This past Sunday some friends and I went down to the Imax theater and saw the Imax The Dark Knight. After hearing from some other folks that “you have to see it in Imax”, I did, and I have to say: not all that impressed by Imax. Sure, the screen is bigger, and I liked that in some scenes, but I was really annoyed by the fact that the movie didn’t use the whole screen the whole time, and every time it shifted one way or the other, it annoyed me. I don’t think I’ll be spending my money on any more Imax shows, as I don’t feel the premium price is worth the return.

After seeing The Dark Knight, those friends and some others met up at Jon’s house for some dinner and some Wii. Gen made us some salmon for dinner, and some blackberry pie for dessert. Yummy nom noms. Steve brought a cake, and I brought cookies, and Jon already had cookies and ice cream, so we also had lots of sweet snacks. Luckily we also had a veggie plate, or the sugar may have made our heads explode.

So, we hooked up my Wii, and proceeded to spend many hours Wiiing together. Between myself and Kevin we had four Wiimotes, so we could get a lot of four player action going. I only had one Wii wheel, though (Kevin had two), so when playing Mario Kart one person had to use the Wiimote as a handlebar instead of a wheel. I am definitely not a great kart driver, but it was a lot of fun, definitely more fun playing with others than playing alone. Later, after about half the group left, we also played some four-player tennis in Wii Sports, and that was also much more fun than I’d have expected. I apparently exerted myself a little too much doing that, though, and have some soreness in my arm.

I’ll say that the commercials are pretty much right, and the Wii makes for a fun party console.

A couple weeks ago I picked up a Netflix Player by Roku, which I’ll just call my Roku box or Roku player. What the Roku box does is connect to Netflix to stream movies over the Internet to your TV. It only costs a hundred bucks, and setting it up was incredibly simple. I even connected it to my TV using an HDMI cable to make it even easier, although it doesn’t currently support HD content (perhaps they’ll add that in the future). Connected to my HD TV, it’ll play widescreen movies formatted correctly for the screen, which is an added nicety.

At this time, I’ve only watched one movie using the Roku box, but it worked very well. The quality was better than I expected, looking to me much like the quality I see from many DVDs. I even managed to watch the entire movie without any hitches or pauses, and only saw one tiny artifact. Impressive. I did watch a comedy, not an action movie, so we’ll still have to see how something with a lot of action plays.

The selection at Netflix for streaming isn’t the best, but I still managed to find plenty that I’d be willing to watch at some point. Since I already have an unlimted rental Netflix account, I get unlimited streaming to the Roku box included–no extra charge.

Because the box streams live–and it does not have a hard drive to cache content–you don’t scan forward or backward in the live, full-screen picture. Instead, you see a row of images, like screen shots (or kind of like cover-flow for iTunes), that you can scan through to see where you’re going in the movie. It actually works pretty well, I think. If you scan faster then the first speed setting, you only see the screen shot in the larger middle window, instead of having the other little windows sitting there to show you what’s coming up or passsing behind. I’m probably not explaining it too well, but I think it works well, and again, is a much better solution than I would have expected for a streaming device.

On the whole, I’m really impressed with the Roku player, and for the price, I think it’s a great bargain if you already have an unlimited Netflix account (and you have broadband Internet access). Best of all, you can check out the movies available (and add them to your Instant Queue) and see if you might find the box worthwhile before you spend a dime. If I remember to watch a more action-oriented movie in the near future, I’ll post an update on how that goes.