This is apparently the month for games announcements made just for me. Not only is Ubi delivering the goods, but look what Konami has in store:

I do love portable Castlevania games

So you just read that Ubi is coming out with Beyond Good and Evil two and said to yourself, what is that? I'm guessing you are one of the many who never played the first game. If you like Zelda or Okami type games, you'll love this one.

Apparently the GameCube version is super rare, there isn't even a listing on Amazon for it. If you haven't played this one, do yourself a treat and pick up a copy of what could possibly be my favorite game of all time (or at least until the sequel arrives).

Ubisoft's Ubidays 2008 just rapped up and they have some eye candy for us:

Prince of Persia

Beyond Good & Evil 2

Props to Kooshmoose

What the hell is this?, originally uploaded by reyn1979.

If you follow me on-line in various places, you may have noticed the Café Chimp has faded to be replaced by Oriental Bento Colonel Sanders (Kombo 5 on the menu), I love this for so many reasons:

1. This is an actual product sold at KFC in Indonesia
2. Apparently the word "Oriental" isn't offensive to Indonesians. Not sure what it means to them, perhaps just East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan)
3. The Colonel is clearly wearing a Chinese outfit, but "Bento" is a Japanese word
4. It says "Bento" but it is clearly a bowl

What this isn't is Dragon Ball Z's Master Roshi drinking tea (good guess Koosh), but such a wonderful mix of confusion, and I'm glad to see that it isn't just Americans who get mixed up with east Asians and can't tell them apart.

I'm sure I'll get bored of this at some point, but the more people I let in on the fun, the longer I think Oriental Colonel will be around, so enjoy!

I wasn't expecting much, and perhaps that helped. Iman dragged me to this, and I agreed since I didn't figure anyone else would take her, who would have thought that I would like it even more than she did. If you ever enjoyed the old Anime series, you will like this. The Wachowski Bros must either be the biggest Speed Racer fans ever, or they watched the entire series 1/2 dozen times in preparation for this movie. This is not a case of someone taking IP and stripping away what the fans are looking for only to replace it with something that barely has the name of the original and nothing left with any redeeming qualities. This is THE Speed Racer movie, and if you are a fan you will not be disappointed. However if you are over 13 and have never seen the original Anime series? Skip this one, you certainly won't appreciate anything except the pretty colors, fast action, and surprisingly good acting.

I'm not much for the music games. Usually they involve color, which I'm not good at, and a particular hand-eye coordination that doesn't seem to come naturally to me, but there is one music game that I'm excited about:

And if the chimp comes with it? Count me in!

WiiWare: Lost Winds Nintendo Wii Nintendo Everyone B

Nintendo has launched "WiiWare", which is essentially XBox Live Arcade for the Wii. Sure the Wii had it's Virtual Console but WiiWare is all new content designed for the Wii to be purchased and downloaded. WiiWare currently runs from $5-$15 and requires "Points" to be purchased either from the store or using cards. The first WiiWare title I have purchased, and likely the only one in the initial line-up, is LostWinds.

First of all, keep in mind that this is a $10 title, therefore the fact it only took 3 1/2 hours to play isn't so bad. The game is super cute, though missing a map of any sort even though I thought we all realized how important a map can be. You befriend a "wind spirit" and then go on a quest to discover what happened to "the evil guy", along the way you learn new tricks which are required to go more and more places. Everything is very standard to a platformer, though the controls are new, in order to jump you need the help of the wind which is controlled by the Wiimote.

I won't give away the end, but as I expect will be common in WiiWare titles the fact that a sequel is coming is pretty evident by the "To be continued...", and since WiiWare lends itself to episodic content, if I pay $40 for 4 mini games at 3 1/2 hours each, that is about on-par with what is expected out of quality games these days.

[ Fiesta Asia! ]

Don't say I didn't warn you, you have 1/2 a day to plan on going yourself...

[ Exempt Those Exams! ]

See, I told you jank is a real word. Now someone tell squankous...

Publishing and testing a Windows Communication Foundation Service in IIS7 on Windows Vista is pretty straightforward, but there are a few pitfalls to look out for along the way. This post is designed to compliment the screencast ‘Creating and consuming your first WCF Service’ which I will publish here soon. I hope sharing this with you saves you some time when deploying your first service.

[ Hosting a WCF Service using IIS7 and Windows Vista Nick Kewney’s Blog ]

Since my last .Net web service was pre-WSE and this is at least 3 iterations later, I have a bit to catch up on. They've certainly complicated things via abstraction, which is probably a great help to many, but seems like overkill for my purposes, but this post helped a lot. Since I need authentication WCF "wants" me to use transport security, ie SSL, so people can't snoop on the credentials. Nice that the framework is enforcing such standards, bad that I have to do that in my development environment. Well, WCF doing a SOAP "basic" webservice via HTTPS is set up on my machine. Now I have to figure out how to implement the authentication headers...

The new Rick Sandoval place, it opened in May of 2008. I went during the first week and thought it was clearly the best Mexican place around. Sandoval places don’t stay great for long, so now is the time to go.

[ Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide: La Sandia ]

I don't know Rick Sandoval from a hole in the wall, but I know Mexican food that I like. I've lamented the decline in quality and service at Tia Queta for a while now, but I must say that La Sandia is better than I ever remember Tia Queta being. I got the Chicken Mole Enchiladas:

Yaty got the Shrimp Fajitas:

She wasn't so impressed, she liked it but prefers the Fajitas as Guapo's and the fresh grilled jalapeño that comes with them. Of course if this is contemporary south Mexican fare, I would expect the fajitas to be less than stellar. The guacamole and the tomatillo sauce that accompanied her fajitas were quite good though.