LittleBigPlanet Karting BETA, Wii U, and Google: Project Glass

I haven’t updated this website in a while, so I decided to do one BIG post about all of the things that I’ve been meaning to post.

LittleBigPlanet Karting BETA!!!
I applied for LBP Karting Beta a while back, and I got excepted! The game stays true to the other LBP games in that you can still decorate your pod, create and publish levels, and decorate your earth and moon. There are still minigames, and the level select is the same. It uses similar controls to Modnation Racers, the reason being because it is made by the Modnation company, United Front Games. The vehicles are either things from LBP, or just funny ideas. Below are pictures from the game.

 

Sackboy Blasting off
Sackboy Blasting off

Cool Picture of Sacks racing
A Cool Picture of Sacks racing, with me smiling for being invited in.

 
Wii U
My dad took me to a developer meet-up where they let us play the Wii U before anybody else! Wii U is the second version of the Wii. It comes with a Gamepad that has 2 analog sticks, a camera, a microphone, a gyroscope, and can also control your TV. The buttons are the four action buttons, (X, Y, A, and B.) the +control pad, the +start and -select buttons, The L, R, ZL, and ZR buttons, and the home button. It ALSO comes with a screen and a stylus. The Wii U system is compatible with the old Wii accessories, including the remotes.

 

Wii U Details
Wii U Details

The Gamepad being used as a remote.
The Gamepad being used as a remote.

 

Here are my favorite games that I played at the meet-up:

Donkey Kong Crash Course – In this game, the object is to roll your vehicle through the course to Princess Peach. Easy, right? WRONG. I’m 99% sure that nobody was able to get to the princess in their 3 tries. Why, you ask? Simple. You can’t got too fast, because you’ll collide with the wall. You also can’t go too slow, or you’ll topple over. on top of that, you have to move platforms with the analog sticks, and ZR and ZL. The gyroscope in the new controller senses when you tilt it back and forth, and the vehicle moves accordingly. I’m assuming that the level that was playable was NOT the first level, so by the time you get to that level, it probably isn’t as hard. (I couldn’t find any pictures for this game.)

New Super Mario Bros. U – In this sequel to the NSMBros. series, there are some new features. The first one is the Flying Squirrel suit, which allows Mario and his friends to glide once the also-new Acorn Mushroom is obtained. The next one is my favorite. Baby Yoshis appear, and have three different abilities. To inflate like a balloon, glow in darkness, and to blow bubbles to cause Koopas to float away. All three can eat guards when they are carried. The Gamepad is able to make platforms appear for the player to jump on in a certain mode. The final new feature is that you can play as your Mii in the game. The only problem that I had with it was that It didn’t have much use for the Gamepad.

Batman: Arkham City Armored Edition – This is an add-onto the original Arkham City game. It uses the Gamepad in many different ways, including controlling a RC Batarang, and investigating a crime scene. It was VERY fun to play, but I had a problem with it. My problem was that it was WAY too easy to fight. All you have to do is keep hitting Y, and he will automatically launch and attack nearby guards. I hadn’t ever played it before, and I don’t think I took any damage. But it was still an Awesome game.

Google: Project Glass
There is a project that google is working on called “Project Glass”. It is the idea that a small machine can connect to glasses to make them into a type of smartphone. It uses voice command, and can take pictures, make phone-calls, text, give directions, show news, give the weather, and so much more. Of course, you don’t have to have glasses to use them. It will be a little bit expensive, but is still very cool. Bellow is a video, showing the features I’ve said and more.

How to run Gamecube and Wii games on the mac

Sonic Adventure 2: Battle
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle
Recently, I wanted to play Sonic Adventure 2: Battle on my Mac computer. Sonic Adventure 2: Battle is an old Nintendo Gamecube game that was released in 2002. If you have a Wii, you can play old Gamecube games as long as you have a Gamecube controller and memory card. I had to do some research to find out if there was a way to play the game on my Mac too.

 
I had heard of a site called Emuparadise somewhere, so that is where I looked to find the game. You can download the Sonic Adventure 2: Battle and A LOT of other games from that site. The games you can download are called ROMs and the programs you need to play them are called Emulators. Here is a link to the Emuparadise site, which has links to the ROMs and a lot of good information about emulators:

http://www.emuparadise.me

 
Once you go to Emuparadise, click on “ROMs, ISOs & Games” from the site navigation. From that page, choose the console type you want to find games for. I chose “Nintendo Gamecube ISOs”. After you choose your console, you are taken to a page where you can either pick from the top games or search for a specific game listed in alphabetical order. I clicked “S” to search for the Sonic The Hedgehog games and then I clicked on the link for the Sonic Adventure 2: Battle game. The game page gives you a description of the game and some screenshots. Scroll down on that page and click the “Direct Download Link”. This might be a little confusing because clicking that link doesn’t download the game, but it takes you to another page where you can actually find the link to the game file. The actual game file will be under the “Direct Download” section of that page. Be very patient while the ROM is downloading. Some games can actually take hours to download from that site.

 
The file you will download will be a compressed file like a .rar or .7z file. Some emulators will uncompress the game when you want to play it, but the emulator I am going to write about makes you uncompress the file first. I use The Unarchiver or UnRarX to uncompress files.

 
Once you download the file and uncompress it, you will have a .iso file. This is the file that the emulator needs to be able to play the game. All of this sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. You can delete the compressed file once you have uncompressed it and have your .iso file.

 

Dolphin
Dolphin
Now that you have the .iso file, you need to download the emulator, which is called Dolphin. As far as I can tell, this is the best Gamecube or Wii emulator for the Mac. Dolphin is also available for Windows computers too. You can download it here:

https://dolphin-emu.org/download/

 
Once you have installed Dolphin, run the program. The first time I ran it, it did not automatically find my Sonic Adventure 2: Battle .iso file. I had to click “Open” and find the .iso file. Since then though, every time I open Dolphin, my game is listed in the home screen. Here is a tip – to make your game full screen, press Command-F (Ctrl-F for PC). Otherwise your game plays in a small window. Another tip – some of the game files are very big, so you might want to only download the ones you want most. The Sonic Adventure 2: Battle file is over 1GB.

 

Sonic Wiki Logo
Sonic Wiki Logo
If you want more information about Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, you can read more on the Sonic Wiki. Here is a link to the Sonic Adventure 2 / Sonic Adventure 2: Battle page:

http://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Sonic_Adventure_2. Spoiler alert! That page tells the story of the game if you want to play it before you read about it!