Hows about that for a headline!?

There I was, perusing the ‘net for the latest news on the industry when this little beauty caught my eye.

Th article basically goes on statements made by Nintendo poster-boy (note: tongue firmly in cheek) Reggie Fils-Aime in an interview with MTV.  To quote the man himself, “We’re not arrogant. We don’t view success as a right. We feel we need to earn success every day. And we’re going to do that by being true to the gamer.”

How do you be true to the gamer Reggie?  If ever there was a PR spin line for hearts and minds, that’s it right there!  Nintendo can’t afford to be arrogant, literally, because if they are history would repeat itself, but more importantly their position in the console wars would only worsen.  However I do believe that there is an ethic of work going round Ninty to try and win back some of it’s lost console manufacturing glory amongst the masses.

Oh and what was I writing about yesterday?  Yup he even mentions the calls of a lacklustre launch line up, but claims this is not so nor willit be an issue going forward.  His example of how to get round possible dry periods of first party software is plug the holes with VC releases.  That’s fine, but what percentage of Wii owners will want to play more retro titles than new experiences.  Initially quite a few I would guess, but if the novelty wears off to quick, the software problem that plagued the GameCube i.e. lack of it, may rear it’s ugly head, leading to disgruntled players and lack of support, again the fate that occured with the ‘Cube.

The only way we’ll truly know whether this is PR hot air or fact is this time next year.  The first 12 months of any console are always critical and often set the trends for the remaining life span.  Come on Nintendo, we’re rooting for you to do the business!

source and full article, courtesy of gamesindustry.biz

This my friends, is the ultimate in Geekdom.

Yes, I like Transformers. Yes, I have all the series’ on DVD. Yes, I also have the move on DVD too. And yes, I’m actually looking forward to the live action movie next year!

One of the greatest franchises ever have been around in various guises, but they were all a bit shit compared to the original. Some people may disagree, but I reckon the majority of you will agree with me. My favorite TF? Dudes, Grimlock! He rocked the big one! Larger than life! The Daddy! “Me Grimlock kick your ass!” LOL!

*cough*

Anyway, I came across www.lilformers.com today., Have a look. You’ll be all like “Oh, gotta get me one of those!” Yeah, I even printed out the little standees that Matt Moylan (the artist) made available too!

That’s all really! Yes, I’m a geek. You’ll just have to get over it.

Carry on!

To continue the Wii line we’ve started, I thought I’d take a bit of a look at the games we’ll be playing come 8th December. I say ‘we’ll’, when I actually mean ‘me’! I’ll get a slap for that later.

Us Brits are getting a choice of 24 games on shelf, with a further 31 Virtual Console games available immediately via the Wii Shop Channel. 50 games total, nice range of the retro and new alike. Numbers are one thing, but what about the games themselves.

Highlights that are on most peoples list include Zelda: Twilight Princess (the one game that I think people will struggle to get hold of before Xmas unless they pre-ordered), Super Monkeyball: Banana Blitz, Red Steel and Wii Play which includes the free Remote. Yeah I only mentioned four games, one of which is a collection of seven smaller games, and another that promises swordplay but seemingly doesn’t deliver too well according to most reviews I’ve seen. That leaves two games in my opinion that are worth it, but when Zelda will end up stealing more of your life than a shopping trip to the Akhibara district of Tokyo (a Tech-heads buying heaven!), and Monkeyball lends itself more to multiplayer by it’s nature, Houston does indeed have a problem!

Sure, there’s stuff like Splinter Cell:Double Agent (already out on other formats), Call of Duty 3 (ditto), NFS:Carbon (ditto…again), a collection of movie tie-ins like Cars, Happy Feet (why the feck did THIS get a game!) and Open Season, oh and don’t forget the lone sports title Madden 07 (wrong kinda of football Ninty!). Yet I can’t help feeling there is something very lacking in the launch games, despite the choice.

I’ll freely admit it could just be me. Having played games as long as I have you tend to see alot of things repeated over and over. Why do I still play games? Well that’s a subject for a later post.

Let me just state that I am genuinely excited about the release of the Wii and what it can possibly bring to the gaming table and have been counting the days since I preordered in September till I can get my hands on Wii Sports and Zelda! It all just seems to lack inspiration for me. Sure, Nintendo have to have titles available that they know are going to sell, and after the relative lack of success of the GameCube they need a top class start on sales. Note I said lack of success, not failure, as the Cube is still a massivley underated console!

What about the Virtual Console games? What do they contribute to the deal?

This question is not one I can answer for everyone as it all depends on your preference for retro-flavoured gameplay. Yet there are some serious historical heavyweights in there like Super Mario 64, Sonic the Hedgehog, Gunstar Heroes, Sim City, F-Zero, the Original Legend of Zelda, to name a few. Who amongst us old enough to remember the original releases though we’d see Mario and Sonic available on a Nintendo system, in their original form!? Let alone in 2006!

With these games costing anywhere between 1000 Wii Points to 500 Points, depending on which system they originally appeared on, they are looking at great buys. Think that 1000 Wii Points is equivalent to about £7 Sterling and you see what I mean. Again though, who of us old enough to remember will not already have some of these classics often many times over, maybe even for the first intended console, in our colleciotns already. Yet what will stop us buying it again for the convenience of playing it on your new shiny Wii? Convenience at a low cost anybody?

I’ll say it again, I cannot wait for December 8th, especially as I booked off the 8th and 11th from work so I can Wii all weekend long. I guess the more you read about something and gather information, the more you begin to pick holes. Holes that in reality may not matter long term.

The question now is, how many more Wii gags can I make within the next week and a half! Let the Wii flow!

The Nintendo Wii will have been available in the US for two weeks this Friday. Saturday will see the release of the console in Japan.

There haven’t been any major reports of hardware failurs, or software not working or any of the usual balony that you seem to find with new consoles (are you keeping track Sony and Microsoft?). Well, people have managed to hack the secure portions of Virtual Console games and put them up on the internets. But apart from that, no major problems.

Actually, I tell a little lie.

There’s been a few reports of broken TVs. As in smashed. Smashed to buggery! You’re playing a game that uses the Wiimote, say Wii Sports: Bowling, and you’ve got ever so slightly sweaty hands. A problem that gamers tend to get. You’re bowling away and the next thing you know, you’re controller slips out of your mits and smashes into the telly! Arg! But, in order to stop this kind of thing happening, Nintendo have lovingly supplied a strap to stop this from happening. Yay Ninty! Err, nope…

Unfortunatly, the strap seems to be a little flimsy, and after a fair bit of usage decides to snap mid-swing. Smash, crash, eek! “NOOOO! My 42″ plasma HDTV!” or “Shit! There goes the window!” or even “ARG! My mirror!” There’s been a whole raft of reports about this happening too. So much so, that there has been a web site created so you can tell the whole of the interweb of your mis-fortune. Have a look at www.wiihaveaproblem.com

I’m surprised, and knowing the americans (sorry if there are any reading this), that there haven’t been any threats of law suits and getting Nintendo to replace the now-useless TV / Window / Mirror etc. But I’m expecting it to happen very soon.

Basically, when I get my hands on my Wii, I’ll be reinforcing my strap. With sellotape. Or some sort of super metallic-movable substance that is super-strong. Or something…

With only me left to do my bit I guess I should post up how my history goes. However it would only be repeating exactly what Duncan has posted below. So I won’t bother.

What I will do is jump straight in and ramble on about two things which have cheesed me off a little lately. Unfortunately both of them are Xbox 360/Microsoft related. SHOCK HORROR I hear you say. One of them is just annoying and the other is just business sense I think.

So “Annoying” is up first…

It’s happened to us all on the PC. We play a game, we save the game, we play the game a bit more. We get quite far, in fact one or two levels off completing the game. Then the next time we load up we find the save game is either corrupt or nowhere to be seen. This happened to me, on the 360 but on an Xbox Live Arcade title - Jewel Quest (One of my favourites).

Now on most 360 titles when saving or loading a game you choose where you’re saving to and most of the time it’s onto the HDD, but with Jewel Quest you don’t get that option. In fact all you get is a popup screen when you load the game saying it’s found a save game and pressing ‘A’ on the controller will load the game. Pressing one of the other buttons erases the saved game and you start over. Nice touch (note sarcasm). So there is no way to have multiple saves or even safeguard your saved game. One accidental press, or even a drop of the controller, and your saved game is gone. Maybe I’m being petty, maybe I’m just being a geeky gamer. Tell me what you think via the comments!

Now, business sense. One of the books I’m reading at the moment is all about the marketing disasters that have troubled the hi-tech industry we live in today (In Search of Stupidity, Merrill R. Chapman - foreword by Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software fame - a favourite blog of mine). I could go into lengthy discussions on the true history of Microsoft, IBM and CP/M and how DOS came to be but I actually want to focus on another story which I think relates well…

In 1983 the internal battlings of a very powerful software company, MicroPro, had led to most of the programmers being either A) sacked or B) quitting. This led to some problems for MicroPro as they needed to release an update of their popular w

ord processing software. They hired in a new set of programmers and briskly wrote a new program, Wordstar 2000. However, Wordstar 2000 was nothing like its predecessor. 2000 had features the previous version lacked but also lacked features the previous version had. 2000 had a completely new file structure and files from a previous version could not be read into the new. The company had lost focus and ended up marketing both the new version, Wordstar 2000 and the previous version Wordstar 3.3 against each other. They both had the same price . The company eventually paid the ultimate price for this mistake, it’s very existence.

Now I’m not saying that the situation is the same but I do feel as though Microsoft is possibly losing a bit of focus here. Granted they are a very big company, very big. But at the moment Microsoft is pushing Vista, it’s new OS, it’s pushing the Xbox 360, it’s gaming console, and now it’s pushing Zune, it’s rival to Apple’s iPod. Now for hi-tech geeks like us it’s not difficult to move between the three but imagine how the man on the street feels right now. Years ago Microsoft was well known for one thing and one thing only - computer software, namely Windows. Ask the man on the street now what Microsoft are and just time how long it takes to come up with an answer.

(Plus they seriously need some good software to make good use of the Vision camera. I’m screaming out for some Sony style eye-toy-like games. Totemball is just awful.)

You can tell this is a new project. We’re all posting like buggery! But this is going to be nice and simple. This is a question for you readers out there…

The Good, Bald and Stupid. That’s this here site. There’s 3 of us. Paul is me, Duncan is the other one (who, by his own admission just 5 minutes ago, talks bullshit!) and Phil is the other other one (who has not admitted to talking bullshit. Yet.).

Obviously, I’m the bald one. The proof is up there and left a bit.

So my question to you lot is..who’s the Good one and who’s the Stupid one?

Ok, lame Pink-lyrics-gag aside, it’s time I kicked my own contributions to this site kicked off.

Firstly, I’d like to say welcome along to all those people who have taken the time to come along and visit our little ole blog. Hey it’s only taken us, what, a year to get even this far, but at least we’re here!

Just how did we get here you may ask? You didn’t? Well screw you, I’m gonna tell you anyway! All you have to do is skip to the next section if you know it all.

A long time ago, in a galaxy……..wait.

Once upon……………

It all started about three years ago for me, when I met a chap on Xbox Live. This chap worked on a website called Vagusnet.com, which was all about video games. That was Paul. He introduced me to the owner of said site, one Gareth Williams. Soon after another chap by the name of Phil joined as well. And so a legend was born!

Now read that last paragraph in the style of a childrens story teller

What began was a journey into the unknown of video games journalism for me. A journey that took me through news writing, reviewing, taking on Editorial duties, running the editorial side (god that caused some headaches) not to mention presenting live TV for nearly a year! Then there’s the VN podcast which aside from live TV is probably the most fun I’ve had with a microphone whilst having my clothes on!

Then it all went a bit south sadly. Still not sure totally why, but there you go, live and learn. Although I’m very glad to say that I’m still very much in touch with those people, naturally my two co-bloggers here included.

That, bar some odd stories and chunks of history, brings us to today, and this here blog. Yet what’s even weirder is that this site was only an idea about five days ago! God bless ya Phil and your ridiculously quick coding

NEXT SECTION

What is this site then? In all honesty, the sub heading at the top of the page says it all. Really, there isn’t much more I could say. As you can tell the rambling bit is right!

Our main focus here is the world of gaming in all it’s weird and wonderful forms. Or at least those forms which we can afford and don’t get shouted at too much for from our respective other halves. That sounds more dodgy than it should. Moving on! (Copyright Father Fil 2006)

So sit back, relax, and enjoy the meanderings of The Good, The Bald and The Stupid!