No time for today’s photo, too busy playing Super Mario Galaxy. Note: I’m so hardcore I’m not even using the wrist strap.

Side note: Happy birthday Tim!

Most of Saturday, Justine and a bunch of female friends overran our house with the sole purpose of sticking photos onto albums in a fancy manner — more commonly known as scrapbooking.

Much of that day, Chris and I had a play date (that’s what Justine called it, and she wouldn’t lie to me about these things) where we played Wii. I am extremely surprised at the longevity of Wii Sports, especially since it’s a pack-in game.

Around half-seven, Justine and I joined Trav and Ange in the city — along the new Docklands precinct — to eat out at Bopha Devi, a Cambodian restaurant.

We decided to park in an open air car park (most are at the Docklands), but the one we chose and pulled into appeared to be closed. Only after a few moments I realised that the chain across the entrance wasn’t because it was closed, it was the way to stop people entering and exiting! Approaching slowly in the car, the chain suddenly dropped to the ground, and we drove over it. Cool.

Justine was initially a little apprehensive at eating Cambodian; she didn’t think she would like anything on the menu. It turns out that was completely wrong. All four of us ordered an entrée and main, but we shared them all which turned out extremely well. For the entree, we shared chicken and crab rolls, fried pumpkin dumpling things, and chicken ribs with sambal sauce, delicious!

For the mains, we had two types of curry (I ordered a wet fish curry and Justine ordered a dry chicken one — Justine’s was nicer) and two types of noodles (Trav ordered some strange buckwheat ones which were only OK, and Ange ordered some nice fat prawn noodles).

Totally stuffed, we went for a short walk on the long pier (with gelato!) while I tried to recover from a severe case of overeating.

As we left the car park (you put a token in to drop the cable) a bunch of young yahoos in an expensive four-wheel drive rushed up behind us to save the seven dollar parking fee. I was disappointed to see that the cable didn’t fly up into the bottom of their car like the signs had promised, but I suppose it was nice we could help them out.

Arriving home, I felt a little sick which I attributed to overeating but it may have been due to the food itself. Either way, I had recovered by morning so it wasn’t an issue.

A very nice dinner and we’ll have to do it again soon, guys.

Ever since all of the “current” generation of consoles — Xbox360, Wii, PS3 — have been released (sure, the PS3 has partly been released, but it’s out there) people have been working hard at making them do things the designers never really intended.

For the Xbox360, someone has converted it to a “laptop”, people are trying to get Linux on the PS3 (and indeed, all the consoles) which interests me as it’d make a good media centre, and people are hacking around with the Wii remotes.

One person has managed to make some software which allows the Wii remotes to be used as a controller on a Windows machine. You can configure the controls to work how you wish (i.e. set the joystick as either a joystick or keypresses, the motion-sensing can be used as a joystick or a mouse) and since it works over Bluetooth, it all functions pretty smoothly and is easy to setup.

Using GlovePIE, there’s very little required to get it up and running. After a little bit of tooling around, I jumped into an FPS game and was using the Wii remote in place of a mouse and the joystick in place of the WASD keys. The mouse was super-sensitive but able to be reduced in-game, and was a bit “stuttery” and the sensitivity made things difficult to aim, but I can definitely see that it’d work — if someone has the guts to at least offer this option in a game.

Yesterday, Justine and I decided to pay a visit to see Dad and Cheryl (it’s also close to USA Foods, which is no coincidence). Seeing another opportunity to evangelise the Wii to yet more unsuspecting people, I packed my Wii into it’s bag (that I got “free” for pre-ordering, but didn’t think I’d ever use) and took it along.

Sadly, Cheryl has done a bit of damage to her back, which makes playing games like Wii Sports a bit of a stretch, so she sat this one out, but we gave her a great show looking like complete fools.

Dad loved playing Wii Sports and was able to compete with me on a pretty level playing field. That’s probably one of the best things about the Wii (or at least a well-developed game on the Wii), it removes the difficulty for non-gamers of having to co-ordinate moving a joystick while pressing a button which has no bearing on what’s happening on screen.

We must have played for 3 or 4 hours and it only took a few short minutes in each of the the Wii Sports or Wii Play games for Dad to get the hang of it, though most of the Monkey Ball mini games are dreadful and not worth mentioning.

Everyone who’s played the Wii thus far (admittedly not a huge amount of people) has expressed interest in owning their own in the future; it seems to be hitting it’s mark as far as demographic is concerned. Wii Sports alone seems like it could be a massive system seller, and it’s a pack-in game (then again, Super Mario Bros was too)!

Well, the new Nintendo Wii launched on Thursday and since I have never done it before, I decided it might be fun to attend and purchase my Wii at a midnight launch Wednesday night.

Justine and I both went down to our local shopping center, had dinner, made our way to our local EB and grabbed a ticket; number #14.

We went back home for a couple of hours and when we returned to the store at about 11:45, I was surprised to see that there were around 60-70 people milling around the store. Not all the people were there to buy, there were quite a few people there for … something to do, I guess.

As the clock struck midnight, the store let two people in at a time to buy their consoles. After around fifteen minutes I walked closer to the front of the crowd to see what number was being called as it was difficult to hear from where we were sitting. Just as I approached and was about to open my mouth to ask, number #14 was called. Convenient.

I picked up all the stuff I’d ordered (except for the component cables, which weren’t in stock yet, what a pain) and we hurried home — OK, I hurried home and Justine sat next to me yawning.

We quickly setup the shiny new system and played a few games of Wii Sports before Justine went to bed and I attempted to get the wireless setup to work. A quick change of wireless channel and I was away… to bed… at 3am.

I’m not sure how I did it, but over the course of Thursday-Sunday (I had Thursday and Friday off), I managed to sink 25 hours into Zelda (and I didn’t play much Thursday), and I’m not even half way through the main quest, let alone all the side quests and bits and pieces you can do.

The Wii is a pretty cool system, but my hopes of it being great for FPS games were a bit dashed because the infrared pointer is a little bit laggy, so not quite accurate enough. Games that use the accelerometers though (twisting, turning, tilting the remote) are great and it’s extremely responsive.

The actual user interface of the system seems rushed and not quite finished; touted features such as web browsing, news, weather are not yet available, and the interface is inconsistent with regards to navigation — things that work in one aspect of the system don’t work in another.

I’d also really love an option to have it start up a game directly rather than having to wait for the system to boot up, then recognise the game, then have me click on it, click Start and then wait for the game to load. The DS has the option, why not the Wii?

As mentioned the other day, the Wii roadshow was at Chadstone over the weekend. Justine and I went down to Chadstone last night (Justine wanted to buy something-or-other, I forget what) and popped into the EB store there.

While waiting for a turn at Wii Sports — the Zelda line was very long and each turn took forever, so I’m happy to wait until I get it myself — Justine went and looked for whatever it was she wanted. Upon her return we had a go at the Wii Sports tennis game.

I served; each time I served I’d hear a little floaty sound come out of the remote and a rumble when I hit the serve. Justine had a little trouble with the tennis and hitting the ball appropriately so we had a second go. On the second match Justine hit a few returns and we had a couple of back-and-forths which were quite fun.

From the demo unit, the pointer didn’t seem to work exceptionally well; I’m not sure if this was down to me never having used it, the TV not being setup too well or it generally being crap — probably one of the first two. Roll on December 7!

This morning, Justine and I went out to get breakfast (35 bucks for a buffet breakfast? Stuff that); after, we made our way to the open area out the front of the Shot Tower in Melbourne Central so I could have a play test of the Wii.

The play test started at 10am, and we had to check out at 11am, including walking four blocks back to the hotel (one across and three down). The Nintendo representatives took a few minutes to setup and at 10:05 or so they let the first kid in to have a test. The little bugger decided to play Zelda which was unfortunate, since that’s what I wanted to play. His older brother opted to play Excite Truck, which was directly in front of us.

The older brother finished his turn after a short amount of time and passed the controller to me. This was the first time I’d held a Wii controller and I was surprised at how light it is (it would have been lighter if it didn’t have a thick piece of wire attached to it) and also how small it is. It seems to fit quite well in the hand and though the controls (d-pad, buttons, etc) are quite small I think they’d work well even in extended play sessions. The first kid was still playing Zelda and that line had more 10 people in it already at that point, so the chances of me playing before we needed to head back were nil (besides, I’m not interested in waiting for extended durations just to play a console that’s coming out in a month).

I held the controller in my hands in the way you’d hold a NES controller, and mashed the button over and over until the race started. As it started, I wiggled the controller left and right and it felt perfectly natural, which is definitely a good sign considering it’s the first time I’ve ever used the controller. I over-steered the first few times which is to be expected when playing any new driving game and after a few very brief moments I had perfectly acceptable control over the vehicle.

Initially, when watching the other guy play the game, I noticed that the graphics were quite jaggy and not really “next gen”, which is something I’ve read a bit about other Wii games. However, when I was playing the game it was the furthest thing from my mind and the graphics suited the game.

Throughout the entire race (two laps) of Excite Truck I had the truck under complete control, except for one time when I ran into a tree as I didn’t know it was an obstacle. Even so, the poor control was my fault, and had nothing to do with the controller; the control felt perfectly natural. This is about as good a sign as you can get with such a different style of controller.

The roadshow will be at Chadstone and Knox over the weekend, so I might see if I can get down to one of the two shopping centres to see if I can get a chance to get a little bit of time in with Zelda, since the controls in that game are a lot more complex than the game I played today.