kottke.org posts about Wii
An appreciation of the Real Super Mario Bros 2. The game was released in Japan in 1986 but was considered too difficult/weird for US gamers and a different Mario 2 (based on a Japanese game called Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic) was released to the US.
In most games, you trust that the designer is guiding you, through the usual signposts and landmarks, in the direction that you ought to go. In the Real Super Mario Bros. 2, you have no such faith. Here, Miyamoto is not God but the devil. Maybe he really was depressed while making it — I kept wanting to ask him, Why have you forsaken me? The online reviewer who sizes up the game as “a giant puzzle and practical joke” isn’t far off.
The whole upshot is that RSMB2 is now available on the Wii Virtual Console as Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels. And for the record, I loved SMB2.
A list of resources for my recent dive into the deep end of an infinite pool. Wikipedia page. Search inside @ Amazon. A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest. Reviews, Articles, & Miscellany. The Howling Fantods! A scene-by-scene guide. Hamlet. Act 5, Scene 1. Infinite Jest online index. Wiki from Walter Payton College Prep (incl. timelines, chars, acronym list, places, etc.). Chronological list of the years in Subsidized Time. Notes on What It All Means. Character profiles by Matt Bucher. Character guide. Vocabulary glossary. Various college theses on IJ. Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (sadly not out until Nov). Not entirely unrelated: map of the overworld for The Legend of Zelda, which I’ve started playing again on the Wii. Suggestions welcome, especially looking for a brief chronological timeline of the whole shebang, something like the chronologically sorted version of this but covering more than just when the scenes themselves take place.
Update: Just to be clear, this is my second time through the book. (Last time was, what, 4 years ago?) Trying to make more of a study of it this time.
Update: Suggestion from Ian: “Get 3 bookmarks. 1 for where you are reading, 1 for the footnotes, 1 to mark the page that lists the subsidized years in order.” I’m currently using two bookmarks…will get a third for the sub. years list.
In the Kottke/Hourihan household, much of the past 4 weeks has been spent determining which has the most sensitive built-in accelerometer: an iPhone, a Nintendo Wiimote, or our newborn son.
The iPhone was eliminated fairly quickly…the portrait-to-landscape flip is easy to circumvent if you do it slow enough or at an odd angle. The Wiimote might be the winner; it registers small, slow movements with ease, as when executing a drop shot in tennis or tapping in a putt in golf.
Newborns, however, are born with something called the Moro reflex. When infants feel themselves fall backwards, they startle and throw their arms out to the sides, as illustrated in this video. Even fast asleep they will do this, often waking up in the process. So while the Wiimote’s accelerometer may be more sensitive, the psychological pressure exerted on the parent while lowering a sleeping baby slowly and smoothly enough so as not to wake them with the Moro reflex and thereby squandering 40 minutes of walking-the-baby-to-sleep time is beyond intense and so much greater than any stress one might feel serving for the match in tennis or getting that final strike in bowling.
Will Wright’s long zoom game, Spore, has been delayed until 2009. No one knows why, but I hope the answer involves porting it to the Wii. (via waxy)
Update: EA’s fiscal year starts in March, so it’s not delayed until 2009…just until after March 2008. (thx, zach)
Update: The unofficial word from someone on the development team is that Spore the system is almost ready but Spore the game isn’t all that much fun yet. A recent round of user testing didn’t go so well. Hence, the delay.
Video of a bunch of reject Wii games, including WiiWhaling, Paperwork Mario, and WiiDriveby. (thx, jeffry)
Not sure that there’s a iron-clad source on this, but a new version of Katamari Damacy seems to be rolling towards the Wii. Katamari seems like one of those games that the Wii remote was made for.
I don’t spend enough time playing Wii Sports to claim mastery in any of the events. I’m hovering around 2000 in tennis, I’ve bowled a 248 (twice), shot an 8-under in 9 holes of golf, and got my only gold medal in “Hitting the Green” with a distance of 84 feet. The big question, particularly in the Wii Tennis clubhouse, is: how high can a person’s score go in a particular sport? Anything over 2000 displays off the chart:
After poking around for a few minutes, I discovered the Wii High Scores pool on Flickr, in which were the 2310 in tennis above, several 300 games in bowling, an 8-under in golf, and 153.1 feet in “Hitting the Green”. Wii boxers in this thread claim a top score of 3124, after which it seems nearly impossible to score even a single point. Here’s a screenshot of a 3120-level boxer:
Does anyone have any Wii Sports high scores to share? Anyone over 2300 in tennis? Photo evidence is preferred.
Here’s some JavaScript you can use to make your web site work on the Wii. “Wiimote keycodes can be detected by JavaScript in the Wii Opera browser [but] I could not find a JavaScript library that facilitates handling these input events, so I created my own”
The Nintendo Wii, and the bowling game in particular, is a big hit at an Illinois retirement community (average age: 77). “‘I’ve never been into video games,’ said 72-year-old Flora Dierbach last week as her husband took a twirl with the Nintendo Wii’s bowling game. ‘But this is addictive.’”
I missed this somehow, but Nintendo has an extensive series of interviews up on their site between Nintendo’s president and the Wii development team. A fascinating look at the Wii’s development process. (thx, zacharie)
Blah, got sick yesterday somehow, so things will be a little sparse around here today. Back to the TV. The Wii isn’t fun when you’re sick…the last thing I want to do this afternoon is stand up.
Steven Johnson has written up some thoughts on the Nintendo Wii. His fifth point is especially interesting and I can’t help quoting almost the entire thing:
Wii Sports trades the onscreen complexity of goals and objectives and puzzles for the physical, haptic complexity of bodily movement. Since the days of Pong, games have been simplifying the intricacies of movement into unified codes of button pressing and joystick manipulation. What strikes you immediately playing Wii Sports — and particularly Tennis — is this feeling of fluidity, the feeling that subtle, organic shifts in your body’s motion will lead to different results onscreen. My wife has a crosscourt slam she hits at the net that for the life of me I haven’t been able to figure out; I have a topspin return of soft serves that I’ve half-perfected that’s unhittable. We both got to those techniques through our own athletic experimentation with various gestures, and I’m not sure I could even fully explain what I’m doing with my killer topspin shot. In a traditional game, I’d know exactly what I was doing: hitting the B button, say, while holding down the right trigger. Instead, my expertise with the shot has evolved through the physical trial-and-error of swinging the controller, experimenting with different gestures and timings. And that’s ultimately what’s so amazing about the device. Games for years have borrowed the structures and rules — as well as the imagery — of athletic competition, but the Wii adds something genuinely new to the mix, something we’d ignored so long we stopped noticing that it was missing: athleticism itself.
He’s not exactly right — for example, drifting in Mario Kart is difficult to do until you develop a “touch” for it and is not easy to explain to others — but the Wii does take it to a new level.
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