Archive for August, 2007

Wii Sports is the only game that my family currently owns for use with our Nintendo Wii. As such, it gets a fair amount of play time around our house. Although it’s a fun game, there are a number of areas that Nintendo could have greatly improved upon. Here’s a short list of improvements that I’ve thought up for the game:

1. Video Replays: When an exciting event takes place in the game, I’d like to be able to save a video snippet of what happened (a “play of the day” if you will). For example, I have hit two holes-in-one in golf over the past several weeks (a pretty exciting event, both times). Having a video replay would allow me to relive that exciting moment, and share it with others.
2. Larger Golf Course: I really enjoy the golf game, but nine holes is just not enough. Why can’t we have 36 holes, or better yet, 72? I can’t believe the courses take up that much space, and I would guess that they are pretty easy to develop (given the basic building blocks).
3. Bowling Tournaments: It would be fun to have some sort of bowling ladder available, where you could compete against either another individual or another team (either computer controlled or human). A handicapping system could even be provided, to allow weaker bowlers to challenge the seasoned pros.
4. Improved User Settings: Every time one switches users during a game, Wii Sports asks you which handedness you prefer (right or left handed). Shouldn’t I only set this once?
5. Fix the Baseball Bug: When playing against the computer in baseball, the “home” team (the player) starts first (top of the inning), while the computer starts second (bottom of the inning). If the “home” team is ahead at the beginning of the last inning, the game ends via the mercy rule. I’m no baseball expert, but I know that the mercy rule only applies to the bottom of the inning! This should clearly be fixed.

If you own Wii Sports, what do you think? Are there other improvements that could be made?

Last Wednesday was apparently a freeze day for the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine (which will appear in Firefox 3). A laundry list of new features have been added, as can be seen from the most recent nightly build report. Full page zoom is one of the biggest new features coming, though it has not yet been enabled via the GUI (you have to download a separate test extension to play around with it).

One particularly nasty regression (bug 390451) lurks in the nightly builds, so I’m not planning on switching my base install to this alpha. But it looks like it won’t be much longer before we can enjoy some new Firefox features.