Diego Safari Rescue

Having bought a Nintendo Wii a few months ago, it was inevitable that sooner or later I would be buying games for my 4 year old daughter. I have no idea why it was this Diego game that my wife chose, but the fact that the Diego and Dora TV series is very popular with our young offspring, was probably a significant factor. The price was about £20 would have put me off, as I like to buy games after their initial popularity was waned somewhat and so tend to be a bit cheaper.

That said, we have certainly had our moneys worth from the purchase. We have both spent some time ‘playing’ the game with our daughter and she has spent time on her own, simply enjoying playing the game. Such is the simplicity of the game that a 4 year old can very quickly get the hang of it. Yet it is not so monotonous that she is bored of it. She will simply loves playing it and will repeat sections of the game just for the shear pleasure of playing the game.

Its a sad indictment of my ‘grown up’ attitude to games that I detest replaying games that I own and once completed, or more accurately, one they get too hard, they tend to be discarded to the dusty back shelf while another new and exiting game takes my fancy.

Diego will be familiar with many parents of young children and is a safe programme for all kids to watch and includes some educational aspects as well. Safari Rescue builds on that and has very simple game play and gradually eases in more complicated moves as the game progresses. There are also sections that make use of the WiiRemotes motion sensors, such as pumping up a balloon or doing a swimming action. Even a four year old can work out that you can still do these actions from the comfort of the sofa, but at least the game play is not restricted to pushing buttons.

Movement of Diego on the screen is done by tilting the WiiRemote, the only button pushing required is to do an action, such as jump. The menus are navigated in the same way. This is a good implementation, as it makes the whole experience much easier for a young child.

So pleased am I with this Diego game, that I am certain that I’ll be purchasing more Diego titles and will very likely purchase Dora ones as well.

Samsung R700

My wife has had her new Samsung R700 laptop for a couple of weeks now, so I thought now was a good time to give a detailed review of it. We have already had to deal with poor quality Dells before so Dell was out of the running, my preference would have been to have a Lenovo as I have had very good ones for my work, but for personal use they are just too costly for our home budget, which is a shame.

We chose the Samsung over many of it rivals because it was given a good review on CNET. We wanted a high power laptop and a decent keyboard was very high on our priorities. The R700 offers a full size keyboard and a separate numeric keypad, so barring a poor review, the Samsung was effectively top of our list of laptop choices.

This laptop is our second R700 because the first one suffered from a dead screen the first day we got it, see here. Having already refunded us for a failed Sony Viao, DABS continued to provide good customer support by shipping us a replacement Samsung. We did have to wait about three weeks for the replacement and communication was lacking a little. But at no point did Dabs fob us off or fail to deliver on a promise, which means they will continue to get my business and recommendations.

So, now that we have it, how is the Samsung to use? I’ll do the negatives first as it is by far the shortest list.

Negatives

When sitting on the sofa (as I am currently typing this) the balance of the laptop is wrong. There is far too much weight at the back of the laptop, meaning that the front edge lifts off your lap, leaving a gap of about half an inch or more. This makes a large typing effort (such as this blog post) less comfortable as it should be due to the wobble of the laptop as the typing pressure causes a see-saw affect. Lifting my knees up to counter this is only a temporary releif because its not long before the laptop starts to slide down my lap and I have to adjust the position every few sentences.

This is by far the biggest frustration but since we more often use the laptop sitting at a table its not something that effects us every time we use it.

The home/end/pgup/pgdn keys are part of the numpad and not separate as on a desktop keyboard, this means much use is made of the Num Lock key if you like to use the keypad for numeric entry.

Other issues with the laptop are minor niggles; the black gloss finish marks easily, there is no physical switch to turn the wireless on and off, something that has been very useful on laptops that have one.

Positives

The keyboard is great, the full size keys make it as easy to type on as a normal keyboard and the feed back is good.

The screen is bright and sharp, making everything clear and easy to read. Glare from the sun is only a problem in the brightest of sunshine, which means we can use it in the conservatory.

The R700 comes with a good array of connections, including 4 USB ports. However, we have not had need for any of them since the printer, scanner, external storage, iPod etc are all connected to my desktop upstairs.

There is also an HDMI port should we want to connect it to our HD TV (also a Samsung), though to be honest, I really don’t see that need arising, unless a digital camcorder makes its way into the house.

One thing that has caused frustration in the house before is wireless, we use a wireless TV sender so that we can watch TV in the bedroom upstairs without having to fork out the extra cost of Sky Multiroom. This has on occasion caused wireless laptops to fail to connect to the wireless box upstairs. The solution is simple, switch of the wireless sender, usually this results in someone coming back downstairs when we realise we’ve forgotten to switch it back on again. It is helpful that this does not seem to affect the Samsung, the wireless connectivity is excellent.

Summary

A solidly built and well specced laptop that I have no hesitation is recommending.