FlashApe

Inspired by Justin-Everett Church’s post about his Wii, here’s my wii number so you can add me as a friend: 2040 6239 3570 4987.

Picked myself up a new Nintendo Wii this weekend. Got in line at Fry’s at about 8:30 am sunday, was the 26th person in line.  The Fry’s employee came out to hand out vouchers for the system and had exactly…26!! So I did a little happy dance and went in and picked up my Wii bundle, which was the console and 5 games: Madden 07, Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz, Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam, Rampage Total Destruction, and GT Pro Series (which comes with a steering wheel that you insert your controller into). This was the only way you could get a Wii at fry’s, you couldn’t get just the console.  Every Wii console also comes bundled with Wii Sports.
If you haven’t heard too much about the Wii, one of the most interesting new features of the system is it’s motion-sensitve controllers (the ‘wiimote’ and the nunchuk).  Most of the games on Wii are now gesture based, meaning that you no longer just sit there and press buttons, you actually have to move your controllers around, in an action similar to what’s going on in the game, to get results.  For instance, in Wii Sport’s there is a Boxing game.  In order to throw punches, you have to jab the controllers towards the screen.  In bowling, you need to give it the underhand bowling motion and release the ball at the perfect time…release too late and you’ll throw the ball down the lane, too early and you’ll jam the ball into the lane.  The best part with the controllers is, for years people have been throwing ‘body english’ into their button-and-joystick based controllers trying to affect the game with no results…now, all that body english counts!
I started off with some Super Monkey Ball, since that is an old favorite.  There’s LOTs of mini games in this one, and all of them are specifically designed for the wii’s motion-based controllers.  Most of the games just use the main Wii remote, though a few use the nunchuk controller as well.  There is a little learning curve to get used to the new controllers, but there are simple on-screen instructions to guide you so you can pick it up pretty quickly.  Overall I loved it, it had the charm of the orinial monkey ball games with the coolness of the new motion controller system.

After that I hit up GT Pro Series to try out the steering wheel add-on.  It took a little bit to figure out that the controller is really sensitve to the movements.  That actuallly made the driving seem a little more realistic to me.  Once you get that part down though, the game gets pretty easy, and that’s about it for that one.

Wii Sports was next. A collection made up of baseball, bowling, boxing, gold, and tennis games, this one was an instant hit, and a great display of the use of the motion-based controllers.  All of the games have ‘training’ to walk you through the learning process, but they did a good job of making the training fun an easy so you still feel like you’re playing a game anyway.  I actually had some trouble with the boxing, I couldn’t get the jab working properly on a consistent basis.  My wife nailed it pretty easily though, so it’s probably me being retarded.

Speaking of the wife, she is another big reason I decided to go for the Wii over the Playstation 3.   Nintendo always seems to have the more ‘family-oriented’ games in it’s selection, or at least games with less of a ‘hardcore’ feel to it.  She isn’t really a ‘gamer’ but she will play some here and there.  In order for me to get my game on, it helps tremendously if it’s something that she is into as well.  Well, she is prtty enamored with the new system and gameplay…so guys, if getting your women into gaming is an issue as well, go for the Wii.

Overall I’m very happy so far with the Wii (and I didn’t even mention Mii’s…characters you can build that will live in your system, your remote, or travel to other systems).  Today is the big day with Madden, I can’t way to try out actually throwing the football in a video game.  I’ll post an update aftwards.

Giving the adsense thing a little trial run, don’t really expect much though.  If anyone has some good pointers/tips to leave that would be appreciated.

Just wanted to post a quick reminder about actionscriptclasses.com.  It’s slowly growing, and I’ve actually found a lot of use for it so far.  Basically it’s a place to find quick links to classes on other other people’s blogs/sites.  There’s some interesting classes I would have never even imagined existed.  Also, anyone can go register and post to share their own classes if they wish.

Been reading up on the big Tamarin announcement.  Most of what I can make of it sound spretty cool, but the part of me is a little frightened that we may see apps out there that could work only in mozilla browsers?  I hope I’m wrong on that, because we’ve come a long way from a place where people developed only for one browser.