The Respite

As far as rocking the backstreets of Oneonta this weekend, I took a short hiatus. I missed out last Saturday as well, unless you caught me at a fantastic little house party with a full ensemble of sound-amplification boxes complete with mood lighting. It makes me miss my performance days. The fact is, I did not actually take the weekend off, but a big-kid job came up, and the bounty was high enough to grease my proverbial palms. The recourse of course was that it killed my Friday night and took off with my Saturday. I had plans to do something spectacular this weekend, I swear! Either way, I don't really mind; the rewards needed to convince me to sacrifice my weekend are indeed high, and were met. Besides, everyone in the whole town seems to have gone someplace else for the Holiday.

I have, in the time since my previous entry, done some research on photo hosting. I've been using Flickr for quite some time now, and I stand by it. I have a few qualms that are happily resolved in the paid version. I suppose that is what qualm-sources are designed for. The biggest two issues were one; when reaching two hundred images, older images disappear from your gallery. You can still link to them, as in they still exist, but simply won't be shown on your gallery. More importantly, you can only have three album categories until upgrading to the premium version. Still, Flickr has a lot of neat features. For my older work, I will be uploading to Google's Picasa. Google offers a gigabyte of storage, and integration with the Picasa software. I've always shied away from Picasa, as I've never really wanted all of the images on my PC to be cataloged into one massive repository. You can discuss directory preferences within the software, but even so, for some reason it is lacking the control I want. Long story short, you can take a look at what I've got so far in my Picasa album here.

Friday was Shigeru Miyamoto's birthday. I've been celebrating by playing his latest masterpiece; Super Mario Galaxy. Miyamoto is one of the most beloved names in gaming history. He is the creative power behind Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong, Pikmin, and countless other Nintendo franchises. His ardent contributions towards the game industry are always highly anticipated. It's not hard to look at a game and recognize Shigeru Miyamoto's touch if he played a part in the development. With that said, Super Mario Galaxy is a complete meridian to his work. If twenty years ago, Miyamoto dreamed of a future for Mario, this very well was it. The game offers so much in near-perfect dose sizes that it is hard to believe that platform games are a dying breed. The Wii's biggest strength and weakness seems to be it's graphic processing capabilities compared to the other current generation systems. Super Mario Galaxy shows that even without the advanced rendering capabilities that the other systems have, a game can still look just as good. The soundtrack this time around mostly consists of completely orchestrated tracks with themes ranging from widely-epic to soothing, melodic undertones. There's quite a bit of the old material too, carefully remixed to take you back to 1992. Best of all, while the idea of plopping Mario in a space environment seems "gimmicky;" the game executes it so well that it feels completely natural. It's no wonder why Galaxy has been getting 10/10 reviews. There have been a lot of big titles to come out the past week or two, but for now, Galaxy has me completely hooked.