Nintendo’s Mario Kart for the Wii releases today to much fanfare. This is one of the “must have” games that we have been eagerly awaiting for our one and only current console system. The game comes with a steering wheel “controller” for the system in addition to the game which is pretty cool. We are extra excited to get it because our nieces are getting the game today or soon and will be able to race against us online which is very cool. I also have a mate in London who was able to get the game last week when it released there and has been looking for people to race against online. We haven’t had any games that we could play online with anyone so far so this is quite exciting and will really let us test out how cool this next generation of online consoles really is.
We slept in a bit this morning. As you can imagine, I was pretty tired after having stayed up so late working last night. I am glad that I did, though, as I got some really great work done and was able to do a bit of my homework for the week. This week is purely discussion based work for school and almost no one is discussing anything which makes it extra difficult. So I posted some discussion material and am hoping that that will kick off some people to respond today so that I will have people to have an actual back and forth conversation with.
We called Ramona at eleven as we were planning on doing brunch. She was ready and we tried to leave right away but it ended up taking a full hour to get our car from valet services. They always go down to just two valets on busy Sunday mornings and it is always one poor girl working as hard as she can and one guy who isn’t quite sure what is going on and not really being helpful at all. They are supposed to have three people on at all times but effectively only have one on Sunday mornings. It has become quite a problem.
It was twelve thirty when we finally got over to Ramona’s crib in the Ironbound. We picked her up and drove down to Elizabeth. Dominica was in the mood for Perkins (apricot syrup craving, I am guessing) but when we got there the parking lot was packed and there was a twenty-five minute wait for seating so we decided to just go on to the Seaside Diner where we usually go (which I prefer anyway.)
We came back to Eleven80. I walked Oreo and then took a walk down to GameStop on Broad in Newark, just two blocks away from us which is awesome, and picked up Mario Kart Wii and two extra steering wheel “controllers” for a total of three.
Dominica and Ramona watched Stir Crazy which Ramona had from Netflix. I worked with Andy for a while, caught up on SGL, did some homework, did some eBay shopping (it has been a very good eBay week for the HP d530 units), managed the Handbrake process and more. No breaktime for me. They ended up being pretty unimpressed by the movie. Actually, “awful” is how they described it, I am pretty sure.
Dominica did laundry today. I did the dishes.
Ramona left around six. She had a show in the city to go to. The city is, of course, Manhattan. It is funny living in a major US city, the largest in the state, in fact, and calling the city two cities away “the city”. Dominica did some work on her homework and we ordered in dinner from Nino’s. Min was going to cook dinner but she had to cook Oreo’s dinner tonight and that keeps the kitchen busy and uses up a bunch of her time. So instead of cooking we just ordered in.
My night consisted of homework, of which there was not all that much, and web site work. It was light work tonight but more was done and I am happy about that. I did play Mario Kart Wii for about forty-five minutes before Dominica went to bed. It is pretty cool. The game itself isn’t amazingly groundbreaking compared to the Game Cube or Nintendo DS versions (we have it for the DS as well.) What makes the make really awesome is just how easy it is to play it online against other people. The DS is supposed to work online but I tried it once and it failed and I sort of gave up on the process. Nintendo didn’t have the online setup system working at that point. Now it works beautifully. You just say that you want to play against some people online and the game takes care of all of the details setting up a twelve person race for you to compete in for points. Quite fun. It is so much nicer playing online that just against the Wii itself. This really changes this type of game significantly. I can see myself playing this pretty regularly.