Beautiful Katamari

Several years ago Dianne bought a video game for our Sony Playstation 2 called Katamari Damacy. The basic idea of the game is that you control a prince (a paper version pictured to the right) or one of his cousins that is using a magical, sticky ball to collect object as the ball rolls over them. The bigger the ball gets, the bigger the items are that can be collected by the ball. The prince and his cousins all have this characteristic cylindrically shaped head.

When Dianne first described the game play, I thought it sounded like the lamest idea ever for a game. After watching her play a few rounds, I decided to try it. Once you get the hang of controlling the ball, there is something very pleasing about rolling up everything from little bits of candy to buildings to mountains and clouds. I was addicted. Many items you roll up make sounds and that adds to the fun. The music is cute too and Dianne even bought a CD of one of the soundtracks. We now have a few different versions of the game that have different worlds with a variety of objectives. If you've never tried it, give it a shot sometime.

Just the other day Dianne found a good deal on an Xbox 360 version of the game called Beautiful Katamari. It's the same idea, just some different worlds to explore. I've been playing that a bit.

Given my like for the game, it's not surprising that a post about a Katamari hat on the Craft Magazine blog caught my eye. The writer of the itchy stichy blog wrote a post about how to make a Katamari prince hat for a baby. Doesn't that just win the cutest hat ever award for a baby? I could see Kyra wearing one of these. Compare the baby costume to the paper character above -- pretty good match!

Pillows for Gamers

Check out these pillows. The perfect gift for your Nintendo loving gamer. Neat idea.

Denied!!

We had a Nintendo Wii today...sort of...for about 3 hours. What a disappointing, waste of a day.

We've been wanting a Wii for awhile. Actually, I wanted to get Dianne one for her birthday. But with all the supply problems they've had, I couldn't find one. A few weeks ago, a co-worker told me he scouted the Sunday paper inserts and went to the store early and got one. One of Dianne's co-workers also mentioned local Wii sightings.

I decided today was the day to go for it. I got up about 6:20 and went to Krogers to buy the Cincinnati Enquirer. It's easy to get a prime parking space at that time of day! I went home, scoured the inserts, and found that Circuit City mentioned Wiis. The ad said they were handing out vouchers at 9 -- one hour before they open. I had some toast and hit the road.

When I got to Circuit City a little before 8, there were eight people already waiting. As you saw in my Twitter tweets, one couple had been there since 5 AM! At 9 AM the manager came out and distributed the vouchers. I was one of the lucky 10 who got one! Several folks were denied. I waited with my book to read ('Made to Stick' by the Heath brothers) until 10 AM when the store opens. While waiting, there were a bunch of folks that drove up looking for a voucher. They were out of luck.

At 10 I went in and bought the Wii, an extra controller, and a Zelda game for Dianne. I thought life was good. I even stopped at Marx's Bagels on the way home to get brunch for us.

Dianne opened it up and we spent quite a bit of time fishing cords through our wall unit to connect up the Wii to the TV. We turn it on and...NOTHING. We check everything...still nothing. I even brought the TV down from the bedroom to try the connection there...still nothing. Were we doing something silly or did we get a bad unit?

So we had to pull the cords back out of the wall unit. We packed up the Wii and made a return trip to Circuit City. The customer service person was nice enough, but he kinda had a look of "...no signal...yeah, sure." He connected it up to one of the showroom TVs and got the same result -- a black screen. At least we weren't doing something stupid, but how disappointing to get a bum unit. They took it back and will hold one for us when they get their next shipment (whenever that is).

Animal Crossing -- I Don't Get It

I get a lot of blog hits looking at this photo of the screen from my Animal Crossing Wild World game on the Nintendo DS. Here is a link to the original post. It's not a great photo. The light was low and the character was moving so it is blurred. Most of the hits come from overseas. Lately, this entry can account for almost 20% of the visits to Earl World. Perhaps there was a re-launch of the game in Europe? I'm not complaining, but I'd like to understand why folks are so interested. I'd appreciate it if someone viewing this post would leave a comment about what led them here.

Animal Crossing - Wild World

Last week we picked up copies of the new Animal Crossing game for the Nintendo DS. If you've played Animal Crossing before, you'll pick this up quickly. All your favorite characters (I like K.K. Slider) are there. I've noticed a couple changes, but they are easy to figure out by talking to the townspeople. I've set up Earltown and here is a picture of me in front of my new house. The Yankee Star design is starting to catch on around Earltown.

We've tried the DS to DS communication-very easy. We were able to exchange apples and pears. We've set up the Wi-Fi connection, but haven't tried it yet. Being able to have visitors in town while you're doing other things adds a new dimension to the game.

Guitar Hero

Dianne got an early Christmas present of the guitar controller for the Sony PS2. It's one of those games that is easy to learn, but difficult to master. As songs play, a scrolling fret bar comes toward you which shows what fret buttons to push while strumming to the music. It's a bit like looking at the road through your front windshield. After focusing on that for a couple songs, I had some dizziness that gave me a headache. It's not for everyone.

There is quite a change in difficulty going from easy to medium to hard settings. Dianne is good at it and has unlocked quite a few songs already. She'll be on tour in no time.

Your Next GameBoy

Who needs a GameBoy micro? Go for a GameBoy macro! The Game Man is a 6.5 times scale version of the old GameBoy that weighs over 100 pounds with a cartridge. Check out the size of the red cartridge in the photo! The person here is playing Tetris. It was created by an art student and is fully functional. Go here for photos and more information.

Advance Wars & Papercraft

When I'm not training Chalupa, the Nintendo DS game I'm working on now is Advance Wars. If you like turn-based games, I'd highly recommend this new version. It has some new vehicle options compared to the previous versions. More importantly, the game makes good use of the two screens on the DS.

When I'm done with the game, I'm going to have to try out some of the AW papercraft here at the bunker. These look really good!

Sony PSP saga

Dianne, the quintessential gamer, got one of the first million Sony PSP units released in the US. We got it the day they became available. It’s quite the system offering gaming as well as options to show videos, digital photos, and play digital audio. The screen is an amazing LCD, TFT screen with 480x272 resolution at millions of colors. You can see a picture and get the details here.

Unfortunately, Dianne’s PSP has some pixel defects. There are at least two (I think one is actually two adjacent pixels that makes it look like one) pixels that are always on. They are in the middle of the screen and stand out when looking at a dark background. It’s pretty annoying to have that happen right out of the box. In the few days the US units have been on the market, there has been a lot of web traffic describing Sony PSP units with pixel defects. For example, check here and here.

I understand manufacturing of LCD screens is difficult and there can be some screen defects. These were much more common in the early days of manufacturing computer monitors. That’s why ISO standards for LCD screens were established several years ago. The standard describes limits for dead or always bright pixels for various quality screens. This site has a description of the standard for computer monitors. If you calculate the defect rate for our PSP unit assuming only 2 bad pixels, it comes out to 15.3 bad pixels/million. Clearly that’s way higher than the error rate for a computer monitor – much harder to manufacture the larger screen. That seems completely out of line for a PSP sized screen.

So how to get it resolved? We purchased the unit at Blockbuster and as of 3/31 they are refusing to stand behind the product and are referring us to Sony. In fact, we were given some mis-information at our local Blockbuster – but that’s a long story. Suffice it to say I won’t be patronizing any Blockbuster stores in the future. If you do, I’d encourage you to read their return policy (especially for non video items) very carefully before purchase! Sony will take the units back as described here and here, but you have to pay for shipping. That wouldn’t be an issue if Blockbuster supported the products they sold. Although Sony’s warranty appears to limit liability, it’s really unfortunate they won’t cover the cost of resolving a problem with a brand new unit whose defect rate is much higher than even a class III LCD screen.