Cubing in Public, Hasbro Edition

One of the things that I did this week was take my younger child to a play group. The least I could do as a parent would be to make sure that he's better socialized than I am. Since I don't know any of the other parents that well I wasn't quite ready to socialize during the waiting around part. (See - this is why I need to do this.) I'm not worried about waiting around while the kids play, that's what I have my Rubik's cube with me for. However, it was rather quiet there, and like any lobby or waiting room it can be rather echoey.

The cube I brought the first time was one of my two new model Hasbro Official Rubik's cubes with the plastic tiles and the new mechanism that I talked about here. After doing a couple of solves, I realized that it seemed rather loud. It would seem that I am the only person that would excuse himself from a semi-social situation to go get a quieter cube. I had a couple of DaYans in the car and opted for my fancy (well, to me it's fancy) stickerless cube. While I am always happy to demonstrate my meager cube prowess, it didn't seem like I should be making a big racket to attract attention on purpose. It did seem odd to me on later reflection that I had so many cubes in the car.

In other news, I haven't seen an email back to find out why Gamora isn't on the official Guardians of the Galaxy coffee mug. I've been thinking about calling them, but I don't know how my employer might feel about a random call to Apopka on my lunch break. I suspect that the answer is going to be something like "That's the artwork that got approved by the Marvel people" without any regard for the exclusion of one of the members.

Squirrel! -or- How long does it take to set up a new console?

So I feel like I've been sidetracked a little. (Squirrel!) My intention of late was to try to play some of the hidden hits of the PS3 before they all disappeared, but now that school is out my attention has been turned to the WiiU.

I actually purchased a WiiU (Nintendo's next console after the Wii) weeks ago, knowing that I wouldn't be allowed to set it up until after school was out. The details from yesterday were a little tedious, I tried to summarize a little while still giving a sense of the timeframe.

• 7AM - Download the WiiU transfer tool onto the Wii. Play it cool for a while because my younger child doesn't know we have a WiiU yet.
• 10AM - Charge the gamepad in the older son's room without the younger son noticing. The biggest difference between the Wii and the WiiU is the gamepad. Sure, the WiiU finally has HD graphics now, but you don't notice that as much as holding a controller with a 852x480 6.2" touchscreen in the middle of it.
• 2:30PM - finally start hooking things up in the living room, and tell younger child what's up.
• 3PM - still setting things up. User accounts, the player characters called Mii's, etc.
• 3:30 PM - Still downloading a system update.
• 4PM  - configuring an SD card for the data transfer from the Wii.
• 4:30 PM - The second SD card has failed to communicate with the Wii.
• 4:45 PM - The third SD card has failed, and I'm giving up on retrieving the Wii data for now.
• 5PM - start the download for Hyrule Historia
• 5:15PM - Start playing NintendoLand while Wind Waker downloads in the background.
• 9PM - after older son is done playing Wind Waker, I tell him to put in Pikmin 3, just to see if it has to do an update, even though he's not interested in playing Pikmin 3.
• 12:30AM - tell older son to stop playing Pikmin 3 and go to bed.

There is a force stronger than LEGO.

Based on my kids' behavior since the holiday break, I would have to say that there is one force in the world stronger than LEGO.

It's Minecraft.

For those of you unfamiliar with Minecraft, it's a 3D adventure game with whimsical low-res graphics with an emphasis on building structures, crafting objects from mined materials, and basic agriculture. While the graphics look like they came from 1995, I'm not sure you could have built a world as large as Minecraft's back then.

I got LEGO Marvel Super Heroes for PS3 this Christmas. Like most of the other LEGO games, they take a simplified storyline, infuse it with LEGO sets and characters, and have you play through it with the main characters, and then go back later for additional playthroughs with the other characters to find secrets and unlock even more characters. The LEGO Marvel Super Heroes story takes us to Manhattan just after the Avengers have saved it, only to find that the Silver Surfer has crash-landed on earth and Doctor Doom is hot on the trail of the broken bricks of his surfboard. Naturally, when the Silver Surfer appears, Galactus can't be far behind. With a possible grab for cosmic power and the fate of the Earth at stake, a lot of heroes and villains start coming out of the woodwork. All of the major characters from the Avengers, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and Guardians of the Galaxy make an appearance, along with some unsurprising additions. You know Stan Lee has to be there, since he's everywhere else.

Normally with that many days off from school my kids (or at least my older one) would have completely torn through the game by now. They had LEGO Batman 2 at 100% in a matter of days. However, they spent the majority of their gaming time during the holidays playing Minecraft, with Super Mario 3D Land for 3DS coming in a close second for my older child and Scribblenauts Unlimited coming in a rather distant second for my younger one. It's even gotten to the point where they're playing with actual LEGO less than Minecraft. Luckily, one of the LEGO sets my older son got for Christmas was a Minecraft set.

More so than for any other game, my kids are watching a lot of things on Youtube pertaining to Minecraft, and even sometimes while playing the game at the same time. I recall watching a few things for Resident Evil 4 in an attempt to improve my Mercenaries scores, but once I got the info I required I went back to playing the game. They're watching Minecraft videos like me binge-watching Community.

As a result of watching all of the videos, they have downloaded some of the texture packs for the game, but they haven't quite figured out the full mods yet. I suppose I'll have to work on that.

Over the last couple of weeks, they have played some of LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, and have completed all of the levels in Story Mode, but they haven't obtained all of the characters yet. My younger one still thinks that the hub area (Gotham) in LEGO Batman 2 is more fun than the Marvel hub area (Manhattan including the Statue of Liberty, The Baxter Building, the Daily Bugle, Central Park, and Grand Central Station), but he has fewer characters unlocked. It's nice that in addition to things like my kids finding out about Howard the Duck without having to watch the questionable film version, I can find out about oddball things like Superior Spider-Man without having to set foot in the comic book store to be berated about not reading enough titles.

A wild Llama appears...

Now I'm going to preface this story with this: Lots of things here are not the way you would do them. I am aware of it.

Last night (Friday) my younger son, who we'll refer to as 'Bub', got to sleep by about 7:45, which honestly is a touch early for him especially in light of the fact that it's the weekend. I read to my older son for a few minutes, said goodnight, and then headed to bed myself knowing that I might be woken up again by barking dogs when my wife came home from work. Luckily, my younger son was not woken up by the barking dogs. So then let's fast forward to 1AM. I hear Bub say "I need a drink" and I go get him some water and then go back to sleep. The next time I wake up is somewhere around 3:40, where I hear him telling my wife that he's going to go watch a movie on the computer and that he needs to find some headphones. He's awake, so arguing with him about how he should go back to sleep will only result in waking up the one person in the house who is still asleep. Bub suggests that all the headphones are in the room of the person who is actually sleeping (his older brother), so at that point I get up out of bed and successfully locate the pair of headphones that are in the computer room already and help him get his movie started. I did think that it was rather considerate of him to want to watch a movie far away from the people trying to sleep, and with headphones on to boot. He's watched DVD's on the computer before, and he can usually manage to operate Windows Media Player most of the time, so I figure I can go back to bed, and this is where (for me) it all goes terribly wrong.

By chance, this is a DVD that he hasn't watched on the computer before. From a statistical standpoint, I didn't figure that was a big deal, since we have several dozen kid's movies and he's only watched five or six of them on the computer. The movie he picked was Robots, a CG animated feature from 2005 made by Blue Sky for Fox. It's a movie that I'm fond of, but I would watch sock puppets in black and white low frame rate Flash video if you told me that Ewan McGregor and Robin Williams were doing the main characters. I like this DVD more than most of the kid's movies we have because it has a very well-mixed DTS audio option and good soundtrack music including a marching band rendition of "Get Up Offa That Thing". I had no idea that once we put it in to the computer that I would find that it didn't act like a normal DVD.

Windows Media player knows that there's a disk in the drive, but it won't start it because it's not convinced that it's a DVD. There's a program asking to run that I had not encountered before called "HOTLLAMA" which at this time of the morning seems rather suspicious. The logo is a bright red llama-shaped silhouette. Since I just want this to be over and done with, I go ahead and install it, knowing that I will be removing it after the sun comes up when I come to my senses. I am ecstatic that it doesn't make me restart the computer when it installs, but when it starts the first time it a) checks for updates (expected) and b) tries to configure TurboTax It's Deductible 2006 (rather unexpected, and honestly edging over into Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot territory). My first thought is that it will check for updates and find that the page isn't even there and the company packed it up years ago, leaving me with a hung install that knows that there's an update and can't get one. As it turned out, it just wasn't any good at talking to the internet unless I had a browser window open. Having done that, the update downloads and installs in a minute or so, give or take a dozen extra mouse clicks to get the aforementioned Turbo Tax module to stop trying to reconfigure itself.

Before HOTLLAMA runs the second time, I spot something in the EULA that says that if I don't agree to it that I should uninstall the program and just watch the movie in my regular DVD program. Since I have a six year old sitting next to me, I exercise some restraint and do not vocalize the idea that if it would just play on my regular DVD program, I wouldn't be messing with this stupid Llama program in the first place regardless of how Hot it is.

So, I let the movie run and go back to bed, and guess what. The program misbehaves - Bub says that it "randomly rewinds" when he comes in to tell me about it - and he ends up watching it on the DVD player in our bedroom anyway. Suffice it to say that I've already uninstalled HOTLLAMA and did some registry cleaning. Now I think I have to go find a Mac user with a copy of Robots.

EPILOGUE: Upon further inspection of the DVD case, I noticed that it specifically says that is not compatible with the Apple Macintosh. Also, around 11:30 Bub poured himself a bowl of Cheerios, ate it, and then promptly fell asleep behind me at some point while I was folding laundry on the bed. Since I wanted to tie this up neatly, I put on 'Robots' again. 

It's Batman Day!

For some of you, you may think of today as Juneteenth, or others may just know that today is the new moon. For a lot of you today is just Tuesday. For me, today is Batman day. We picked out shirts last night, although my older son figured out that his long-sleeve LEGO Batman shirt was too itchy to wear, I had to put a LEGO Star Wars shirt on him instead. (Note to self : Wash the LEGO shirts with extra fabric softener.)

I haven't pre-ordered a game in a while – I may have mentioned it before. Since my older son got a pretty good report card, we decided that we would get him the LEGO Batman 2 video game when it came out. I did the actual purchase a couple of weeks ago, so that today I can send him with the receipt to just pick it up. (I called the store just to make sure.) Gamestop opens up at ten here, so we'll see what happens. There is supposed to be a Lex Luthor minifig, and some code for a villain pack.

Thank goodness school is back in...

#1 son just finished Capcom's "Okami" (Wii version). I am proud of him for finishing it, because the only things that he wanted help from me on were the timed races. He gets a little freaked out on missions where you are timed, so it's understandable that he can't really do them. It's easier to play a race or two for him and let him take over again when he's ready. We might have looked up a puzzle or two, but I am impressed that after showing him a little bit of technique on one of the first bosses he did every subsequent boss battle himself.

"Okami" is an adventure game like the Legend of Zelda series games, but the game has more of an emphasis on character interaction for completing missions, and has an art style that makes it appear as an animated Japanese watercolor painting. Another major difference between "Okami" and the Zelda game for Wii "Twilight Princess" is that when you aim the Wiimote at the screen in "Okami", it's only to use the game's magic system. The Celestial Brush, when activated, is how the wolf god Ameratsu interacts with her surroundings. You pull the B trigger on the Wiimote, time stops in the game, and you draw various symbols on the screen to achieve various results. Lighting fires, blooming flowers, making the wind blow, and delivering quick slashes to enemies are all done in the magic system. The other fighting moves are done with buttons and shaking In "Twilight Princess", the slingshot, boomerang, and bow and arrow are all aimed on-screen with the remote in real time during battles. It's great for someone like me with lots of game experience, but it's not so great for a 9-year-old that gets anxious when he's trying to aim at something that's shooting back.

Finishing "Okami", I think counts for more than finishing one of the LEGO games - there aren't too many boss battles in the LEGO games that can even compare.

When I asked him if he wanted to finish some other game now that he finished "Okami", he said that he wanted to play "Okami" again so he could find all of the stray beads in the game. Luckily, this will be a good bargaining tool to get him to finish his homework.