journal for 2002-06-12
video game addiction… ADVANCED!
I went to pick up my Wavebird controller last night. It’s great. More on that later.
The bigger (read: more expensive) news is that I picked up a Game Boy Advance. I’d been thinking about it for a few months, and as more and more GCN games promised GBA hookups, it seemed more and more inevitable that I get one. Since EBX is running a decent rebate right now, I decided to pick one up. Reading reviews of only the best games didn’t help me fight the urge, either. With only a few hours of gameplay under my belt, I am already happy with the purchase. (It really does need some kind of backlight, though. I’m waiting for more news on the Afterburner.
I bought Golden Sun and Advance Wars, but Golden Sun has been so addictive that I couldn’t be bothered to play any Advance Wars. I watched the opening graphics, was impressed, and went back to helping Xeja (aka Isaac) save the world. So far, I don’t think he’s quite up to snuff. He barely survived stopping a trio of small-town thieves. Still, experience suggests that by the end of the game, he’ll be wielding world-shattering magic and a really, really big sword. I’m OK with that.
Unfortunately, the guy at the register forgot to ring up my GBA-GCN cable, meaning that I can’t get the best rebate. I’m going back tonight to get it all straightened out.
As for the Wavebird, it’s pretty great. I sat in the library and played Smash Brothers from about thirty feet away. IGN said they were able to use it from thirty yards, but even ten was too far. I’m just going to enjoy being able to sit back on the sofa and wave my arms wildly without fear of yanking the cable out.
The control feels the same, although I have the sneaking suspicious that there are a few quirks. When holding A in SSX, before approaching a jump, the game seems to think that I release it when I start holding a D-pad direction to prepare to spin. I think that’s probably part of the “button-push figuring-out-er” algorithm, and I can live with that. After all, it is a little cheesy to sit there with A held down for a long time, I guess.
food
Salad for dinner, last night, which was good. I’m always surprised when we have salad and I’m full by the end. I mean, we eat good-sized salads, but there’s that stupid American Sensibility in me saying, “Salads are what you put on triple cheeseburgers to make them California.” I really like salads, though, and I should endeavor to get them more often when I eat out.
We had a wasabi dressing on the salad, which was really weird, but really good. I think that if I’d been asked what kind of things you could put wasabi on, I never would have listed salad. But it was good and, as Gloria suggested, was like a honey mustard dressing with wasabi instead of mustard. Unfortunately, it apparently has a short shelf life, so I’m not sure if we’ll be able to have more next week. Of course, we could always try to finish it off this weekend. And maybe we can come up with some kind of alternate killer application for the dressing, like as a maranade or something. It’s probably a bad idea for me to try to think of recipes. Last night, I suggested an anchovie-stuffed pizza. (In my defense, I didn’t mean only anchovies!)
wishlist
I’ve gotten pretty tired of Amazon’s lameness, lately. They screwed up a number of my orders over the past few months, and seem to be getting especially inept at handling pre-orders and not-yet-published titles. Beyond that, their stupid recommendations and other gimmicks have gone from mildly interesting to awful and intrusive.
So, I decided to try and shift my business away from Amazon. I like Borders, but their online store is Amazon. I like B&N, too, so I was planning to take all my business to bn.com. Then, I realized that BN’s wishlist isn’t accessible to anyone but the user. When the help said, “Others can only see it if you allow them to,” it meant, “…if you let them sit on your lap while you’re logged in.”
I’ve been meaning to write a unaffiliated gift registry for a while, and I still want to, but in the meantime, I’ve moved my wish list back to Amazon. BN didn’t seem to care much when I explained in detail why they should have a gift registry. I mean, not only would they have my business, they’d have the business of people who want to give me stuff. Maybe they just figure that nobody likes me, so they’re OK. After all, they know what I read; they might just figure I’m a big geek. My last purchases from them were Marshall McLuhan, a book on go strategy, and four programming books. It’s true: I am just a big geek.