Just upgraded WordPress to 2.0.5. We wouldn’t want any crackers getting any ideas about messing with an old WordPress installation, would we?

I’d like to wish everyone a happy and safe holiday and new year.

My goals for the new year:

• My Botball team will do well.
• My GPA will stay at 4.0.
• I will get a new job (and keep it for a while).
• I will get off my butt and actually post a new programming project or two here.

(And yeah, I know I probably misspelled the holiday name. Shut up. :-))

I got back my ACT scores. 35 composite; 35 on everything except Reading (which was 36). I’m therefore in a very good mood.

This is Biolizard89, signing out.

My brother got his Wii. I’m kind of torn as to whether I should love or hate it. On one hand, the controller is truly innovative, and has lots of potential. Unfortunately, the two games which I’ve played so far (Wii Sports and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz) seem overly shallow.

First, Wii Sports. Bowling is the most fun of the five games, and the physics and control are quite good. But the feature set just isn’t. Monkey Bowling 2 in Super Monkey Ball 2 (for GameCube) was much more fun, because of the Special Mode (which had 30 crazy-shaped lanes, many of which moved). Tennis just isn’t fun. Why? The controls suck. If you draw your hand back in preparation to swing (as seems natural), it thinks you’re swinging the racket, and, of course, the ball will fly off in the opposite direction from what you were aiming at. Golf is lame, too. It just doesn’t register slow, small swings (which are necessary to move the ball a very short distance). All these control problems stem from the fact that Wii Sports doesn’t have a one-to-one correspondence between the position of the remote and the position of your player on-screen. Instead, it attempts to recognize high-level gestures (e.g. a fast jerk, meaning a swing), and often fails miserably.

Now, on to Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz. I cannot see why they are trying to turn this into a Mario Party game, with more and more mini-games and less and less quality. SMB2 had 12 mini-games, most of which were good. SMB:BB has 50 mini-games, half of which are easily crap, and the rest of which are shallow. Monkey Race is a good example. On SMB1 and SMB2, it took hours and hours to get good at the harder levels. On SMB:BB, with less than 3 hours of experience with the Wii remote, I beat all of the levels on my first try, despite the fact that I was bouncing off the walls and generally sucking. In fact, after the first 10 seconds or so, I never even SAW an opponent, except for the occasional Hunter Missile hitting me. I’m sorry, but I’m not that good. There is no reason why I should be able to own a game like that. Monkey Wars is pretty good, but it has a total lack of features. Not even a Survival Mode. And, worst of all, where the heck is Monkey Dogfight? It was one of the best games in SMB2, and it’s completely gone from SMB:BB.

Oh, and one last complaint. Why is there no emulation of the GameCube Broadband Adapter? I regularly play Mario Kart: Double Dash on LAN with more than 4 players, and there is no conceivable reason why they would leave it out. It seems they just got lazy.

I really want to like the Wii, but its games suffer from lack of features and control problems, and I just can’t overlook that. Sorry, but the Wii is staying on my “watch” list rather than my “go buy now” list.