Review: Ram Restaraunt in Seattle SUCKS

I wrote a review of this awful place on Yelp. Go check it out.

Mario Galaxy Wii Mod

When you care enough to send the very best, you send me this. This Wii mod is being sold on behalf of Child's Play (Penny Arcade's charity) and it is clearly *the* bomb. It would be especially meaningful to me, at the moment, because my Wii won't read any of my discs. Yep, that's right, it won't read one of the fourteen discs in my Wii library. It is, to quote the bard, DEAD. The pictures of this Wii mod do not do it justice at all. You need to check out this link and travel over to Ebay to watch the video. The Wii makes Mario-esque sounds now and is just really, really impressive in every detail.



[Ebay via Gizmodo]

XKCD At The End Of The April Fool's Rainbow

For those of you searching the Web for your favorite Internet comic, XKCD, you might have come up empty handed. If you go to XKCD right now, you get the comic strip Questionable Content. If you go to Questionable Content, you get Dinosaur comics. And, if you go all the way to Dinosaur Comics, you finally get your dose of XKCD.

Check out the April 1st, 2008 XKCD here.

For a list of all of the Web's April 1st jokes, check out this Digg.

French Footballers Abstain From Wii

The perception of how sex prior to competition in sports effects performance of those athletes has been vigorously debated; it turns out that sex helps make players more aggressive, but hampers intellectual competition.

There is a new menace though. It's given black eyes to friends of the careless and damaged high-end electronics of the slippery-handed (causing some to go to some pretty impressive protective lengths). The threat is of course: the Wii. The Wii threat isn't limited to just TVs, it's now transcended into the realm of psychotic trophy wives, exotic sports cars and drugs. Yep, that's right, althletes now fear the Wii too.

The French football team's coach, Raymond Domenech, has banned his players from playing the Wii to avoid unncessary injuries. Seriously. No joke. Check the link.

Kotaku's Dissertation on Wii Fit

Wii Fit promises (release date: May 19) to be a novel way to get a bit of exercising done on your favorite console. This $100 accessory for the Wii (how they love their accessories) is a plastic board (300 lb limit) that you work out on. You do a lot of balancing type of exercises (yoga, etc.) and even push-ups. It's maybe not as much fun/exercise as a post-bar game of DDR, but then again hopefully you won't be falling down as much as you would trying frantically to pull off some insane teeny-bopper moves after consuming enough beer to qualify for German citizenship. I don't exactly picture a post-bar game of WiiFit either. Can you honestly tell me that you know people who want to go practice yoga after tying one on? I don't know any people like that, and you don't either.

Kotaku's Japan editor has written a lengthy article on the topic, so read up if you're considering this semi-expensive purchase.

No More Heroes Review

No More Heroes for the Wii was everything that I hoped it would be. Right off the bat: I give it a very solid 9 out of 10.

Graphics
The stylized graphics play to the comparative weakness of the Wii's graphical power by using blocky character models with detail and shadow added by the skin of whatever t-shirt or jacket you dress your character up in. It's future noir style is brilliant. The lighting in this game goes to Citizen Kane levels - it is simply artistic beyond all comprehension when you put it next to other video games.

Gameplay
The action is dialed up to maximum Smash TV volumes. The violence is comical with a hint of gameshow - when you kill an enemy, a slot machine wheel spins at the bottom of the screen (while coins erupt out of the mangled corpse of your enemy) and, if you're lucky, will stop on all 7's or Bells and start a burst of superhuman power with a battlecry like "Blueberry banana cheesecake!" The enemies and their blood are limitless. Bodily fluids come out so copiously that you'd think you'd accidentally stuffed a dozen live grenades into an elephant - there are, literally, times when the screen is whitewashed with blood. All of the actions required on the gamer's part to make things go fit the fast paced nature of the game very neatly. Button mashing "A" FTW!

Story
The story is not secondary to the game. It's been awhile since I've played a game and said "What?! No! OMG! Seriously?! WOW!" and tried to pull other people in to the room to watch the cut scenes unfold (the cut scenes could be linked together to form an award-winning Anime). The story really is that good. There is a LOT, LOT of swearing in this game, so be prepared - they didn't get the Mature rating for just the blood, folks. The sexual innuendos are also very liberally sprinkled. Definitely a Mature game, and, I thank Suda51 very deeply for that.

Little Extras
The little touches are nice: when your character gets a cellphone call, the dialog comes out of the speaker in the Wiimote, so you have to hold the Wiimote up to your ear to make everything out. There's also a bevy of clothing options for your character, which I usually hate, but the t-shirts in the game are so cool that I'd probably buy most of them to wear in real life if I could (and there are about 100 too).

If you haven't already given this game a chance, do so immediately. I rented it from Gamefly, and, after beating the game, I *still* bought it. That's how good it is. No More Heroes deserves a place on your mantle and in your video game library. 'Nuff said.

I Saw Dyson Naked Today - PDF Mistake

I think it's great how companies today put manuals online for their products. I can't tell you how many times that I've lost the manual for something and gone to the well that is the Web to find some information.

That said, there is a right way and wrong way to publish information to the Web. The wrong way has been clearly illustrated by those vacuum geniuses, Dyson. Check out the link: Dyson PDF Mistake.

Now, I don't know how many of you would really care about this error, but it doesn't look good (on many levels) to have a print-ready copy of a PDF with full bleeds and crop marks on your website for the average customer to run into. Sure, you could go to any printing house and make your own suave looking copy of the manual (in bulk, no one-offs for trimming) with that PDF, but that one "benefit" really outweighs how much of a turn-off this is. If I try to print that out from my home computer, the information that I want will be reduced in size because of all of that extra bleed/trim. It would be an incredibly easy thing to correct. Ugly, just ugly carelessness. Tsk Tsk, Dyson.

Headphone Review - Ultimate Ears Super Fi 3

The earbuds that came with my iPod nano didn’t work for me. Despite being the newer variant (more silicone, less hard plastic), they were only comfortable for the first few days. They were only comfortable for that long because I hadn’t used earbuds in years and I simply did not want to spend any money on accessories. After several weeks of the earbuds constantly falling out of my ears, pumping out tinny sound and generally being unable to drown out the background noise in my apartment’s gym without me throwing the volume up all the way to Oh-My-God-Are-You-Deaf-Yet volumes, I'd had enough. I went and did some research on headphones and ended up purchasing the Ultimate Ears Super Fi 3.

The Super Fi 3 are essentially earplugs with speakers. Because they are earplugs first: you get better ambient noise canceling than larger headphones designed for the task, the noise canceling is passive, they are much smaller than the larger variety of over-the-ear noise canceling headphones so when you wear them you don't look like you're going as a cross-gender Princess Leia to an office work party. Once upon a time though, these types of aural pleasures were reserved strictly for performing musicians, but the price of these types of headphones has come down in recent years. To attest to their inside start, the Ultimte Ears company was actually the brainchild of a monitor engineer for Van Halen.

The Ultimate Ears Super Fi 3 retail for $99, but I got them for about $78 shipped from EarPhoneSolutions.com.

I picked them up for the following reasons:
- Headphone.com includes them in their Mobile Entry-fi package ($289), and I highly respect their opinion. I would have bought directly from them, but the extra five dollars in total cost… I got really cheap when it came time to submit my CC and I mitigated the damage to my conscience by purchasing from another small, specialized dealer (earphonesolutions.com).

- Headphone.com gave them a decent value rating.

- Cnet gave them a 7.7 rating (very good).

- Cnet hammered away on the comfort and quality seal of these canalphones, and comfort was very important to me.

- They came with five different types of in-ear adapters, so I was assured a quality fit somewhere in that spectrum.

After using them now, for probably about five hours a week (at least) for the past six months, I can say that I really do like them. They fit my budget and my requirements perfectly. I use them while doing housework, traveling on an airplane, or working out in the gym. An excellent "bang for the buck" purchase.