Transformers Communication

A live action Transformers movie? I really hope they do a good job of this! I can see it being quite good, or just absolutely awful...

Monkeying Around

When you go on a cruise, only certain ports have a deep enough harbour that can accomodate cruise ships. We were in Cozumel Mexico for these pictures, and I guess Cozumel has a lot of tourists. Almost all other ports we had to tender, which means you take a small boat to shore. It's just a little more inconvenient, because you have to wait for the boats to load and unload, but at least the cruise ship has docks so that the boats to come right up to the ship.

Anyway, in this particular port, there were two Carnival cruise ships docked on the same pier and it just so happends that their docking lines were crisscrossing the pier. So for fun, I jumped up and hung off of them. It was fun, until the cruise ship people started yelling at us that is! I suppose it is dangerous, but it sure was fun!


The water is really really clear down there. And it's really, really hot down there. When I was going throughout Europe, I would often relate my experiences to video games. For example, when I was at the Riechstag in Berlin, I was comparing it to the one in last mission of Call of Duty. That was one of my favourite missions in COD, and being at the actual location was really cool.






Anway, this cruise reminded me most of Mario Sunshine. In that game, Mario goes on vacation to Delfino Island, which is in a tropical setting. Well, it really felt like i was in that game, from the clear blue water, the palm trees, the sand and surf, the straw huts, overexposed bright colours, and the bright sun. Except there was no Mario and a Princess to save.

In Cozumel, Kitty and I didn't decide on any excursion, so we just ended up walking around onshore with a bunch of people. The one excursion that i missed was Scuba diving. I'm going to try it next time, but preferably I'll get licensed in Thailand where it's cheaper and then go Scuba wherever I am. We ended up at a restaurant/bar drinking cheap Corona and Sol. It was very pleasant, especially since it was soo friggin hot. The waiters were cool and brought us buckets of water that we used to splash each other.

Anyway, at night we joined a drinking excursion for Senor Frog's Boat Party. I'll blog about that another time...

PS The dolphin excursion that I last blogged about was the cheaper one. The more expensive one (~$70 more dollars) included swimming with the dolphin. Or more accurately, you hold on to its fins and the dolphin pulls you while it swims. That sounds like even more fun!

PPS The airline I flew to Paris with is offering a discount: $99 to London Gatwick, Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester & Paris. WOW.

Nintendo Revolution Controller

What a tremendously risky venture. But the gaming industry needs more innovation.

I have a Wingman Extreme which includes a gyroscope (detects tilts), but i found that it isn't responsive enough for intense fast paced gameplay. It was also hard to keep in the center position, but i guess that's a calibration issue. I used it alot when I was playing ff7 to navigate my character around on the map since it was tiring to be on the dpad all the time and I could just tilt instead. That's an example where I didn't require precise control and I found the tilting feature really useful. For flying games, where it would be most useful, I found that in general it was diffcult to use effectively and accurately, so i went back to the dpad or mouse/keyboard.

From the review it sounds like the responsiveness and the accuracy are very high, which should be an improvement and address the issues I had with the Wingman Extreme. It not only detects the orientation, but also the position, so that makes it more versatile. I think it could use more buttons though.

The example games from the article are intriguing, but I'm worried they won't get enough developers to make games to really take advantage of the interface. I think the DS is going to run into the same problems, where developers aren't really spending the time to really take advantage of the dual screens. It seems most developers go the safer route and develop for something "simpler" like the PSP.

I wish Nintendo the best of luck....maybe I'll even help them out by purchasing their system, because I am a bit of a Nintendo fanboy...

Here's some more links:
http://hardware.gamespot.com/Story-ST-15143-2567-x-x-x&body_pagenum=2
http://cube.ign.com/articles/651/651224p1.html
http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200509/N05.0915.1754.23125.htm
http://cube.ign.com/articles/651/651275p1.html

Cruising in the West Caribbean

Well last week I got back from a week long cruise in the West Caribbean. Stops included Belize City, Belize; Roatan Island, Honduras; Grand Cayman and Cozumel Mexico.

Highlights?

The first that comes to mind is the "dolpin encounter", as they named it:

This was my most expensive excursion at $135USD, but I thought it was worth it. We were in Roatan Island in Honduras and we bussed over to a marine study center. I suspect they they don't do any real study there....although they do get students in during the summer as a sort of marine biology school. That would be a fun thing if I were a kid (and had rich parents).

They keep dolphins in pens and they have multiple dolphin trainers. You are assigned into a small group of 6 - 8 with a specific trainer + dolphin. You get to pet the dolphin, feel it's teeth and tongue, learn about it's anatomy, feel it swimming around (and through) you, hug it, let it kiss you, watch it do tricks, like a fast swim, tail swimming etc. That was really fun and entertaining. The dolpin actually had a surprising number of scratches and scars. After it was over, they gouged us with the photos. Even though most of us had brought underwater cameras, there was a person taking high quality digital photographs. We decided to buy them all, since it was relatively cheap to get all our photos on CD. It was $40, which worked out to $8 per person. Just buying one printed photo would have been $15.

In the photo itself, Kitty and I are hugging the dolphin while we taking the photos. The dolphin started to rotate ontop of me, so I'm getting pushed into the water. I have a surprised look on my face and Kitty seems to be laughing (at me).

I am going to post more pictures, when I get the rest of them in my possession.

check out some pics from the cruise i just went on...good times!!!