|
|
In what could take the title of Most Stunningly Bad Product Naming Decision away from Pocari Sweat or Calpis (never name a beverage after something that sounds like a bodily secretion in ANY language), Nintendo announced the official name of their upcoming next-generation video game console yesterday.
Let me point out, before we continue, that the code name for the project, the Nintendo “Revolution”, was a perfectly suitable one and very much in line with Nintendo’s philosophy of continual innovation and development of new video game experiences. There’s no reason they couldn’t have just gone with that.
So, now that that’s out of the way, dig this: It will be called the “Wii.” At first glance, I thought this was pronounced “why” as in “Why in the blue hell would I want to buy this?” I was wrong. It’s pronounced “we.” Or “wee.” Yeah, that’s MUCH better.
In searching Yahoo to find the news item I linked above, it asked me “Did you mean “nintendo wifi?” Google interprets it correctly, but still, this is not what you want your product name to do in a search engine.
“Hey, Billy, do you wanna come over this weekend? I just got some more ChinPokeMon!” “Nope, I’m gonna stay home and play with my Wii.”
“Mommy! Let’s go to Best Buy! I wanna Wii!”
“Put this disc in your Wii, let’s see what happens.”
On the upside: it’s marketing decisions like this that make my decision to get on the Xbox 360 bandwagon look that much wiser. I wouldn’t have bought a Revolution anyhow, but NOBODY is gonna buy a friggin’ Wii. If the Sony folks would just announce when the Asstastic Buttsnoggler is gonna hit stores the cycle will be complete.
Some of the very poorest “journalism” found online today is in the video game arena, filled for the most part with way-too-hip twentysomethings who turn their nose up at Pong and Combat because the graphics aren’t up to snuff. Every so often you will see one of them crap out an “OMG MOST IMPORTANT GAMES OF ALL TIME!!!!111!!ELEVEN” list that is just a waste of perfectly good drive space because if it didn’t happen on a console made before the first Nintendo Entertainment System, it didn’t exist. Nolan Bushnell? Who’s that? Didn’t he run a pizza chain once?
Which brings us to today’s “You Just Suck” Award (as always, brought to you by our good friends at Oreck Vacuums), which goes to one Danny Cowan, for the following passage in this article “celebrating” the fifteenth anniversary of the Philips CDi video game console (emphasis mine):
The story may be an ugly one, but you’ll find yourself with a new appreciation of modern consoles after hearing of the blunders Philips made with its first — and last — voyage into the gaming industry.
Ralph Baer would like to have a word with you.
Okay, here’s another one for the geeks in the house.
(“All the ladies in the place say HOOOOO!” “Hooooooooo!” “All the geeks in the place recite pi to 127 places!” “3.141592653….”)
First, a little background: I have this spiffy universal remote that I picked up a while back. It does everything, and because I’m a geek, I made it do a little more; I hacked a JP1 connector into it and soldered a TEENY TINY EEPROM chip to the circuit board so I can program it through my computer. (To this day I don’t know how I pulled off the solder job.)
Well, last week, I took the plunge and bought myself an early birthday present (May 4th, kids, mark your calendars), an Xbox 360. And it occurred to me, as I saw the $30 remote they wanted to sell me so I could have full DVD remote functionality instead of controlling it with the wireless gamepad, that perhaps someone has posted the JP1 codes and I can just program my spiffy hax0red remote to do it and save a few bucks.
So I do some Googling and subsequent checking of the relevant forums, and lo and behold, the 360 Remote Master codes are indeed out there. So I download the file, build the upgrade, and upload it into the remote.
And it works fine…until I try to open the DVD tray, at which point it does nothing until I close the tray manually or use the gamepad to close the tray using the Xbox dashboard. And I’m stymied. I’m absolutely convinced that I’ve done something wrong putting together the remote upgrade, and I post in a panic to the aforementioned relevant forums.
Tonight, I’m playing with it some more (I found a new upgrade with some more functionality, so I figure maybe it has a different open/close tray code), and having the same problem. And folks have since replied to my panicked posts, swearing up and down, to a man, that it’s worked for every one of them and that I’m doing it just right. Well, apparently NOT, since the damn tray won’t close, right?
Oh. Wait.
The vantage point I’m doing these experiments from is above the unit and to the right, as it is located in the storage cubes that flank my television, and I’m sitting at my computer desk.
Go back and look at the picture of the unit again. See that little dark oval on the lower left? That’s the infrared sensor for the remote. The DVD drive tray is the long chrome slot above that.
Guess what gets completely obstructed from an angle of above and to the right when the DVD tray is open?
In a bout of semi-random Web surfing, I came across this thread about DDR (Dance Dance Revolution), which if you’ve been under a rock for the last seven years or so is a video game where you are challenged to step on pads in time to music. It requires fast feet and a damned lot of memory and dexterity, and good DDR players are truly a sight to see.
Anyhow, this is one of your standard bitch threads about what annoys you when playing the game. And a lot of it is typical elitism (“OMG! I can’t stand it when someone plays Song X on EASY! Like, they’re wasting time I could be using to get an AAA rating on Song X+42!!!!111!!! LOL!!”), but some of them were generic arcade complaints that surprised the hell out of me, because it was stuff that simply WOULD NOT HAPPEN when I was an arcade rat in my teens. To wit:
- Stealing tokens: A common bit of video game etiquette is to (ideally unobtrusively) place a quarter/token/whatever up on the lip of the marquee of the machine to indicate that you would like to play the next game. If several people are waiting their turn, you place your token in the line, and when your token is at the front of the line, you get to go. Apparently there are idiots now who think they can get away with attempting to pocket someone else’s token. Unbelievable.
- Messing with the controls: There were more than a few complaints of people standing around and then stepping on the pads while you are playing to intentionally screw up your game. I would never DREAM of pushing a button on a machine someone else was playing. Ever.
- Generally getting underfoot: There is a practice known as “shadowing”, which is when someone jumps up on the other unused pad (a DDR machine has two pads side by side, one for each player) while someone who is playing solo, and doing the steps for the song alongside. I would find this TERRIBLY distracting. There were also several complaints about parents with their rugrats letting said rugrats stumble around the feet of the active player instead of keeping them the hell out of the way, and then yelling at the player when the kid inevitably gets themselves hurt.
There were quite a few other complaints, some reasonable, some asinine, but these were the ones that jumped out at me. And all I can say is: What. The. HELL. When I play arcade games, anyone who gets so close to the screen that I can see their nostrils better than what I’m playing quickly receives repeated elbows to the ribs until they get the picture. Working the controls causes arms to flail, you know. Terribly sorry there. And, yeah, we had quarter-moochers, but anyone who tried to outright STEAL quarters in the coin line would be dealt with quickly, harshly, and often physically. And DO NOT TOUCH my control panel. You shouldn’t even be that close to me anyhow, but I’m paying for this game, and if I come up a smart bomb short because you thought you were being cute, I know who I’m taking out my frustration on.
Bottom line, if anyone pulled crap like this back in the day, they would be on the receiving end of a Grade-A asskicking. It didn’t happen. These were the biggest faux pas you could make in the scene. In 25 years of gaming, someone has touched my controls uninvited ONCE (costing me a man in a game of Tapper, by the way), and the only reason that guy didn’t get thrashed is because he was known for being mentally unstable anyhow, and I frankly didn’t wanna be entwined with him anymore than I already was by virtue of being regulars at the same arcade.
So the following question occurred to me: Have people just gotten ruder over the last ten-fifteen years or so? It’s not like the stuff above is some super-secret behavior that only arcaders know, it’s COMMON SENSE. Don’t steal. Don’t get in someone’s way if you can help it. Don’t screw someone else up if they’re doing something. Do you reach over and punch buttons on the checker’s cash register at the grocery store?
I’ve said many times: People Are (Freakin’) Stupid. Are they really THIS stupid? Even OUTSIDE of the red states?
Hey, sorry I haven’t written anything in a while. Let’s just say it’s been an…interesting month. As in the old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”
Fortunately, every so often items come along that are too good to pass up. The Four Of You know (often because you’re the ones playing them with me) that I’m a big fan of board games. And a lot of the games I play are European in origin, which means that on occasion the language used in the game’s directions, cards, and such is not English. Sometimes the language barrier requires a little more effort to play a game, and sometimes, the game is abstract enough that it doesn’t make a difference. The latter is the case with Reiner Knizia’s Einfach Genial, which was published in Europe last year. The English translation is “Simply Ingenious”, but the name given to it in the English-speaking parts of Europe is “Mensa Connections”. It is an excellent game, and was one of the five finalists for the 2004 Spiel des Jahres, one of the higher honors that can be bestowed upon a board game.
The Four Of You have probably heard of Mensa, the society open to people who can score in the top 2% in a standardized intelligence test. I have some opinions about this group, and to a wider extent about intelligence tests as a whole, but they aren’t really germane to this piece, so we’ll save them for another time. (Suffice it to say I’m not a member. By choice.)
At any rate, each year a bunch of them get together and play a boatload of games and decide which of them are fit to carry their “Mensa Select” seal, which means they think that those chosen are good games for smart people to play or something. (Where I come from, Select is the rating given to beef that isn’t good enough to be Choice or Prime.)
(I further feel compelled to point out that if you were to take the top 10 games for a given time period as voted on by the Mensa folks, and the top 10 games for that same period voted on by the knowledgable gaming community at large, the lists would differ significantly. Infer what you will from that.)
Anyhow, I direct you to a letter to the editor of the Seattle Weekly, for the week of December 8-14, 2004:
An interesting concept [Gift Guide 2: Mind, Body, Spirit, “Play, Einstein!” Dec. 1]. Unfortunately, Roger Downey missed a major opportunity. Had he gone to the site of American Mensa (www.us.mensa.org) instead of British Mensa, he would have found information about Mind Games and some 75 games Mensans have tested and designated as Mensa Select over the past 16 years. The list includes such games as Apples to Apples, Scategories, the Poll Game (made in Seattle), and many, many more.
The board game he mentions, “Mensa Connections,” cannot be sold in the United States under our licensing agreement. We tested it last year at our games competition and found it wanting. We did not want the Mensa name on the game in this country.
Jim Blackmore
National Marketing Director,
American Mensa, Ltd.
Thank God for the people of Mensa, for preventing me the unspeakable horror of playing substandard mind-rotting games! Oh, and Jim, if you happened across this in a vanity search, get off your damn high horse: The game can absolutely be sold in the States, and in fact has been available in German form for a year. Ya ever hear of this new concept called “importing”? (The fact that you misspelled “Scattergories” is another joke unto itself, but, again, I digress.)
So here’s the punchline: Apparently this year’s Mensa MindGames event came to a close today, and the list of the recipients of the oh-so-coveted Mensa Select rating made its way onto one of the gaming newsgroups I read.
One of the lucky winners? A new release entitled “Ingenious”. Which just happens to be the domestic version….of Einfach Genial.
So I dunno if I’ve really mentioned it in the blog itself, but I’m a classic arcade game nut. MAME and a full set of ROMs occupy a prominent place on my game drive.
Well, being able to play all of these old games arcade-perfect is one thing, but it loses something when you have to do it with a keyboard, mouse, or a gamepad. Nothing feels like a real arcade joystick and buttons, and few computers are equipped with a spinner to play Tempest with.
As a result, a niche hobby-within-the-hobby revolves around building control panels (and often, entire cabinets) to complete the overall effect. John St. Clair runs the Build Your Own Arcade Controls website, which should absolutely be your first stop if you find any of this the least bit interesting. He’s also taken what he’s learned and written a book, Project Arcade, which includes step-by-step instructions and plans and other information about how to do it. Go buy six copies.
Anyhow, here’s what I did. Eventually, it will be part of a full cabinet when I have more room:
…and it is AWESOME. I can play Tempest with a spinner, and Marble Madness with a trackball. Games take on a new dimension. Not only that, but I have a flatscreen monitor that rotates now, so I can play games that usually run in portrait orientation the way they were intended to be displayed. It wasn’t cheap, but as far as I’m concerned, it was absolutely money well spent.
Been watching a lot of Bravo lately, mainly because they show repeats of The West Wing, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite dramas on television, right up there with Boston Public on Fox. So as a result, even though I do the best I can with my Tivo, sometimes you see ads for other Bravo programming, and start to watch those shows as well. (Yeah, I watch Queer Eye. You wanna fight now?)
Anyhow, one of the nice things about this effect is that I’ve been able to catch Celebrity Poker Showdown from the very first match. I love poker, I watch it often on ESPN, and I think Rounders is a truly underrated movie.
One of the fallacies about poker is that it is a game of luck. Huh-uh. Poker, especially Texas Hold-Em (the way the Big Boys play it), is as much pure skill and pure acting as it is luck. And I believe you can learn a lot from watching and playing poker. So with that, I present:
What I Have Learned From Watching Celebrity Poker Showdown:
1) Life isn’t fair: I knew this going in, of course, but watching Willie Garson win hand after hand on the turn and the river really drove it home. EVERY time he needed to fill an inside straight, he did it. EVERY time he needed that third Jack to beat someone elses two pairs, he did it. People were going all-in on completely reasonable hands, and he would out-draw them EVERY SINGLE TIME.
2) Allison Janney can sit at my poker table anytime, as she is intelligent, delightful to look at, and a wholly mediocre poker player: I knew most of this going in, too. Knowing that she’s a bad poker player and that I could prolly take her for a few bucks is just icing on the cake.
3) A broken watch is still right twice a day: How Nicole Sullivan went from the short stack to the overall winner of her round still baffles me, as her cards were never really that good and she didn’t bluff all that well. But it happened.
4) Coolio is a pussy: I’ve long believed that the decline of Western Civilization started with seven words: “I’ll take Coolio to block, please, Tom.” Coolio should hunt down his booking agent and beat him with a hammer. I mean, how can you lose street cred FASTER than sitting in a flashing square for a week? Answer: by proving that you can’t play poker either. Wow. With five players at the table, you do NOT represent like you have something when you’re holding 4-6 unsuited, because there is a good chance that someone else either a) DOES have something, or b) is willing to pay to see if YOU do. At the rate he’s going, he could come across Young MC in a dark alley, and HE’D be the one to turn and flee screaming.
I probably learn a lot from Queer Eye, too, but if I were to analyze it I’d need therapy, and that’s good for nobody, so we’ll leave that be for now.
|
