u l t r a m o o k i e

Here’s what I’m playing right now:

Burnout Dominator (PSP):  You gotta love the Burnout series!
Cooking Mama (DS):  Just.  Plain.  Fun.  And no dishes, pots or pans to clean up after cooking.
Rayman Raving Rabbids (Wii):  Hee-larious and very fun game!
Super Paper Mario (Wii):  A great re-imagining of the Mario series.  I really like the small touches they’ve [...]

Here’s what I’m playing right now:

• Burnout Dominator (PSP):  You gotta love the Burnout series!
• Cooking Mama (DS):  Just.  Plain.  Fun.  And no dishes, pots or pans to clean up after cooking.
• Rayman Raving Rabbids (Wii):  Hee-larious and very fun game!
• Super Paper Mario (Wii):  A great re-imagining of the Mario series.  I really like the small touches they’ve added like the “flipping”.

I watched a bunch of videos from E3 and here are some games that I would love to play:

• Halo 3 (Xbox 360):  I have played and finished Halo and Halo 2 on my Xbox.  Halo 3 looks really great, but I am hesitant to cough up $460 to play Halo 3 ($400 for an Xbox 360 and $60 for Halo 3).
• Killzone 2 (PS3):  This game looks fantastic and was the talk of E3.  Again, I don’t know if I would want to cough up $560 to play it though ($500 for PS3  and $60 for Killzone 2).
• Super Mario Galaxy (Wii):  I can’t wait for this one to come out.  I want it for my Wii.
• Metroid 3:  Corruption (Wii):  Looks interesting, I just hope it doesn’t have the “I finished the level, now I have to backtrack through the whole level on a timer” thing.

Any games spark your interest from this year’s E3?

Wow!  So, I haven’t posted since my birthday.  Here’s what’s been going on.
Eileen and Jacob got me, not one, but two games for me birthday!  Burnout Dominator for my PSP and Cooking Mama for my DS!  Wow!  That’s a lot of gaming!  It should keep me busy for a long time!  Thank you Eileen and [...]

Wow!  So, I haven’t posted since my birthday.  Here’s what’s been going on.

Eileen and Jacob got me, not one, but two games for me birthday!  Burnout Dominator for my PSP and Cooking Mama for my DS!  Wow!  That’s a lot of gaming!  It should keep me busy for a long time!  Thank you Eileen and Jacob!  I have been playing Burnout Dominator a lot lately, unlocking stuff.  It is really nice.  And the graphics are surprisingly good, almost PS2-like.  I am impressed by the game.

My parents got me a niiiiiiiiice gift card from Fry’s for me birthday!  Thanks Mom and Dad!

My sister and brother-in-law got me…a niiiiiiiiiiice gift card from Fry’s for me birthday!  Thanks Sis and Albert!

Eileen and I went to Todai’s on my birthday for a free seafood buffet dinner.  Mmm!  Yummy!

On Sunday, I flew down to LA to help my sis and Albert move.  That was quite an adventure and fun too!  They moved from the boonies/outskirts of LA into Westwood!  That is a big move and a great change in lifestyle.  And I got to eat at Yoshinoya’s!  Yum!

Anyhoo, that’s it for the last few days!

I visited Micro Center yesterday at lunch (which curiously my wife asked, “They’re still in business?”) and I was quite surprised when I got into the store.  For those of you who haven’t been to a Micro Center — and that could be most of you — they have a huge book section in the [...]

I visited Micro Center yesterday at lunch (which curiously my wife asked, “They’re still in business?”) and I was quite surprised when I got into the store.  For those of you who haven’t been to a Micro Center — and that could be most of you — they have a huge book section in the store. I would say their book section was a good 15-20% of the floor space at a store. Well, not anymore. Yesterday, when I arrived at the book section, it had been sectioned off. The book section was now about 40% of its old self, the other 60% was dedicated to console gaming.

I can understand Micro Center doing this, as they are in business to make money and they will dedicate floor space to what is actually selling. But, it is a pretty sad reflection on our society that we have become so enamoured with the instant gratification of video games that books (and more importantly, reading) has taken a backseat.

On an off-note, I got to play Gears of War on the Xbox 360 finally and I must say:  Graphics, sound and music score are fantabulous!  Framerate?  Not so fantastic, after a few minutes of play I was feeling a bit nauseous — and this only happens to me with games that have bad framerates.

I was downloading a Linux ISO via Bittorrent and my Netgear WPN824 kept restarting itself.  I am not sure what was happening, but I think it was because Bittorrent was overrunning the Netgear with open connections.  I hooked up my older Netscreen 5GT and it handled Bittorrent just fine.  When I looked at the number [...]

I was downloading a Linux ISO via Bittorrent and my Netgear WPN824 kept restarting itself.  I am not sure what was happening, but I think it was because Bittorrent was overrunning the Netgear with open connections.  I hooked up my older Netscreen 5GT and it handled Bittorrent just fine.  When I looked at the number of active connections, it was near 300.  Yikes.  So, for now, I have the WPN824 acting as only an access point, the Netscreen 5GT will handle all the routing and firewall duties.  I also hooked up my old Netgear WGR614 as a gaming router, it will handle all the 802.11b traffic for my PSP and DS.  The nice thing is that the WGR614 can be alive with the radio off (it is a switch in the configuration).  So, I can just turn on the radio via the web interface when I want to game online.  Nice.

Over the last week, I have been playing a lot of Advance Wars: Dual Strike. I had put it down a while back because I got stuck in the first “Dual Strike” mission. But, finally, I figured maybe I could get through it — and I did. It was not too bad [...]

Over the last week, I have been playing a lot of Advance Wars: Dual Strike. I had put it down a while back because I got stuck in the first “Dual Strike” mission. But, finally, I figured maybe I could get through it — and I did. It was not too bad after I got the hang of how “Dual Strike” missions work. I have always loved the Advance Wars series and with Dual Strike, I still love it a lot. They did not make too many major changes to Dual Strike from the previous two releases. The big changes are the “Dual Strike” missions where a war takes place on two fronts (one on each screen) and the addition of more COs. There are some new vehicles and stuff, but they fit in so well with the old classics, they really don’t stand out.

There are two different types of controls for the game. The classic D-pad plus buttons or the new touch-screen interface. I prefer the classic controls because they are a bit more precise (it doesn’t sound like it makes sense, but the D-pad controls are better). The graphics in the game are the same as before, I guess they may have beefed up some of it to bring it up to the higher resolution of the Nintendo DS. Oh, a nice feature now is that when the cursor is hovered over a unit, the stats display on the top screen. In the old games, I would have to press a shoulder button to get the stats for a unit.

I haven’t gotten to really give the wireless games a go. I tried once with my brother-in-law, but we only tried the Combat mode and that mode was pretty lame. There are a lot of extras in the game, including a nice map editor (where the touch-screen comes in handy). Also the medals system is pretty ingenius. I have only 11 of 300 medals right now (sigh).

Anyways, the current game in my Nintendo DS is Advance Wars: Dual Strike — with Tetris DS swapped in and out when I don’t want to think too much.  What games are you playing?

I don’t know why, but I’m attracted to flashing blue lights…and I must have them. Last week, I replace the home Airport Extreme Base Station with a $20 Netgear WGR614v5. That meant that I could no longer Tetris DS online (damn you Nintendo for not incorporating WPA into the DS).
Today, after having [...]

I don’t know why, but I’m attracted to flashing blue lights…and I must have them. Last week, I replace the home Airport Extreme Base Station with a $20 Netgear WGR614v5. That meant that I could no longer Tetris DS online (damn you Nintendo for not incorporating WPA into the DS).

Today, after having a nice dim sum lunch with my parents, sister and brother-in-law; Eileen and I visited Fry’s…Well, Eileen came along for my visit to Fry’s. There, I found that they were selling refurbished Netgear WPN824s for $49.99! That’s down from $108.99. I have nothing against refurbished products when they are nicely discounted.

I convinced Eileen that I should use the cheaper WGR614v5 for gaming (which it was intended) and we could use the WPN824 for our regular house wireless router. So, we picked it up. The one that we picked up seems to be a v1 of the product which does not include a hardwired on/off switch for the blue LEDs. The v2 version does have this switch. As for the v1? The blue LEDs cannot be turned off, but since the thing is in the office and not a bedroom, who would want to put out those cool blue LEDs??

Seven antennas has to be better than one, right? And the WPN824 has WPA2 support which my Powerbook and Linux notebook can take advantage of. And…well…there are those bright blue LEDs. Neat. I can sit and watch them forever — in case you are wondering, each of the blue LEDs represents one of the seven antennas. The LED lights up when that antenna is being used. The WPN824 uses the different antennas to deal with interference and such. And if you’re really wondering, the blue LEDs were used only for debugging purposes when the WPN824 was developed. But, apparently when marketting folks saw them, they had them put under a frosted dome — you know, cause people like me are attracted to blinking blue LEDs.

After switching over to 802.11g + WPA for my wireless network at home, my Airport Extreme Basestation seemed to have lost its mind. The other day, it locked my Powerbook off the network until I restarted it. Then a little later, it decided that my CentOS notebook was rotten and kicked it off [...]

After switching over to 802.11g + WPA for my wireless network at home, my Airport Extreme Basestation seemed to have lost its mind. The other day, it locked my Powerbook off the network until I restarted it. Then a little later, it decided that my CentOS notebook was rotten and kicked it off the network. I went looking for new firmware and found firmware version 5.7 from Apple. After upgrading, things seemed a bit snappier until this morning when the AEBS decided that all machines were offlimits to the network. Sigh.The other day I had picked up a refurbished Netgear WGR614v5 from Fry’s for $20 (yea, I know great price!) It was going to be the AP that I would turn on to use when I wanted to play online with Nintendo WiFi — since Nintendo decided that wifi devices of this day and age only needed to support WEP encryption.

Well, I just put the WGR614 to work as the main wireless AP and router for the house. I added a $40 Ethernet print server from CompUSA so that I could get the same network print functionality of the AEBS. The WGR614 eliminates me having to connect a switch to the AEBS because the AEBS only has one Ethernet port on the back. The WGR614 also eliminates me having to connect the AEBS to the Netscreen 5GT for firewall protection. Oh, and it is really nice to be able to manage the AP from any box without any special software (the AEBS needs a special Mac/Win application to manage it, no web interface).

The Airport Extreme Basestation is now taking a nap in its box. It is too bad that it had such a bad reaction to WPA. I’ll keep my eye out for new firmware from Apple to see if that will correct some of these issues I have been seeing. I know my friend John had switched away from his Airport Extreme Basestation a while ago because he also had consistent crashes.