the […]

It would seem to be E3 time again; hmm. I suppose the world does not need another blogger talking about it, but I have nothing better to do. Besides, I never got around to talking about the name “Wii”. Which is a stupid name. I know they’re trying a blue ocean strategy, I think that’s […]

Sorry I’ve been so quiet over the last month or so. One reason is that I’ve been spending a fair amount of time playing Knights of the Old Republic. It’s not that I was blown away by it: I was just enjoying it enough to want to finish it while realizing it was a long […]