I have finally managed to snag myself a Wii! After my parents essentially gave me an “I.O.U.” for Christmas, it’s been a little over 2 months until I was able to locate one. My mom and I were flying to Florida fairly early on Sunday, so my dad went by Target after dropping us off and got one from their shipment. So far, Zelda: Twilight Princess is the only game I’ve bought in addition to the included Wii Sports, but I’ve logged quite a few hours of playing time nonetheless.

So far, I’m really liking the controller—it just feels much more intuitive. For instance, yesterday I got my sister and parents playing Wii Sports with virtually no instructions: all I had to say is “do it like you’re playing tennis,” and they played Wii Tennis with ease. Were this a regular controller, they would’ve had no chance of learning with so little instruction. As of right now, there really aren’t too many games out for the Wii yet, but I think as soon as developers start figuring out how to best use the new controller, there will be a heavy flow of innovative titles. Personally, I’m really looking forward to First Person Shooters on the Wii (there’s a good article over at Joystiq about possible controls), but I’m even more excited to see how many new ways game developers find to use the Wiimote.

Hopefully I’ll pick up a more few games soon—Excite Truck looks like it should be lots of fun, as will Mario Party 8 when it comes out.

I went and saw The Last King of Scotland tonight, and it was excellent—Forest Whitaker certainly deserved the Oscar, and the rest of the movie was superb. The best moment came after the film, however, as we were walking out: a group of 5 older ladies, all dressed up very nicely, were walking in front of us and were all looking quite distressed. (No doubt due to some of the gruesome sights in the film.) I then hear one lady, dressed in an expensive looking fur coat, exclaim, “Well that certainly wasn’t the movie I thought it would be! It was supposed to be about Scotland!”

Classic.

A little while back, I wrote about Netflix “Watch Now”, the movie streaming service from Netflix. Today, I was finally able to test it out, as my account had it activated (how, I’m not quite sure—the tab just appeared). Overall, I was fairly impressed: my thoughts on the good and bad follow:

The Good

• Generous viewing time – For every $1 you spend on Netflix each month, you get 1 hour of online viewing. This means that I get 15 hours per month that I can watch movies online—not bad! There’s even a potential for bonus time.
• Good video quality – For streaming video, the quality was quite good. I had no problems with skipping, although the soundtrack was a little off during portions of the movie (Word Wars is what I watched)
• Quick and easy installation – To get the player running, it took at most five minutes—I fired up Internet Explorer (which unfortunately is the only supported browser at the moment) and Netflix installed everything for me. The only little blip was that Windows Media Player had to be upgraded, but that was as simple as pressing “Upgrade”.
• Easy to use player – The video player was dead easy to operate—play, pause, fast forward—all of the basic controls you need.

The Bad

• Limited selection – At the moment, only 13 of the 156 movies in my queue were available to be viewed online and, with the exception of Word Wars, they were all fairly old. I’m sure this will improve with time, but at the moment, it’s a little disappointing.
• No advanced features – I was unable to find any way to display subtitles, and there certainly weren’t any special features—just the movie.
• No auto-resume – Unless I’m mistaken, there is no way to resume a movie where you left off. For instance, I watched a few minutes of the movie and then exited. It would have been nice if it restarted right where I left off, but instead, it went back to beginning. Annoying, but not terrible.
• Only supported on Windows in Internet Explorer – This is a real downer, but hopefully they’re working on other systems/browsers. I really don’t like opening up IE any more than I have to.

The Ugly

• Watch Now crashed my browser twice, and I had to reboot my system. – When I started the movie, I exited out once or twice, to see what would happen. The second time, I had to force quit IE, and open it back up again. The movie still wouldn’t play, so I had to do a reboot. After that, everything went fine, but it didn’t leave the best first impression.

I’m really interested to see how this service plays out—it could either be a huge flop or a big success. I think that, as long as newer movies are released this way, it will take off. Otherwise, I don’t see it gaining widespread use.

I was pretty impressed with the Academy Awards in general tonight: Ellen DeGeneres did a great job hosting, the in between acts were interesting (the Snakes on a Plane silhouette was classic), and, well, Jack Black and Will Ferrell did a duet—need I say any more? A few comments on the winners (and losers):

• I have to see West Bank Story. The tagline says it all: “A little singing, a little dancing, a lot of hummus.” Unfortunately, Netflix does not have it (yet), but I’m hoping they’ll have it available soon.
• Hollywood loves Al Gore. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise, but it seems like no matter what he did, whether presenting or accepting awards, the audience loved it. An Inconvenient Truth won both of the categories it was nominated for.
• Even if you have a 3 out of 5 chance of winning, it’s not a guarantee. Somehow, despite having three songs nominated, Dreamgirls failed to win Best Song, to, you guessed it, a song from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
• Rags-to-riches stories are in. Between Forest Whitaker of The Last King of Scotland and Jennifer Hudson of Dreamgirls, we got our share of impossible childhood dreams coming true. But, I guess every year there’s always a story like that.
• It’s too bad most of the movies aren’t on DVD yet. Because of my limited mobility without a car here, I haven’t been able to get to the movie theater very much, so I wasn’t able to see many of the films that were nominated (and also because of the insane prices charged for tickets). Since most of my movie watching is through Netflix, it would have been nice to get some of the films on DVD before they won the awards.

Not much more to say than that other than congratulations to Martin Scorsese; he certainly deserved the award. For more coverage, Wikipedia, naturally, is the place to go.

UPDATE: Here’s the Jack Black and Will Ferrell bit (unceremoniously stolen from YouTube):

Tonight’s episode of Lost was certainly exciting and a good start to the new episodes. After the first six aired back in the fall, I was a little worried that the producers had lost their touch. Thankfully, I was wrong. With “Not in Portland,” the seventh episode of the season, they brought back the old Lost formula, and they were able to answer a few questions as well. Good stuff all around—I’m definitely looking forward to next week.

The Super Bowl last night, other than the first quarter, ended up being pretty ho-hum. Commercials weren’t too great either, but here are a few of the ones I liked (and that I could find online). I’ll keep adding more as I find them.

UPDATE: YouTube has a complete collection of all the commercials. I think I got the highlights, but if you want to see them all, you can get them there.

Budweiser King Crab Commercial

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After watching Jesus Camp today, I was left thoroughly disturbed. This is a movie that chronicles the indoctrination of young Evangelical Christians with the teachings of the Evangelical church. It is a movie that features children speaking in tongues, crying, and even having seizures, all in the name of God. They even worship a cardboard cut-out of George W. Bush. The children go to a camp dedicated to teaching them the word of God, but instead, it seems more like a brainwashing.

Many of the scenes in this documentary revolve around what happens during sermons, with the children screaming aloud and writhing on the floor. It is sickening. But, it does not end there—the children are also brainwashed at home. Because their parents believe public schools to be unfit for their children (primarily due to the fact that schools do not teach creationism), many are homeschooled. At home, the teachings of church are reinforced, illustrated in the revised Pledge of Allegiance they say before school:

I pledge allegiance to the Christian Flag, to his savior, to his kingdom it stands, one brotherhood uniting all Christians, in unity and in love.

I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God’s holy word. I will make it a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. I will hide its word in my heart that I might not sin against God.

While the U.S. is so concerned with Muslim fundamentalists in the Middle East, perhaps we should also be watching out for fundamentalists within our own borders; these are people who are determined to get more and more political power to further their goals. A preacher, near the end of the film, even states how excited he is at the power of evangelical voters in elections—he believes that, were all the evangelical Christians to vote, they could win any election: a scary thought indeed.

It seems as if Scorsese is going to be directing a sequel to the Oscar-nominated The Departed. I’m not too sure how he’s going to pull this off—he ended up killing pretty much everyone important in the movie, so it seems like nothing more than a way to make more money off the success of the first.