Seems logical. You can pre-order them now if it’s that important to you.
Archive for the ‘videogames’ Category
For winter exercise, we got Everybody Dance. It’s a Playstation game where you hold light bulb controllers and mimic dance moves on a camera. It has the embarrassing option to record your dancing and upload it so that others can see it. (From what I hear, Just Dance 3 is a better alternative for kids, without risque videos and songs.) Anyway, it accomplishes the goal of getting some exercise nicely. It teaches you more than Dance Dance Revolution did, since you’re not just stomping in a square pattern…not to say that I actually look like I’m dancing. Here‘s a video of Mia and Sean.
We happened to be near an R/C hobby shop yesterday so we went in. They had a PC with RealFlight R/C flight simulator set up. It was really neat to be able to fly an R/C plane, crash it, reset, and try again. It had a real R/C controller. I assume it can simulate harsh New Mexico desert winds. Unfortunately, the price is $100 for the most basic version. I think you can get a cheap battery-powered plane for that much. As long as you don’t crash it, it’s more cost effective. I wonder if those trick R/C helicopter pilots practice with this software.
Well, I’ve had the Rock Band 3 MIDI keyboard adapter for a while now and have really enjoyed it. I still play on easy in most cases, but I sometimes turn up the sound on the keyboard to hear what I’m actually playing. You’re generally just doing some easy harmonizing on easy mode, but it’s great fun. The only drawback I’ve seen is that I probably have some really bad finger placement and don’t know really know where best to put my fingers. I try to play with the right hand, since you’re only playing the right-hand part of the songs. In other Rock Band peripheral news, they’re discontinuing the really real guitar controller, so buy one at Best Buy if you were planning to. An alternative would be the cheaper, somewhat realistic 100 button guitar. The music game genre is generally dying out, it seems. If you wanted a game of that kind, you probably already have it…so what’s the point in another? It was fun while it lasted and at least I have this stuff to learn from.
At the supermarket the other day, I looked at a Redbox to see what games they were renting. They were only renting 3 games for PS3. Wow. At least they were new. If Netflix started doing that, it’d be sweet.
I just discovered there are apparently no doctors on the west side of Albuquerque…at least none accepting new patients. Most doctors are apparently on the east side. Also, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield site that helps you find a new doctor is either terribly out of date, or full of lies and deceit.
EA is trying to compete with Steam by releasing their own game download manager, Origin. They probably think they’ll suddenly have customers swarming from Steam to their service because of Battlefield 3? Seems like they’ve tried this several times in recent years. Their previous efforts were all horrible:
EA Downloader was launched in late 2005. It was replaced by EA Link in November 2006. In September 2007, it was once again replaced by the combination of EA Store and EA Download Manager, abbreviated EADM.
I don’t look forward to a future where my system tray is filled with EA, Steam, BattleNet, UbiSoft, and other download manager icons running all the time.
You can now buy A-ha – “Take On Me” for Rock Band 3. I’d love to see a series of video clips of people just trying to reach that high note. IIIIIIII’ll beeeeee goooonnne….in a DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYY!!!!!!!!! It’d be great to learn the keyboard bit though.
After giving up on getting Minecraft working on an old computer and putting Sean on a faster machine, we had the Minecraft experience I was hoping for. I started up a server and we both connected to it. Sean’s only 6 and it’s a great game for that age. We hunted cliffside rocks for coal to make torches because it was getting dark. My cousin joined the server and started digging out a cave for the night as I made torches. We showed Sean how to hunt pigs for ham. We made it through the night just fine, and expanded the cave during the night. None of the blocky monsters got in. The next day, my cousin showed us how to make stone axes to chop down trees. Building things is half the fun. All of this in less than an hour. Of course, we had the crashing of a beta program throughout this, but it’s still a good game.
Minecraft is a neat game you can try out for free here. Click on one of the Minecraft Classic links in the lower right. It’s a game with 2 modes…Creative and Survival. In Creative mode, which you can try for free, you just build freely in world of blocks. Build a house, a ship…whatever. You can watch this video and see if you’re interested in the commercial version, which has Survival mode…gather resources and make a shelter to make it through the night when the blocky monsters come out. Sean and I have had some fun in Creative multiplayer. Beware though, this is buggy beta software, so don’t assume things will work. For example, I can’t get his computer to properly connect to my survival mode server, so we’re limited to single player in that mode for the moment.
My MIDI keyboard adapter for Rock Band 3 arrived yesterday, so we tried it out with my cousin who’s visiting and knows how to play some keyboards. (I don’t know how to play myself, but hope to learn something with this.) We brought my Yamaha keyboard down to the living room…it’s getting crowded down there. Playing keyboards in the game is hard as you have no point of reference for your fingers. I might need to put some colored stickers on the keys or some kinda bumpy thing so that my fingers know the current position without looking. The MIDI adapter can be clipped to your belt and has an overdrive button on the corner that I guess you could push if you weren’t too busy trying to find the keys. There are a bunch of tutorials in the game that I plan to go through when I have a chance. We just jumped into pro keyboard easy mode and were able to at least find some of the notes. You’re playing the right-hand part of songs only. A couple of problems with keyboard mode are that they couldn’t fit the span of the keyboard on the display so they have to shift it over sometimes, making you lose your place. Also, if you try to play keyboard with 2 guitars, it goes into a lame “all instruments mode” that doesn’t score vocals. Overall though, I think it’s great that they made the idea of learning an instrument a fun thing.
