Blessed by the Potato

Well, my Nokian WRs were fantastic this winter, with a huge improvement in traction over the all-seasons I was using before. I only had my wheels spin even a little just twice through the whole winter, whereas before wheelspin was at least a weekly occurrence (if only a minor split-second loss of traction at an icy stop) when the weather was particularly nasty. As spring is setting in and the warmer weather returns I’m not finding any issues with the tires being too soft or sloppy, though the real hot weather hasn’t hit yet. As I first reported, they are a bit noisier on the turns, but it doesn’t bother me at all.

In addition to recommending the tire, I’d also recommend Kal Tire, the store that I got them from. Just a few days ago, I hit a bump or pothole or something, and heard a strange bouncing ball type ringing noise from the back of the car. It didn’t happen again, so I didn’t pay it much heed… until today when I found out I had a bulge in my sidewall. Their warranty is going to take care of it, and the experience in dealing with them has been pretty good so far. They didn’t have another Nokian WR in stock in my size, and I said I had to drive to Toronto tomorrow. Rather than let me risk driving on a tire that has a compromised sidewall, they put on a used tire (which is worn down, but still legal and in good shape otherwise) free of charge to get me around until my new Nokian arrives next week. At that point, I’ll have to pay a bit for the replacement since the warranty is pro-rated and I’ve got about 6000 km on the tire now, but it should only be about $10 or so, and they’ll do the mounting for free (I believe — we’ll see for sure next week!).

I got Metroid Prime (actually Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, though I don’t recall hearing about a Prime 1 or 2) for the Wii way back at Christmas, but just got around to giving it a whirl this week.

I recall playing the original Metroid at a friend’s house on the NES as a kid, getting better and better until one night we played through the whole thing in one crazy marathon that took us until past midnight (which, at the time, was obscenely late) to finish. I recall liking the combination puzzle/action shooter aspect of it, so I was looking forward to playing the current one for the Wii. So far, the game itself seems to be quite good for the Wii, however I find the control setup rather painful.

Let me go back a step: the Wii is an awesome, unique game system with a totally revolutionary set of control inputs that has already allowed a number of games to really push the boundaries of what and how we play. However, it is not, most decidedly not designed for marathon weekend gaming sessions. The nunchuck/wiimote setup I’m finding is rather painful to use since so many finely controlled wrist movements (or in the case of Mario Galaxies, spastic wrist movements) are needed to control games. This is an interesting, fun way to interact with a virtual environment, don’t get me wrong — in fact, one thing I’m really impressed with in Metroid is the way to open doors by pulling out a control lever, twisting it, and pushing it back in. It’s just a nifty movement to make with the motion-sensitive device. However, it is not a kind control scheme for my wrists. The worst thing I find is having to hold the Wiimote at the screen to control an on-screen cursor since it offers the fewest ways of repositioning myself for relief and variety, and also requires the most “rigid” and controlled wrist movements. For some games, such as Zelda and Mario, only occasional screen pointing is required, so this doesn’t become much of a problem. Metroid, however, is a first person shooter where your turning is controlled by moving the pointer left/right, as you would with a mouse on a computer. This means that the pointer has to be kept on the screen constantly, and I’m finding it can be a real cramp on my poor atrophied wrist. The nunchuck stick defaults to strafing, which I see can be useful for combat, but means that I can’t do most of the exploration with the joystick alone as I can in other games to give my right wrist a break…

That wouldn’t be so bad if I could save and take a break whenever I wanted, but Metroid is a spread-out save point type game. I’m a grown-ass man, and I want to be able to save and quit whenever I please. I’m just getting too old to game through the pain and Nintendo hands, and moreover, I’ve got responsibilities and an early bed time and stuff, so I want to be able to quit on say 5 minutes notice. On the level I was playing last night, I found the map, and it indicated that the save point was another 40 minutes of gameplay away, based on the speed I was going through the other portions (fortunately, there was an unannounced save another 5 minutes in, but that was still a 20 minute break between save possibilities). Of course, I can’t really blame the game designers, since when you save and quit you get your health and ammo restored… wait, I can blame the designers for that, since they could have put in a “quicksave” as well, or save points that just save but don’t restore…

Nintendo doesn’t seem to have been hitting very many ergonomic hits lately, as I’ve also got a DS which I find is an absolute killer for me. It just doesn’t fit quite right in my hands, like I want to hold it completely differently to just hold it so I can see the screen, maybe with my thumbs in towards the centre a bit more for a heftier grip, but then the controls are out near the edges for people with tiny hands…

I haven’t had a chance to play MarioKart for the Wii, but the reviews I’ve seen for it so far indicate that it (like many other games for the Wii) might be just as fun if not better if played with a game cube controller (and I’m ready to believe that if the motion-sensitive cart controls are prone to oversteer like the cow racing and manta-ray surfing minigames). Does anyone have a spare gamecube controller kicking around?

The summer blockbuster movie season has started, and started off well with IronMan. Note that Netbug’s site is down for the moment, so it falls to me to sing its praises. In particular, I really enjoyed the steampunky goodness of the “mark 1” IronMan suit made in the cave. Plus, the camera/CG work seemed to have been done with somewhat of a stable mentality: at no point in watching it did I feel the need to turn my head and puke from motion sickness. The tone was light throughout, and pretty much all the humour worked, even the little throw away bits (“this is the FUN-VEE”). Yes, there were plot holes you could drive a mech through (why, once you returned to civilization, would you decide to put a better power generator in your chest instead of, say, removing the shrapnel?), but it’s a super hero movie, and aside from that plot-central one, the fight (more after the spoiler warning) and Miss Pot’s ridiculous shoes, none of them bugged me while I was watching.

Spoiler warning

So during the final fight with the bigger, cooler, better-armed mech/power armor, there were a few things that got to me. First off, this suit was supposed to be tougher, but not as technologically advanced: it didn’t look to have that repulsor technology, but instead had some sort of rocket-based jumpjet in the feet. In that case, it shouldn’t have been able to get to those kind of stratospheric heights in the first place… but then when it did come crashing back down to earth, I didn’t catch it re-light its boosters to help with the fall. It should have smashed up there and that been the end of it. That wouldn’t have made for as big of a drawn-out fight scene though, so I suppose I’ll let it slide.

The ending should make any sequels interesting, as it does away with all that secret-identity stuff.

After my dad got his USB thumbdrive/memory stick and synchronization software, it worked quite well for about 6 months. It wasn’t the “cruzersync” software, which as mentioned previously was useless for synchronizing two computers. He ended up buying a program called “Carry It Easy Plus” which worked quite well and intuitively for him, even though I thought $25 was a little steep for a program that basically automated copying & pasting.

Of course, it only worked quite well for about 6 months. Last week for no reason at all, it started misbehaving in a particularly nasty way. Instead of faithfully copying his Quicken files to the stick, and then from the stick to his other computer, it deleted his Quicken program and data files. I shouldn’t say deleted, since technically that’s not what happened (and a delete might have landed something in the recycle bin to restore). It actually decided to overwrite his data with files of 0 size. So first his Quicken program wouldn’t even open, and then after I got the program up and running, we found that his data was gone. This is, I can not say it enough, not the expected behaviour of a commercial product.

Miraculously, he still had mostly up-to-date unsynchronized Quicken files on one computer, so we were able to recover. He suspected that it was the fault of the stick writing/transferring data improperly, so I ran out to buy him another U3-capable USB drive. We reinstalled the Carry It Easy Plus program, and did a test synchronization. It worked pretty good on one computer. I left it with him, and he synchronized again on Friday with his home computer, then went up to the cottage and synchronized with his cottage computer. That’s when all hell broke loose again. The Quicken program files were overwitten, the data was erased, and it looked like his weekend at the cottage wasn’t going to be very productive. My mom, who was heading up a day after him, brought up his home computer… and the data on it was gone too. This is the part where it goes from nasty bug to simply inexcusable: how on earth did the stick, copying the obviously most recent data from his home computer, manage to erase it in the copying process?

So now I’m walking him through the process of restoring the backup I made for him last week, which is quite painful (“ok, now paste that in” “we just did this… but how do I paste again?” “go to edit, dad…”), and for the next while we’re going to avoid Carry It Easy Plus like the plague and get him to synchronize the old-fashioned way, as painful as that is.

I was looking up the contact information to get some support or at least vent a nasty letter their way, but my dad said not to bother: after deleting his most valuable data, there’s really nothing they can do to make it right, and as handy as the program was for the last 6 months or so, he’s lost all faith in it and won’t try it again after this…

My parents bought the PS3 essentially to serve as a non-user-friendly BluRay player, so it’s not a total let-down that it’s a fairly lousy game system. Don’t get me wrong: guitar hero is fun, but it’s better on the Xbox.

Until now, I hadn’t bothered connecting the thing to the internet, partly because I figured if I ever want to play a multiplayer game, that’s what the PC is for (I don’t have any experience of using a console to connect to the internet), and partly because I was just too lazy to dig up the password for the wireless network. But today we were playing Rock Band over at Netbug’s, and it was neat that we were able to include Ryan in the game by having him play from his house over the Live service (though why he didn’t just come over and play in person since he wasn’t all that far away is a mystery). Plus, Netbug had downloaded content for his games, which made me wonder what might be out there for the PS3.

So I go and set the stupid thing up on the wireless, and of course the first thing it tells me is that there’s a system update available, so I get it. I don’t know what that lump of shiny black plastic was trying to do with my network, but it managed to crash my wireless router and not only disconnect itself, but disconnect every other computer in the house. After fixing that, it got the update just fine. Except now I need to update Guitar Hero before I can play it… and it won’t update! First, it downloaded about 16%, then crashed the wireless router again. After that, I gave me “an error occurred” message, which was ever so descriptive about what the problem is. It’s really infuriating to have this kind of thing happen on a PC, but at least there it’s sort of expected that users will troubleshoot things and all the various non-compatible software, hardware, and drivers will occasionally lead to a conflict… but this is a closed system! This shouldn’t happen at all! And if there is some random error, it should still let me rock out to the old version of guitar hero and just get the stupid update later. I want to play, and that’s about all the system is good for!

Edit: Oops, not a total disaster: there is a way to get in and play, it’s just not obvious. (The only option when presented with download is “Ok” with “cancel” at the bottom — cancelling actually goes into the game instead of back to the menu).

One neat thing with the online connectivity is that the PS3’s processing power can be put towards the Folding@Home project if you want to leave it on and unused.