Triumph of the Wii: How Fun Won Out in the Console Wars
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Nintendo's magic machine does an end run around high-def graphics, giving gamers what they really want: a good time.
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Tycho:  In case you are wondering, cats apparently need regular maintenance, like cars.  And, like an oil change, this juicing process can be done (I'm told) at home, preferably with the curtains drawn and a couple inches of sawdust laid down.  That's right: you can wring out your own cat's asshole.  This is the kind of helpful information you can expect when you visit Penny Arcade.  Don't everybody run home at once.    I've been playing a lot of Prism on the DS, even though the Zelda cartridge seems to squeal as I remove it.  I understand there's some kind of Ghost Ship?  I forget all of my cares, and also the cares of Princess Zelda, once those beams begin to refract.    They've ginned up some ridonculous crap about light eating space monsters to support their gameplay, which is very solid, and requires no extraterrestrial photophiles.  It's a puzzle game.  When I put pieces of a puzzle together, I never think about how alone each piece must feel, longing only to congregate with similarly knobbed partial images.  So, discard that.  Discard also the truly nasty presentation, no doubt a result of hard time done in already the Mobile and PC Casual markets.  Part these imperfections like tall savannah grass, and gaze into the game's rich core:  the creation of sometimes very complex circuits.     Inside each puzzle grid, the player is given some combination of Light Emitting Entities, Reflective Mirrors, Splitters, or Prisms.  You must jigger the aforementioned until light of the correct colors is distributed to targets around the edge of the field.  That's it, and the fun comes from how complicated this process can become.  There are quite a few cooperative puzzles as well - where each player has access to half the grid, and they must work together to route everything.  If you try this mode - and I request that you do so, as you only need one (1) cartridge and a willing accomplice - I recommend that you each turn your DS sideways, so that the UI is along the bottom.  That will make it so that "left" and "right" and "up" and "down" all mean the same thing to each of you.  Trust me, you want this.  The game is hard enough without the horror of fully relative terms.    Prism actually taught me something fairly significant about why I play games, and I think it's because the gameplay is so clean and the presentation so spartan that I could pick up on it.  I like games that generate communication.  This is why team-based shooters, roleplaying games, and tactical games are my delight - every one of these entails a suite of custom language to describe it, they require constant dialogue, and, most importantly, all other things being equal these games can be won by the efficient use of language.  Working out puzzles together in Prism has a strong logic component, but in large part the challenge was communicating ethereal notions succinctly.    I suppose this is also why I torment you here, thrice weekly: even when playing a game by myself, I am harvesting the experience so that it may be reconstituted here.  So, thank you for reading.  You dignify my leisure hours.          The Playstation 3 in the office has been more than acceptable for playing the sometimes short, often bad games that have arrived on it - but this holiday, with the titles to prove out the claim, I had to "get mine" in the bawdy parlance of the young.  What tipped my hand wasn't the four hundred dollar system on offer, rather, it was the three hundred and seventy nine dollar model.  These are probably mostly a mail order proposition, but any of those rare twenty gig models the platform launched with got bumped down by the new price.  It's inexpensive by PS3 standards, but it's positively cheap for a Blu-Ray device.  Now fully franchised, flexing all the rich benefits of Sony citizenship, you may expect me to be even more brutal in my critique.
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Nintendo Wii sales worldwide have surpassed lifetime Microsoft Xbox 360 sales in less than a year.
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Tycho:  Having already purchased two fifths of The Orange Box over the last few years, the level of value I have derived from it is "fantastic" but not "supernatural."  For Gabriel, who never finished the second Half-Life and never purchased the first episode, the aforementioned Box represents an intimidating and possibly even brutal level of content for one's holiday dollar.  It's hard enough trying to keep up with all the games that are coming out, but when you start putting more than one game on the disc the difficulty is compounded.   We're lucky, then, than the best thing on there can be completed in only a couple hours.     I've tried to make my rounds through the disc, but I kept coming back to Portal until I'd completed it.  I expect every part of this strange collection to be full of virtue, in the way that Valve's anomalous position in the games industry allows: self-funded development in their sky-high Bellevue commune until each product sings.  But Portal is strange, even for them.  Risky on every axis, we may now say that the "first person puzzle comedy" has now been proven out as a genre.  The gameplay is strong, but Portal's unique combination of hilarity and menace elevates it, resulting in a few perfect, indelible hours of gameplay.          My TeamFortress 2 experience so far on the console has been fairly uneven.  Coming from the PC beta, where I sometimes battled with stability concerns but the games played smooth, I'm now grappling with the reverse.  I love the play experience, as I've already expressed, and I'm rarely of the opinion that having more players automatically improves a game - so the differential between the PC and 360 platforms isn't as important to me as it might be to others.  No, the problem with TF2 on the 360 (and likely the PS3, as well) is that peer to peer hosting just ain't cutting it.  There are games that seem to manage it better, but with Vista PCs authenticating into the service now peer to peer games should be an option.  This needs fixed overnight.     I'll try to complete the second Episode over the weekend, interleaved with finishing the writing on my own game, which has become more difficult since completing Portal.  I'm starting to think that Precipice needs a greater concentration of synthesized ladies.      I would be abdicating my duty if I neglected to mention the EA thing, which is really the EA/BioWare/Pandemic thing.  I was under the impression that BioWare and Pandemic had merged precisely to give themselves leverage over monolithic publishers like Electronic Arts, but who knows.  The biggest fallout in the short term is that, beyond the first Mass Effect, a multiplatform release is almost certain.  Of course, I wholly endorse that kind of thing, but I imagine that Microsoft might hold a different opinion.  After spending years promoting the series, enduring delays, and now having spent months beating the shit out of it in test, it's fair to say that MS was investing in a larger trilogy - one that gamers would associate exclusively with their brand.
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Tycho: This thing is pretty huge. I don't mean in terms of kilobytes - I mean it's packed tight with powerful features. Upscaling of content has been in demand, and it's been delivered. Like the 360 Elite, you need to be hooked up via a managed connection (i.e., HDMI) to upscale a DVD. Past that, it will knock up your old PS/PS2 games to 1080p, but the results we've gotten here haven't been supernatural - still appreciated, though.The real flavor is elsewhere: specifically, the ability to stream video, pictures, and music from "a DLNA compliant device," which you'll find just about every computer already is. That's only half of it. The Remote Play option of the PSP (the one that lets you enjoy certain types of content stored on your PS3 via your PSP) is deeply enriched by this capacity. You can do this much already. But with the next update for the Playstation Portable - 3.50, to be released before the end of the month - you'll be able to access your PS3 remotely via any wireless connection. I must say, starting a download at home while I'm still at the office sounds pretty Goddamn good. Also, while we are loving the PSP, am I the only person enthralled by the idea of R-Type Tactics? (CW)TB
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LOS ANGELES (Reuters Life!) - Kris Smith called it "the equivalent of a man Tupperware party." In early December, he and a few pals gathered in a basement in suburban Chicago to try out their friend's brand new Nintendo Wii video game console.
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SEATTLE - In a slight crouch, Reggie Fils-Aime snapped off a left jab followed by a right hook. Demonstrating how the hand controls of Nintendo&#39;s hot-selling Wii video game console work in a boxing game, Fils-Aime, executive vice president of sales and marketing, let out a laugh. He could well afford it. For now, Fils-Aime has put real-life business rivals at Microsoft and Sony at the receiving end of a pummeling.
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roundup Playtime isn't always fun. As researchers note the effect of violent games on the brain, some console buyers risk life and limb.
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Gabe: Joystiq had some interesting articles up over the weekend about introducing your family to the Wii. I actually had a similar experience. We had a house full of friends and family for Thanksgiving and the Wii was really the star of the show. Kara and I both had parents over and we actually had a hard time getting them off of Wii sports. I can"t even count how many rounds of bowling I must have played. It was amazing to watch how easily they picked it up and how much fun they had. What was great was watching Kara"s Dad who loves to bowl but can"t anymore because of his knees. I wouldn"t be surprised if he goes home this week and tries to pick one up.
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Fitness experts from the International Sports Sciences Association say that "exertainment" such as Wii Sports combines fun and fitness in a way that could provide a lifetime of benefits. In Game|Life.
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Hobby and student game makers are getting a chance to make games for the Wii console.
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After flocking to design games for the Nintendo DS, developers are eager to exploit the device's wireless capabilities. First up are local network multiplayer games; in the pipeline is wireless gameplay over the net. By Daniel Terdiman.
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Tycho:   The foe revealed, Armadeaddon is now almost complete.  Monday will see the promised epilogue, so at this point you have very nearly survived the ordeal.  We have endeavored these past weeks to reward the true "enthusiast," that man or woman who, brow heavy, has faced such cruel abuse at our hand for the last seven years.  It is apparently our policy to honor such dedication one every decade.    Since it was announced a couple days ago, the revelation that MS would be actively courting the hardcore boardgame player is something I've thought about almost constantly.  It may be that you weren't aware there was such a thing as a hardcore player of boardgames if your last experience with the context was playing Sorry! with your sister when you were eight.  Things have progressed.   There's a million experiences in this space I could use to lure you in, but one company in particular - Days of Wonder has already decided to make electronic variants of their tabletop crack, so they occupy a twilight space between the worlds.  I hope they see an opportunity to take their (already completed!) games over to the 360, or that Microsoft offers them a locked case containing an unspecified amount of untraceable U.S. Currency, because I'd love to see this prescient move by MS turn into a new era.   Days of Wonder makes a game called Shadows Over Camelot that could quickly become a dangerous obsession, obscuring biological realities with a single-minded focus on grails.  Well, grail I guess.  There's just the one.    But it's a completely cooperative boardgame, so every player is working toward the same goals - fighting back invasions, questing, all of it.  Except there might be a traitor in the group, determined by a hidden draw, who tries to derail the effort.  He's not always there, but the potentiality of that nefarious force can create unbelievable social tension.    The gaming table's fixed coordinate in space is its asset and its obstacle - managing space and time is actually the primary challenge of any gaming group, as opposed to banishing necromancers, though that also ranks up there.  Boardgames are so rich in design that, when one of these gets dropped in front of them on Live, I think many gamers will be shocked at their sophistication.    My thumbs hurt.  (CW)TB out.
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Since their debuts more than a week ago, two game systems earn good grades from consumers, but the underdog Nintendo Wii is the early favorite over the pricier, sexier Sony PlayStation3. About 49% of online discussions were favorable to the Wii, compared with 27% for the PS3.
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Console's bits in their mitts Market watcher Semiconductor Insights has taken Nintendo's Wii to bits - a little more carefully, we presume, than the sledgehammer-wielding Canadians - to expose the next-generation console's internal workings. Handily, it filmed the process.â¦
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Nintendo's Wii is a disruptive technology. Can Sony adapt?
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LOS ANGELES (Reuters Life!) - Kris Smith called it "the  equivalent of a man Tupperware party." In early December, he  and a few pals gathered in a basement in suburban Chicago to  try out their friend's brand new Nintendo Wii video game  console.