almost witty

Appropos of nothing, I ended up upgrading to Windows Vista last night. (well, rather, my new swanky laptop which I got for a ridiculously cheap price arrived).

Straight away ran into a few problems. All the fancy graphics are nice, but don’t actually amount to even a ramp of beans, let alone a hill. The much-vaunted security issues seem positively annoying when you’re trying to set up a new laptop.

The worst issue is that my favourite game in the whole wide world, Civilisation 4, refuses to run on Vista. I’ve tried running patches, installing DirectX, uninstalling and reinstalling and each time various little bugs come up. including that it can’t find the DVD - even though I ran it from the DVD in the first place.

Which wouldn’t be so bad if … half the reason I upgraded was so that Civilisation 4 could run comparatively smoothly on it instead of crashing when my old laptop would overheat.

Have you used/tried Vista in earnest and anger? Would I really be sad if I resorted to trying to dual-boot it just so I could run a game?

So Miss R and I have had a weekend of being with the Wii … and while Miss R has not tried to wrestle it from my hands, we’ve had a good couple of games of tennis and bowling on it. Which she beat me at (oh the shame!).

On the Friday night, Miss R’s sister and brother-in-law happened to pop over, and so we showed them the console. The brother-in-law, having had some boxing and golf experience, took to boxing like a duck to water - and it was amazing watching him playing the game while adopting the classic boxer stance. Because while you can sit on the sofa and play these games, why would you want to? Now I’ve got two controllers, I’m wondering whether to get two more in case any visitors pop round!

Having said that, it does take some time to get used to the controllers. Holding it sideways for Sonic? The thing that really baked my noodle for a while was in Call of Duty 3 when you have to move it fast in a certain direction to wrestle a rifle from an enemy. I’m still not sure how that happens, to be honest!

Making a Wii for myself was rather quirky fun, but that’s where my love affair with the cutesyness of the Wii control panel ended. All those jolly sounds, all that Japanese animation - it can get quite grating after a while. Give me the tentacle monsters of anime anyday!

Right now, though, my Wii has been trying to download a systems update from the wireless internet since midnight on Sunday. It still wasn’t done at 8am this morning - hopefully it’ll be done tonight. And for a putatively simple console the whole family can use, getting it online is a bit of a struggle.

Of course, the real test will be whether Miss R likes the Wii enough that she plays it by herself…

I still want a Playstation 3 though! In that spoof Apple-style parody video for the PS3 versus Wii - the “cute as a button” skinny blonde/Nintendo Wii would have me reaching for a garrotting knife sooner or later. Or maybe I just want to keep up with the electronic Jones’ in the work office next door…

Like most gadget/tech/game-obsessed folk, I’ve been dreaming and arguing with myself between the PS3, the X-Box 360 and the Wii as my next games console of choice. Which is rather silly, considering I mostly play RTS games and I don’t use my existing game consoles that much any more. But dream on, I do. And unlike Angelina Jolie, a games console is within reach. At least, theoretically.

Why would I want all three?

A Nintendo Wii will get me off the couch, it seems like great multi-player fun and it might just turn Miss R on into the possibilities of gaming.

A Playstation 3 - well, it’s just the games console equivalent of a great big thundering V8 turbo-diesel Ferrari. The idea of downloading games and trailers in HD quality does sound appealing - even if I have a traditional CRT TV set. Plus, the trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV had me *drooling*.

As for the XBox 360 - well, it came out before the PS3, it;s cheaper and it promises better integration with my PC and online, with downloadable movies and trailers. But then the PS3 promises that as well, doesn’t it?

All this came to a head last week, when on one day whispers on the Internet abounded of a discount code that let you get 40% off any goods in their catalogue, at least for the 20,000 customers. Including a Playstation 3. So I ended up ordering a Playstation 3, and wondering if I could have better spent the money on something else. Like a house.

The next day, Miss R told me (on request, she doesn’t check on this all the time for me!) that the local game shops had managed to secure a supply of Nintendo Wii’s. Before I had time to think about it, I’d popped down to the shop, handed over my credit card and became the proud owner of a Nintendo Wii. Mostly because I had aspirations to selling it on eBay - but also because I did want to play it, see what it was like, and perhaps turn Miss R onto the power and greatness of gaming.

Alas, to sell it on eBay meant not touching the Wii. So it’s been sat on the living room floor for the last week, lonely, untouched, unplayed with me only occasionaly salivating at it, wondering whether someone would pay me a lot of money for the privilege. But it was not to be - the only two flickers of interest came from someone in the Phillippines who wanted two (scam alert! scam alert!) and someone from Scotland who wanted it for their church youth group and wondered if I would do a deal.

Of course, in the midst of all this, I was starting to stress about just what I had done, buying two games consoles on two consecutive days. At least until the letter came through saying that the discount code had been withdrawn, and that if I wanted the shiny gleamy Playstation 3, I’d have to pay full-price for it. Baluga. Although my parents are in Hong Kong at the moment, where PS3s cost 73% less than they do in the UK…

So tonight, after the total failure of my attempt to make some money (that’s my application to The Apprentice cancelled), I at least have the small consolation price of having a Wii to play with tonight. Unless you want to buy it from me?

Way way back in the mid-1990s, I remember when mobile phones became more than just ways of talking to people. My then-new Nokia phone had a little mini-game called Snakes.

It was a very simple 2D black-and-white game on a screen that a Spectrum would laugh at, in which you controlled a little snake in order to make it eat things and grow larger, while avoiding its ever-growing tail. But it was just enough to occupy my attention span on any bus or tube journey, and there were reports in the paper of showbiz celebrities (such as Robbie Williams) competing with each other to attain a higher-and-higher Snake score. Thought they were dead busy meself.

But later Nokia phones that I owned seemed to abandon games altogether. My last phone was a Sony Ericsson W810i, and aside from its laughable excuse for a keypad, it didn’t seem to have any particularly compelling games on it.

Today, I got myself a Nokia N73. One of the great joys of getting a new mobile phone is diving into all the buttons, options and menus - without having read the manual, of course - to see what there is. That is, after you’ve frantically opened it and plugged it in only to belatedly realise that you need to insert the battery first. Which involves removing the battery cover which takes a degree in mechanical science - or a belief that you can rip apart the phone without damaging the new toy you’ve got.

Anyway, while I’m checking out all the new options - where’s the automatic keypad lock ?! - I find the Games section. And there’s a game called Snake. Oooh, past guilty pleasures abound, I think. Retro emulation of an old game on a new smartphone - how cool is that?

Nope. They’ve gone and reprogrammed it. With sound, music, lights, colours - and more importantly - re-set it in a 3D world. Now it’s no longer a simplistic, easy-going game that anyone can figure out. And now it’s even harder to play. Multiple distractions of light and sound everywhere. The blackness of the gamescape makes it feel like you’re in an oppressive world rather than a cheerfully simplistic one.

The most annoying thing is that since my commute is now 5 minutes long by car, I can’t play the game properly. And I really want to!

I currently own a Playstation 2 and an X-Box. Aside from the odd spurt of gaming obsession (mostly with Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and Halo), they mostly sit there lying, begging to be used and played with. So when news first eeked out about the X-Box 360, I wasn’t that particularly bothered.

Until I saw that the X-Box 360 comes with a built-in Media Center Extender. Which basically means it can hook up to my PC network (wirelessly I assume), and let me watch digital videos or photos stored on my PC, in the living room on my TV set. Now this sounds dead handy to me. Especially given the 40 Gigabytes of video I’ve yet to watch.

Of course, I could just mod my existing X-Box for the same effect, but why do that when I could have a new gleaming white/green gadget to play with instead? Then again, I could just go on holiday instead…