Author: Joe

Categories
Video Games

GoldenEye 007

GoldenEye 007A few months back, Target was running a buy 2 get 1 free video game sale, so I figured I’d pick up GoldenEye 007 for the Wii as one of the games. The original on the Nintendo 64 was one of the all time greatest games in my opinion. The multiplayer bouts were amazing, and really set the standard that is still followed today. Back at Micorplay, GoldenEye was one of the biggest tournaments we held (that and Twisted Metal 2, haha good times).

I’ve recently finished the campaign mode, and thought it was very impressive. The levels are challenging, but not so hard that they’re frustrating. The music and story do a great job of making you feel like you’re part of a story and not just shooting at things. I was pleasantly impressed.

I haven’t really tried out the multiplayer or online play yet, which is weird since that was I enjoyed so much about the original. As far as Wii shooters go, this one is probably the best I’ve played. There’s a lot of stealth involved, which really makes things interesting and challenging. A very solid game and worthy follow up to the classic N64 game.

Categories
Development

Drupal 7 hide taxonomy

Drupal 7 Manage DisplayI’ve just begun upgrading a Drupal 6 custom theme to Drupal 7. And after a couple of attempts at cleaning up my theme (ok, numerous attempts), things started to render correctly.

However, I did notice that the taxonomy terms that I had removed from node.tpl.php in my Drupal 6 theme were now appearing in 7. After some investigation, I did notice that while logged in as admin, under Structure > Content Types > then manage display for the respective content type you could make certain Fields hidden.

While it took me a little bit of adjustment to find at first, this is great. I just set the Label and Format to field I didn’t want to display on my Page to <hidden> and all is well again.

Categories
Video Games

Kirby’s Epic Yarn

Kirby's Epic YarnOne of my favorite games I’ve played recently has been Kirby’s Epic Yarn on the Wii. While it might come across at first as a little kid’s game, it’s really a great and fairly challenging platformer.

I was extremely impressed by the artwork used in the game. Everything has a fabric or pattern feel that really looks amazing. You can go beneath the fabric at times, and pulling strings changes the landscape is very cool too. It sounds pretty strange, but really worked well.

What really makes it great is the co-op play (unless you’re being Kate-ed by your teammate – aka being blamed for everything and anything bad that happens while playing). The ability to control both Kirty and Prince Fluff on screen at the same time is very similar to playing New Super Mario Bros. (and that’s a very good thing). This is the perfect game to play with a casual gamer.

Prince Fluff is amazing, and if I were ever forced to get a tattoo he’d be a serious consideration. Even after beating the game there’s still much to go back and complete if you’re a perfectionist. Some of the optional challenges are very difficult. A highly recommended fun 2 player game.

Categories
Movies

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: The Complete Series

He-Man and the Masters of the UniverseI have a new best $7.99 I’ve ever spent, and it was on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: The Complete Series. This isn’t the original series that aired in the early 80’s, which by the way was pretty awesome in itself. This was the series that aired on Cartoon Network 2002-04.

I’d never seen an episode before, but randomly had someone I follow on Twitter share a link on YouTube of how Skeletor lost his face. Upon watching that, I was figured I’d see if I could find some more of these episodes. The complete series of 40 episodes was on Amazon for only $6.99, so I figured why not and ordered it.

A recent week off from work and a decent blizzard led me to finally get around to watching this series. It was amazing. The stories were really great, and not just by cartoon standards. The detail that they paid to characters that my brothers and I used to play with over 25 years ago was amazing.

I wish all retellings of franchises were of this caliber. Skeletor and his evil warriors are depicted as the formidable and evil foes were depicted perfectly. Even obscure characters such as Stinkor and Fisto not only were featured, but given plenty of screen time. It was great recalling all these characters that I thought I had forgotten.

Highly recommended, I wish the series hadn’t ended at 40 episodes.

Categories
Video Games

Fallout New Vegas

Fallout New VegasYou know a game is really great when you’re sad to beat it. Fallout New Vegas was at times near addictive and I’m sure I put way too much of my time into it, but it was entertainment well spent. There’s just something fun about walking around a post apocalyptic world for me.

The many quests and story were excellent, however it was a bit buggy for console game. Freezing up, characters floating in the air, were fairly common. But apparently a patch that was just release the past week should resolve most of technical issues mentioned above. Despite these bugs, the game is still overall great.

I decided to side with Mr. House, so that was the route I took. I also took Cass and Rex as my companions towards the end. I had Boone for a while early on, but lost him somehow (a bug maybe?). There’s just so much to do in the game, there’s so many different ways the story can be played.

What a great game, thinking about picking up some of the additional downloadable content or maybe even playing it through again but taking a different path.

Categories
Adventure

Christmas 2010

Christmas this year was pretty low key. So much of the family had moved, passed away or just alienated themselves the past few years. But less people did mean much less drama, so that’s not such a bad thing I suppose.

Thanks to the magic of Skype, we were able to have my brother Anthony take part when we exchanged presents. The interent really has opened up some amazing communication possibilities, it was really cool.

Everybody seemed very pleased with what I’d gotten them, so that was great. It seems to get tougher every year to think of something to get my parents, feel like after so many years I’m starting to run out of possibilites at times.

Here’s a list of some of the really cool stuff I received:

  • Lego Hoth Wampa cave
  • mononucleosis (harmless this time!)
  • Mass Effect 2
  • Spectacular Spider-man volumes 6-8 on DVD
  • Mario & Luigi radio controlled karts
  • a few flannels and t-shirts
  • Fraggle Rock Christmas DVD
  • Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer DVD