Wiimpressions

I’ll admit, when I first saw the Wii (then called by a better name, the Revolution), I thought it a bit gimicky. It seemed more a toy than a full-fledged, powerful next-gen console. It certainly didn’t seem to have the power of the 360 or the (if it ever comes out) PS3. I’ll also admit that I’m not completely sold on it not being a gimmick, even after reading and watching several reviews (the best I’ve seen is this one from IGN, taken from Nintendo’s booth at the Liepzig gaming show). The controller is more or less a light gun with motion detectors: this isn’t amazing, 21st century technology. After seeing an official teaser trailer (found here on Youtube), I got pushed even farther into the gimmick camp.

All this, of course, isn’t going to deter me from getting one on launch date or as soon as possible thereafter. The reasons for this are two. One, I’m a huge fan of Nintendo’s franchises. I’ve been hooked on Zelda, Metroid, Mario, F-Zero, Smash Bros., etc. for years now. I like what Nintendo’s developers have done with these franchises. I’ll use Metroid as an example. I loved the old 2D scrollers and generally hate the entire genre of 1st-person shooters but love the Metroid Prime games. These franchises have kept the basics of solid gameplay that made them great in their first iterations and successfully updated them for modern gamers. I simply cannot go on gaming without these familiar faces and solid gaming franchises.

The second reason is that I think Nintendo’s gimmicks work. Look at the DS. At heart a simple device with no mind-blowing technology or graphics, it has succeeded to be a great handheld with a growing list of great games. Nintendo seems to be on the right track as regards innovation in interaction between gamers and their gaming environment. I am not saying that they are the only innovative company in the gaming market. I am not hard core enough to judge this nor do I think it is true: many companies come up with unique and interesting games all the time. I’m saying that Nintendo is changing how we play games, first with the DS and soon, I believe, the Wii. This is why I’m desperate to get one as soon as it launches, because the Wii looks to introduce a fun, new way to play games, even if these games are not all that different than ones I’ve played before. For hardcore gamers, this should be fun because of the challenge. For casual and non-gamers, this will make games more approachable and intuitive to learn and play. I won’t be able to judge if I’m correct until November 19, but I’m excited to try.

Where the heck…?

All right, so even I must admit that it’s been a long time since I last posted. With some quick mental math, it appears that I haven’t written anything in 8 months. I don’t really want to go into my extended absence in much detail because it’s not very exciting. I don’t have cancer, no one died, I didn’t get arrested, or anything excited like that. I just sort of lost interest and the drive to write, and some things came up:

1. Marriage: I got married to the greatest girl in the world on April 22, 2006. As you can imagine, there was a great deal of planning that went into this, and while I can take little credit for the smoothness of our evening, I did put in some work in the preceding months, which cut into the time I had to rant here.
2. House: Right after we got hitched, we closed on our first house. It’s a duplex townhouse, 3-bedroom, 1 and 1/2 bath, and I love it. It’s really crazy owning something as important as a house, not to mention incredibly scary. I’m always afraid that I’m going to touch something and the place is going to tumble down, or I’ll accidently push the secret house self-destruct button (all houses have these, by the way, usually to the left of the fuse box) and ruin my costly investment. And you just know insurance won’t cover that sort of shit.
3. WoW: World of Warcraft is perhaps the most addictive video game known to man, and this is coming from someone who has played Diablo 2 through to the end at least 50 times and beat all the Weapons in Final Fantasy VII. I held off purchasing this game for a very long time, but I eventually caved and my life and free time have spiraled downhill ever since. The gameplay is very similar to Diablo 2, but there is way more content and a million other people hanging around with you. The millions of people don’t make the game more addictive by themselves. There is simply a lot out there to do and the game keeps expanding. Only a couple of weeks ago my main (Derevo, a druid) hit level 60, which alone took me 4 months. I then realized that there is a lot I still need to do if I want to be any good. This is where the millions of people come in. You want to make your toon better than everyone else. That takes a lot of work, more work than I can probably manage in fact. I am still trying, however, and am with a good group of folks (Arcane Council, a great guild of friendly people on the Garithos server) who’ll help me get some phat lewt.
4. School: I recently started a graduate program in international relations. I’ll be there full-time for 2 years and will end up with an MA. My focus is similar to what I studied as an undergrad: in a word, Russia. Judging from the first couple of weeks, the program is great and I’m learning a lot. It’s forcing me to think and use my time very differently than I did the last couple of years and the adjustment has not been easy. I’m not working, which gives me lots of time to do the class work, which is both positive and negative. I need the time because I’m slow at homework after taking the last couple of years off, but all this free time leads to great temptation to misuse it, which I do on occasion. Really, only every once in awhile.
5. Puppy love: He’s a cavalier king charles spaniel and is a big ball of sweet. He’s little and cute and loves me. He also pees on the rug (not much anymore, but still does when he can’t make the long trek upstairs or to the door), requires a lot of supervision, and doesn’t listen to much of anything I say. Basically, he’s a puppy. Despite all the difficulties and frustrations, he’s a great addition to my life and I am very fortunate and happy to be able to spend so much time with him. He’ll be a feature on this site for sure and I’ll throw up some pictures of him shortly.

Anyway, enough with excuses. I’ve been away for awhile blah blah blah. No one likes to hear excuses. People like action, and I’m here to give you some! I’ve decided to take this website in a much geekier direction than where it’s already headed. Don’t worry, there will still be boring updates about me and the amazingly happy life I lead, but I plan to focus more on gaming, in the hopes that this will focus my gaming efforts. Having hit level 60 in WoW, I’m hoping that my in-game time in WoW will decrease, or at least end up on a firmer schedule, leaving me more time for other games. I also want to start reviewing all the games I play. These reviews will be heniously out-of-date because I’m so many years behind other gamers, but I’m sure they’ll be interesting to no one nonetheless.

I also want to start expressing my views and opinions on what I am studying now. This will allow me to brainstorm for actual academic work I’m doing and sound like an elitist dweeb. It’s a win-win.

I’m also thinking of redesigning and renaming my site. I’m not a big fan of having my actual name on a web page somewhere, and we all can admit that the current site design is terrible, or at least begging for better colors. These are pretty low on the to-do list, though, since generating daily content is itself a struggle. Well, the generation of content is actually quite easy in my head, but getting it all down onto the ol’ Interweb is the time-consuming and tricky part. If I manage to keep up the posts (say, thrice weekly), then I’ll treat myself to a new design.