I just bought this game Thursday as I was leaving work. I had heard great things about it and I wanted to see if it was better than Super Mario Sunshine, which had left a sour taste in my gaming mouth.

Well, so far I’ve gone through about maybe 15% of the game and I have to say that SMG is really living up to the hype. First, the control scheme for the Wii is pleasantly intuitive (Warning: it requires the Wii nunchuck controller attachment!). Mario is very easy to control, even in an environment that makes your perspective go upside-down and sideways on a regular basis. It seems that Nintendo learned their lesson from the game camera perspective problems in Mario Sunshine. That was one of the reasons why I stopped playing Sunshine. Another thing that they seem to have omitted (so far!) is the crazy obstacle course levels that Sunshine had. Some of those weren’t bad, but others seemed so hard as to make you rely on pure luck (the Pachinko level, anyone? I went through tons of Mario lives trying to get through that one!). Galaxy is easy at first, but I can tell that isn’t going to last very long, seeing as I lost a few lives due to figuring out what to do on some of the later levels. The cinematics are a joy to behold! Visually, as well as in gameplay, this game is a real treat to dive into. Even the physics of the game, namely the gravity effects, are way cool.

I can’t wait to go through the rest of this game so that I can give a more in-depth review. Be on the lookout for this, and more, on The Esoterik Blog! Cheers!

Side Note: I’ll be posting some video of my gameplay on the Wii during various games. These will be separate posts from reviews or anything else, unless I deem it necessary.

Thursday, I came home from work, happy that it was the end of my workweek, to find this gem sitting in my mailbox. As you can see from the pics in this post, there are fourteen triangular and vertex-shaped pieces that can be twisted around each other any number of ways. Each piece is tiled, not stickered like some other puzzles. It’s very well-made and feels very solid in weight, movement and construction. I ordered it at Mefferts.com for eighteen bucks; I think over half of that went towards the shipping cost!

Due to the nature of the shape and cuts of the pyramid, the tips don’t move (only rotate) and everything else revolves around the center vertexes. This means that , despite the cool design, it’s not at all hard to solve. The minimal difficulty notwithstanding, I’m still happy with it. I’ll have fun trying to unearth its small secrets, making patterns and endeavouring to bring my solve time down. Just to let you know how easy it is to solve, I took it out of the box, showed it to the wife, mixed it up, set it down for a few minutes… and then solved it a few minutes later! In terms of difficulty, it’s really like a glorified 2×2 cube, much as a Megaminx is little more than a glorified Rubik’s Cube.

Well, I’ll be looking around for more possibilities to add to the collection. I think I’m ready for two difficult puzzles. One is the Pyraminx Crystal, which is in the final drafting stages before production at Meffert’s puzzle shop. I can’t wait for this one to be available soon! The other is either going to be a 20 color Dogic VI puzzle or a 12 color Dogic I. Before I go further, I’ll answer Travis’ comment (on my last entry) with this: yes, I’m definitely interested in a Sudokucube! That one, you have to work out where all the numbers are going to go in advance before using a 3×3x3 solution. In fact, I’m thinking of buying replacement number stickersets to put on one of my spare cubes! But I digress… Anyways, I’m in sore need of a new challenge.

Cheers! (And I still hope someone mass-produces the Gigaminx puzzle!)

For this Esoterik Blog post, I’m gonna borrow Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine and transport myself back to Hanover Park, Il. sometime around 1986. Around the time that I was finishing junior high and entering high school. This was also the time where my musical tastes were starting to transition from Top 40 Pop/Dance to Hard Rock/Metal. I wasn’t buying any albums yet, but I had a radio with a tape player/recorder and some spare recording cassettes laying around. What was a budding music appreciator to do but start recording his favorite songs and shows off of the radio. Those homebrewed mixtapes had some charm to them; little imperfections like the tail-ends to commercials, beginnings of songs accidentally cut off, station DJ blurbs and special show introductions lent the tapes a lot of personality! (Side note: the mixed-format Chicago station WVVX in Highland Park had this kick-ass metal show that aired during the weekends (or on most nights, at one point!). Not only did I tape that show when I had tapes to use, but that show’s intro is still memorable to this day!! I miss it soooo much!)

When I met friends who did their own tapes, we often traded and got exposed to other music that we may not have found on our own. You could say that was the social music revolution of the day, akin to how Last.fm and iLike.com work today (but without the personal touch of trading; you can only look at and sample what others are listening to!). When I started dating, I often made mixtapes of various lovey-dovey songs that were special to me, or that reminded me of the girl I was dating at the time, and of course gave those tapes to them. Some thought it either cool or silly, but… that’s besides the point! Also, when CD’s became the standard album format, that made it so much easier to make these tapes rather than holding the FF/REW buttons on the playback tape to find the right spot to start the music. (I’m 35, so I grew up around the time when tapes were king, the 8-track was all but dead and vinyl was dying a slow (kicking and screaming) death!)

For me, this continued until some things changed in my musical life. Along with getting a couple of portable CD players, I finally could afford a CD writer for Christine’s computer when we were engaged. So, tapes went into permanent storage and the almighty CD became completely standard for me. This also meant… mix-CDs! I mainly made these for myself and Christine. However, as my working relations grew around me, I did enjoy making mix-CDs for my friends and co-workers with whom I talked music with the most (which I still do; I just made one recently for my fellow work partner!)

Now, as of 3 years ago, the iPod and other portable media players have replaced the almighty CD, which has now been relegated to permanent hard-copy use (music) or rewrite-able recording and playback (video). Once Solid-State Memory (SSM, or flash memory) goes way up in capacity and way down in price, that will herald the death-knell of the CD format. I’m sure some who read this will be, like, “Well, DUH!”

So why am I writing all this? Because a new music site just took me back to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when I experienced the satisfaction of making and trading mixtapes. Muxtape.com is a free storage medium that is set up like your own personal “mixtape”. All you do is upload songs to it (a maximum of 12 files, each one with a 10MB limit) and it gives you your own account URL to share your virtual mixtape to others. This is a very simple, bare-bones interface (I think it’s AJAX), that is even RSS-enabled. It only allows for 12 songs on one account, so it’s not like having a bunch of blank tapes to work with, but I can understand this limitation, given the (albeit dropping) costs of online storage. Of course, another difference is that you can skip around to other songs at will, unlike riding the FF/REW buttons on a tape deck. You can pause songs, but not skip or jog to parts of songs, which is somewhat bad IMHO; I encounter lots of songs with lame beginnings that end up being great songs afterwards. However, this is a promising service with some room for growth.

Well, I will share my Muxtape URL with all my readers here: http://chrisw357.muxtape.com/. Not only did I try to use all my favorites, but I also included songs from diverse genres and sub-genres. When you do listen to it, I hope you will enjoy at least one or two selections. It even has a length of almost an hour, just like one of those beloved blank tapes!

Take care, all!

Hello to all!! I’m sorry I haven’t written here in a while. As the title suggests, I’ve had my time occupied with some new toys in my life. You know it’s true what some people say; when men get older, they still play with toys… but they’re either more expensive, imported or have tons of neat useless features!

Nintendo Wii

In one of my postings before last Christmas, I was pining for this system. I was also being realistic; I didn’t expect to get one as long as retailers kept jacking the price up because of near-unavailability. Well, since Nintendo boosted production on the Wii, the store I work at finally got them in at the regular price. I just had to buy one that day, especially since one guy earlier in the day was trying to buy all of them!

If you’ve read anything about this console, I don’t need to tell you how cool this thing is. However, for those who haven’t paid much attention to tech matters like this, I’ll fill in the gaps here. This is probably the very first console to have an emphasis on actual physical movement while playing some of its games. Wii Sports, the game disk that it comes with, has five games on it that make full use of this functionality. The bowling, golf and tennis games were rather low impact, but the boxing and baseball games actually made me break a small sweat! There’s virtually no lag time between swinging the wireless controllers and movement on screen, showing just how far this kind of technology has come for home use. Thus the reason why I haven’t been blogging lately… I’ve been on my feet playing video games and being somewhat active at the same time. (speaking of which, I started rollerblading again… but I digress!)

There’s more to the Wii than just its own games. There’s built-in online functionality, with access to Nintendo’s Wii Shop Channel… a place that, admittedly, had me asking my wife to chain down my credit/debit card! You can buy points there, which enable you to get applications and games for download into the Wii console. The games are part of Wii’s Virtual Console, and the shop has access to lots of older games from classic systems, with more being added every week. That leads to another feature; the Wii is backwards-compatible with my GameCube games! Add those things to the Wii’s main home screen, which has other channels such as news, weather and social interaction channels (all free use!), and you’ve got a great diversion from everyday life.

Games And (even more!) New Cubes

In addition to going a bit crazy on Wii’s Virtual Console, buying three classic games, I got two new games for it (ow… my aching wallet!). The first one is The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Yes, I know I already have it for the GameCube, but the Wii version is somewhat different. First, the entire game is right/left inverse and, second, the game makes full use of user movement with the wireless controllers. The first time I swung the sword around with Link, I broke into the biggest grin my face has ever endured! The second game is Super Smash Bros. Brawl. It’s a game where famous video game characters (mainly from Nintendo), duke it out in arena-style combat. It’s a very enjoyable game, with an immense challenge factor. Also, it makes use of the Wii’s online capability, enabling you to play against other players from around the world.

I also finally got the new cubes I had talked about in my last post! These are different than the 4×4x4 and 5×5x5 cubes I have with the Rubik’s name. They’re made by a Far East company called Eastsheen. I’ve worked with them for the past three days and I have to say that they are made better than their Rubik’s counterparts; they turn much smoother and tighter, due to different internal mechanisms. Because of this, my times have improved to around 5 minutes on the 4×4x4 and 11 minutes on the 5×5x5. So what’s going on with my shattered Rubik’s 5×5x5? Well, I’ll probably put that back together and just have it for display, with minimal use.

I won’t be getting any more puzzles or games for some time now; I want to save for better things. However, if I can find a Pyraminx at a good price, that will be the next puzzle. Rumor has it that, in September, a company in Greece is going to be mass-producing their new Rubik’s-style cubes. These will go by the name of V-Cubes, and they have had working prototypes of 6×6x6 and 7×7x7 configurations. Look them up on YouTube; I already featured the video of internationally-known cuber Frank Morris solving their 7×7x7 prototype in an earlier blog entry. If and when these become available, you know I’m going to be in line itching to get my hands on one!

Before I leave, I have one tidbit of useless trivia for you, garnered from Wikipedia and the original paper on the subject. Did you know that a 5×5x5 puzzle cube has approximately 283 trevigintillion combinations in it? Just to give you an idea of the size of the number we’re talking about, that’s 283 followed by 72 zeroes. A research paper stated that the number is also a very rough estimate of the number of hydrogen atoms in the known universe!!

With that thought, I bid you all a good day. Cheers!

I have to give a tip ‘o the hat to Chris Pirillo, egomaniacal geek that he is, for pointing this app out.

Click on the thumbnail to embiggen the image of my new desktop (wallpaper, for you Windows sufferers users!). I created that while using this awesome fractal-generating app called Oxidizer. It’s an open source project on Sourceforge.com and, so far, it’s only available for OS X. Be warned, though; you will definitely need some muscular processing speed to render any thumbnail samples generated by Oxidizer to full size images within a decent timeframe.

Case in point: Chris Pirillo demonstrated this app on his quad-dual-core Mac Pro machine. That’s 8 processor cores, compared to my lone PPC 1.8 Ghz G5 processor. It took him all of 37 seconds to generate an over-2000px wide image. It took me seven freakin’ hours to generate this image you see in the post to 1680×1050px resolution!! Oh, by the way, this thing does fractal morphing animations as well. So, yup, definitely think twice before doing any serious stuff with this app if you have a underpowered (read: over 2 years old) computer.

If you want to use this image for your own (legal) purposes, click here to download it in 1680×1050 widescreen goodness. (567 Kb download)

Cheers!