Things Rising from the Dead

Well, not really, but I'm no longer witty anymore, so it'll have to do.

Stumbled upon my old blog, The Procrastinator Triumphant. I was pretty sure I had killed the blog, but I guess nothing's really dead when it comes to the internet. I read a little bit of it and I was like, impressed. The vocabulary! The vulgarity! The blantant lack of respect! Crazy. It was kinda a nice reminder that everything changes, no matter how similar and boring you might think it is.

Well, that's enough penny philsophy.

So the "Love" album came out today, and I am quite curious and a little disappointed in a way. I'm listening to the preview on the Beatles.com website, and some of it sounds quite the same, and some of it just seems wonky. Like Number 9 from the White Album just broke free and tried to infest the rest of the albums. It's a strange remix/reworking, not really what I expected. I think when I think remix, I think of Fatboy Slim and other kinds of DJs just putting in beats and souping it up. The remix seems different and yet, very much the same. No word on whether or not I'll be getting it. Don't know how I feel about it.

So as promised, the thing about the Wii.

I think it's really something for the company to reinvent itself. I think in a lot of ways, Nintendo is like Apple - a formerly very strong company that's having to fight for its life, and realizing that the best thing going for the company is its innovation. Instead of pimping out their next-gen console with micro-processors and Blu-Ray madness, it decided to go back to basics, and do something different. Does it pay off? So far, yes and no. The games are certainly different in their feel - you seriously couldn't sit down for hours playing like you would some other games, because fatigue does set it when you're swinging, twitching, jerking and extending your appendages to do what you need to do in the game. I think that the launch games are okay, but definitely there needs to be more games to gauge. And half of the features like internet, the Virtual Console, Wii News and Weather are still offline, so it's really tough to tell. Some of the other games might have online capability, but I don't like a lot of the other games, so I'll have to keep waiting for one.

Like I said, I welcome the new control scheme, though there has been a number of times I'd really just like to relax my arms and sit down. But it's fairly difficult to do so since there's so much require movement. Shooting games like Red Steel doesn't fair too terribly well when you're sitting because there isn't enough room, and it's tough to pretend to shoot from the hip.

The lack of CD/DVD drive is a little weird, not that I need one, but hey, it would be cool. The Photo Channel is nice, having the ability to preview your SD photos, but then again, it doesn't read the movies from my Minolta. It'll help when I need to show my recent photos, but by no means anything more than that. And they really should have done the photo-editing more justice by making it more open ended, like Mario Paint. It gives you a lips stamp and a star stamp, which really should be replaced with a keyboard or fonts.

All and all, it still comes back down to gameplay I suppose. There's still something to be said about a standard controller and console whereby I don't have to stand or fling my arms around to be entertained. But Wii is a great party machine, a good console for a household with stagnant kids, and generally a happy little machine.

Doesn't play Gears of War, but hey. I don't have 600 bucks either.

Sorry, 1,200 bucks, if you want to get your hands on one.