However, the big hit for the whole family, has been the Wii. This is the first thing that I have seen that has gotten four out of the five family members hooked on it. My Wife is the only one that has been able to maintain any sense level-headedness over the absolute need to play it. Of course, we just think she’s crazy!

Both Brian and Will are having a blast with bowling, boxing, and tennis on Wii Sports. They are also enjoying Super Mario Galaxy and Rayman’s Raving Rabbids(Don’t ask). Victoria has gotten to be quite good at bowling, and she and a few of her friends were absolutely hilarious the other night playing tennis.

And while I am interested in all of the games we have so far, I have spent the majority of my time on the Wii playing Tennis, baseball, bowling, and golf. It has seriously become something of a workout regimen for me. Now most of you that read this know me, and know that I am not the most active person in the world, but spending a few minutes boxing or playing tennis will seriously get your heart pumping.

Another nice thing about how Wii sports was designed, is that it does not care of you are young or old, tall or short – there is at least one sport that you can excel at. For instance, Will and Brian play against each other most of the time and while Brian dominates Will in Tennis and Baseball, he can never seem to get the better hand in boxing. In fact, it’s pretty funny watching both of them shadow-boxing with the television and tiny little Will delivering that knockout punch to his big brother! And while Victoria struggles with her swing-timing in baseball, her form in bowling – and the hook on her ball – is something to see…. And me? Well, it’s not quite fair, because I can play on it all night once everyone else goes to bed. I have reached the PRO level (at least 1000 skill points) on bowling, and tennis, and I am very close to reaching it in golf. However, I am not that great in baseball, and I just right-out suck at boxing.

To say that the Wii is getting a lot of play time is an understatement. It has built in Wi-Fi, so it connects to my wireless network and lets me browse the web, or connect to the Wii Virtual Console Channel and download all of those kewl old skool Nintendo games like Donkey Kong or Mario Bros. They also have some old Sega and Neo-Geo games, like Sonic2 or Street Fighter2. I can also turn it on and it will give me the latest weather forecast and a list of news headlines as well.

Downsides? Well, there are a couple… One thing is to take heed of all the warnings that come up on the screen about making sure that the players have enough empty space around them. More than once has someone got unintentionally whacked by the overzealous player. The other? Well, let’s just say that if you are out of shape, you really need to start off playing fairly conservatively. After the first night of playing, I could barely get around the next day.

Now if I could just get my hands on Guitar Hero 3, Tiger Woods ‘08, and Zack & Wiki…

[tags]wii, games, fitness, sports[/tags]

A couple of notes:

1. Wow does Windows load up fast!
2. After loading up all of the needed drivers, I re-installed Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and turned the graphic settings all the way up… simply beautiful!
3. I’m really digging this new heatsink. It was HUGE and a pain to install, but in combination with the fans in my case, it is keeping my new quad-core CPU a very cool 25° C.
4. The PC is much quieter than my old one.
5. 32-bit Windows isn’t able to utilize 4 GB of memory. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get my hands on a 64-bit version. No real matter. I plan to be working in Linux mostly anyway.

I did take a number of pictures that i will import in shortly. I know it’s really geeky, but hey, that’s how I roll…
[tags]windows, pc, games[/tags]

Now all that is left is to install the video card, make sure my BIOS settings are correct, and install the operating systems and device drivers for each…. That should do it.

I’m stoked again. I quit playing games like Oblivion or Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter because they were just too sluggish on my old setup. In fact, I couldn’t play Ghost Recon after a while because of all the graphic artifacts and tearing that I used to experience. Now I’ll get to see these games again in a brand new light. I really can’t wait to get home!

Oh, I have a question. If my order was set to ship on UPS 3-day select service, and the order didn’t arrive until the fourth day, what happens? Do I get some sort of credit, or a check? I tried to look for an answer on UPS.com, but didn’t really find anything.

[tags]games, pc, ups, delivery[/tags]

The java based client allows for a buddy list, rated games, timed games(10 minuteper player/ +10 seconds to each turn si the default), a variety of game lobbies, and supports multi-player games and both the TWL(North American) and SOWPODS(everyone else) dictionaries.

If you can’t tell, I REALLY like this site! I haven’t gone a day since finding it without playing at least one game. If you decide to register(it’s free), look for user inthenet and challenge me to a game.

Those last 2 are tough.
So, after much consternation, I came up with this setup. I actually feel like I will need more storage, but I do have a 250 GB IDE hard drive that I can transfer over to the new box. As long as I still have my little linux box running, it will handle all of the web testing that I do for both work and for fun. It can also handle some networked storage as I have had samba set up on it for a few years.

My plan for the new box is to be my gaming machine and then use the free vmware server to run another instance of linux. The Virtual machine will be up most of the time and I will use that as the primary computing machine. Since my pc has become a communal entity, I thought it would be much easier(and safer) for me to run a virtual instance of linux(or guest), and have everyone just use that. When I want to game, I can just close down the virtual machine and I will be in my Windows(host). Heck, if it weren’t for my gaming habit, this whole house would have been running linux a long time ago.

So anyway, take a look at my wish list and come back and tell me what you think. I’m actually trying to get the cost down to $1,200, but I’m not sure I can do that and still reach all of my goals. I highly encourage any suggestions you guys out there might have.

Not alot to post about today, but I remembered that I had left out the fact that I had picked up NHL07 on that same trip to BestBuy. I was actually excited to try it out this year after being so disappointed last year. The hype on this year’s version was pretty good. From all of the sites I visited, this year’s version was to include a shooting function for the right analog stick, and had reworked the gameplay to do away with the speed burst button. All of these new features were supposed to take the NHL series more toward simulation play….
… Unfortunately, none of the sites I visited made the key distinction that all of the new features were to be implemented on the Xbox360 version only. What a waste! Being a PC-only gamer, I am once again disappointed as EA is the only option I have for PC Hockey aside from the text-based Eastside Hockey Manager(I will be checking this out soon. I played it about 3 years back and was pretty impressed.)

Anyway, I am really upset that I wasted my money on what seems to be a roster update instead of a game full of new features. I felt I should put this out to let any other PC hockey gamers know. I also emailed the guys over at sportsgamer and ended up getting some unexpected love for my efforts.