Stex Toys

Last night saw me back on the Wii for the first time in a long time. However we set ourselves up a Mario Kart night and five of us, from a planned six, took part. The entrants where from our office and are named thusly Steve – that’s me (also sometimes refered to as Dr Jones), Jez – fellow employee of over 12 years and longtime Nintendo owner, Adam – ex employee at our work, Dunc – fellow employee for over 12 years and Rob – longtime fellow employee, but only recently joining us in IS (Information Services)

Due to the lovely friend codes we had to plan this night weeks in advance to ensure we would all be able to play, and there was no voice chat as we didn’t get around to setting up a Skype conference or anything, but maybe next time!

Rob kindly kept track of events and so I present them here as given to me:

Jez wins first race
Jez wins 2nd race
Rob wins 3rd race
Steve wins 4th race, Jez wins series
Jez wins again
and again…….
and again
and Jez comes last! (but wins series) Adam wins
guess who wins again – Jez – methinks too expert
Rob wins! (me? biased?)
but Jez goes back on top
Adam wins, but Jez takes series (again)
and for a change, Jez wins
hmm Jez again
Jez again – can he get the “perfect”?
damn it! he can! perfect 60pts – blasted rainbow road has a lot to answer for….. Time for a break, and balloon game.
And the Red team loses Congrats to Dunc & Jez (aka the blue team)
Racing again – Jez wins
and with Inspired use of POW – rob wins
Missing my red shell by millimeters, Jez again
Curses! Jez again – and Jez for the series – Is Dunc ever going to win a race?
This could be called boring – Jez again
Steve wins! but major hard fought battle – best yet?
Jez fights back.
Dr Jones wins the race & the series – Jez didn’t win! (although they were equal on points) – But Steve loses kudos for saying “I’m the best” on messages….. Though he then bows out. Night Steve.
Jez wins- but more a case of Dunc being unlucky
Jez again – despite about 10 red shells
Adam wins – by miles! No one else even close
Adam wins again – Jez – what’s happening? Still – you got the series again eh Jez?
Yaaay! Duncan wins a race!
Then Rob makes it look easy..
Jez gets it back
And goes on to win the series! That’s all 32 tracks played!

For the first minute or two I was so very aware of how blocky the graphics felt, part of this will be watching on a full HD screen of course, however given 60 seconds of actually competitive game play and all that was forgotten as the shells started flying and the pure fun that is Mario Kart burst forth, and even without the voice chat to help arrange track orders and just for general bitching, we still managed to have a totally enjoyable night. Might have to do more of these in 2010, closing such a rich avenue of gaming based purely on the increased difficulty of setting up a game is a poor excuse

So it was once again the end of my 12 month contract and time to see what new shiny toy I could get my hands on. After two BlackBerrys (Pearl 8100, Bold 9000) I thought maybe it was time to join the touch generation, but not the usual iPhone route. Nope, I’ve had my eye on the Android platform for a while now, Google’s purpose built mobile platform that stands out for being open source, and with a market place now full of some really cool apps it’s a rich and engaging community.
o2 are toting the Samsung Galaxy I7500 at their latest Android based hand set, a lovely looking device with an OLED screen for that vivid look, and lower power consumption, so it was this I picked up on an 18 month contract (o2 no longer do 12 months) at £35 a month, plenty of calls and texts and the all important unlimited internet! On top of that I paid just over ninety quid for the device, which is pretty reasonable for a modern day smartphone.

So, what’s it like? Well take a look (Sorry for slightly skewed angle, I was using a desk stand for the camera and couldn’t quite get it parallel to the desk.)

The home screen of this OS 1.5 Cupcake based device has three panes, to the left you see my central default pane. The icons will be as you would expect from other touch based devices giving me quick access to my most used apps such as twitter, facebook, GMail and the browser. But also note the widgets for the calendar and BBC News, those are live updating panes that I can have displayed in amongst the usual application shortcuts. Very nice indeed!

Also, see that switches app icon in the top right? That right there is a very nice shortcut into the power draining features for quick and easy access to the screen shown on the right where they can be turned on and off with a simple press. That’s an example of some of the clever things built in to the phone, however this being an open source platform it’s really encouraged app developers to spend some time and they’ve come up with plenty of fantastic solutions, many of which are completely free, far more in fact than I expected.

Take for example the XBOX Live tracker on the left here that I’ve setup with a few of my live buddies for testing. This gives me both an overview and notifications of my friends activities even when I’m not on the XBOX, perfect! Now I should miss out less on fun when I spot someone has booted up LEFT4DEAD and can go jump right on in. Some of the other free yet brilliant finds so far are Andro Wall, which will scour Flickr for set search terms to find replacement wallpaper for your home screens, which use a single wide shot that slides in parallax with the icons. Compare Everywhere, one of many barcode and search application that are proving popular on the iPhone also. Then there’s the augmented reality app LAYER, which upon firing up displays a live video feed of your surroundings and lays over the top say all Pizza places in 3 miles of your current location. As you hold the phone up infront of you and pan around, you can see the location markers of any results from Google Places right in your view. OK so that’s pretty geeky, but also really cool, the future is here.

Then there’s the apps you don’t mind spending a few dollars on, such as DoggCatcher over there, a podcast management suite which can download, organise, and playback both audio and video podcasts, whilst also providing access to an text based entries within the same feeds. Really nice. And shares many of the features I had become accustomed to on the brilliant BlackBerry app, PodTrapper.

All in all things are looking pretty good on Android, the OS 1.6 is out now and hopefully will be made available to me via o2 or Samsung soon, and 2.0 is already on the horizon, bringing some of the next gen controls you would expect such as multi-touch. For a good read on that head on over to Android Bloke where some of the exciting feature are highlighted.

It’s still pretty new to me, but so far I’m real excited to have such an emergent OS in my hands and have high expectations for the coming 18 months!

So things on this blog have been pretty quiet of late. Those who checkup on this site are probably aware why. I’ve been rather busy setting up and keeping a check on the ever growing community over on the Digital Cowboys Forums which has kept me well entertained over the past few weeks.
In fact with all my involvement over on the DC site I’m not entirely sure what to do with this blog now, sure I still have things to talk about that wouldn’t fit well with what I write over there, but really it doesn’t leave all that much! So perhaps I’ll wrap this blog up soon, or merge it with Linda’s blog somehow.. we’ll just have to see how things go.

My gaming kudos will grow a little this week, as I will be jumping on a Halo release from the start! Having missed out on all the previous iterations by simple not being around the console world, the lure of getting in on the ground floor and indeed the sound of the Firefight mode were too strong to resist. Maybe I’ll see you there?

I’ve secured both Persona 3 & 4 from a friend, both of which should be playable on the PS3. I’ve never experienced any Persona before, other than watching a few videos on Giant Bomb so it should be interesting to see if these games can hold my interest. It’s also a first real step in using the backwards compatibility to see some games I never got around to when we had the PS2 setup, and there are a great many PS2 games that are still worth spending some time with I believe.