Tag Archives: amiibo

May 29

Friday Post: BeagleBone Splatoon

Posted on by

Hey All,

Happy Friday!

Today Nintendo released a whole bunch of new Amiibos that were highly sought after.  I was in line at WalMart at midnight and had a lot of fun.  Met a bunch of cool people in line.  We were laughing and comparing game collections, and then the electronics guy comes out and tell us there are 6 Amiibo.  Not 6 of the 9 characters.  Just 6 Amiibo total.  3 Pac-Man and 3 Charizard.  I was 7th in line.  We could only laugh at the ridiculousness.  On the plus side, I picked up Splatoon! It is just as amazing as the demo!  If you have a Wii U and like FPS / 3PS this is a must.

The only Amiibo I was after was the Silver Mario.  I mean, come on, Silverman, Silver Mario.  It was a must buy.  There was no line at my GameStop so I was able to get one without a problem, it was just that was all they had.  This whole product line is crazy.  People going crazy over little figures.  Gotta catch em all!

In other news,  I picked up a Beagle Bone Black and I am working on testing PiPlay on that.  Initial tests look good.  It runs Ubuntu, and has some quirks, but I was able to get Mednafen, CaveStory, and DGen working without issue.

Look for more updates regarding that soon!

Have a good weekend all.

-Shea

Mar 22

Very Late Friday Post: 2 Years!

Posted on by

Hey All,

Sorry for the very late post this week.  Trying to figure out why I’m having such connectivity issues to my web host.  Replaced the router.  Still happens.  Modem is fine.  It’s not my host.  But my ISP can’t see it as being down since it comes up 5 minutes later.  I can VPN into work and access my host from there.  So weird.

Anyways,

Tomorrow marks my 2nd Wedding Anniversary.  It feels like it’s been a day and a half 🙂 K, I love you.  Thank you for putting up with me.

PiPlay

0.8 Beta 9 is coming along.  It should be released in a day or so.  This is the best version yet, and I’m so sorry for the Beta 8 release.  Trying to get everything working on both the Pi and Pi2 has been a challenge.  But I think this version will be great.  We have upgraded to the latest Raspbian image, moved more emulators into GitHub / Git and now can update most of PiPlay with a Git Update.  Mark has created an awesome file watching script which automatically updates the frontend when a new file has been uploaded.  No more running the scraper, it all happens in the background.

Mario Party 10

Mario Party 10 came out this week.  I had a chance to play it with a group, and, well, it feels like Mario Party Lite.  The game is gorgeous, the levels are beautiful, but there are only three game modes.  Amiibo Party, Bowser Party, and “Mario Party” which isn’t like previous games.  Everyone works together to get to the end in a vehicle, basically pooling dice rolls.  The classic game has been shortened and moved to Amiibo Party.  It feels like a lot of content is missing.  The load times are also really long.  I really wanted to love this game, but I feel like its a demo.  I’m hoping patches and some free DLC fix that.

SmartiPi

I backed the SmartiPi kickstarter a short while ago, and received my case the other day.  I think this is one of the best designed cases out there.  It easily wraps around the whole Pi, and has LEGO compatible pegs on the case.

IMG_4913

 

Have a great week(end)!

-Shea

Jan 02

Friday Post: 2015!!!!

Posted on by

Hey All,

Happy New Year!!! 2014 was an amazing year for me:

  • Got contracted to write a second book (almost done)
  • Ran a successful Kickstarter
  • Had YTD 64,000 downloads of PiPlay
  • Spoke at PyCon, Computers in Libraries, and EDUCAUSE conferences
  • Participated in Orlando Maker Faire
  • Was able to hire the very talented Elizabeth Williams to be part of my team at work
  • Developed software that is helping 60,000 students
  • Added a very cute and very annoying kitten to our family
  • Learned a few new technologies that I had been putting off
  • Watched my wife get a great new job
  • Watching my friends start families
  • Made some new friends

Not to say everything has been great, but the good has totally outweighed the bad.  I have to thank all of my readers as well.  I couldn’t have done without you all.  Thank you!

Amiibos

So I’ve been hit by the Amiibo bug.  I started cutting out these stands for my collection.

IMG_4653 IMG_4654 IMG_4655 IMG_4656 IMG_4657 IMG_4658 IMG_4659 IMG_4660 IMG_4661 IMG_4662 IMG_4652I may have gone a little overboard.

PiPlay

The next version of PiPlay is really coming along.

snapshot

You can see our game listing screen now shows a lot more info.  We are also moving a lot of our configs into SQLite DB files for faster retrieval.  This is going to be an awesome release!

Happy 2015 everyone!

 

Nov 23

Late Friday Post (yeah it’s Sunday): IAAPA! Super Smash Bros!

Posted on by

Hey All,

Sorry for the super late post.  The weather changes here in Florida knocked me on my butt.  I’ve been in bed for the past two days trying to get over this cold.  Going from 40 degrees to 70 to 80 back to 40 just messes with me.  It also didn’t help that I ran myself ragged on Friday.

IAAPA

So Friday was the “members of the public” day at IAAPA.  IAAPA stands for  International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, which means that if you ever wanted to see how a ride works, or where to get new arcade machines, or pretty much anything within the amusement / coin op sector, this is the place.  I go every year and it is always a blast.  The biggest noticeable trend this year is how un-3d everything is.  2 years ago every ride and game had a 3D gimmick to it.  Now, pretty much nothing is 3D except for the big ride experiences.

This year some of my coworkers went with me.  They enjoyed themselves.

Super Smash Bros.

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U came out this weekend.  Holy crap it is amazing.  I had friends over on Friday, we played 8 player smash, and it was a riot.  I will have the image of me playing as Samus getting the smash ball and taking out all 7 of the other players in one final smash attack burned into my memory for a very long time.

It’s a beautiful, well made, extensive game.  I have no idea how long it is going to take me to unlock everything.

The game also includes support for Nintendo’s new NFC characters called Amiibos.  Think Skylanders but different.  For now, the way they work is dependant on each game.  For Mario Kart 8, it just unlocks new outfits.  In Smash Bros, they act as a super smart CPU character.  The figures are really well made and look good sitting on display.

IMG_4536

I’m still trying to get some of the NFC info from them.  I’d love to write a program to back up the data, but it’s hard finding info on the MIFARE Ultralight chip it identifies as.

If you have any info please let me know!

Have a good week all,

-Shea