Mac, LInux and things in between

I’m wouldn’t call myself a huge gamer but the fact that Steam is coming to Mac has be excited.

I thought I’d take a break from my usual topics and hit on something I haven’t talked about for awhile, gaming.

If you played Nintendo growing up and you are my age you probably played at least one Mega Man game. Mega Man 2 is the I played a lot of growing up and while it was really hard I still had a good time.

In today’s gaming world that kind of difficulty just wouldn’t fly. Games are much longer afairs today and require more time to complete. If a game like Metroid Prime was as brutally difficult there is no way I’d ever finish it. I’d be so frustrated that I had just lost an hour’s worth of play time I’d soon quit playing.

So when I heard Capcom was going to be creating a new Mega Man AND was going to be doing it the same 8 bit style Mega Man 2 was done in I was pretty excited. When I downloaded the game off of the Wii shop channel and started it up I couldn’t believe how well Capcom captured the feel of the original games. The sound effects, music and animations were all just right.

Then I realized that after no less than six attempts I hadn’t even made it past the first checkpoint in the Concrete Man stage. After twenty minutes I had just made it to the end, to Concrete Man himself, only to die immediately.

But I loved every minute of it. I haven’t had as much time as I would like playing the game but the $10 price is well worth it. If you liked any of the original 8 bit versions of the game you owe it to yourself to play this game.

Whenever I can I’ve been playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl. This game has sucked me in more than I ever thought it would. In fact, I even once was the game looked retarded and chaotic, something that I wouldn’t like.

Well one of Brawl’s major components is online play and all to often I find myself playing with someone and there is a lot of lag. While I wanted to blame Nintendo completely at first I thought I should at least verify that the issue isn’t on my end first.

I set out doing this by getting my Wii connected to the internet through my usual wireless setup and thing sending a ping request to it from my Linux box. My wireless router is less than five feet from my console and yet I’d see at minimum a 2ms delay. 2ms doesn’t seem like much until you ping my laptop and get .600 ms over the same wireless connection.

I kept pinging the Wii while playing a round of Brawl online and I found that at times, the delay *just on my network* would go as high as 111ms! Now, the Wii might be doing packet prioritization but I doubt it. Anyway, 111ms is quite a bit higher than I would typically get to any other web site I usually visit. The round trip time to yahoo.com is around 64ms. If I’m seeing typical times to Nintendo’s servers and then I add in that my Wii’s wireless is contributing between 2-30ms (take out m y worse case) it’s easy to see why some Brawl games suffer from a lot of lag.

To combat this issue, I picked up a LAN adapter from Best Buy. When using the lan adapter the delay still isn’t great, but it is at least rock solid at 2-3ms no matter what is going on. This is a huge improvement in my eyes and if a person is at all serious about online play with the Wii, a lan adapter is key.

I haven’t really discussed my gaming habit for awhile so for those interested here is an update.

The holiday season added a number of games to our collection. I can no longer call it “my” collection as now there is a game that was purchased specifically for my wife. It is officially our game collection. Anyway, I’ve been filling my time by switching off between Metroid Prime 3 and Super Mario Galaxy. Both are excellent games.

When I’m not playing Wii I’m probably playing DS. I recently finished up The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and picked up Mario Kart DS. Mario Kart DS is an older game but is highly rated.

So I have a little something to admit. I’ve never played a console game over the internet. No really, I never have. Way back in the day when 56k was the next best thing I played a Star Wars game online with a buddy but that’s pretty much the extent of what I’m done.

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My Wii has now been back for a week and all is good. Although the shipping took forever the entire process went very well. It was refreshing to deal with a company that didn’t try to walk you through some idiotic script of did you try this and did you do that. I guess when you depend on your product to generate future sales you can afford to actually please the customer.

We (my brother-in-law and I) were able put a number of hours on it, along with the projector, playing a number of games including Resident Evil 4 and Super Swing Golf. My short review is, RE4 is a keeper, Super Swing Golf is hardly a renter. I usually stick to the first party Nintendo games so RE4 is a bit of a departure for me. Although I wasn’t able to put a lot of time into it, it was fun.

I stopped by our local Best Buy to pick up a classic controller. The place was filled with people and yet they had a number of Wii’s on hand and nobody swarming them. There are Wii’s on ebay selling for *less* than $250 (plus the outrageous shipping of course). Has demand slowed or production increased?

Lots of great stuff came out of the Nintendo press conference at E3. I was able to read the live blog as it happened over on gamespot.com and here are a few of the highlights I picked out.

• Mario Kart Wii coming and will be online sometime next spring and will include a plastic steering wheel attachment for the controller
• Similar to the cheesy plastic steering wheel attachment offered with MKW a “zapper” has been create that allows you to attach the remote and nunchuk to a gun shaped thing. This allows you to move your character with the nunchuck and aim on screen with the remote. FPS games would be the major use here. Sold separately this item is $20
• SSBB will be released December 3rd, online play as everyone already knew.
• Madden 08 and FIFA 08 will both be online
• Super Mario Galaxy to be released November 12
• Lots of new games for the DS, Wii Fit for the Wii. Uses a pressure sensitive, wireless pad to determine how/where you’re standing. Interesting idea.
• A new channel called Check Mii Out where you can vote on Mii’s created by others. No details on how it works or when it would be available, maybe it’s available now?

For complete info, head over to gamespot.com and read up on their E3 coverage. Lots of news for Xbox and PS3 fans as well.