I bought the new Mario game for Nintendo DS the other day. It’s brilliant! New Super Mario Brothers is a new (well, duh, it’s in the title) game in the classic Mario 2D side-scroll style. It’s graphically shinier and Mario has a couple of new moves but it retains the left-to-right race to the flag goodness we know and love and it’ll be my most played DS game for a while. In a surprising twist, Bowser kidnaps the princess at the start of the game and it seems to be Mario’s mission to rescue her.
I’m also enjoying Brain Training which I’ve been playing for a couple of weeks now. It’s pretty addictive in a fun-for-a-few-minutes-a-day kinda way, with some interesting and quite tricky puzzles to have a go at. I’m particularly impressed by the speech and handwriting recognition software it uses. Admittedly someone who’s not had much recent contact with these technologies, I was wowed by its ability to regognise any voice without the need to be taught. And reliably! None of the tedious messing about with trying to speak naturally into the microphone in an effort to teach it to understand your commands that you used to have to do (of course, no matter how casual and cool you tried to be when recording your voice, it never came out the same as when you actually wanted the damn thing to do something for you).
Given this drastic improvement, maybe soon someone will make some widely available voice software that will actually be useful…
Update:
Apparently Nintendo have sent George Bush a nice little present for his birthday. Brilliant!
Hello, nice site. I wondered why a new incoming link had appeared on my Dashboard
Haha thanks. Cheers for the link - nice tooltip!