Jeffool.com

I would like to thank you for your press conference Monday night. You took a chatroom full of people who previously took every chance to make fun of the name ‘Wii’, and united them against a common cause, you. Not only was your performance forced and rather boring, but let’s do the checklist!

First a lecture telling us that you’ve sold over 100million PS2s and other numbers. (As if about half of those weren’t people rebuying the system after their died.)

-Gran Turismo 4, slightly retooled for the PS3. Gran Turismo HD? The same game running in HD and you gave it ten minutes? Seriously Sony, what the fuck?

-+EyeToy. A new EyeToy game isn’t a game so much as a nice side item to the game, like R.O.B. the Robot. While you’re playing a CCG, EyeToy sees the cards you play, airing that on TV, with monsters appearing over them and fighting. Interesting, but not really ‘fun’.

-PS3 will have a MySpace-esque service. Yay?

-The online system is referenced as a good place for ‘shopping’. A decided boo goes here.

+A brief glimpse of games not expected at launch like Lair and Afrika. Also games from London Studios and Naughty Dog look fun enough.

And then there was your wannabe Wii controller. You claimed your new “innovative” controller will have ‘six degrees of freedom’, but by the horrible display given on-stage, it seems that it really just recognizes pitch, yaw, roll, and vertical change. So, if you moved the controller to the left without tilting it, the game would never know. It then doesn’t even have knowledge of where it is in relation to anything. So, it can’t do any of the things that the Wii can so far as gameplay. But the question isn’t ever “is the product better than the original,” only “is it good enough?” And to that I still laugh. In fact, the entire chatroom laughed the whole time until the very end when the controller was revealed, and then everyone laughed again.

Yes, when Kutaragi revealed your controller, which looks like a Dual Shock 2 with an Xbox ‘Guide’ button, the audience actually snickered at the man. Then they grew silent, and then made polite applause. And when he said “that’s not all,” I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I knew what he was going to do; we all did. But I felt like I was in the theater at a horror movie when the young blonde, before the opening credits, gets the phone call from inside the house. You shout “No! Don’t do it! You’ll die, and you’re not really that bad! Don’t get yourself killed!” But Kutaragi couldn’t help himself. It was bloody. And thank you from that Sony. Thank you.

-Jeffool.

Don’t believe me? Grab it from torrent, (here.) I’m grabbing a copy to watch again to see if I missed anything when I was nodding off from boredom.

(Sorry. It was either that or “Wii will rock you!” which I guarantee you the gaming press will wear that out quickly.) (Also, sorry again, I won’t be making penis jokes.)

Nintendo has announced that their next console (codenamed ‘Revolution’) will in fact be named Wii. Now, is anyone who likes the idea of the Wii, or anyone who likes Nintendo, not going to get this system because of an odd name? No. Just want to get that out of the way. Face it, a bunch of fans will be waiting overnight to get it on launch day. This is a given, accept it and move on. Now, let’s move on to nongamers.

I think that this oddly named product has the potential to make the word ‘Nintendo’ ubiquitous to gaming again. The Wii’s ability to take players in a new direction (yes, thanks to the controller, its ability to offer add-ons, and an assumed retained focus on gameplay) will make it different from other systems, which has long been Nintendo’s “Blue Ocean” strategy. They want to the the iPod to Sony’s discman and Microsoft’s… Well, ‘other discman.’ (To stick with the comparison.) To do that, they’ll need a new type of gaming to go along with it. Let’s hope that Red Steel is only the tip of that iceberg.

There are also those who game, but don’t really care. Let’s call them non-fans. I have no problem with people like that, as I’m sure Nintendo hopes to make a killing off of these people! They bought Guitar Hero because it was new, and fun. They bought Halo when they heard that fun coop had came back to gaming. They buy whatever console or a PC and play the games they like. To those, normal, people, gaming is similar to TV and movies. They play a game and then go about their day and I commend them for it. Gaming doesn’t have to be an all-encompassing way of life.

But the haters? The ones who actively hate on Nintendo, not just because of the name, but call them ‘too kiddie’ simply because their games don’t contain more violence/blood? The people who will surely be using the term ‘Wiitards’ in the coming years? Y’know, those people who you (I) secretly hate because they think of themselves as hardcore for getting into games because of Final Fantasy VII? People who have never so much as heard of M.U.L.E.? They’ve pushed me over the edge. After constant complaining about how gaming has been ruined by marketing and graphics-whoring games, which they themselves buy every year, they have the nerve to bitch when a large company finally makes a move to be independent of that type of shit. To reference RvB, they could bitch about anything.

I’ve never owned a Gamecube. It didn’t strike me as something I’d like at the beginning due to the games released on it, and I never got around to picking one up after games I thought I would enjoy finally came out. But a while back I picked up a Nintendo DS and it all made sense to me. It just felt ‘right’. Before, I was just ‘really interested’ in the Wii. Now I’m drinking the Kool-Aid. I’m in Nintendo’s boat and sailing off into the Blue Ocean with them, because I desperately want greener gaming pastures.