Sunday, April 27th, 2008

I picked up my copy of Mario Kart Wii Sunday afternoon, and even though I had very high expectations for this title, I was still not disappointed. Between the new additions to the series (bikes, steering wheel, online play, bigger jumps, tricks) and the refinement of the old standbys (old courses, characters and vehicles), this version has a lot of stuff that will make old fans of the series and newcomers alike very pleased with their purchase.

A lot of the classic tracks are included, from SNES all the way to the DS version of the game. Many are left in nearly the same condition that you recall from 10+ years ago, but others have received a slight facelift in their latest appearance on the Mario Kart series. The new courses are chock-full of jumps, tons of elevation changes, and a lot of great Mii integration (in one course I saw a poster with my Walter Sobcheck Mii, and that made my day). I’m sure a lot of ‘purists’ will bemoan the addition of jumps and mid-air tricks, but I think that it makes the franchise a lot more fun to play in a casual environment. My brother noted that it felt like ‘Mario Kart meets Tony Hawk’ on a few of the courses, but it’s really not that bad. Another thing I have noticed is that the switch from 8 to 12 racers has really made the action a lot more chaotic when you’re in the middle of the pack. On one hand, if you’re in 5th or so place, it makes it really tough to break out with all of the shells and such flying. But I’ve also found that the fray makes it a lot easier to make a quick jump from 10th to 2nd place in a matter of a half lap. If you can manage to avoid all of that action, you can make a move really fast.

I found it odd that the drift settings are set to automatic by default (the computer basically handles your drift, but you get no power-up this way), but my guess is that they are just trying to cater to newer users of the series and let them ease into that part of the game. I’ll say this though — not having to press left and right while drifting to get a boost is a great change. Makes it so much more natural.

One of the biggest additions is that of the motorcycles. These suckers can FLY, but are susceptible to getting bumped out of the way by the traditional carts. I’m still a cart fella for the main courses, but they’re tough to beat in time trials (since there are no others there to take advantage of the shaky nature of the bikes). The control in general takes a few races to get used to, but now that I’ve had a chance to play around with it some, I really do love playing with the ‘Wii Wheel’. I’d guess that control would be slightly more accurate with a GameCube or Classic controller, but the wheel just ‘feels right’. It makes the experience that much more fun, and having the jump/drift button on the back of the controller works great too. Overall, I’m quite pleased with the wheel, as I was afraid it might be a little gimmicky. But I’m pleased to say I was wrong!

The online experience is probably the best of any Wii game I’ve seen so far, but that’s not saying much. On the first run of the game, it asks you to update your Wii software, then allows you to install the Mario Kart channel if you so desire. This can always be done later from the settings menu, but it’s a nice touch to get it in there from the start. The Mario Kart channel is nearly identical whether you launch it from within the game, or if you launch the channel from the main Wii screen (this method doesn’t require a disc unless you’re going to play an actual race). From here, you can view top 10 rankings for each track, add/view friends, race against ‘ghosts’ (recorded versions of others in the same race that you are in), and enter tournaments. I played 10 or so races online, and there was no real lag to speak of, and the competition seemed fair. I won a few races and finished dead last in a few others. It was a lot fun, and I can’t wait to play against a few more of my friends who picked up the game today.

Overall, this game is as great as I anticipated it would be. If you’re a fan of the series at all, or just enjoy a fun, casual race game that has a lot of depth to it if you give it time, you’ll be nothing short of blown away by this entry to the Mario Kart series.

If you’re a Mario Kart Wii player and want to swap friend codes, here is mine: 2320 6527 8198.

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nintendo, reviews, video games, wii, mario kart

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Posted on April 27th, 2008 | 4 Comments »

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

I’ve tried to be good lately and not post about politics as much on here (I’ve been posting most political-type stuff on my tumblelog), but this one was too much to pass up.

The New York Times has posted an editorial today about the ongoing Democratic race for the nomination, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d think that they were ‘un-endorsing’ her (the NY Times endorsed Hillary right before Super Tuesday). While the author (rightly) does not claim that Obama’s hands are completely clean in the latest round of mudslinging, he certainly makes it clear that Hillary is the one that seems right at home in this style of politics, and is benefiting from attempting to destroy Obama’s electability by focusing on fringe issues that do not matter to Democratic voters.

Because Hillary has been constantly attacking, there has been little time to talk about things that I feel voters deserve after 7+ years of divisive, brain dead politics. As the author says, we deserve a nuanced debate for a change, about how each candidate will approach all of the issues facing our nation over the next 4+ years. Instead, we get multiple questions about a flag lapel pin. We get Hillary invoking 9/11, Giullani-style, unprovoked. Even Karl Rove would be proud of her fear-mongering.

I guess you could say that I ‘called it‘ back in February after Super Tuesday came and went. I wasn’t alone in this prediction back then, and I’m certainly not alone now. However, I would like someone to ask her to honestly answer the question of how she plans on winning the nomination. So far, all I have heard is that she plans to say that Obama is not electable, and she is. However, her negatives are off the charts among independents and Republicans. Most Democrats will vote for her, but if the Superdelegates were to flip the pledged delegate count in favor of her, I think a lot of folks would walk away from this election. Now that’s what I call an electability problem.

I’m still confident that Obama will win the nomination, as there is just not a realistic path for Hillary. But god, am I tired of all of this. I think the positive is that Hillary is bringing up all of the petty stuff that 527’s and McCain’s folks will try to bring up in the fall. If it’s already had it’s run on the news now, it’s kind of hard to revisit it in a substantial way come general election time.

Regardless, it’s time for Hillary to hang it up if she can’t win North Carolina and Indiana in two weeks. She’ll try to spin it (just like she claims she ‘won’ Texas, she won by double digits in Pennsylvania, and she’s winning the popular vote) in a number of ways if she doesn’t win one of those primaries, but the stark truth is that she needs to win every primary by a 70 - 30 margin to overtake Obama’s delegate lead. That’s just not going to happen.

Sadly, she doesn’t realize this. Ah well.

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politics, obama, clinton, hillary, barack, north carolina, indiana, pennsylanvia, democrat

Posted on April 23rd, 2008 | No Comments »

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

All of you Mac users out there probably know about Camino, the excellent open-source browser that is based on Gecko (Gecko, you may not know, is the same basic codebase that FireFox is based off of). You may even have heard that Camino 1.6 was released this week, after nearly a year of work on the 1.5 codebase.

Some of the new features are as follows:

• Toolbar search (you can now add on searches using OpenSearch) improvements
• Find bar now is not a pop up dialog. It’s on the footer, where it should be. Safari still kicks Camino’s ass with it’s search highlighting, however.
• Built-in software update via Sparkle framework.
• Better session saving
• Better Keychain support
• Leopard-specific UI fixes (retouched toolbar icons as well)
• Newest stable Gecko rendering engine.

Camino would be my default browser of choice if it weren’t for a few nagging issues. That doesn’t mean that I don’t use it almost all of the time, but little things keep me falling back to Safari. But the bottom line is that Camino is fastest browser on the Mac with a very low memory footprint. That means that it’s fast, and it doesn’t ever slow down your system over time. The Safari folks can’t say either of those with a straight face, though they seem to want to claim it. Throw in excellent cookie management, built in flashblock and adblock, and throw in the excellent UI and wonderful Camino community, and you’re set.

However, with all of that said, as long as some of the following nag the browser, I’ll be sticking with Safari 3.1 as my default:

• Buggy Flash: flash still doesn’t play nice with Camino all of the time. Sites that don’t crash any other browser have a tendency to crash Camino.
• Camino needs draggable tabs, a la Adium, Safari, etc. This was supposed to be in 1.6, but has been pushed back to 2.0.
• .Mac sync. I want the same bookmarks at work, at home, everywhere. All the time.
• Widget weirdness - this should be fixed in 2.0 when they switch to Gecko 2.
• If I can be picky, I’d love some developer tools type stuff: Activity monitor, DOM inspector, javascript debugger, source/css editing … but I’m not counting on it.

Still, Camino is the fastest. lightest browser on the Mac as it is, and the issues I have are all trivial. If you haven’t ever used it, you should give it a try. You’ll definitely be happy with your experience.

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applications, macintosh, reviews, software, camino, gecko, mozilla

Posted on April 20th, 2008 | No Comments »

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Recently I came across a problem in Mint that I thought I’d share a solution to. Over the past month or so, I had noticed a huge drop off in traffic on my site. At first I figured this was due to the fact that I wasn’t writing anything interesting (certainly a possibility), but I also noticed a substantial drop in Google’s organic results too. After doing more research, I noticed that only a tiny fraction of my pages were actually logging page visits to the database, and the rest were returning 503 errors, saying that the service was unavailable.

Basically, people were visiting the site, but Mint was not able to record the visitor information because it was being rejected by my server. After talking with the DreamHost support staff, it was determined that mod_security was probably to blame. Mod_security is basically an add-on for my webserver that protects against folks running attacks (usually through malicious javascript), but can also sometimes shut down normal services such as my Mint tracking software. I was able to turn it off in the control panel, but I also had to add the following to my .htaccess in my wordpress folder (which for me is the root level of the server):

<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
SecFilterCheckURLEncoding Off
</IfModule>

After saving the updated file, I was able to view statistics for all of the pages on my site. I honestly have no idea what caused this to start happening - maybe the upgrade to Wordpress 2.5 was the culptrit. I hope this helps anyone who is experiencing similar problems.

Posted on April 15th, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Sunday, April 13th, 2008

Over the weekend, I came across a really great resource, if you want to call it that. The Nerve is listing The 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of All Time, and there are some gems to be sure. Some of the ones that made the cut are amazing, including:

• “More Cowbell,” Saturday Night Live, 2000
• “Ass Pennies,” Upright Citizens Brigade, 1998
• “Celebrity Jeopardy!,” Saturday Night Live, 1996
• “The Pre-Taped Call-in Show,” Mr. Show, 1997
• Citizen Kane - The Kids in the Hall
• Wycked Sceptre Party Tape - Mr. Show
• He’s Rick James - Chappelle’s Show
• The Racial Draft - Chappelle’s Show
• “The Idiot in Rural Society,” Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 1970
• “Dead Parrot,” Monty Python, 1969

My major complaint is that while one of my personal favorites (pre taped call in show) did make the list, some of the best Mr. Show sketches didn’t. Ah well. I guess I am a Bob & David fanboy.

Anyway, I hope you have an hour or more to kill, as this is quite an extensive list of great comedy sketches. If you can think of any that were left out of the list, feel free to add it in the comments.

Posted on April 13th, 2008 | 3 Comments »