My first attempt at photosynth...not sure if an animated GIF would have been better...

http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=6623a623-0f8a-4171-9e3a-755e8425fe20&

Some people were interested in the music playlist, so here it is for the ceremony. Music selection was a very interesting process for us, I'll probably post more about it later.

Prelude:

Calm Before the Storm - Dirge of Cerberus Final Fantasy VII OST

Fragments of Memories - Final Fantasy VIII Fithos Lusec Wecos Vinosec

Why (Crisis Core FFVII Mix) - Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII OST

Cloud Smiles - Final Fantasy VII Advent Children OST

1000 Words (Instrumental) - Final Fantasy X-2: real Emotion / 1000 Words - Koda Kumi

Blackjack - Final Fantasy VI Grand Finale

Suteki da ne (Instrumental) - Final Fantasy X: Suteki da ne - Rikki

Yuna's Ballad - Eternity ~Memory of Lightwaves~ Music from Final Fantasy X-2

Besaid - Eternity ~Memory of Lightwaves~ Music from Final Fantasy X-2

Tsuki no Akari -Final Fantasy IV Theme of Love- (Karaoke) - Final Fantasy IV: Tsuki no Akari - Megumi Ida

Gau - Final Fantasy VI Grand Finale

The Princesses' Round (Firebird) - Igor Stravinsky (New York Philharmonic + Leonard Bernstein)

Grandparents'/Parents' Procession:

Melodies of Life ~featured in Final Fantasy IX (Instrumental) - Final Fantasy IX: Melodies of Life - Emiko Shiratori

Bridesmaids' Procession:

Cantata BWV 208: IX. Schafe Konnen Sicher Weiden (Sheep May Safely Graze) - Johann Sebastian Bach (Musica Antiqua New York + Mary Jane Newman)

Bridal Procession:

Bridal March - Jonathan Cain

Sand Ceremony:

Lucky (feat. Colbie Caillat) - Jason Mraz

Recessional:

Some Hearts - Carrie Underwood

Reception Entrance:

You Found Me - Kelly Clarkson

Cake Cutting:

You (feat. Jane Krakowski) - Jim Brickman

First Dance:

The Way - Clay Aiken

Father/Daughter Dance:

A Song for My Daughter - Ray Allaire

Slideshow:

Our Lives - The Calling

Making Memories of Us - Keith Urban

Fireflies - Owl City

Pictures of You - The Last Goodnight

The videogame crash of 1983 is one of the most interesting periods of video game history. You can basically point to every single company involved and show that they made mistakes.

The primary cause of the crash, for those who haven't looked into it, is that Atari lost control of the market. All sorts of companies rushed to try to capitalize on this new video game market, and the result was a huge glut of games being released. The notorious examples are of games created basically to hawk Purina dog food, and the creation of a video game studio within Quaker Oats. The number of poor quality games depressed the market and created a public perception of all video games being poor quality. Why buy the new game now for $30 when it will end up in the bargain bin for $2 in two weeks? The public got fed up with the poor quality, the revenue dried up, many companies got burned or died, and so the video game industry became a wasteland.

What everyone failed to realize, however, is that the public still had an appetite for video games, and Nintendo was the one to capitalize on it and risk releasing the NES. It was a huge battle to convince the once-bitten retailers to carry the NES, but their "gamble" paid off. Largely, it was due to several draconian measures instituted by Nintendo to prevent any semblance of the causes of the crash. Nintendo maintained strict control over the games for the NES. Companies could not create a game for the NES without getting approval from Nintendo. Nintendo was the only company allowed to create the actual cartridges, and other companies who tried to do so (100-in-1 games!) faced legal action.

Additionally, companies were only allowed to create 5 games for the NES per year. The reasoning behind this was that if companies could only create a limited number of games, they would be more likely to put more resources into each individual game and therefore create better quality games, as opposed to trying to cash in on the latest fad by releasing 50 sub-par games. Many companies familiar to kids who grew up on the NES were actually created for the sole purpose of getting around the 5 game restriction! For example, Ultra Games was a subsidiary of Konami. These kinds of measures, encompassed and represented by the Nintendo Golden Seal of Approval (remember those?) prevented a quick repeat of the video game crash of 1983.

Fast-forward to 2010. This past month saw E3, the industry's showcase for all that is great and new for the coming year. The big announcements were Sony's Move and Microsoft Kinect. Everybody is basically jumping onto the bandwagon that Nintendo created with the Wii (with improvements! /s)

Here's my take. Nobody has really figured out how to make this new control scheme work. I mean, we've seen lots of demos, and we can get players to do a variety of things (think party games), and it's perfectly serviceable to navigate menus. But nobody's created a huge new game genre or found a way to migrate existing genres to take advantage of this new control scheme. I'm thinking about how FPS made the transition from keyboard to keyboard/mouse. It's perfectly possible that someone will figure this out, but right now motion control is a gimmick. It can't support the depth and variety of games that the industry is used to. But all the companies are emphasizing these games.

And as everyone stumbles around trying to find out how to build a game around motion control, the quality of games will drop. Guess what the first thing that hits your eyes when you browse the Wii section? Shovelware. Which is about to duplicate itself into the PlayStation and Xbox areas. Shovelware everywhere. Does this start to sound familiar?

The good thing is that every major console manufacturer has learned from the crash of 1983. Random company PQX can't make their own Xbox or Wii game and sell it to retail stores. They have to go through an approval process with Sony or Microsoft or whoever. So we can't truly fall into the depths anymore.

Also, despite what it might seem, I like motion games. I like Trauma Team. But "surgery" games cannot be the same depth/breadth as "FPS" games or "RPG" games. The market can't support that. I think of motion control being able to support similar numbers to "rhythm" games. But the industry thinks that motion control is their savior, and that motion control games can be equal to all the previous genres combined. Motion control is much better (currently) at enhancing games, just like rumble/vibration. The killer motion control genre has not appeared yet, but the industry is copying mediocre motion control games indiscriminately to cash in.

Handheld gaming is proceeding nicely, with Nintendo continuing to push the edge with 3DS. Strong competition from the iPod/iPhone as well. The casual gaming market continues to improve its production quality while keeping prices relatively constant. $1-5 for games in the AppStore and $3-6 from places like Big Fish Games is starting to put pressure on the "traditional" PC and console games. As more gamers become more aware of what value can be had for <$10 games, I'd like to think their expectations for $60+ games will increase as well... And innovation is still strong in all sorts of genres in the indie area...

Here's the new game:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/zdbzd/lateral-the-word-association-game?user-level=82643

I'll be posting little hints and clues in the weeks to come...

1) Think about what's important in our life -- health, happiness, family, friends, work, etc... ?

2) Need help with the last one connected to wedding? What's a popular place to have weddings? Also, if you have access: http://www.facebook.com/prdwong#!/video/video.php?v=16268315532

3) Apart from playing the guitar and the drums, there is also .

4) We'd like to, but haven't had a chance to, go see The Lion King. Live!

We got up and headed down for our complimentary breakfast in the hotel. It was the same nice place that we had dined the night before, except it was setup for a small buffet instead. The staff was very friendly. I grabbed a bunch to eat. Afterwards, we headed back for our car and took off. I had asked that they put the valet charge on the room bill, but at the end of the trip, it turns out they didn't. I don't know if I was supposed to do it or what, but I definitely thought that the valet guy said that he would put it on. Maybe he didn't know what room we were in or something.

We headed out to Kelly Tarlton's Antarctic Encounter, which was kind of like an aquarium. We went in and looked around, and boy, was it a disappointment. You could barely call it an aquarium. There were some exhibits about the South Pole expeditions (and how they ended in disaster), and then a little car ride the drove on rails so we could see some penguins. Apart from that, there was a tank with some manta rays in it, the obligatory shark tunnel, and then a few tanks that look like they could belong in a rich person's house. The tanks at Monterey, you would definitely not expect to find at somebody's house. I'd say maybe there were 10-20 tanks there, tops. Waaay small. And then at the end they had the gift shop with a small theater showing Spy Kids. Huh?

The only saving grace for me was that I managed to catch a guy going around and feeding a lot of the different tanks, so seeing some of the fishies eating mussels and the seahorses eating small floating things was fun. We also caught the manta ray presentation, but it was not particularly interesting to me (it's not like you got to feed them, like at Seaworld). He did make the ray splash a bunch of people, though.

We then drove up to see a couple of the volcanic cones in Auckland. The first one was One Tree Hill, and the drive up reminded me of going to Twin Peaks on the day that I proposed to Patricia. There wasn't much to see, except the city of Auckland stretching off in all directions. You could also see the other volcanic cones that made up the landscape. Guess it was a little weird seeing these hills here and there in the city. Afterwards, it was lunch time, so we stopped at a little restaurant next to the i-Site at the park. It turned out to be a fancy expensive restaurant that we were not expecting, so we got out of there and decided to find something else.

I drove us over to Parnell Street, where there was supposed to be a lot of small shops for shopping. Finding a parking spot was horrible, but I finally got one at a small side street. Patricia had seen a nice Italian place, so we went there and it turned out to be another expensive place where there were people in business suits having their power lunches. Man, we must have looked out of place with our backpacks and everything. We had a pizza, which wasn't too bad (hand-made). When we got out, we decided to walk down the street a little bit to see what was around. As we were walking, we passed the Italian place that Patricia had seen, so we had gone to the wrong restaurant, which was nagging me. Doh!

We found a few nice shops to look at. At this point, we kind of decided that we wanted one of the Maori symbols that represents two lives intertwining and becoming one, but all the ones that we saw were really dark (dark, dark blue). A lot of the other symbols had a lighter color to them, so we were hoping to find one that was a bit lighter. But we didn't have any luck there. I found a small little wooden block game where you are supposed to balance them on top of each other. The blocks are horse shaped, so I wanted to use it as a display to show that I could get the horses to do whatever I wanted (Patricia is a horse remember -- I'm the sheep).

I was a little bit worried that we would not be able to bring wood back due to animal/plant restrictions. What was more worrisome was the wool that I still had back at the hotel room, from when we saw the sheep get shorn at the Agrodome back in StinkyTown. I wanted to put it in a plastic bag or something so that if customs did decide to confiscate it, that I wouldn't get into all sorts of trouble with the exposed wool also contaminating my backpack or something. Patricia offered to let me use the little Ziploc bag that she got from Pak N' Save also at StinkyTown. Yeah, right. I didn't really think that would be a great improvement, because that was the Ziploc bag that she had bought all those dried mangoes in. And I knew they don't let you bring dried fruit anywhere, because when we got to New Zealand, they made us throw away our unopened dried fruit snacks, even though we had gotten them on the Qantas flight to New Zealand (and we told them that, too).

We found a little pastry store too where Patricia got some shortbread. We had some confusion over what exactly shortbread is (besides a type of cookie-type thing). The Chinese guy behind the counter tried to describe it, but not very well. Guess it's a hard thing to describe. I got myself a huge fruit tart (like bigger than my fist). As I was still stuffing myself and licking cream, we also stopped by an ice cream shop...hahaha.

We still had a little time, so we went off to the other volcanic cone that I had planned, Mt. Eden. Another twisty drive up, and we were up at the top. This one was a bit more interesting because you could actually see a deep depression which made it sort of look more like a volcano (if there were grass growing on the inside of the volcano). I wanted to go down there, but a) it looked steep, b) it was really windy, c) I think there were signs saying you were supposed to stick to the paths. There was a path, but I couldn't decide whether it was an official path, or just a path that happened to form because of all the people who wanted to go into the cone.

After that, we headed back to the hotel, where I tried to figure out the parking situation since the valet cost was a little high. There was a parking lot across the corner from the hotel, but we had a hard time figuring out how to use it. And there was no attendant anywhere, just the automated pay machine. You could only pay for a max of 12 hours, but that meant that I would have to come down and pay again at like 5am in the morning. A couple guys came by and Patricia said that they just bought two tickets of 12 hours (both expiring around 5am) and then concluded that displaying both of them would be good for 24 hours. That seemed a little shady to me. I decided that I could just come back late at night like at 10pm or so and just pay for another 12 hours. I found a spot away from where there was a big pool of water in the middle of the lot.

There wasn't anything else to do for the day, so after a while of looking at stuff online, I found that there was an IMAX theater nearby at SkyCity. So I told Patricia we should go, since we had been bemoaning the fact that we would miss all the movies that were coming out when we were gone. I confirmed that this theater was a "real" IMAX (one with a gigantic screen). I have no idea why the ones at Mercado or Vallco or wherever are called IMAX.

We walked down the streets looking at shops (even though a lot were closed). I thought we were going to the big tower, which is SkyCity, but apparently SkyCity is like all over covering what seems like five blocks of Auckland. So we eventually got there thanks to my trusty GPS and got some tickets for Transformers.

We had a little time before the movie, so we looked around a little at the SkyCity. Patricia was not handling it particularly well because the other floors are high up and you have to walk on walkways where you can look down. The place got me turned around so much -- I could never figure out where the elevators, or even the stairs were whenever I came out of a shop. There was an arcade and a game shop on the second floor that I said I might come back to. I thought maybe I could come back on Friday and do some FNM! (yeah, right).

Downstairs there was a neato Japanese store like Daiso with really crowded aisles. Patricia picked up a few things she needed. And then we went into a Borders and browsed around. I found this interesting book co-written by Arthur C. Clarke called The Last Theorem (about Fermat's Last Theorem, and also invading aliens) that I decided that I would pick up when we got back home. I must have spent too much time browsing because when it was time to leave (since Borders was closing) Patricia totally wanted to get out of there. Maybe it was the sugar level, so Patricia got a little something at the food court while I mooched off of her.

I'm sorry, but for a summer tentpole movie, Transformers sucked. I suffered from the same exact flaw as the first movie, which is that the models for the robots sucks. As a concept, the robots are cool, but as a story driver (and that's what movies are, stories), the design of the robots are horrendous. It's because it's virtually impossible for anybody watching the movie to be able to instinctually grok what in the world is going on up on the screen. I've heard it from a lot of people -- they have problems telling who's an Autobot and who's a Decepticon in many fight scenes. But it goes beyond that. I think people have problems telling what's an arm and what's a leg and what's a face. So a) it's harder to follow the story since you have to (unconsciously) devote a fraction of your brain into figuring out what you're looking at (is that a chest?) instead of instinctively knowing right off, and b) you don't get invested in the characters as much because it's that much harder to view them as characters instead of an amorphous blob of metal. And the new characters that act all goofy and everything? Whaaaa????

And that was it -- we walked back to the hotel, while it was raining a bit. I went to go pay for 12 more hours on the car, and the lot had flooded a whole lot more, so I'm glad I didn't completely soak my shoes or anything. After walking through the dark minefield that the lot was and getting to the car to put in the new ticket, I figured the safest way to exit the lot was to actually hang onto the chicken wire fence that was on a bit higher ground and kind of shimmy my way to the street.

When I got back to the hotel, I wanted to see if they had complimentary umbrellas that we could use in case it rained more for the rest of our stay. So I went up to the conceirge and asked them if they had any umbrellas. Well, first asked me if I was staying at the hotel, and then he made me confirm it by asking me what my name was and what room I was staying in (plus, the room was not under my name, it was under Patricia's). So after all that rigamarole, he told me that yes, there were umbrellas available, and was just about to go to the back to get one, so then I had to explain that I didn't want one right that moment, I just wanted to know if they were available in case I needed them the next day. Blarggghhh.

I went to sleep with horses balanced on my nightstand. =)