Whose Faulty Vision

Wii’re Number One!

Okay, since this seems to be Video Game Geek week here at Whose Faulty Vision, one more post.

When a company comes out with a new product, especially one aimed (at least partially) at kids, they should really get a bunch of third-grade boys in a room, tell them the name of the product, and see if the kids come up with a dirty joke based on the name inside of 10 seconds. It would save a lot of embarassment.

I say this because Nintendo just announced the official name of the console they’ve been calling the Revolution: the Nintendo Wii.

I guess it’s their way of signaling to Sony and Microsoft that they want to be “number one” in the market.

I Want My PSP

Following up on my lengthy post about Nintendo, I’ve done a bunch of research and settled on a Sony PSP as the replacement for my trusty Gameboy. The innovative side of Nintendo is coming out with some interesting games for the DS, but not many, and overall, the PSP has a more appealing game library.

Macaroni and what?

I got a craving today for some macaroni and cheese, so I was down at the supermarket buying some macaroni and a block of cheddar and the rest of the ingredients I needed, and right behind me in line, a woman was buying two or three boxes of boxed mac & cheese. And not even Kraft, but the ultra-cheap store brand. I just thought that was amusing.

77 Feeds

My gosh, I’m following 77 feeds in my Google Reader. Now, granted, a lot of those are personal blogs that only update once every few days, so they’re not much to read. And most of the rest are news sources that I need to keep up-to-date on for work purposes. Still, 77 feeds…there’s no way I would have been able to follow that many different news sources before I started using RSS. Amazing how technology changes things.

Keypad Order

Why do telephone keypads and calculators have their rows of numbers in reverse order from each other?

The Two Faces of Nintendo

So with the recent price drop on the Sony PSP (and the earlier one on the Nintendo DS), I’ve been thinking that it may be time to replace my trusty Gameboy Advance with one of the new machines. Reading about the games available for the DS, and thinking back to the games Nintendo released for the Gameboy Advance, it feels almost like there are two companies calling themselves “Nintendo” and releasing games:

One of the Nintendo companies is the least innovative company on the market. The bulk of their releases are re-releases of games from the NES and Super Nintendo eras. Even when they do release a new game, it still looks identical to a game released for an earlier system, even using the same characters, just with a different set of levels. This Nintendo released a huge number of games for the GBA, and is pumping them out for the DS as well–one of the flagship games for the DS launch was a reworking of Super Mario 64, originally for the Nintendo 64. This Nintendo feels like a company mining the past for a few extra dollars, nothing more.

The other company calling itself Nintendo, though, is one of the most innovative game companies on the planet. It’s creating entirely new sub-genres of games, setting leads for other game companies to follow. This is the Nintendo that released Wario Ware, and Super Smash Brothers, and Pokemon (since there were so many knockoffs, it’s easy to lose sight of how groundbreaking the original Pokemon game was when it was released). This is the Nintendo that came up with the DS hardware, and the forthcoming Revolution.

It’s a funny dichotomy in one company. My best guess would be that the reliable income from the first category lets them do the experiments in the second category. It seems to me, though, that Nintendo desperately wants a brand image as an innovator, and that the flood of re-releases is harming that image–sometimes it seems like all the GBA has available is old NES and SNES games.

And here’s another funny thing: neither Nintendo is capable of creating new characters anymore. Setting aside Pokemon, which was a phenomenon driven as much by TV and trading cards as by the video game, the last character Nintendo created who was capable of carrying a franchise was Wario, and he first appeared in the early 90s sometime–and even he is just an evil version of Mario. Since then it’s just been Mario, Zelda and Metroid over and over again. They’ve been crammed into puzzle games and pinball games and so on. For a company that claims to be the innovation leader, you’d think they could come up with some new characters every once in a while. It can still be done–I point to Sony’s “God of War” as a new series that I expect to have legs.

If I were in charge of Nintendo’s marketing, and I really wanted to foster Nintendo’s image as an innovator, I would try to find ways to separate out the two Nintendoes I described above, to try to keep the first from tainting the second. Maybe put all of the old re-releases and re-hashes under a “Nintendo Classic” brand, and limit their number so that they don’t overwhelm the shelves. And encourage my team, while they were coming up with innovative new game types, to come up with some new characters.

Birthday

I’m 28 today. Christmas is taking me to an excellent steak place in town to celebrate. Because, really, nothing says “I love you” like a big chunk of deceased cow. Mmmmm…deceased cow…