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Wii thoughts, two days in
Mar. 6th, 2007 11:21 amI'm ready to play an actual game with it now. Wii Sports and Wii Play are both good tech demos and are great ways to introduce people to the sytsem and controllers, but they don't have a lot of sticking power.
Just for grins I bought Bonk's Adventure, a TurboGrafx-16 game that I remember reading a rave review of in a 1990 issue of Video Games magazine.
It cost $6. I have mixed feelings about this price. While I love the idea of bringing old video games back into circulation and am happy to encourage the practice with my wallet, I question selling them for as much as I could buy a used PS2 game at the record store. On the other hand, one could argue that by this logic a new copy of a Scrabble board game should cost about 25 cents today (or maybe cost + 25 cents), since it's the exact same rules and technology as was introduced decades ago. So I dunno.
Meanwhile, I am pleased to discover that the Wii's emulator UI is quite simple and nice. Individual games that you buy show up as "channels" on the Wii's main menu, and it automatically freezes state. Unless you specifically tell the Wii to reset the emulated system, you can leave a game hanging to do other Wii stuff (including shutting off the system), and pick up where you left off later.
And Bonk is fun! It's from the bad old days of platformers where everything on the screen is there to kill you on your inexorable journey from the left to the right, but it's not too hard, and features reasonably-paced continue-checkpoints. Really, though, I think I paid at least $3 too much for it, just on principle.
The news channel is cute. It's sexier and faster than Google News but less convenient, so I don't see it being more than a novelty. Oddly, the coolest thing about the news channel is the fact that the zoom function for stories' photographs makes a paper-rustle sound, as if you're picking up the photograph and holding it closer, and suddenly it feels like you're playing an adventure game. OK, so clearly this guy in Portland who etches Van Gogh reproductions in car windshield dirt is a clue! You'll probably meet him later.
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toonhead_npl sent me a bunch of Miis he made of random cartoon characters and nerdy celebrities. I sent him back the cast of BSG, which I built on Sunday. Ha. I should make a YouTube out of them.
Just for grins I bought Bonk's Adventure, a TurboGrafx-16 game that I remember reading a rave review of in a 1990 issue of Video Games magazine.
It cost $6. I have mixed feelings about this price. While I love the idea of bringing old video games back into circulation and am happy to encourage the practice with my wallet, I question selling them for as much as I could buy a used PS2 game at the record store. On the other hand, one could argue that by this logic a new copy of a Scrabble board game should cost about 25 cents today (or maybe cost + 25 cents), since it's the exact same rules and technology as was introduced decades ago. So I dunno.
Meanwhile, I am pleased to discover that the Wii's emulator UI is quite simple and nice. Individual games that you buy show up as "channels" on the Wii's main menu, and it automatically freezes state. Unless you specifically tell the Wii to reset the emulated system, you can leave a game hanging to do other Wii stuff (including shutting off the system), and pick up where you left off later.
And Bonk is fun! It's from the bad old days of platformers where everything on the screen is there to kill you on your inexorable journey from the left to the right, but it's not too hard, and features reasonably-paced continue-checkpoints. Really, though, I think I paid at least $3 too much for it, just on principle.
The news channel is cute. It's sexier and faster than Google News but less convenient, so I don't see it being more than a novelty. Oddly, the coolest thing about the news channel is the fact that the zoom function for stories' photographs makes a paper-rustle sound, as if you're picking up the photograph and holding it closer, and suddenly it feels like you're playing an adventure game. OK, so clearly this guy in Portland who etches Van Gogh reproductions in car windshield dirt is a clue! You'll probably meet him later.
toonhead_npl sent me a bunch of Miis he made of random cartoon characters and nerdy celebrities. I sent him back the cast of BSG, which I built on Sunday. Ha. I should make a YouTube out of them.