Author: Joe

Game Night

A group of us from work met last Friday to play video games late into the night, and a couple PS3 Move controllers were acquired to try out. We had one game (that I think was in the Move controller/camera package) and a demo disk. The game was a set of sports that were played using the Move (archery, bocce, disk golf, gladiator, table tennis, and beach volleyball).

All of the sports were fun and tracked the controller pretty well (probably because every time you switched games or number of players it had you recalibrate), but I never did manage to get consistent at disk golf throws except gentle straight throws (somewhat similar to real life with a Frisbee actually). Not all the games in the demo pack were playable (due to random “This must be enabled in the XMB menu” messages), and not all of them tracked the controller all that well. The worst part of the demos was that they tended to be somewhat lame games with Move controller support that didn’t add anything to the game.

Anyway, gladiator was a big hit. In that one you have a shield and a melee weapon and the point is to beat the other person with your weapon while blocking and bashing with the shield.

Calvin solo

For some reason the embed code is setting it to much wider than my page formatting accounts for, so I’m just putting in links for the sake of finishing this post quickly. I didn’t get Calvin’s first round which featured even more exaggerated movements and jumping, but that was the second round.

These were the 2 player matches that I filmed. Calvin won both.
Round 1
Round 2

The Move controller shows up really well in the videos as a solid color ball. That’s probably why they didn’t need a great camera plugged into the PS3 for it to work (every time a game brought up a video feed of what the camera saw it was grainy, low resolution, and the colors were a bit shifted, but we didn’t have great lighting in the room).

New Cat Toy

I got a package from my mom last week that contained a few things for me and a new cat toy for Talore. It’s basically the same toy as the black ball of fur but with different coloring.

That’s just after I took the toy back from Talore as she snatched it out of my hand while I was untying the string from how they packed it. I think she grabbed it again right after the picture was taken, she was certainly interested in having it.

I actually read the instructions this time (and looked at the pictures, they were more helpful) and hung it up as was intended to be: with the wire hanger clamped above the molding on a door frame.

With it just hanging there Talore wasn’t interested in it at all.

The tissue paper that was used as packing kept her entertained for the rest of the night. It was under the ceiling fan, so it was twitching in the slight breeze, which was all it took to get it attacked repeatedly. By the next day the tissue paper was thoroughly perforated and one of the sheets was nearly torn in half. The roomba took care of the bits that got shredded off.

Cheating Roomba

The roomba came with battery powered infrared fences that can be placed to limit the area that it cleans. For the past week I’ve had one set up to keep the roomba out from under my desk because I didn’t want to rearrange the wires there to keep them out of its way. The way I placed the fence also cut it off from the balcony door.

The problem is that the fence is line of sight only. The docking station works the same way and Talore has confused the roomba by lying down in front of the docking station while the roomba was attempting to home in on it to charge. I have a couple small boxes that I close toys in for Talore to get out and the roomba occasionally pushes them around, usually just to the nearest wall. Today the roomba pushed the larger box right in front of the fence emitter, then charged my desk.

I came home to find the roomba lifted partially off the floor by some of the cables it snagged and tried to back off of. It also pulled my speakers off the back of the desk and pulled that plug out of the back of the computer. As far as I can tell nothing got damaged, but the roomba didn’t do much cleaning.