The best part of the night was, by far, the impromptu “DS Circle”. I had my Nintendo DS with me, Harley had his, and after a couple of head-to-head matches of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan we were noticed by some other DS owners. Within minutes there were six of us, sitting in a circle, playing a multiplayer game of MarioKart DS. I think we actually spent the majority of the party playing with our DS’s, with the group’s numbers fluctuating as people left to play actual vintage games and then returning for more multiplayer gaming.

One of the most brilliant things about the Nintendo DS is that most games have single-cartridge multiplayer. Meaning only one person actually has to own the game for an entire group to play it. This was no accident – it’s precisely this feature that lets groups of would-be strangers start socializing and gaming with each other. (It’s also a great way to try out games that you might consider buying).

It was so much fun that we exchanged e-mail addresses and started up a group, the Concordia Nintendo DS Club, so that we could get together again – hopefully on a regular (weekly?) basis – and play some more games together. It’s amazing how the Nintendo DS can be such a powerful social tool. It’s no surprise that it renewed my faith in video games.

I had so much fun playing that I must have looked deranged, with a huge stupid grin on my face, as I launched red shells at Shy Guys and mushroom-boosted my way to victory! (Actually I think was in second place after all that MarioKarting).

We finished off the night with a four-way match of Bust-A-Move.

So if you have a Nintendo DS, and you’d like to meet up with a group of people to some multiplayer games on a (hopefully) regular basis, make sure to sign up to the group.

It’s a merger of a traditional Boat Race and the infamous Binary Tree data structure.

The Boat Race is a drinking game, in which two teams line up with a beer in front of each player, and start chugging. Like in a relay race, a person can’t start drinking until the player before him/her finishes. The first team to finish all their beers wins.

A Binary Tree is a way of organizing data. Each data is contained in a “node” and each node as at most two “children” which are below it in the tree. There is a “root” node, which is where the tree starts. It can have two “child nodes”, and each of those can have two child nodes, and so on. A node with no children is called a “leaf”. So at each level of the tree, you have at most double the number of nodes as the previously. Where n is the level if the tree, and the root is at n = 0, the maximum number of nodes at each level is 2ⁿ. A path through a binary tree is called traversal.

In the Binary Tree Boat Race, the players arrange themselves as a Binary Tree and start drinking in a parallel breadth-first pattern: The root starts drinking, and as soon as he finishes, the two people below him start drinking. As soon as they finish the people below them start drinking and so on. Here’s a diagram:

The winners of the Binary Tree Boat Race are all the members of the path leading from the root to the leaf node that finished drinking first. The root always wins. Following the diagram, if player F finishes drinking first, then the winners are the root, player B and player F.

Try it next Frosh. :)

When I was between 14 and 15 I became heavily involved in particular in the Star Wars gaming communnity and participated in building a number of fan sites for upcoming games. I was a member of The Force Commander Network, XWAlliance.com and even started my own fan site The Rogue Squadron Network – which, I’m still proud to say, reached over 300,000 unique visitors (including a number of people from LucasArts and Factor5) before going defunct. I went by the (very unoriginal) nick “JediNite”. Shut up. It was eight years ago, and I was 14. (On a completely unrelated aside, I stumbled into an old IRC hangout of mine from back then and there are still some of the same people that ran those sites with me around.)

Eventually I started to lose interest in video games. They all started to blend together and nothing really offered me a unique gaming experience. Most games were nothing but variations on tried and tired genres, and it seemed that games started trying to differentiate themselves primarily by their graphics than by gameplay. That trend still continues. I see more and more games that are nothing but another shooter, albeit looking better and with maybe some twist or another (“it’s a shooter – WITH CARS!”). And I just stopped caring.

Until I went to Arcadia last November, I figured that there was virtually nothing left in games for me. (So why did I go? Because The Minibosses were playing). After years of not playing anything but some old favourites I found myself in the Nintendo booth and was nearly blown away by their simple and fun approach to games. I still wasn’t entirely convinced though, until I saw the previews for The New Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo DS. The prospect of playing multiplayer competitive Mario and fireballing each-other was too much to pass up.

I bought a Nintendo DS Lite during Fantasia along with Mario, Brain Age and MarioKart DS. I’ve been playing virtually every day since. These games are all simple and fun, and remind me of everything I loved about video games when I was 6 years old playing Super Mario Bros. for the first time on my brand new NES.

But it’s not just the nostalgia that’s got me hooked, it’s the fact that these games are simple, fun, creative, and therefore addictive. The Nintendo DS has two screens, one of which is a touch screen with a stylus. Gameplay happens on both screens simultaneously. Depending on the game you might have to interact with the touch screen in addition to the now-standard D-Pad. What’s surprising and innovative and new is just how the games take advantage of the new kind of input. The mini-games in Mario are a perfect example: they’re varied and interesting and addictive and, most importantly of all, FUN.

All this makes me extremely excited for Nintendo’s upcoming home console, the Wii. Nintendo has decided that it’s not going to compete directly with Microsoft’s XBox 360 or Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 3 by providing what is essentially a supercomputer in a pretty box. Instead Nintendo is focusing on new, innovative gameplay. In the same way a touch screen re-invented gaming for the Nintendo DS, the Wii introduces a gyroscopic remote that you can control by moving. In driving games, you steer by turning the entire remote. In a tennis game, you swing the racket by swinging the remote. The possibilities and potential for a whole new world of gameplay are too great to pass up. In short, I’m excited. And on top of all that, the Wii will feature emulation for all the old Nintendo systems dating back to the original NES and even the Sega Genesis – both of which I’ve long since regretfully parted with.

Nintendo’s target demographic isn’t the hardcore gamer who will shell out ridiculous amounts of cash to have the best graphics, sound and multimedia ever, it’s the casual gamer who likes the occasional fun gaming experience – the very people that used to love video games when they kids but have since lost their way in the sea of hardcore gamer culture.

In other words, Nintendo is seeking me, and I intend to welcome them back into my life with open arms and a grin from ear to ear.

Granted I wouldn’t normally go to the beach, or the pool, or any other place that where I would be expected to roam without a shirt on. Below is an actual picture of me with my shirt off. Clearly, you can see why I would be timid.

The fact that there were literally hundreds of gorgeous girls in bikinis on the beach only made me more self-conscious.

Anyways, I figured it’s been far too long that I’ve cowered behind the fear of my Wookie-like appearance and braved the open seas … err, lake. We went up to Oka National Park for a day of beaching. I would’ve been difficult to recognize, though proudly sporting my Geek colours with a white (!) t-shirt that said CODE HERO in large letters on the back. I also had a red (!!) baseball cap promoting the Concordia Stingers which I got as a door prize registering for my first year of university.

I ventured into the water pretty quickly, and eventually we got into a competitive game of free-for-all frisbee, or something, in the water, and it was fun.

I also got to reading some of my book (Microserfs by Douglas Copeland, which I’m re-reading, which is a telltale Nerd book.) I didn’t play volleyball, because when my friends went to play volleyball they were joined by a couple of people that I didn’t know. I’m really shy with strangers – ever since I was a kid when I’d adamantly and absolutely refuse to use a swing if there was someone I didn’t know on the swing next to it. So yeah, I didn’t play volleyball, I read my book. I still had a lot of fun at the beach. :D

After the beach we went for a barbecue … at _my_ house. Nobody ever comes to my house. It was a very strange day. Needless to say we ran out of barbecueing gas and so we had to make our burgers and hot dogs (with beer) on the frying pan. Rather, Harley did all the cooking, because I can’t.

The girls (Roxanne aka Lime, Linda aka Kiwi and Leilani aka IronArms) made a dessert consisting of 20% sponge cake, 30% fruit, and 50% Cool Whip. It was … interesting.

Then we started a game of Taboo that lasted until 2am. Taboo is a game in which you are given a word, and a list of words that you are not allowed to say (they are taboo). You need to give clues to have your teammate guess the word without using any of the illegal words.

It’s interesting how personal references and shared experiences factor into how you get people to think of words. For example, Leilani said “I went through one of these yesterday” so I knew the answer was “stop sign”. Or “At dinner we thought Kiwi said that Orlando Bloom was doing…” and I said “Elizabeth Taylor”. You see? Random. But you had to be there. :P

I hadn’t played Taboo since I was a kid. Games take on a whole new level (of perversion, most likely) when you’re older. I’d definitely be up for another uncharacterstic day of fun.

skrud@Akane ~$ date +'%H:%M:%S %d-%m-%y'
01:02:03 04-05-06

I just think that’s awesome.