Lots of big happenings lately. I picked up Spore (both the full game and the DS version) last week on vacation, I bought Rock Band 2 on Sunday, and iPhone OS 2.1 released on Friday. Oh, and I reformatted my Mac Pro.
I'm not entirely sure I'm prepared to discuss Spore or RB2 yet. Spore is surprisingly uneven. I enjoyed the "Creature" stage quite a bit, but that's only one of the five stages. The cell version was basically a flOw knockoff, although it did have a very limited creature editor. The Tribal and Civilization stages were both shallow and frankly annoying. The Space stage ... well it's really cool but it's also very repetitive. The combat is clunky and poorly done - the key bit seems to get the AI ships in your fleet because they are vastly more effective than the weapons I have so far. I haven't made up my mind about the Space stage but I'm surprised that I have as many issues with it as I have so far.
As for Rock Band 2, it seems trickier than the first game. The horizontal lines are further spaced out than they are on RB1 and I've seen notes come in between the lines now, even on DLC tracks that I've played on RB1 before. As a consequence I think the timing is tighter than it used to be. I had to drop back to medium difficulty to make it through intro-difficulty songs. I think I like the new layout more but I've only played an hour or so and that was pretty much entirely taken up with going "Whoah! This shouldn't be that difficult!"
2.1 for the iPhone so far seems brilliant - maybe even what 2.0 should have been. Icon placement is now permanent, I installed an app upgrade over the phone without iTunes getting all upset later, and backups are much faster. I can tell the cellular radio is doing something different because when it's plugged into my kitchen speakers I can hear the radio noise. It uses the radio much more often with 2.1 than it did on 2.x. Which raises the question what the battery life is like, but I'm not sure about that.
Read moreOh hi there!
Maybe I should dash off a quick missive to my neglected blog during my jetsetting ways. It's vacation time! Last weekend we flew up to Seattle for PAX. We came back on Monday and I had just enough time to A) write a silly little iPhone app I wanted for my next vacation and B) develop and mostly recover from some mild con-flu thingie. Tomorrow morning at stupid o'clock I'm off to the east coast for yet another Big Honkin' Road Trip with some friends.
PAX was awesome as it always is. We got the new MC Frontalot album which doesn't even get released until November, got to see Jonathan Coulton and Freezepop play, saw the west coast premiere of Nerdcore Rising and generally hung out. We also managed to go check out the Experience Music Project (very meh) and the Science Fiction Hall of Fame (sadly also sort of meh).
We also flew Virgin America, which truthfully I didn't care for. The seats were cramped. Jetblue has recently done this thing where you can pay extra (like $30 or so) for "Extra Leg Room" seating and that's much nicer than Virgin. They both have the screen that I don't use (do you have any idea how many video playback devices I carry for even a two hour flight? I come up with four. It's ridiculous.) and Virgin's extra interactivity seems to amount to Doom and a bunch of crappy Linux games. It was cheap and I guess it was nicer than Southwest (but not much - really I care about two things in an airline: being on time, and given me enough room to actually sit without hunching my shoulders. I felt like the VA seats were even MORE cramped than normal.) and Jetblue doesn't fly to Seattle from here. But I was surprised after all the internet gushing over Virgin Air. I'm happy to be flying Jetblue tomorrow instead of Virgin. The Virgin first class seats looked nice, but DUH! everybody's first class looks nice.
Read moreFinally!
Shares of TiVo jumped Wednesday after the San Jose company said it will launch a new high-definition digital video recorder under an extended agreement with DirecTV Group, reigniting a once-cooling relationship.- from TiVo, DirecTV to offer new HD DVR to customers About time. Actually, it's about two years late, since the new model won't be available until "mid to late 2009". But it is pretty good timing for upgrading my leased HR20.
Lebowski Fest in SF
Huh. The Lebowski Fest is coming to San Francisco. I'm out of town that weekend otherwise I'd think about going. Might be fun, in a kitschy sort of way.
Read moreA week with Wii Fit
I feel like I should talk about the results of having Wii Fit for a week. What complicates it is that I'm having back problems, and I don't think it's due to Wii Fit (in fact I think it's helping), but I can't rule it out.
Here's my basic capsule summation of the Wii Fit: I think it is fun and I think it's a great addition to an existing fitness regimen. If you aren't exercising I think trying to get a real workout out of the Wii Fit is just going to be frustrating.
In both my case and Karin's we already have exercises that we're doing, so the Wii Fit is mainly for tracking and for a little variety in exercises. There's also the yoga portion, which impresses me. I've never done any yoga study, although there's some overlap with tai chi in terms of the breathing exercises. I think the balance board really helps with yoga because the virtual trainer can tell when you're doing something wrong balance-wise. Eyetoy:Kinetic was much less effective, since it was trying to see you, as opposed to measuring weight shifts.
I was (well I still am) tracking my weight manually and updating a spreadsheet every month, but the Wii can give you daily feedback. That's sort of a double-edged sword and frankly I think they could have done better with some of the commentary. The truth is that a shift of a pound or so in a day may just be random fluctuations. They mention that but it will still express disapproval over a half pound gain, which could easily be just a few extra glasses of water over the last day. It's also a bit odd because it asks if you are wearing "light" or "heavy" clothing and it considers "light" clothing as 2 pounds. Well my sneakers are 2.5 pounds by themselves, so I have to use the "heavy" option, even if I'm wearing T-shirt and shorts. It does have a custom option as well, but that seems like a slight hassle to weigh everything. It also doesn't track completely accurately versus my digital scale. It does most days but I've had one day where the Wii said I lost weight and the scale said I gained. Maybe my T-shirt that day was extra light, I dunno. It also uses Body Mass Index (BMI) which I gather can be somewhat inaccurate. According to it I should be trying to lose almost half of my body weight, which can't be that healthy. I'm overweight sure, but I don't know if a doctor would sign off on me losing over 100 pounds. I suppose I could go ask one, but who wants to do that?
The biggest problem with Wii Fit is that there's no real exercise program. If you do some exercises it will suggest they pair well with another exercise, but they don't even tell you where to find that other exercise (So far I've only seen like three of those and they were always pairing a yoga exercise with a "strength exercise". I suspect that's the case because the other categories are aerobic and the balance games.) There's certainly nothing you can do that amounts to "give me a half hour workout". For instance I'd like to gently stretch this back muscle that's giving me grief, but I just have to pick and choose exercises based on overall muscle groups, or based on prior experience. The aerobic exercises seem particularly fruitless because you only get a couple of minutes of exercise and then you're back to the menu to pick something else. Getting an actual elevated heart rate for a significant period of time would either be really difficult or a real danger sign of poor physical condition.
The balance games are fun, but there's an odd neither fish-nor-fowl problem here as well. You can't say "OK we're going to have three people take turns on the Slalom and compare the scores". You have to just keep hitting retry and comparing the scores yourself. It tracks high scores for Karin and I, but that doesn't work if we were wanting to play at the same time.
It does seem spot on in balance analysis. I was pretty close to centered left-to-right when I starting using it, but I really stood with my weight back on my heels. At first I thought I was standing on the board wrong, but over the last few days I've realized it's correct and that I'm a little more comfortable if I consciously shift forward more. I'm not convinced there's a real health benefit from that, but it's certainly interesting to know.
The final analysis is this: I haven't really been losing any weight this year, in fact I went up a little bit (around 2 pounds) over the holidays and I've held pretty firmly at that mark for about 8 months now. The Wii Fit sees a slight downward trend over the last week and my manual chart seems to agree. I think adding half an hour or so of Wii Fit work has A ) gotten to some muscle groups that I wasn't exercising, and B ) been the final kick to my metabolism that may actually trigger more weight loss. At least I hope so :-)
As a peripheral the Balance Board is certainly neat. I'm not sure how many really good games will actually use it. While the Fit is selling out in the US, I'm not sure how many units that really amounts to. I sort of doubt it's really enough to really lure 3rd party developers to do really good work for the board. I'm know there's been at least one other game that uses it (We Ski) and there are a couple coming up that do. But I suspect it's going to be a lot of half-assed "you can play like this if you want to" implementations where some programmer spent a week on it right before alpha.
I guess at the end of the day I'd love to see a Mario game that used the board, but I'm not sure if that will happen.
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