Hung Truong: The Blog!

Wii Play for Nintendo Wii – Review

I got Wii Play from Amazon.com yesterday. The main selling point is that it comes with a wiimote and costs $50, so the game itself is worth $10. It comes with a bunch of minigames, much like Wii Sports, but they’re not all sports.

Out of the nine, I’d say 3 or 4 are actually fun to play.

The Shooting Range game is not Duck Hunt, which makes me sad. Basically you just shoot stuff. Sometimes the Duck Hunt ducks will fly by and you can shoot them, but otherwise you just hit targets.

Find Mii is lame, unless you enjoy finding people in crowds. Table Tennis is really weak, because you can only control the horizontal action of the paddle. Tennis in Wii Sports is about 100 times better, and it comes with the Wii when you buy it! Pose Mii is also pretty boring.

Laser Hockey is actually very fun. The graphics are cool, and who doesn’t like air hockey? I need to get a friend to play this one with me, since the CPU is kind of dumb. Billiards is good too. It’s not quite ready to be its own game, but I enjoyed it (and I actually played it more than once).

Fishing is worthless. This looks like a tech demo. An unfun tech demo. Charge is kind of okay, and very surreal. I like how it uses the wiimote, at least. Tanks is also very fun with the nunchuck. I imagine getting 4 players would make this very, very fun.

In the end, if you’re looking to get an extra wiimote anyway, then Wii Play isn’t a bad buy. If you already have enough controllers, I don’t think it’s worth $50 for the game. There’s some good games, and there’s some not so good games. I personally think Wii Sports is more fun. Laser Hockey might be worth $10 by itself though.

Hung Truong: In PHP!

So I decided that I should do a little bit in PHP since I’m going to have a Google interview soon and the most I’ve done before is manipulating other people’s code. I have my (semi-) professional site thingy over at the root of the site, hung-truong.com. One thing that bugged me about doing that quick site was that I was writing everything in static html. So I had to statically write the menu bar thing so it showed the active menu item for each page. A lot of code was repeated, and it was generally pretty ugly.

I figured it’d be a good exercise to redo that simple site in a php template of sorts. So I used this pre-existing templating class and modified it for my needs. Yeah, I’m still manipulating other peoples’ code, but at least in this case, the code is simple enough so that I understand how all of it works (I haven’t taken the time to go digging around in all of WordPress’ source yet).

Unfortunately the class was really simple, and it still couldn’t handle my dynamic menu bar list thing. So I wrote a quick class called Menubar and it works! You can see the php version of my professional website at this location. I might end up just making it the official one, once I know it’ll work ok.

It was a bit of work, and I didn’t really change anything to the actual site, but if I ever end up adding another section, it’ll be a lot less work than before. Plus it sorta refreshed my (almost non-existent) PHP coding skills!

LocoRoco for Sony PSP – Sorta Review

So I bought LocoRoco from Amazon.com after some crazy glitch that let me order it for 60% off. It finally came while I was out of town and I got a chance to sit down and play it.

LocoRoco is one of those weird Japanese games that become famous due to their weirdness. In LocoRoco, you roll a yellow ball animal thing by tilting the world left or right. You can also bump the world so the ball can jump. When the ball eats red flowers, it can grow. You can also blow up the big ball into smaller balls, and reform the big ball later on.

Basically, the idea is to get the ball as large as possible and to make it to the end of the stage. You can get attacked by black spiky things that will reduce your size. At the end of the stage, you see how well you did getting larger, and collecting other random stuff.

And that’s how the whole game goes. There’s not much else. If you’ve played one stage, you’ve sorta played them all. I got through the first world.

One plus is that the game is super cute. Like the little yellow balls will sing in random pseudo-Japanese (it’s not actual Japanese, but it uses Japanese syllables). And the theme song is sorta addicting. Just listen to it! [audio:LocoRoco Title Theme.mp3]

So yeah, LocoRoco is sorta repetitive, but also way cute. Like me!

Threadless Spring Broke Sale – $10 T-Shirts!

So there’s another $10 t-shirt sale goin’ on at Threadless.com. I had a lot of referral credits ($30 worth) so I picked up some tees. I was only gonna order one, but then they said I had to use all of my credit at once, so I ordered 3. Stupid Threadless!

Anyway, here’s what I ordered:

Pencil Forest

When I saw Pencil Forest debut a few weeks ago (or was it last week?) I thought it was pretty cool. But not $15 cool. Luckily, it’s $10 cool.

It sorta doesn’t make sense though. So the guy is cutting down the tress to make pencils? But why are the trees made of pencil shavings? Oh well, I guess it doesn’t really need to make sense.

Para Poppins

I’ve wanted Para Poppins for a while now, though I don’t think it’s ever been in stock during a $10, which is usually when I’ll buy shirts from threadless. It’s just the kind of weird, off-beat shirt that I find myself gravitated towards. I’m sure Mary Poppins will show those insurgents who’s boss!

Stone Jungle

Stone Jungle is a pretty cool looking shirt that has some city stuff on the top, and nature stuff on the bottom! How artsy fartsy! I got it because I was forced to get 3 shirts. I like the design, plus green is my favorite color, so yeah, there ya go.

In fact, I just noticed that all the shirts I ordered today have a shade of green in them… Weird.

The Threadless Spring Broke sale lasts until March 12, so get the shirts you want now! And vote for this shirt to be reprinted!!!

Family Feud – Starring J. Peterman!

So lately, I’ve been watching Family Feud on TV. It’s only because all the other shows that are on at that time are either soap operas, or Anna Nicole Smith documentary shows. And by that, I mean gossip shows that only talk about Anna Nicole Smith.

For some reason, I thought that Louie Anderson was still hosting Family Feud. He’s kind of depressing and scary, so that’s why I have a bad image of Family Feud. Well, they finally kicked out Louie Anderson (probably a long time ago) and now John O’ Hurley is hosting! Who is John O’ Hurley, you ask? I dunno, but he played J. Peterman on Seinfeld!

It’s kind of weird seeing a character actor like him hosting Family Feud. Like there was a contestant named “Elaine” and when he said “come up, Elaine” I had weird Seinfeld flashbacks! He even said it in J. Peterman’s voice! I guess technically it’s his actual voice, but still.

Oh, and speaking of Family Feud, I really hate how they show the answers at the end of each round. Like they have the audience read them to us slowly as if we’re blabbering, illiterate idiots. I suppose most people who watch Family Feud are, though. (Not me, of course)

Also, where do they find these families? Can people be so out of touch with reality that they think funerals are a good time to have a family portrait taken? Or that Wal-Marts exist in malls!? Who are these people!?