Category: Tech

New Year’s Resolution?

February 2, 2013

When I returned from Australia, for some reason I started becoming very aware of the piles of stuff that filled my house. Books to be read. Games to be played. Media to be consumed.

When I was young there was so much I wanted but couldn’t have. Now I can have it all, but – especially in the last year – have been accumulating it faster than I can enjoy it. The reasons are varied (work, World of Warcraft, age), but I’ve never purchased anything I didn’t really want to read, watch or play and, by Jove, it was time to do just that!

So, my first ever (?) New Years resolution: Consume more media!

How much am I talking about here? I will preface by saying we all have little ‘to read’, ‘to watch’ and (some of us) ‘to play’ piles. For instance, I know for a fact quite a few of you – SFL, AW, BS – certainly do. But mine had gotten quite large. As in very large. And it’s time to climb them.

I’ll revisit this resolution at the end of this year, but here’s the scope of what I’m tackling. All of this just describes what is in the house right now, not anything I expect to obtain in the next few weeks or months…

Books

That’s the English version of Monster Hunter Illustrations, which came out over a year ago and is jam-packed with all sorts of fascinating MH art. It’s on my pile with two additional japanese MH books including the sequel (!) and a different art book on TCG art. These share a shelf with no less than four additional art books (including Genzoman, Queen’s Blade and the recently released Hyrule Historia Zelda art book). I could probably look through all these in a long afternoon.

But that’s hardly all. There are some 30+ volumes of manga (Bleach, Bakuman amongst others), 16 novels (including some purchased five years ago when a local bookstore went out of business), 2 academic texts (one, on cryptozoology, is almost 800 pages long), about 50 comics and 20 odd magazines. This list doesn’t even include the approximately 100+ gamebooks from a collection of over 200 that I haven’t played through.

How much of this can I read in one year?

Movies and TV

I got the above for Christmas. It’s the long-awaited (by me, for one) second full Ultraman series finally translated into English. And it’s 19 hours long. It sits on a shelf right now next to DVD collections of all 4 series of Lexx (over 40 hours in total) and the first three seasons of the Keroro Gunso TV anime (20+ hours). Add to this list 22 more anime DVDs or Blu-Rays adding to more than 35 hours (including the full series of Claymore) and about another 28 hours of UK TV series collections and 30 more hours of (sometimes untranslated) Japanese or Korean series and I start to wonder realistically how we could watch all this in a single year? I haven’t even considered the movies…

Games

I currently have, unplayed and in most cases still shrinkwrapped:
– 8 PS3 games (including Hyperdimension Neptunia 2 and Resonance Of Fate)
– 6 Nintendo DS games (including Pokemon Conquest and Shepherd’s Crossing 2)
– 17 (!) PSP games, almost all RPGs, many of which look great (including God Eater Burst and Ragnarok Tactics)
– 11 3DS games, many of which were Christmas gifts (including Theatrythym Final Fantasy and Paper Mario Sticker Star)

That’s 42 games on my ‘to play’ list. With some embarrassment I’ll reveal I have already preordered about 6 more online, and yet right now much of my gaming time is spent playing Warcraft. I think I’ll have to be more disciplined 🙂

Will I succeed? Can I possibly consume all this media before getting overrun? Also, will I stop buying more until what I have has been enjoyed? I’ll revisit this post at the end of the year, and it will be interesting to see how effective my resolution has been!

Wii U

January 26, 2013

I got one of these for Christmas:

It’s the new Nintendo console hardware, and that giant tablet thing is the controller. I set it up last weekend, have played it for a while, and here are my thoughts.

Firstly, the tablet controller (the ‘gamepad’) is amazing. I was absolutely not expecting the screen to be as responsive or as high resolution as it is, and although massive the controller feels very comfortable in your hands. There is no discernible lag between what happens on the screen and the controller, which is important since you can essentially remove the TV from the equation and play (some) games simply using the controller screen. The Wii U also supports other controllers, including the old Wii motes and assorted other devices for the Wii (such as the classic controller).

The hardware itself seems fine. Graphics are of course much better than the Wii, and it’s nice and small like the way, almost hidden away next to our TV since I sat it vertically. I very much liked that it uses the same cables as the Wii, so installation was simply unplugging the Wii and putting the Wii U in its place! Tragically, our non 1080p TV only has a single HDMI port so I had to connect this guy using the old Wii cables, however I was very surprised by the quality of the picture. Yet another reason to delay buying a new TV…

So the hardware and controllers are good, but what about the software? What about the Wii U experience?

Well if you’ve read anything about it you would have read about the excessive load times! They are terrible. Starting an ‘app’ or even switching menus can sometimes result in 20-30 second (no, I am not exaggerating) load times. This is obviously completely unacceptable and Nintendo knows this and is constantly saying new updates will fix it. Those fixes can’t come soon enough.

The system also seems sparse on included software. Only some of the ‘channels’ from the Wii are present (no news, weather, Nintendo channel, Mii contest channel, quiz channel etc) and some of those on the front page I will never use (such as Hulu or Amazon instant video, for which we use the PS3). There is a new message board called Miiverse though, which has forums dedicated to every game on the system and lets you hand write posts. In practice this turns into people drawing unbelievably good sketches on their gamepads and showing them off to the world. Impressive stuff!

As usual Nintendo has also flubbed the online component. There are user accounts, but it’s unclear as to whether they are system specific. There is certainly no online requirement, so I assume they are. This means nothing is ‘saved’ to be accessed from other Nintendo systems or even Wii U consoles (if yours breaks). Furthermore, there is no messaging or achievement system, and the silly friend list requirements of previous Nintendo systems seems to have returned. Nintendo is still at least five years behind when it comes to the social aspects of consoles.

I have precisely one game for the system, called Nintendoland. This is a collection of minigames designed to show off the features of the controller mostly. Although it’s fun enough, it’s not at all worth full price and should be a pack in for all versions of the system, not just the ‘deluxe package’ (which I have). There is only one other game out right now I am interested in (Super Mario Brothers) and this reveals the critical problem with the Wii U right now – a shocking lack of games.

In fact, looking ahead to games that have release dates within 6 months from now, only two pique my interest. That would be Pikmin 3:

And the god of games, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate (which can be played online from the Wii U):

That last game alone makes the system worth owning for those under its spell, but for the rest of the world… who can say?

Later this year the next XBox and Playstations will be unveiled. Nintendo has at least a year-long head start. Will they use it to their advantage? The hardware seems solid, but they really need to bring the games.

Rubber Duck

January 12, 2013

It was an early start yesterday, on the 6:41 am train from Broadmeadow to Sydney.

As with my previous three train trips, I saw only a single Kangaroo on the trip. Once again the glimpse was fleeting and I was unable to photograph it. Here’s an artists impression:

I was in Sydney early, and after dropping my stuff at Adams set out for the city. I had an inkling to hit the shops!

I did the usual places – Kinokuniya, QVB, Pitt Street – before heading to Darling Harbour. There was something there I had to see…

It’s a 3-storey tall inflatable duck art installation, which is floated in Darling Harbour for the Sydney Festival. I’m lovin it!

As I got closer to Darling Harbour I began to see signs advertising dugongs at Sydney Aquarium. I’d never seen a dugong, so decided it was worth a look.

The cost was $38, and the first few displays were decidedly underwhelming. I’d been to this aquarium several times before and feared it may have gone off a bit.

My fears were unjustified! The displays are now themed, and it was just that the first set – Australian river fishes – were just a bit drab. As I wandered through the next I was treated to a kelp forest, a sunken ship, a steampunk themed crab and lobster display and a remarkable ray tank:

And then, the dugongs! Seeing them float around happily almost brought a year to my eye 🙂

They have two, a male and female, who have been there for three years. They are two of the only six dugongs (a south pacific relative of the manatee) in captivity in the world. They eat 50 kg of lettuce each a day!

They are in one of the giant walk-through tanks at the aquarium, which are submerged under the water level of the Harbour.

It’s a very peaceful and special way to see the animals.

There is a mural painted on the walls of the ramp leading down to the bottom of the dugong tank. It details one aspect of man’s history with these beasts:

Sailors jump from a ship pursuing a lovely mermaid…

But mermaids don’t exist and it’s a dugong!

But then later on we discover there is a real mermaid after all 🙂

Fancy a real dugong? Well that would be difficult, but the shop sells the next best thing:

There wasn’t a price tag 🙂

Overall the aquarium was spectacular, and I’m very pleased I visited.

Changing tack a bit, the above is ‘Dark Escape 4D’, a new light gun shooter I played (for $4 a go!) The game is in 3D (you wear glasses) and has a moving seat, an air gun that blasts your face and even a pulse sensor in the gun handle that makes the gun fail if you panic! It *is* a scary game (you sit enclosed in a dark room), but it’s a bit slow for my taste.

I wandered over to The Star casino, where I would boggle at the variety of machines and how geared to Chinese Tourists they have become. $10 of my hard earned dollars went – in equal portions – into the paired games Ice Horse and Fire Horse, mostly because I was attracted by the pretty fantasy horses galloping through the videos 🙂

A bit later I visited an Uggs shop in which no employees seemed to speak English. Do you think Chinese tourists buy a lot of Uggs: