Well it's been a good couple of months since I have got around to writing a new blog, so I think it is about time I got around to it. Although I really haven't been playing many games in all honesty in the last month, but I may as well give my impressions of the Wii since I finally got my hands on it. I have to say I love the damn thing from the size of it to just how good it look and feels to play, it's quite frankly fantastic, and I have played the games on it enough to say the controller is just great to use, and that I finally got to play Twilight Princess after two months of it sitting on the side, and it was a great feeling to finally load it up and get going on it, I will cover my thoughts on the games more when I get around to reviewing them this weekend. The whole interface of the console is fantastic though and so easy to use, and the virtual console is near enough perfect, already downloaded two NES games, Wario's Woods and Solomon's Key, both I will be reviewing as well over the weekend, all I can say is if you can find a Wii get one. I know people complain about the graphics of the Wii but in all honesty, I don't see it as a factor, and after playing Twilight Princess for about 80 hours the game looks fantastic through out, even though it could be done on the GCN although on a slightly less defined look and no wide-screen support, it still matches most games on the Xbox360 and PS3 in my opinion.

On a bit of a side topic my Xbox360 has slowly started to die on me already, at times it doesn't read the discs at all, or reads them as DVDs instead of games, even causing the system to freeze, it has even ruined my copy of Smackdown vs Raw 2007, scratching it beyond repair and now I can only get as far as the menus. Very annoying seeing as this is what also happened to my Xbox.

Well it's take over a month, but a few hours ago I got an email confirming my Wii has been sent out, so by tomorrow I will be playing my way through my copy of Twilight Princess that has been taunting for the last month or so. Silling thing is with out really giving it any though I went a paid out for some part so I can build another PC yesterday, and then this, well that's me broke now.

Well I have got to say this is one thing I thought I would be getting a PS3 for but now I have picked up Enchanted Arms for the Xbox 360 and done a bit of research into others that are coming out, I am really favouring the Xbox 360 now even for my RPG fix, not something that ever could be said about the Xbox. Although I am only very early into Enchanted Arms I can see it is quite a good game, and I have heard a few mixed opinions about it my friend recomended it to me and we share similar game likes and dislikes so I went based on his recomendations and so far not disspointed. With othe RPGs coming too I can see many months of play on just these alone, the three I am most looking forward to are Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey and Eternal Sonata all three look great from the videos I have seen and two are ones that are exclusives as well something which may help sway people towards the console in Japan, which it does deserve more sucess over there and that would be the way to do it. Hearing that Enchanted Arms is being ported to the PS3 is kind of funny since it's hard to believe that a Japanese RPG is being ported from a none japanese console to one, I just hope one day I hear the news that Final Fantasy 13 is coming to the Xbox 360 and I will have no need for a PS3, well that and Metal Gear Solid 4. Other than that still trying to get my hands on a Wii as Zelda sits there on the side and taunts me, looks like no chance until next year though.

This is the worst thing that could of happened I started to get a bad feeling last week when i started hearing about everyone selling out of preorders straight away, although I preordered my Wii on play.com on September 16th, it's suposed to be a first come first served basis on there, looks like I was no where near first then since I haven't got it and i never recieved an email saying it was coming out to me, what is worse though they send me a copy of Twilight Princess and I got that first thing this morning, talk about the most taunting thing they could have done, every single place i have called is sold out and can only meet the preorder demands and my guess is they can't even meet all of them, this is great for Nintendo, but not for me. Although they have recived a few angry emails to the news saying they shouldn't be getting all the publicity because they can't meet the demand, just because they couldn't get theres but i can understand since they did put money down on them.

Well it's now only one week left until the Wii is launched here in there UK and in the rest of Europe, and i am quite excited in all honesty just to finally get my hands on one, i expect I will also have to comment after I have had a chance to play through Zelda on the score that Gamspot has given it, although I have disagreed with scores they have given before, so i don't over react like some people so mine won't be a mindless fanboy rant like some I have seen. At the moment I am only going to be getting the Console and Zelda to start off with all though, both Wii Play and Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz appeal to me quite a bit, and believe it or not Red Steel does too as the reviews have not been so bad over here, and i will certainly be picking up a virtual console pad or two, i heard that they also come with some wii-point as well? Don't know if this is true or not? Cerainly plan on downloading a few for that mainly Gunstar Heroes, Bomberman '93, F-Zero and Solomon's Key at the moment, I think it will be a great way of playing many of the games I missed on all these consoles, and the news that you can even delete them and download them again at any point after wards is a great way of saving space, I still plan on getting a large capacity SD card for games saves and photo's for it, but I can't see many games using much internal memory to save unless they are stat heavy games and chances are they will only be third party sports games, the only sad thing is I have no TV that suports the component cable, it only has VGA and DVI inputs so I will have to wait until next year when I get another TV to be able to display the picture as best I can, i know it's not important but I notice the quality of comosite pictures and consider it to be quite poor, all though I will probably pick up and RGB scart cable to get the best picture I can from it until I get a new TV, atleast the Euro Wii will have this ability the GCN was stripped of the use of it, since so few TV's on Europe at the time could take advantage of it.

Well I am finally on Xbox Live and so far I am very impressed with everything that you can do on there, everything seems to run very smoothly for me and the ammount to download is impressive. I also think it's a great way of showing just what you have done online too no more lying about completing games when you haven't.

I have also been playing my 360 in HD and I am very impressed with the picture quality, although I wouldn't say it's needed it's good if you can take advantage of it, I may even consider getting a HD-DVD player addon for it, since it looks like a good investment. I am finally starting to see what the Xbox 360 is capable of and it really looks like I may consider not getting a PS3 for a long time now, since I can't see it offering much different to what the 360 does.

Anyone who want's to add me on Xbox live go right ahead, although don't expect to see me online all that much at the moment due to work.

I know I was supposed to give more updates on my thoughts of Windows Vista, but since I have really encountered no new problems other than the same one as before, there is not much I can say about it, however I will more than likely switch back to windows XP soon, since my hardware really isn’t up to the task of running Vista, all I have used it for is to see how my computer handles it and my guess is if it struggles at the moment with it, then it may well have more problems as time goes on, so it may be better just to switch back and wait till I upgrade further before I consider Vista as an option.

 

Anyway the other main reason why I haven’t been on here much is I have been putting a lot of thought into a website I have wanted to do for a while, it’s not going to be anything fancy since I am only really good at doing basic html layouts, but it will do for what I want it for, and that is doing a Nintendo site and pretty much reviewing every Nintendo game I can get my hands on, from the NES right through to the Wii, I even have a forum set up for it ready for use, all though it’s really just a blank shell just like the website, my plan is to also have photos and videos for near enough every game I review. I will also be looking for one or two people to help with the reviews because I don’t have the money to get a hold of all the games, but I won’t accept poor reviews or very short ones for that matter, I want them to be quite in depth and contain as much information as possible, if you feel like you would like to give this a try let me know, although I will tell you I will be writing all the reviews for the games I own or have access to, and since this is many of the big games, I will only except a second opinion on those ones. I am hoping to have the site up and running by the end of the week complete with at least a couple of big game reviews, I am a bit of a perfectionist though so it won’t be done until I am ready, and getting the media in place may well take some time too. I am hoping I can get a few people to help out though as it is very hard to do on my own.

 

On the subject of reviews I wouldn’t mind a few more of you checking the ones I have made on here out, and rating them, so few people seem to do this, I like a bit of interactivity.

 

One last thing too would you people please stop sending me invites to unions I am not interested, seriously Gamespot should have an option to not allow invites if you don’t wish to be bombarded by about 20 or so a week.

Ok quite a bit to cover here, I have been testing Windows Vista for about a week now and all though I am happy with the overall look of it and feel of it, I have come across more problems. The first being I seem to have lost the Aero interface all together, I am guessing it is a program that I have installed that isn't compatible with it and is running all the time, so by the looks of it I may have to replace a lot of the software I used with Windows XP to have it all running properly, of course due to the fact that this is only in beta form most of these software updates wont exist until Vista is in the shops. Admittedly the speed that things run at can be annoying as they can slow down a bit more than is expected, at the moment I am leaning more in the direction that Windows Vista may not be ideal for this system considering the only thing I can upgrade in it now is the graphics card, I think all the extra power needed is a drain on the system, and won't allow me to play games or even watch videos.

Ok Now onto the Wii, now that all of the games are starting to be shown off I can honestly say I am quite excited about them, really there hasn't been that much time to build all the excitement for me since, it's been such a short space of time between seeing them and the launch getting closer, normally here we have to wait until the following year to get it. Maybe I am also just excited about a Zelda game at launch though.

Also one last message I have asked before but would you people stop sending me invites to your stupid unions if I wanted to join one I would actually seek them out, and since I don't have the time to actively take part in them there is no reason for me to join them and it's getting to the point where I get the same invites every few days, don't you people get the hint, that I don't want to join?

Ok I have finally decided to try the final beta release of Windows Vista, mainly to decide if I want to upgrade to it or not, and also to see how it preforms on my older computer components. So far it has been pretty good other than a few niggles here and there, one of the hardest was finding an anivirus that works with it, and there was only one that Microsoft recomends at the moment not that thats much of a problem.The other one is an early problem with the screen going black at random times, which I thought was a graphics driver problem which I tried to update them and that caused a few problems first it wouldn't allow it since it didn't recognise my OS as Windows then when it did install I lost the new Aero interface completely, so I had to do a system restore to get that back. It hasn't happened too much lately so that's ok.

Let me tell you about the positives at the moment though, the interface is far nicer and more pleasant on the eye, and rather than windows just popping up out of no where they actually slowly appear on screen, i say slowly it's rather quick. The whole desktop has had a hi-res make over too, all the icons are hi-res ones now so they are no longer pixelated, when larger the inclusion of the desktop sidebar is a great idea, I have had a similar one on my Windows XP desktop and I find it to be a great addition, even highlighting the tabs at the bottom of the screen brings up thumb nails of that page even when it's hidden. As i expected all of Microsoft's latest programs are on there in full walking glory, Internet Explorer 7, Windows Media Player 11 and Direct X 10 all coming as standard, the first two working better on Vista than they did on XP. The only problem with windows media play I have at the moment is because everything on the desktop takes so much graphics memory up it affects the video playback on my system, which i was expecting due to the amount of stuff going on at once and that is just a basic program setup going nothing of my own.

The main problem I have noticed is compatibility with programs either just not working with Vista or not recognising it as Windows because it was designed for Windows XP, which I touched on before there is a program compatibility wizard though so most programs should be able to be run on that, if you have trouble, except anti-virus programs which they don't recommend.

Now onto the games well I have only tried one at the moment and that is Football Manager 2005 and the game loads fine and seems to be ok so far, except that is really runs a lot slower when it get to the in game matches even on the fastest speed settings, this is the same problem I had with videos on Windows Media Player since the graphics memory is being used on just about everything else too, I haven't tested a 3D game just yet so I haven't seen how Direct X 10 performs just yet, but I am expecting some slow down there too, at the moment though everything is running well if a little slower I may just need to upgrade my graphics card, to help things run smoother. I am going to try and keep mor regular updates on this since the more I use it I'm sure I will run into more problems.

Ok it's not long now until the launch of the Nintendo Wii, I was thinking about getting a PS3 too but that thought was washed away by Sony, when they announced that it would not be coming to Europe until next year, I guess it means that I will have more money to spend on Wii games and controllers though. Talking of spending money I am very happy over the price, £179 including a game and the controller and nunchuck, it's the fact that to get a controller and nunchuck separately will cost a lot though £29 for the Wii-mote and £14 for the nunchuck, thats about £45 and games will usually cost about £34-£39, how much would the console cost with out the two parts of the controller and game? And it's not like nintendo are going to use anything but the best parts for the life of the console, based on past experiences even the GCN I have never had a Nintendo console stop working, and near enough all disc based consoles have died on me long before the consoles life cycle ended, I am just wondering how they can afford to sell it at these prices and still make a profit on the console? I am also happy that I will be able to connect online out of the box thanks to my wireless router, it works with my DS so I think I will have no worries there. Then there is £14 for the classic controller, and I believe it will work with GCN games too so I may pick up a few of these, not just because the D-pad clearly looks better, but the analog sticks are finally starting to give way on my GCN pads. The price certainly gives me a lot of room to get all the games I want too at launch. i will add one thing the fact that even up to know Nintendo hasn't released the full on specs of the console which is good to see that they have stuck by that and don't want the focus to be on it.