A few more Mario Golf impressions. So far so good, it's a good game. Solid. I really would like to play it with a few other people though as I hear that's where it shines. As a single player experience it's good, it has enough to keep you involved and enough variety that you don't really get bored.

It does seem to be missing something off the bat, namely courses you need to unlock (there's only one available at first). The first two are easy to unlock, but then it gets a bit harder. There's also 4 secret characters to unlock, not sure how to unlock those however. So obviously there's more to the game.

The driving part of the game is pretty rudimentary, but you'd expect that. The only time it isn't is on the harder courses, where they give you the option of trying a real hard shot to shave off some points. It reminds me of Golden Tee in that sense, where you have a high risk/reward for certain shots. This only comes up once and a while though.

The short game and putting is the tricky part though, especially getting it close to the pin. You really need to pick a character and learn them, because they all have different approach shots. I'm mainly using Waluigi and have him down a bit but it's still hard. The short game is where you earn your birdies. Putting is equally hard, and not very forgiving. Reading the green is key. You have enough info at all times to do what you need to do, it's just pulling it off that's the trick. I like that part of the game because it makes it a deep game. Unless you're playing the easy course, shooting below 60 is a real test of will (if under par sometimes).

Only a couple things that are annoying. One is the camera isn't as free moving as I would like. It does the job just fine, but I'd prefer 360 degrees of spin around the ball. You get about 120 or so. Also some of the characters are cool in thier voices/animations, like Wario, Waluigi and Bowser, but some are just stupid, namely Peach and especially Yoshi.

The thing that really pisses me off tho is that if you sit and look at your lie for more than 2 seconds a ghost comes out, makes a sound and says "Press A to Swing!". And keeps coming out every 2 seconds after that. It gets annoying quick. If you're fiddling w/ the controls it won't pop out, and once you get the hang of things you don't see it as much (you're just faster) but I wish I could turn it off. For now I've found that if I hold the C-stick to the left or right to move the camera a bit while I'm thinking about my shot, they won't come on the screen.

The mini-games are cool, but all pretty challenging. I'd say Closest to the Pin is hardest, just because you get major points docked if you don't hit the green, and the course it's on is in tree tops (Donkey Kong's) and the greens are small.

You do kinda have to take things toungue-in-cheek though. It's arcadey. It has a very deep swing and physics system, but it's still arcade golf. I'd like to at some point get a nice golf sim, but I'm not sure what would fill that at this point since Tiger Woods has turned into an arcadey game as well. Still, I'll enjoy this while I have it. Good fun.

Just baught Mario Golf for my Gamecube. Haven't gotten too much into it yet, but it's fun thus far. It's a lot like Hotshots Golf. I really like golf games for some reason and this one looked really fun from what I've seen. I still need to unlock a lot of stuff yet and I haven't played many of the different options (there's like 10 different modes), but in due time.

A nice pick up and play game is just what the Dr. ordered.

Everything you ever wanted to know about my ROM collection but were afraid to ask.

Oh, and did someone want to see my video game collection?

My Fantasy Football draft is done! Here's my picks by round:

1. Shaun Alexander, RB, SEA
2. Tiki Barber, RB, NYG
3. David Boston, WR, SD
4. Jeff Garcia, QB, SF
5. Todd Heap, TE, BAL
6. Jimmy Smith, WR, JAC
7. Charles Rogers, WR, DET
8. Mike Alstott, RB, TB
9. Tai Streets, WR, SF
10. Jon Kitna, QB, CIN
11. Maurice Morris, RB, SEA
12. Packers, D, GB
13. Chad Lewis, TE, PHI
14. Jeff Wilkins, K, STL
15. Joey Harrington, QB, DET (rookie keeper)

Overall a decent draft, though I think I could have done better in later rounds. Unfortuantley my internet connection at home went down (damn Comcast) and we haven't been able to get online for the past 4 days. Hopefully that will be fixed tonight. I have more to post, but it will have to wait until after that.

Ouch, I was just working on my 2nd prototype for my control panel and cut the shit outta my finger. Huts like hell. Damn it's hard to type or use a mouse when your index finger is out of commission. :/

Another day, another dollar, another website launched! Launced the Walker Channel today, which I designed and coded. Content is sparse at this point but we'll be adding a lot later. I actually watched "Below the Belt" tonight. Hooked my computer up to my TV and watched the live webcast. It was just like watching TV! And it was very good. The only real bad part was the DJ competition, they all sucked. The rest was really good though. The archive of it will be up in a few days for those who want to check it out.

It's pretty cool watching a live event online. I actually think it's more fun just because I can heckle the people up there in the privacy of my own home and not have to drive out to the 'burbs afterward. Though tonight is one of the rare nights when being at the Walker and heckling was the better way to go. Still a good show. Makes me want to go out and check out local artists here. I can't believe what a good hip-hop scene we have here. Makes all the radio stuff seem like shit (which it is).

I got to the end of Metroid Fusion. The end is 4 bosses in a row to kill. I got to the final one but got killed. I just don't have enough energy tanks, and I can't go back to get them all (the doors are locked). I suppose there's a possibility I could still beat it, but for now I've resinged the game. Much like Metroid Prime, I just don't have the time to spend trying to beat the end. Maybe someday.

The game was terriffic except for those few sections I wrote about and not being able to go back and get energy tanks. If I could have gone back to find more I know I could beat it. It's sorta lame they don't allow you to do so. If they would have made that one area a little less confusing/difficult and allowed you to backtrack at the end, it probably would have been one of the best games I've ever played. But overall it was enjoyable.

Cool, CD Baby is signing up artists for distribution of online music, and the deal looks good. You pay $40 per album for admin costs and they put up the music on Listen.com, EMusic, and Apple iTunes. They take a 9% cut and you get 91% of all the money sold, no fees or anything.

Can you imagine any major label artist getting that kind of deal? That's crazy. This should be a godsend to all the indie bands out there. Maybe Tony's band should sign up when they get thier album out. I think that'd be so cool to pop open iTunes and see his album listed in there.

In other news...

This ones for Dave. My mom sent me a clipping of the Advocate that said Patty Jo is getting married. Apparently she's marrying some guy she met in the Air Force. They're stationed in South Korea right now. Pretty cool!

Forget what I said about Fusion. It is getting quite frustrating at this point. I don't expect to win everything right away, but it's getting to the point of where I don't really know how to get to where I need to go, and also have no clue how to kill any of the bosses I get to. Only after consulting a walkthrough do I figure it out. And even then it's not enough for me to beat these bosses (who seem to be coming one after another at this point).

The slight issue I had with the controls is now the big downer of the game. As you gain new abilities there are many different button combos for you to do to pull them all off. This latest boss I'm on requires quite a few different tricks I've learned, but in the heat of battle it's almost impossible to pull them all off. Perhaps I'm just not good enough and need more practice, I dunno, but I don't really have the time to invest in it.

We'll see how far I get. I'll likely play it a few more times to see how much worse it gets, but right now it's rather disappointing. Great first half, shitty second half, just like Prime. Having to use the walkthrough is what really pisses me off. I've found that the less I have to consult walkthroughs so for games, the better they are. I was going along perfectly until just a bit ago. Now it seems I can't move forward without getting stuck. Maybe I really do need to find an easy game to play. Perhaps Pokemon should be on my list next. Heh.

Well just as soon as I post that I get past it. Looks like now though I'm on another tough part. I guess this games has switched to super hard mode all of a sudden. Hopefully it won't be too frustrating. :/

I got to the first real ass kicking part in Fusion today. And by ass kicking I mean I'm the one getting my ass kicked. It's this spider type boss, and it is REALLY hard. It's not totally frustrating as of yet, so hopefully I can get past this thing before it becomes so. Hopefully this won't stop me from moving forward.

Got my spinner today for my control panel. The thing is actually pretty heavy. But the knob is quite cool. It's a Discs of Tron replica knob. I can tell already that this thing is going to be a pain to install. I'll probably also need to buy some new hardware to mount it.

I've decided to build a second prototype. Annette got a new Gateway computer a couple weeks ago and the cardboard from the box is about 3 times thicker than the stuff I'm using now. I also want to change a few of the layouts a bit. I still don't know exactly where to put the spinner though. I think it's going to be a tough call there.

Anyway, in other news, my fantasy football draft started a day early. I sorta like this slower format to it however. It gives me time to really think through my picks. I took Shaun Alexander in the first round. I'm up again in 10 more picks, which probably means tomorrow.

I've been playing a lot of Metroid Fusion lately, since I've gotten my Gameboy Player. The more I play it, the more I like this game. Except for a couple very minor control quips, it's exactly the type of game I love to play. It's not overly complex, it keeps a good pace, and you can sit down for short periods of time to play it.

One of the great things about the game is the puzzles. I hate to use that term because they aren't really puzzles, but you figure out quickly to use bombs, missles, etc everywhere to find hidden areas. Sometimes you can only go forward in the game if you find the "hidden" areas. A lot of them are obvious, but what it does is makes you try to bomb different places to find a way forward and in doing so a lot of the time you find secret areas.

So far it hasn't been hard or frustrating, it's been pretty great. And it's really meant to be played on the big screen. It's been a long while since I've played a 2D adventure and I must say I miss it. For everything 3D has brought us, I really miss the simple things you can do in 2D to make a game enjoyable. Because of this I'd say so far, Fusion is better than Metroid Prime. Hopefully the rest of it will be as good.

I think once this is over I'll try my hand at one of the Castlevania games, since I've heard they're so good.

The internet is shit. I would agree with that.

Well I am now ready to start my fantasy football campaign this season. I was lucky enough to find a posting on a board I frequest asking for owners in a Keeper league. I've always wanted to be in a keeper league so I jumped at the chance, and was able to get in. I'm taking over for someone who abandoned their team.

The team I have isn't the greatest, in fact, I'm not sure if there are even any keepers on it. I spent a lot of time today pouring over the league rules and trying to figure out the worth of certain players in keeping vs dropping them. You only get to keep 3 players max (plus 1 rookie if you have one). For each player you don't keep out of the 3, you get one extra draft pick, going up in the draft each player (4th round, then 3rd, then 2nd).

After much though and number crunching, I realized you're basically trading any player you keep w/ a draft pick. Thus, if I keep one player, I give up my extra 2nd round pick. Because of that it's easier to guage value, you just need to figure out if that player you're keeping is a player you would have picked by the 2nd round.

Or is it? Because other teams are keeping what are probably the best players, the draft/talent pool shrinks, and when you would have normally taken a player in the 4th round, might now be a solid 2nd rounder. It's a much tougher call. Add on to the fact that all players have contracts (determined by when in the draft they were drafted), and you can't keep a player who's contract is up in '03. Thus you also need to guage which players will flow back into the draft/talent pool who would have otherwise been someone else's keeper. As you can see, pre-draft takes a lot of time and work.

Luckly I have a pretty good plan in place, but I don't have much time. Draft is on the 18th, and there is info I'll need to know in order to figure out my keepers and how I want to draft. We find out draft style on the 13th, that'll influence my keepers, since one of my players is on the fringe if I want to keep him or not, it all depends on where I pick in the draft. Then we find out keepers on the 15th, which will really tell me the kind of pool I have to deal with on draft day.

One thing I know I'll do though is keep my rookie. Rookie keepers are traded for the 15th pick, which is almost a no brainer if you have a rookie of any value what so ever. Obviously this next week is going to be pretty hectic with this stuff.

Warning, tech talk to follow...

The other day I decided to delve into the unix part of OS X since I have a few more days before I need to be back at work. First thing I did was fix my terminal app to the colors I want and my .tcshrc file to have all the aliases and whatnot I normally have.

Then I figured I'd screw with Apache. Apache comes w/ OS X and starting it up is super easy since it has a control panel. Started that up and started futzing with web stuff. It wasn't long before I asked myself, "how do I run Perl scrips?"

So I went online and found out. It wasn't hard, Perl was already installed! I just had to find the right directory (it's different from Linux). Then I got even more ambitious, what about PHP? Hey, PHP comes with OS X too! But it's not on by default. So I figured out how to change httpd.conf to let me run PHP. I have never used PHP before so this is pretty cool.

I was also going to install mySQL to play with, but decided against it. I figured learning Apache and PHP will be enough for now. That is, if I ever use them. The more I got into the file system of OS X though the more I liked it. I had installed Samba to give me more control over user shares (so Annette could access my photos, etc), and since then I've been wondering what else this thing can do.

The only issue with all this is (as Dave can attest to) it can be a time drain. I had found a cool Perl script to let me admin iTunes over the web, which I figured would be great to let Netter play whatever songs she wanted from her computer. Problem was I had to install a lot of Perl modules, but CPAN didn't like my Perl set up for some reason (kept saying certain files were missing?). After a couple hours I gave up, realizing it was a futile attempt and was draining way too much time out of my day.

Luckly though, most of the stuff I've done was pretty simple. I think I'll stick with what is simple to set up and use from now on. ;)

Annette and I went to Door County over the 4th, and here's a recap of the major events.

On our way up there we stopped at Joe Rouer's Bar to have a burger. Mmmm. They still have the best burgers ever. Grease, grease, and more grease. Quite good. My parents met us there (we were a little late) and mom ordered some Teezers. The menu said D.G. Teezers, and we tried to figure out what the D.G. meant. I said Damn Good. And they were.

Friday consisted of just driving around DC. We stopped at Not Licked Yet and had some ice cream. Awesome as usual. Then we just headed around. I like DC because you can just pick a road and drive on it and never get lost. No matter where you go you'll hit water eventually. We ended up on a dead end that had a big boat dock on it, so we hung out there for a while. It was pretty cool.

That night we went to see the fireworks in Sturgeon Bay. We sat by the old West Side School baseball diamond. The show was pretty good. I tried to take a few pictures, but it's somewhat hard to take firework pictures.

Saturday we decided to go for a bike ride down to the lake (we brought our bikes). It was a good ride until we had to go up Silverdale hill. I think that was too much for both of us. That was probably the longest bike trip I've had in a while.

Later that afternoon Annette and I went to the movies to see Legally Blonde 2. It was alright. Quite cheezy and a good way to waste some time. After that my parents met us at the Neighborhood Pub. I told my dad I'd buy him dinner since his birthday was on Monday. Afterwards my parents said they were gonna go home and watch NASCAR, and we didn't want any of that so we just stayed at the bar. While doing so I had a sneaking suspicion that our waitress looked familiar. Then it dawned on me she looked sorta like Kate Beck. I have no idea if it was her or not, I didn't have the balls to ask her, but it did look and sound pretty much like her. After we got home I looked her up in the phone book to see if she was in there. Nope. So either it wasn't her, or she got married. Oh well, I haven't thought about her in ages, so I thought it was interesting.

Sunday we just hung out and then went to GB. We went shopping a bit, hit the Exclusive Co. They had the Topsoil 1993 CD (I have the 92 version), but the only decent band I saw on there was Thin Red Line, which didn't justify the purchase price. I was hoping there might be some Vesicular on there but to no avail. Then we drove past Lambeau, which looks real nice. I'm pretty impressed.

After that we went off to the Abbey to meet my buddy Bob for dinner. Had a few burgers and played some Golden Tee. It was kinda weird though, we haven't talked in a while and it was hard to find things to talk about. Yet I see Annette every day and we usually have things to chat about. I always hate that when that happens. Things don't seem so natural as they could be (or used to be?). I still had fun though. After that Annette and I went to Onieda to waste some money. I stuck to the video poker but Netter played some black jack. We both lost but that's to be expected. It was a good time however.

The next day we packed up and came home. It was pretty relaxing, which I know we both needed.

Instead of replying to everyone individually from my last post, I'll just post this. It's good to see people do keep up w/ this. I don't expect comments all the time, I just wonder sometimes if I what I write is boring. I guess I began to think that because when I went to Michigan, Phlappes told me that he found my previous journal boring because it was always about games. I suppose I shouldn't have let that get to me.

I do need to post more often, though. I realize I post in spurts. Dave meantioned only having 3 friends, but I don't really know anyone else on LJ, nor do I really read many others besides my friends. I always think it's odd reading someone's journal you don't know. It's the same w/ the blog scene. I only read my friends blogs, because I can relate to them. With someone I don't know or haven't met, it's harder for me to relate to them and really get into their journal or blog.

For example, because I know Dave so well, I find his quips on politics and technology to be interesting and amusing. If I didn't know him, I think I'd be harder for me to get into some of the posts (especially the ones that tend to go on and dig deep, which is one of the endearing things Dave does and is able to do quite well). Tho, perhaps I'm just not looking hard enough elsewhere.

Anyway, expect a few more posts soon to catch up on happenings lately.

Does anyone even read this anymore? Or is it even interesting? If not I'm thinking I'll just scrap it. I'd like to condense a bunch of my stuff anyway.