Video Game Christmas

Well, the entire family had a video game Christmas this year. I knocked off 3 games on my wishlist – Elite Beat Agents, Clubhouse Games, and Cooking Mama. My wife got the latest DDR game for the PS2. And each of my boys got at least one or two games as well.

But, the biggest item was the Wii that I managed to pickup on Friday at the local Wal-Mart. Normally, I try to avoid Wal-Mart, but for last minute shopping, you sometimes have to do things you wouldn’t normally do. Amazingly enough, they had not one but two Wiis in the display case. While I was standing there looking at them, I heard one of the associates talking to someone on the phone telling them that they had two of them, but they wouldn’t hold them. I knew what I had to do :)

Dec 25, 2006 Read More »

Installing Windows XP with an Upgrade disc on a Mac mini

Today’s Windows Tip Of The Day™ is regarding installing XP with an upgrade disc on the Mac mini under Boot Camp. Officially, Apple says that you can’t do this – and with good reason. None of the Intel Macs have an eject button for the CD/DVD drive on the front of the machine. Only the eject button on the keyboard. Since that button doesn’t work from the XP installer, when you get to the screen where it asks for your previous version of Windows (in my case, an old copy of Windows 95 – see, it’s still useful :) ), you have no way of ejecting the disc. Until now…

Dec 24, 2006 Read More »

RetroBlast

I don’t normally do this, but for family (and a good game) I will. My uncle Dave has a game on his site called RetroBlast that is very good. For those of you who weren’t aware, my uncle did a bunch of games for the Atari 8-bit and ST back in the day. If you liked what he did back then, you have to check out his latest game.

Dec 14, 2006 Read More »

Mii Hurt

So, after a few days of waking up sore in my arms and legs, I finally put 2 and 2 together and realized that my pain is caused by Bowling and Boxing in Wii Sports. It probably wouldn’t be too bad of an idea if the game offered some warm up exercises the first time a player played for the day. Something to ease that morning pain… unless, of course, it’s just me. Which means that I probably should be getting out and exercising more. :)

Dec 13, 2006 Read More »

Google Web Toolkit is free!

Now this is more like it. Google has open sourced their Web Toolkit under the Apache 2.0 license. This is a very smart move and should get a few more developers to hop on board. It also shows that Google is very confident in their technology for them to release it to the world without chaining it up under a license that keeps it under their control. Now anyone is free to work on GWT and release their changes. Kudos to Google!

Dec 12, 2006 Read More »

XNA Game Studio Express

Interesting development over in Xbox 360 land. Microsoft has just released the XNA Game Studio Express package that allows aspiring developers to target both the Xbox 360 and Windows by simply recompiling their C# code. But, as usual, it’s not as rosy as it appears.

Dec 12, 2006 Read More »

PS3 update and arrival of the Wii

I just got the HDMI->DVI cable in, and I attempted to use it with one of our flat panel monitors we have here. No luck – I was greeted with a black screen. So, either something in the monitor or the PS3 isn’t liking sending video over HDMI to a DVI monitor. I’m going to attempt trying it with another monitor later this week. This one only has two resolutions that it supports – 1366x768 and 640x480 – so it’s possible that might be throwing off the PS3.

Dec 11, 2006 Read More »

The GBA is officially on life support... or is it?

I just saw a craig-ign’s blog posting about the GBA version of Downhill Jam vs the Wii and DS versions. That is horrible looking. It’s really surprising to see how the game translated from the Wii to the GBA – especially considering how well Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 translated from the PlayStation to the GBA. And that was a launch title!

Sure, it’s not perfect. But at least it doesn’t make you want to claw out your eyeballs everytime you look at it :) Which makes me wonder what the developers that were assigned to the GBA version of Downhill Jam were doing? I completely understand that the GBA certainly isn’t as cabable as the DS. But, honestly, some of those 2600 games looked better than the GBA version of Downhill Jam…

Dec 11, 2006 Read More »

Parallels and Coherence

I just sat down tonight with the latest beta of Parallels Desktop for the Intel Macs. I have to say I’m both excited and scared at the same time. Let me explain why.

First, the excited part. As a programmer, seeing a hack like the coherence mode actually making it seem as Windows and OS X are running side by side is admittedly pretty cool. I’ve seen some minor problems (Command Windows act very funky), but you can now have a mixture of both Windows and OS X apps on the screen at the same time. For example, you can be running Safari, Terminal.app, and Solitaire (okay – that’s a bit cheap – but, admittedly, it was the first Windows app I fired up :) ). Also, Parallels has done a great job managing CPU load – I rarely see the CPU spike to 100%. This is exactly the way you would want to share a machine between two very different OSes. Even the two finger scroll on the trackpad works in Windows, something which I’ve grown very addicted to on the MacBook.

Dec 08, 2006 Read More »

Heroes

I’ve been telling all of my friends and family to watch, so I figure I should post something up here as well. Heroes, monday nights at 9:00 EST, on NBC. Watch it. Best new show of the year. Period.

Also checkout (Dead Link: nbc.com/Video/rewind/full_episodes/heroes.shtml) if you need to catch-up. I even checked if it works on a Mac – it does (in Safari, at least). All eleven episodes are there. You have plenty of time to catch-up, because the next episode won’t be coming on until the first of the year.

Dec 07, 2006 Read More »