Cheesy Quintessence

Today, for the first time ever, I went with a friend to play a game of laser tag at Main Event in Austin, which uses a Lasertron brand system. It was pretty entertaining, and my team won by over 72,000 points. Unfortunately, the game was only 15 minutes long, which seems awfully short considering how much it costs to get in. Additionally, I don’t know the details of what I did because I got the wrong player sheet in the end; the display on my vest had so many broken LEDs that I couldn’t read my player number, so I got somebody else’s. Again, as much as it costs, surely they could maintain the vests a little better. If I am correct in guessing that my player number was actually 16, I was one of the poorest players in the whole game. Figures. Oh well.

Yesterday I finally got my SanDisk Sansa e270, part of SanDisk’s fairly new e200 series of flash-based MP3 players. The e270 is notable for being the most spacious flash based player yet, at 6 GB, or up to 7 GB if the expansion slot is used. It’s quite a heck of a bargain, too, as it has a user-replaceable lithium ion battery, 20 hours quoted battery life, a scratch-resistant design, voice recording, an FM tuner, video playback, and a picture slideshow, and a fairly attractive design, for less than the cost of the 4 GB iPod nano.

Perhaps this all sounds too good to be true. Indeed, it has its shortcomings. It is a very nice music player overall, but since I don’t find it particularly innovative in many ways other than its feature set as described above, I’m just going to note my complaints:

• The wheel feels quite rough, and the middle button wiggles a bit. Doesn’t have a high quality feel to it, which is a contrast to the rest of the player.
• Nobody else has mentioned this as far as I’ve seen: the screen isn’t reflective at all; unless the backlight is on, it may as well just be blank, it’s so hard to see. This hold true even in direct sunlight.
• The wheel light always goes off after a few seconds of no wheel use, regardless of backlight settings. So, the wheel light is constantly turning on and off, rather annoyingly. I’d like to see a custom time for the wheel light, and the option to just disable it, as it’s useless.
• Leaving the now playing screen, including shutting down, when the player started with music paused causes it to forget what was playing. Avoidable by resuming playback before doing so.
• When shut off, it forgets where its volume was set. I wouldn’t mind so much if it didn’t set the volume too high.
• Certain functionality is difficult to get to. For example, to add music to the on the go playlist, you have to start it playing first. Also, there’s no way to directly browse all songs by an artist; you have to “play all,” then go to the playback list. Getting back to that list isn’t particularly intuitive either, as there’s no button to go up a menu level from the playback screen like there is from other menu screens (previous track is used to go up a level, and is used normally on the playback screen).
• The record button is quite easy to press and causes active music to stop playing.
• When browsing an artist’s albums, the album you select is saved so it can be remembered later. Unfortunately, it remembers this for all album screens. If you select Album 2 by Artist 1, then go to Artist 2’s album list, Artist 2’s second album, instead of the first album in the list, will be selected. This is fairly disorienting.
• A friend and I have both had issues with it “refreshing database” over and over. This takes forever for it to accomplish. I can’t figure out why it happens, but it seems to have something to do with certain stuff I put in the music library.
• In regard to the problem above, top rated songs seem to be lost when a refresh happens.

Obviously, nearly all these problems could be fixed with a firmware update. I’d be incredibly satisfied with the player if most of these issues were addressed. I’d have already contacted SanDisk with this list, but it seems there’s no technical support email address for the e270 in the US. Shame.

I think I may have figured out why Nintendo removed Pokémon Gold and Silver’s wonderful clock, which added a sense of realism to the game in that you had to play at real physical times in order to accomplish certain goals, from the latest generation of Pokémon games. It seems that after less than five short years, my Pokémon Gold and Silver batteries have been drained; my game saves, in which I had a nice team and all 251 Pokemon, have been completely lost, and the cartridges can no longer remember games.

I feel strangely hurt by this. Pokémon Gold and Silver meant a lot to me back in the day. I have very fond memories of exploring the game for the first time, with its incredibly innovative features (such as the clock and the cellular phone), and I feel like a part of myself has been lost now that I can’t go back and live what I did way back in 2001. That’s especially true since the best part for me was exploring Kanto again; the way Nintendo presented the old world was, for me, incredibly nostalgically satisfying. I sure hope Nintendo decides to give the Gold and Silver generation a facelift like it did with Red/Green/Blue.

When it comes to advertising and spam, I really thought I’d seen it all. Alas, I hadn’t. The other day, when I started playing Yahoo! Pool again, I observed that Yahoo! game rooms now have porn advertisment bots using the lobbies to pretend to be barely legal females with webcams. Now, I can understand why AOL’s public chat rooms are almost all filled with these bots–AIM is a medium that supports hyperlinkes, so it’s possible that people will get drawn in and click the provided links. The Java app for Yahoo! Games, however, do not support hyperlinks, so people will have to go through a lot of effort to follow the advertisement.

Really, how pathetic can pornographers get? Or, are these even pornographers running the bots, or are they just jokes by people with way too much time and perversion? It’s amazing.

18/f/pix c web cam lol click in baby

Yesterday, I discovered in our PO Box an advertisement for the famous Pro-200 video game system, the hottest in all history. It seems that after all these years, the Pro-200 is still the most amazing video game system on the market. Without a doubt, its gigantic block graphics are just as breathtaking as they were five years ago–try saying that about Nintendo or Sega!

Here’s an overview of this amazing gaming system:

1. 668 games in one!
2. 15 different speed levels per game!
3. Over 10,000 ways to play!
4. 18 shooting games!
5. 32 pong games!
6. 32 frog games!
7. 16 bee games!
8. 8 racing games!
9. A calculator!

And just think, the list only covers 106 of the 668 games. There’s so much more! I’m really going to have to get another one of these gems–the controls on the one my relatives bought for me ceased to function well after a couple of hours’ total use, so I’ve been without the enjoyment of these great games. It’s only $19.95, so what is there to lose?