So, after months of waiting, the Wii finally arrived last Sunday. Wii’ve had it for a wiik and wii are addicted to it. Wii Sports is an amazing game - provides workouts and gets everyone to get up from their chair and do some physical work. Zelda looks great and expansive. My limbs are tired from Wii Sports. And although I would rather go play some Wii Baseball, I must write this entry.
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Last night me and friends went to see Russell Peters do stand-up in New York City. It was simply fantaastic. A-1. First Class.

For those unfamiliar with Russell Peters, he’s a Canadian Indian now living in LA that does awesome stand-up comedy. His punch lines and best acts have to do Indian stereotypes which us Indians would find either offensive, hilarious, or offensively hilarious. Personally, I subscribe to the third one. And the best part is, we know most of it is true. He did a joke yesterday about how Indian parents will lie to their daughters just so that they stay away from boys. “Don’t go out with boys. If you do, don’t hold their hands. That’s how you get pregnant.” So true! He has a DVD out called “Outsourced” that has some funny shit about Indians, Asians, and everyone else. These guys are way more offensive and vulgar live than on TV. Apparently he’ll be doing shows in India next year and is petrified since his punch lines are standard behavior for Indians. Will they laugh with him? Or will they laugh at totally different reasons such as his accent?

Moving on, if there’s one thing that new console launches teach us time and time again, it’s that the public goes bananas when new consoles are in short supply at launch. If you haven’t read up yet, do some googling or digging and you’ll find numerous incidents that happened at the US PS3 launch. The best one I think was one where they guys from smashmyps3.com sledge-hammered a brand new PS3 outside a Best Buy in New York. Right in front of dozens of fanboys lined up to get hold of a PS3. Other events included drive-by shootings, people getting mugged, brawls breaking out, and what have you.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of PlayStation. I hate the PS2. I think the PS3 is great hardware but the high price and other problems plaguing Sony in general make it a bad decision to get one at launch. Wait for the dust to settle. Let units become readily available and for better games to come out. Me and my roommate have waited on a 360 for a year now. Good titles are coming out now but we want to hold off a little longer. Sure, we’re itching to play Gears of War, but we will wait. We know MS is going to put in 65nm processors sometime soon and there are rumors of an upgraded HDD as well as an integrated HD-DVD drive. Plus, we anticipate a price drop, no matter what Microsoft says.

But, tomorrow is Wii day. I’m going to head out with my roommate as he gets his Wii at a local GameStop tomorrow morning. Furthermore, and this is the best part, one of my buddies’ dad won an Xbox 360 Core System at a raffle and is going to pass it on to my friend in exchange for his old Xbox! We will soon go from no next gen to 2 next gen units! And since my roomie has a 720p capable Dell 23″ LCD, the 360 is gonna spend a lot of time here. Oh, and Amazon has this new dealy where they put up four incredible deals for customers to vote on and the winning deal is offered in limited quantities to everyone. The Xbox 360 Core System at $100 is one of the deals. It’s winning the vote with 85% last I checked and we hope to be able to snag one of the 1000 units that will be available. We can get the hard drive later and buy wireless controllers. No sweat.

I’ll post again tomorow with images of Wii procurement, unboxing, and the first run. These are exciting times people. Not to mention a Quantum Mechanics exam on Monday at 9am. Good times!

Earlier this year, my trusty PowerShot A75 suffered a lens misalignment which caused the camera to become myopic - no kidding. It wouldn’t focus at anything. Camera stores were looking for $200 for repair while Canon was asking for $85 + shipping minimum. I decided, I’d just wait it out and get a new one later in the year. Well, that wait came to end last month when I finally settled for the Canon PowerShot A710 IS camera. Read one to find out what I think of it. There’s a gallery at the end for you to look at.
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Oh my God trust me the Asian robots are gonna take over the world one day. They can make human faces at you, walk, dance, look like Einstein, and talk at the same time. Is that creepy or what? Furthermore, they have robots that mimic your hand gestures, dance to a Japanese tune, and bang your girlfriend when you’re not looking. Ok I made that last one up but everything else is true. Honest.

I am referring to the Wired NextFest expo that I went to today. The point of the show was to showcase the future of technology with an emphasis on how robots will take over planet earth in the near future. Nah, just messin’ with ya. It wasn’t that bad. Those robots were pretty cool and I still think we are far from robots killing humans and ruling the earth. In fact, that might never happen. With scientists not developing any alternative energy sources, how the hell will we power these robots? Solar power still isn’t available in a convenient form-factor for power-hungry applications and fuel cells are having a rough time getting to work properly. We will self-destruct long before robots can take over. I wager 2050 as the last year for human survival. What surprised me was that all those cool robots were from Japan/Korea/China. How about the Americans? They had robots that can throw basketballs. Yay. But hey, these were only school kids while the others were made by professionals actively working in robotics. Hell, MIT had a device that can make music using a series of tubes (internets?) spinning at varying speeds. There was also a laser harp. Yeah. It took me a while to figure out what all those red lasers were doing being sent down to a 45 degree mirror-like device. They were cheap lasers, one could tell. But the magic was in how they produced music if you moved your palm in such a way that you cut off partciular lasers. Snazzy.

They had XPS 700s setup in LAN!!! Running Half-Life 2 Deathmatch!!!! Kids were glued to them systems. Pricks. The cabinets were ginormous but gorgeous in that formula red and aluminum finish. There were sections on alternate sources of energy and the Discovery Channel. Atari was giving away free CDs with 12 classic games. I picked up two. The XPSes for some reason were not in the gaming section but the gaming section had its own interesting stuff. Like the “putting you IN the game” area where cameras put you inside a game and tracked your movements into in-game movement. It was a 2-D fighter, a la Street Fighter and old-school Mortal Kombat and it seemed unfinished but this was an excellent new technology. Competition for the Wii I’m sure!

Rabbit Theater - creepy to say the least. Imagine 150 electronic rabbits flopping their ears and glowing in different colors to the sound of music. In case you’re wondering what kind of rabbits these were, go here:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/8301/

I think I forgot to mention those cute baby seals that I clubbed at the show. All right that wasn’t funny. In the robotics section, there were these robotic seals that respond to touch and love and affection and all that jazz. You can keep them as pets and they won’t die! They’re furry, cute, cuddly, and without all the mess that comes with owning a REAL baby seal. Again, these were from the Japs who seem to wanna make up for killing all those whales by making robot baby seals. Some stupid kid kept trying to poke his finger into the eyes of one seal. The seal would promptly close its eyes whenever he tried to do that. That seal is smarter than you asshole, get over it.

Among other stuff, there were eco-friendly cars, the SpaceShipOne, a circular panoramic display with a mile-long line to boot, and stuff for kids to do. There was a real 3-D display where you can actually perceive depth and when you see the same image on a regular LCD display, it looks so…2-D. I got to see the new Vein Imager that continuously takes images when you place a hand/body part under it and projects it back on the hand to clearly show where the veins are. The imaging and projection takes so little time that the images are pretty much real-time. It can even tell when you have a bruise becase it shows the swollen nerve where you took that punch at the bar last night for messing with some guy’s girlfriend. They will use the imager for babies and old people. GE had this display on materials that was interesting. They showed how a butterfly’s wings were hydrophobic due to surface geometry and texture and how they were building materials which did the same. It was quite nice and something to keep in mind after (if?) I get my materials science degree from Columbia.

It was a fun show but I regret having missed the panel discussion on the future of robots. All thanks to that interminable line to get tickets. I knew I should have bought them before I got there. I had to run to the train station in the afternoon to catch the 12:31pm train and got there just in time. Then, I had to pretty much run to catch the 5:48pm train back and made it comfortably. Eventful day. Out.

I’ve had my DS for almost two weeks now so I thought it was appropriate to pen my thoughts on this console. I waited twice to buy it. Once, for a redesign that would take care of some minor issues with the original DS and then again for a color other than white. White’s good and all but honestly, with everyone including Apple slapping that shiny white on iPods and iMacs it has become sort of annoying. And then those iPod accessories, again designed to fit the looks of the player are also usually white. So, I wanted something different. I saw Japan had a Black and Navy Blue DS to go with the White so I waited.

Finally, Nintendo decided to release Black and Pink on September 12. I rushed (well, all right, I ambled) to the EB store in the mall here to place a pre-order for the black DS. Then, I spent a week deciding what games I wanted to get with my DS. I knew I wanted to get Mario Kart for sure but couldn’t settle on a second one. Finally, I decided to get Mario Hoops 3-on-3 which came out a day earlier. So off we went to the mall on the day and picked up my DS with the games. Also got a year-long replacement guarantee from EB - just in case.

Got back to the room and quickly unpacked the DS and fired it up. The black, sleek, DS Lite is sexy. The bright screens stand out against the black background. The button setup is simple. You get four keys on the right (A, B, X, Y) and an 8-way D-Pad on the left. There are shoulder buttons, on on either side plus a Start button and a Select button. These two have been moved over to the bottom right and are fairly tiny. Can be hard to press at times but you rarely need them anyway. The power button is along the right side while the volume slider is on the front side. The microphone is located between the two screens while the stylus sits nicely on the right underside. The package also includes an extra stylus plus the charger. You can actually get yourself a miniUSB-to-USB cable to charge it from a USB port. It takes about 4 hours for a full charge but you can play games while you charge it.

After initial setup, you need to turn off the DS and then you restart it with a game inside to start playing. The basic menu lets you choose between the game in the DS slot, GBA slot, PictoChat, or Download Play. Pictochat lets you use the wireless to chat with images you can draw with people around you. You can also play certain games multiplayer without actually owning a cartridge for you system by using “Download Play.” At certain retailers, you can download content for your games. I popped in Mario Kart DS and it looked SO MUCH better on the Lite than it did on the original DS. The buttons feel a little loose but you get used to them real quick. The stylus feels good in the hand and works flawlessly. The tiny speakers fake surround sound pretty well. The GBA slot has a cover when you are not playing any GBA games. The battery lasts for 5-8 hours depending on what you run on it. For graphically-intensive games such as Mario Hoops, it will top out around 6 hours. WiFi use cuts the life short but not drastically. With regular games like Mario Kart, you can easily get 8-9 hours out of it. Wonder what method CNET used whn they declared the PSP as having greater battery life than the DS.

The system has two processors, either of which can power either screen. Each screen displays 262k colors and as it well-known, the bottom one is a touchscreen. While a lot of games use the touchscreen to show useful maps, more and more games are actively using it. For example, games like Starfox and Mario Hoops make extensive use of the touchscreen and demand a certain amount of dexterity with it.

Short Game Reviews:

1. Mario Kart: This is a really fun racing title. For those who have played Mario Kart on the N64/GCN/GBA will take an instant liking to this new avatar. It even includes tracks from previous titles if you want to relive those good times. There are a number of game modes that promise endless fun. Under Single-Player, you have Grand Prix, Time Trials, Vs., Battle, and Missions. All are well-done and the unlockables will keep you going for hours and hours. Certainly one of the best games for the DS and a must-buy even though it came out a year ago!

2. Mario Hoops 3-on-3: Mario has been in a number of sports titles like Soccer, Tennis, and Baseball. With Hoops, he invades the world of basketball with his pals. The game looks absolutely gorgeous and is another fun game to play. The game uses the touchscreen for an innovative control scheme. Other than moving your player on court or switching players, everything is controlled by the stylus. Gameply mechanics are good except for the clumsy switching system. It’s ok when you switch to the wrong player on the easy mode but when it happens in hard, the game punishes you with a high-scoring basket. That is pretty much my only gripe about the game. If you want to see what the DS can do, then this is the game you need to get.

Both games support wireless multiplayer and two DSes connect seamlessly with each other. There is no lag and you can’t tell you are playing wirelessly. It’s great if you can get 4 players together for a game of Mario Kart!

I knew the DS had great potential when they first announced it but I had my doubts due to the bulk and two-screens. However, the DS has come out with flying colors and the DS Lite has pushed the envelope further by offering a sleeker package. The selection of games is way better than the PSP and as an added bonus, you can play old GBA games. At an affordable $130, this system is a great buy and games are cheaper than other consoles. The DS is great for a quick game in between classes or if you are bored. With the CF/SD media player attachments on their way, the DS gets expanded functionality. If my DS were a lady, I’d make love to her. Wouldn’t you?