Mario Kart WII

I was looking foward to reviewing this game ever since I got it from GameFly, which you should check out because it’s nice. Anywho, For people that are under two, Mario Kart is a racing game developed by Nintendo in which you drive around in motorcycles and karts trying to win the race, while slaughtering every A.I and person in sight with little red shells.

I’ve never really been a fan of the series, but it’s a nice game to play with my little cousins on vacation. But this Mario Kart has really been a kickass one. Honestly, it is the first game besides Alone in the Dark and Wii Sports that actually uses the Wii controls well. Well, I admit, it’d be really hard for them to cock it up. But at least your not randomly throwing the controller to try to do something (Zack and Wiki).

Let’s dive into the gameplay. For singleplayer you can do a variety of things, a loose campaign (Grand Prix), Time trials, scoreboards, and online multiplayer. The Grand Prix is fun at a variety of difficulties, and it includes a large variety of older tracks, aswell as new unlockable tracks in the Star Cup, Leaf Cup, and more I haven’t unlocked yet =P. Online multiplayer is weak in the custom options, but it’s surprisingly fun. And the game let’s you play on racetracks you haven’t unlocked yet, which is groovy.

Mario Kart Wii also has a tournament system, it’s own channel, and a nice ranking system. So all in all it’s fairly well rounded game that is a good time waster and is great for playing with younger friends.

360desktop – Compiz for Windows

Yes people, a Compiz-like program that works well is finally available for the PC. Actually, I bet it’s been around for a while but it takes me a long time to start caring since I really only use Linux most of the time. Anywho, 360desktop is just like Compiz, allowing you have almost unlimited desktop real estate. Which is nice, especially for laptops or small monitored desktops.

I found that it worked fairly well on my 128mb mobile graphics card, aswell as my 256mb desktop. So if your in dire need of more desktop space, or you think your computer is tough enough to run Crysis on very high on the same computer twice then 360desktop is for you

360desktop

Missing Desktop Syndrome

Here’s a quick tip that I squeezed out of myself just now. If you ever find your icons plus taskbar missing, hit the old CAD (ctrl alt del) and find explorer.exe on the processes list and kill it, if it’s not there, then simply hit file then run and type “explorer.exe” no quotes and that should fix the problem

NOTE! To Vista users, if an MSI file hangs explorer.exe do the same thing!

Firefox 3’s Easter Eggs

Mainy game and software designers have realized sometime in there lives that jokes are funny, and people like funny things. So they throw in these random lil’ things when they get bored.

Until recently, Firefox has only had the Book of Mozilla, but it appears that Mozilla is branching out with it’s third installment of the worlds best web browser, Firefox.

Firstly, everyone liked the movie I, Robot and if you didn’t go suck a fat one. AANNNYYWAY, type about:robots in your address bar to see a nice little page of goodies

Another easter egg hidden in Firefox is none other than about:config. Type it in for the first time and you’ll get a nice warning message

Also, of course, is the sleeping giant, the Book of Mozilla. Tenth edition

Open Office 2007 Files w/ Older Versions

A while ago, I noticed that Office 2007 had a new format to smack in my face. It was .docx, .pptx, etc. This was nice, instead of the files being around 80kb they were about 20kb, perfect for me since I tend to make about 6000 documents per month.

The only super retarded drawback to this was that I couldn’t use my schools computers for the files because they all had WinXP and OfficeXP. So I went searching and found that Microsoft had decided to come out with a little crappy mcgibbit that adds the ability to open these nifty little formats in previous versions of office. It can be found here. Remember to do all Windows Updates before installing

Message to Developers!

Hi there

I’m not much into the whole developing stuff for other people, but for those who are, my friend has a site called HelpDeveloper which has some nice tutorials and community that you should check out.

http://help-developer.com/

Civilization Revolution – Review :)

Gotta love those Romans Imgscr: Gamespot

The only possible ways for you not to have heard about the Civilization series if you are encredibly stupid or have been living under a rock. And even if you have been, it’s perfect for you cave dwellers since it plays like a nice introduction of basic history in a nice, pretty, cartoonish way. Which is great, as long as you can tolerate your military advisor babbling on about “Hogogoboga” for 15 seconds every time you get attacked. Honestly, the advisors can be so utterly hilarious yet so disturbingly annoying. It’s like Bill O’Reilly on Paris Hilton. Sorry, lost my train of thought.

So, enough rambling about that, let’s get dirty into the game! While I’m still waiting for Gamefly to finally send me a god damned copy of the game, I downloaded the demo for a quick game of pwnage. The result was a resounding meh. It could have been great, but there were just too many design flaws.

For example, in the demo I would often use the left analog stick to move around the screen, whilst the game told me to use the one on the right. Ignoring that, it seemed to work fine, but it wouldn’t let me use any of the buttons unless I used the right analog stick, causing my gory first person shooter addict hands to mindlessly slap the controller.

Also, I have no idea how to zoom in and out. Maybe I just wasn’t paying enough attention to the tutorial, but it seems like the right analog stick sort of kind of does that. But it rarely zoomed out and when it did it wouldn’t zoom back in.

The button controls are fine, when they aren’t teabagging your corpse with the text “Use the right analog stick you twat.” The graphics are great, but they’ve moved from semi-realistic graphics to hilariously funky cartoons. And the battles look like something out of your average SSBB clusterfuck.

If I remember correctly, Civ4 would let me build buildings and people at the same time. As far as I can tell that doesn’t happen in Civ: Rev but I didn’t get to play it for a very long time.

But, overall, Civilization Revolution is perfect for mediocre fans of the series and newbies, but it’s hard to recommend it to hardcore fans of the series that love micromanaging every little worker, but at least the majority of strategy fans will like it.