Francisco & Ross’ place

Friday night just gone I went round to Francisco & Ross’ place for a little shindig they were having, as something of a celebration for the iPhone shipping, or something. I’m not sure what exactly. Also a house-warming, I think, for some of their uni friends that hadn’t yet seen their new place.

Anyway, that was cool, and they have a Wii, which I played with for a bit. I was very disappointed. I’ve heard a lot of great things about the Wii, and was pretty sure if I ever bought a current-gen console it’d be a Wii, but, after playing it… the idea is cool, with the novel controllers and whatnot. But, in practice it just doesn’t work very well. ‘course, the only game they had was Wii Sports, but many people rave about that, and I just found it immensely frustrating. You have very little actual control over what’s happening – you basically just wave the controller a bit when you want to perform the one single action you can in any given game. I mean, if you were really drunk and actually acting out pitching or boxing or whatever else, then that’d probably be hilarious for everyone nearby – at least those you don’t whack – but otherwise… meh.

I think sadly the most fun Jessie & I had was on the menu screen playing with the cursors.

And in the end we spent more time playing with the Apple TV than the Wii, too, which was pretty sad given there wasn’t much on the Apple TV aside from some misc. music and a bunch of TV shows. We checked out the YouTube side of it, and I was reasonably impressed – it works as advertised, although if you’re searching for things a lot you’ll quickly get over it’s virtual keyboard. (interestingly the Wii should be better for this given you have essentially a mouse, but it was just frustrating as the controls just don’t have much fidelity)

Otherwise, we watched Contact in about 45 minutes – just skipping the boring bits. It was actually surprisingly good – I like the movie as-is, too, but the shortened version captures most of the pertinent details. :)

I left relatively early ’cause Mike had mentioned earlier going up to SF on Saturday, so I didn’t want to stay out too late and ruin that.

[[Subnote: I’m also miffed that you can’t really create HgyHgyHobo. :( ]]

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