New games: Street Fighter IV (PS3) and Wii Fit

I played Street Fighter IV at the Games Convention in Leipzig last year, and it was fun. I liked the good old Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES, so I went and pre-orderd the new version on Amazon. Since the British pound is so weak lately, I bought it on the Amazon UK website. Importing it from the Brits is about 15€ cheaper than buying it in Amazon DE
Anyway, the game is tons of fun, and I can safely encourage anyone who like the II Version, to go out and buy it. Probably the best 2D Fighter out there. Even though you play on a 2D plane, the 3D graphics are good. The comic like shading is cool. But there are also some downsides to the game. First and foremost: it is f***ing hard. Now I know I’m not the youngest anymore, and I never was an uber-pro at this kind of game, but I kinda expected to have a slight chance at winning when I set the difficulty setting to super easy mode. Nah, it’s not hard, but you can still run into opponents that will kick your ass. Medium is … hard, I can’t say much about medium since I cant seem to get farther than 3 or 4 rounds before the computer starts whipping my ass. And don’t even get me going at the ranked online matches. Selecting “Find someone near my rank” seems to have zero affect. More often than not I’ll end up with some “hyped up teen drinking red bull” as an opponent and I feel like the match happens in fast forward and I’m just a spectator.

Wii Fit: Yeah, we finally got around to buying one. Not much to say here that hasn’t already been said a thousand timea before on the Internet. It’s fun and interesting

I think I’ll add another widget here on the right with my online gaming pseudonyms so friends have an easier time keeping track of me.

Then I finished up my MythTV computer. The PC has Wifi and normal LAN, but the LAN cable is only connected when I need to transfer large amounts of data (e.g. video files). It turned out Linux was a bit stupid out-of-the-box. Ethernet Interfaces are always UP, no matter if a cable is physically plugged in or not. And since by default all interfaces have the same routing metric I couldn’t connect to the box via Wifi unless I plugged a Ethernet cable in -duh-. So after some google digging I found two useful packages, ifplugd and ifmetric. The former pulls interfaces up/down depending on their physical state, the latter sets the routing metric, so now Wifi works the way I wanted it, and the PC automatically chooses the faster interface for communication.

Thursday and Friday we went to Phantasialand which was lots of fun. A few tips:
- Black Mamba: sit in the first row, it is definatly worth it.
- Colorado Adventure: sit in the last car
- Winja’s Fear (right side) is better than Winja’s Force
- Mystery castle is … fun
- River Quest: you will get wet. the only “maybe” here is if you only get wet, or if you get soaked