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According to this article, Rock Band will be available for the Wii on June 22. However, at this time, it seems likely that both online play and downloadable content will not be likely. Hopefully, they will be able to work these things in anyways.

On the upside, getting a PS3 seems to become a likely path for me now that Blu-Ray is more or less the de-facto standard for hi-definition discs. That, and the new live Genesis release will be available on Blu-Ray as well. So maybe I’ll hold out and get Rock Band for that instead. Except that my TV doesn’t handle HDMI, and I don’t know if a DVI adapter will solve the issue…

Minor update: my connection is HDCP enabled, so an adapter WILL work. Woohoo!

Tags: rock band, video games, wii

I’m taking a break from my (not particularly) busy schedule to let you guys know that King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters came out on DVD today. The movie is a documentary that follows a guy named Steve Weibe in his quest to attain the world record for highest score in Donkey Kong by beating out the long time high score holder Billy Mitchell. I am by no means a movie buff, but I went out to see this movie because it got really good word of mouth review and it certainly appealed to my geeky side. However, I was surprised with how good this movie truly was.

Even though the subject matter might seem off-putting to anyone who isn’t a video game nerd, and admittedly part of the humor involves the other-worldly passions of competitive video gamers, the movie in the end is truly about someone trying to prove himself in the face of rivals willing to do anything to defend their pride. It’s like Rocky, except with Donkey Kong instead of boxing. If you don’t believe me, perhaps you would instead believe the overwhelming critical acclaim it has received. It currently scores a 96% at Rotten Tomatoes (the DVD box says 99%, but close enough) and 8.5/10 in IMDB ratings, so it certainly shows that it has wide appeal.

Next time you decide to rent a movie, you should certainly check this out.

Tags: movies, video games

As I mentioned before, my router is acting up so every now and again the port forwarding to my webserver ceases to work, so the website becomes unavailable for hours, sometimes days at a time. When I find the time, I’m going to take one my many spare machines lying around and put together my own router/firewall to deal with the problem (my luck with wireless routers so far hasn’t been very good). Until then, expect more foolishness.

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Good luck out there if you’re doing any Christmas shopping.

Just before I went to bed, I saw the slot in my Wii glowing in the otherwise completely dark living room. I turned it on to see Nintendo send out no less than three messages about various things. One of them is a notice for an available update in the Wii firmware which includes a new feature that seemed pretty obviously necessary to me since the introduction of the Internet channel: you can now use a USB keyboard with your Wii. Huzzah!

Also, if you haven’t noticed, some new games were added to the Shopping Channel at the beginning of a week. The big news is that they are the first games for a brand new platform of games available for the Wii: NeoGeo. The first released games are all classic arcade style fighters which NeoGeo was famous for. I’m looking forward to many more NeoGeo games coming to the Wii. Also, a few weeks ago we also started to see imports pop in the channel, including the Super Mario Bros. 2 that was released in Japan (known as the Lost Levels in the U.S.) in all of it’s original 8-bit glory, and an arcade style Japanese Shooter called Sin & Punishment for the (I believe) Super Famicom.

Am I the only fool around here using Twitter and not using Facebook?