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Nintendo + Apple

16 Jan 2012
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gaming japan rant tech

The connection - or rather, similarity - between Nintendo and Apple is incredible.

Here are a few choice quotes from Osamu Inoue's Nintendo Magic, one of the better Nintendo books from the last few years:

"I think they have a lot in common with us in that we both make unique, interesting products that surprise people. I really respect and think highly of Nintendo. I myself own a Gamecube and a Wii." -Phil Schiller, 2008

Apple takes pride in its software development, bringing new experiences to its customers on the twin pillars of hardware and software. On that count, it's certainly not unlike Nintendo. [Nintendo president Satoru] Iwata himself agrees: "We want people to be surprised, and we want people to call our approach unique. That's what people say about Apple, too.

It's cherry-picking the numbers, but if you stack up quarterly sales numbers from 2005 through 2008 the lines are identical. Apple's are higher by a steady margin of about $3 billion, but the lines are identical in shape:

That's Apple on top, in black, and Nintendo below in grey, and me creepily peering around from behind the book

The quotes are endless about how either company wants to surprise people, or focuses on R&D heavily, or holds employees accountable, or how execs use each other's products, or has been to the brink of death and back, or has millions of people waiting with baited breath before product announcements.

My personal favorite common factor about the two companies is how both reach into their back catalogues of experiences and bring them back in unexpected ways. Roughly 48% of all media coverage of the iPad has referenced the Newton (a prototype PDA from 1993, pretty far ahead of its time). Other recurring themes include the Macintosh and iMac unveils, but you'd have to find a dedicated Apple fan to get you more examples than that.

I can give you some Nintendo ones, though. The 3DS is, in a sense, a refinement of the Virtual Boy that came about once the technology improved. Nintendo has some product failures, such as Virtual Boy, just like Apple had the entire 1990s and the Motorola ROKR. Products aside, Nintendo brings back some small details in very subtle ways. Check out this little tune, which was bundled with a DSiWare animation app called Flipnote Studio:

Seems innocent enough, until you find that someone snuck a very similar tune into a secret level of Super Mario 3D Land:

And it turns out that these little tricksters have a long history of doing this stuff. If you owned a GameCube, you may not have ever known that the calming ambient system menu music is actually borrowed from a Famicom (NES) accessory that never made it to the US:

Speaking of hardware that never left Japan, learning about Satellaview blew my mind. It was a SNES addon with a satellite modem that let players download small segments of Nintendo games and even play along with live broadcast audio tracks, creating a sort of Legend of Zelda-meets-radio drama kind of feel.

But the "download small segments of Nintendo games" is the big thing here. New bits of content for games like Link to the Past, F-Zero and Dr. Mario were created exclusively for the service. So, in effect, Nintendo was pushing the boundaries of what we now know as downloadable content and episodic gaming. In 1995. Here's a commercial, and even though it's in Japanese, you can get a basic idea of what's going on:

So in one corner you have Apple, which tried to take the computer mobile nearly 20 years ago with Newton and failed because the technology wasn't ready. And in the other you have Nintendo, which tried to reinvent gaming by way of connectivity over 15 years ago and failed because the technology wasn't ready (at least on the small scale of Japan, which didn't have terrestrial Internet in 1995). The ideas were always there, but the means weren't.

After being an Apple user for some five years, and having read Steve's bio, I'm finally coming around to understanding why someone would be an Apple fan, someone who follows the company out of something more than attachment to the products themselves, someone who sticks by in thick and thin.

I'm understanding it because I'm the same way with Nintendo, a very similar company.

Postscript

In all fairness, Nintendo didn't invent the gaming modem. The Sega Channel beat Nintendo to the punch in 1994, but the precedent for failed gaming modems goes back way further than I ever thought.

In fact, attempts at connected gaming go all the way back to the Atari 2600. If Wikipedia is to be believed, that failed attempt became the eventual core technology of AOL.

If Nintendo had to be 'first' at something in the field, it was the use of a broadcast satellite, although even the Golden Age-era consoles used cable TV to achieve much the same effect.

(On an aside from my aside, Ed Rotberg, the creator of Battlezone, even told me that gameplay analytics were thought of at Golden Age-era Atari but the machines needed modems to phone home. Does the gaming industry have any ideas that weren't originally thought up in the 1970s?)

And while I'm doing the errors-and-corrections segment, I may as well admit that the 48% statistic about Newton is totally made up.

A bit of politics

17 Sep 2011
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rant

Recently there was a wave of forwarded emails and Facebook copy/pasting wherein students showed their support for passing some sort of law that would forgive all student debt.

I even got it from my mom, and she stopped forwarding MoveOn.org emails to me after the 2004 election. (Then again, she moved a little more to the right in the intervening years, but I digress). My grad school classmates, my band of brothers in job searching, blew up Facebook with it.

Sounds nice, right? Drop a year's salary in debt on a Masters degree, find that it doesn't get you a job, then let the debt slide since you did the good American thing but it didn't work out for you anyway.

Too bad it can't happen.

Total student loan debt hit $830 billion this year, a 4x increase from just 10 years ago. American university education is officially a racket.

Remember AIG? The "too big to fail" guys? Their market cap was just $200 billion at peak and held just barely $1 trillion in assets. For $830 billion in debts to suddenly vanish overnight would be a serious, serious problem for the guys who own that debt.

And at 8 percent interest - that's what you're paying, grads! - the $830 billion easily balloons its valuation into the trillions of dollars. As much as I hate to say it, I suspect that forgiving student debt would actually be a systemic risk.

You could make the argument - and perhaps those on the left do - that if the government were to pay off those debts at face value, and the government has spent nearly as much money on deficit stimulus in recent years, you'd avoid financial collapse and still do the right thing.

To them, I wish them luck in persuading the government to spend nearly a trillion dollars on the country's small sliver of most educated people.

That said, as a student debtor, I'm obliged to say that I would support such an action in the alternate universe in which it could happen. But since I don't believe in online petitions or political action via Facebook posts, I'd like to propose some more concrete political action:

I will donate $10,000 to the campaign of the President who passes student loan forgiveness.

(*by way of a shell corporation, since it's above the limit for individuals.)

Sound crazy? It's more money than I have, yes. But it's a small fraction of my student debt and since I have good credit, I could pay back that loan at way less than 8 percent.

Unexplored territory [warning: OMG sooooo nerdy]

25 Apr 2011
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rant tech

In ancient times, I probably wouldn't have been an explorer. The world was too big.

But now, the world is small. So what few places aren't well-charted, or known, or inhabited, always leave me curious.

In the real world, this is true of small Pacific islands used by Americans in the mid-20th century. There are places that were of serious importance for things ranging from guano mining to logistics in fighting against the Japanese to nuclear bomb testing. And since those uses they've been largely abandoned.

For many of them, the US Fish & Wildlife Service stops in "every year or two" to check up. Aside from that, it's wild birds and wild cats that were brought along on ships. Maybe the occasional airstrip for emergency landings.

I mean, we could go to these places. It's possible. We just don't, because they're not important anymore. Who knows what they'll be needed for again in the distant future.

Meanwhile, think of the people who still do go. They're either military personnel there to clean up an airfield, or Fish & Wildlife staff to record a statistic or two. Are these jobs totally cushy positions because they're quiet and situated on the world's most private beaches? Or are they hideous for being so disconnected from modern society?

I get the same vibe from the Internet.

No, really.

The absolute center core of the net is a more fascinating way to explore history than any museum could be. Just take the endings of web addresses you know and love: .com, .net, .org, .edu and so on. Then add in the countries: .uk, .jp, .kr, etc. And the miscellaneous stuff like .biz, .info, and even .museum. (All of these endings are called domains, so keep that in mind if I drop that word later on). But there's more than that.

For a while there, you could just enter in http://to/ and that was a valid address. (That's really .to, the two-letter code for Tonga, but since there's no words before it you don't even need the dot). But there's also .arpa used in the root networks - the guys who tie the backbones of the backbones together. That's because ARPA, the US military's research agency, funded the inventing of the Internet. And their basic stuff, which was supposed to be replaced, is now keeping the entire world connected.

Then there's a whole shadow Internet outside that system. Anonymizer software, frequently used in countries with repressive regimes, uses domains like .onion and .freenet. These things are "on the Internet" in the sense that you access them over a network with your computer, but they're also "not on the Internet" because it's not within this one big unified network.

But it's not limited to just democracy advocates trying to fly under the radar. Allegedly, NSA internal email uses .nsa and Hotmail's internal workings are inside .gbl, so that they can't be reached easily by random Joes on the Internet. As far as your computer is concerned, it's never heard of .nsa or .gbl.

The Internet wasn't always so centralized for ordinary users, and technically still isn't. Leaving the domain stuff behind for a second, dial-up services in the 90s like AOL and CompuServe often listed what features their service came with. A lot of it involved special content or unique chat rooms, but it was also access to certain parts of what was coming together as The Internet. So they listed 'WWW Access' as just one feature alongside other stuff like Usenet and Gopher. Nowadays, things are much simpler: your ISP sells you Web access and off you go, because the Web ended up replicating the functions of Usenet (forums), Gopher (uh, just browsing), Finger (blogs) and so on. [Yes, techies, I'm glossing over the differences between domains and protocols. Apples and oranges. If you know, that's great, but I'm not burdening readers who've made it this far with that.]

But those things didn't die forever. You can still use Usenet and Gopher. Usenet fell into the hands of warez jockeys, so ISPs dropped it and you have to go pay someone a subscription for access. Gopher is around, and free, and usable right now with a Firefox plugin or alternative browsers like Camino. Wikipedia suggests that there are 150 Gopher servers hanging around. That's a tiny amount. On that alone I gather it's a little old club for old guys who enjoyed "the good old days" on Gopher sites and occasionally want to stroll down memory lane.

But in a sense, playing with these things is like diving backwards in time. Gopher, or Darknet (which is a spinoff of the .onion thing mentioned above), lets you see what the Web looked like in the 90s. For me it's a whirlwind back to childhood. It's the only history museum that's ever been interesting, and it's because you can actually relive some experiences, however trivial, instead of looking at an object in a glass case and making your imagination do all the work. So it is as the root of the Internet, too. We take for granted that the entire thing is held together by some links that ARPA strung together in the 70s and 80s.

What we have now will eventually be Memory Lane too. The ARPA stuff is staying in place, even with a big conversion we'll all have to make to IPv6, but the whole domain thing is about to get real freaky. They added support for foreign languages. So right now, if you're Japanese and you want to read about Nintendo, you to go www.nintendo.co.jp - those are English letters, which many Japanese aren't so good with. (That's probably why they picked up QR codes so fast, but that's a different story.) In the future, it'll look more like: http://例え.テスト. By the way, you actually can click that. Look at what it does to your URL bar!

This stuff blows my mind. IT'S SO COOL!

Ahem. Sorry. Nerd freakout.

It all makes me wish I could see that root. Maybe it's like getting out of the Matrix and meeting the Architect. Granted, it's probably just a data center somewhere, but it's only in Hollywood that the inside of the clockworks looks interesting. The core of the Internet is put together by an offshoot of IEEE, which is a big academic body for engineering.

So basically, whether you're on the world's most remote island, or at the center of mankind's greatest invention, you're really looking at a handful of academic types hanging around, being all academic-y.

There's an awesome book in that parallel somewhere.

Televised racing is awesome

13 Apr 2011
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blake recommends rant

In the last month or so, I've fallen in love with telecasts of Formula 1 and American Le Mans Series races. You should too, and here's a few awesome reasons why:

An amazing team sport. Winners often credit their teams (that is, their crews and engineers), while the crews and engineers treat the driver like another part of the car. That's not a lack of respect, that's chemistry to an extreme. A football team specializes only along the range from huge and fast to huge and faster. A racing team ranges from PhD mechanical engineers to dudes who can lift serious weight using their necks.

Travel the world. Formula 1 hits a new destination in the world about every two weeks. Gaming career, what? What's a startup? I totally want to do something menial for Red Bull's F1 efforts just so I can follow the team around.

Way less advertising. Advertising in American sports has gotten way out of control. The first down line is sponsored. The line of scrimmage is sponsored. The scoreboard is sponsored. The commentators' predictions for who wins are sponsored. Individual clever comments or identifications of key plays are sponsored. The halftime show is sponsored. The two-minute warning is sponsored. Instant replays are sponsored. Oh, and the postgame show is sponsored too.

ALMS? In two and a half hours of continuous racing I've seen maybe 2 minutes of commercials and a 2-minute shameless plug interview with someone from Mobil 1. F1? Can't recall any shameless plugging, at least on the BBC broadcasts. Sure, there's plenty of logos all over the cars and drivers, but that doesn't detract from actually watching the action. Nor do commercials, because there really aren't any.

Decent announcers. You might enjoy Charles Barkley's trrbl talk but I could use something a little more intelligent. Racing announcers aren't always MENSA members, yes, but they're capable of taking complicated engineering talk and reducing it down to pedestrian levels. Pretty cool.

Plays nice with new technology. F1 fan? BBC's iPlayer has you covered. Le Mans fan? ESPN3 lets you watch entire races, commercial-free. No blackouts, no regional nonsense (unless you're British - I torrent F1 since there are no US sources to my knowledge), and no other such silliness deriving from American cable TV monopolies.

So join me and start watching so we can talk about the races!

RIP Music Games, 2005-2010

9 Feb 2011
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gaming rant

Today, I finished DJ Hero 2.

(Yeah, I'm way behind on my gaming backlog, school is utterly demolishing me lately).

It was the best music game I've ever played. When Guitar Hero came out, it was widely loved for how it enables 'power fantasy' - the ability to suddenly be awesome at guitar, without all the work and calluses. I always, always wanted that for turntables, a symbol of the music that more appealed to me, whether hip-hop or electronic. Getting to imaginarily play the part of DJ was as appealing to me as electric guitar is to white people.

DJ Hero came out in 2009 and lived up to the promise, just. It was a flawed game, a 3-out-of-5 in most reviews, but I was just happy that the thing existed. But DJ Hero 2 seriously tightened up the graphics on level 3 - better visuals, yes, but more gameplay depth, more difficulty depth, and much better music. Out of all the tracks I played, I'd only give about 2 tracks less than a 3 out of 5. Most were very good, and a large number were seriously awesome. This game is, objectively, a 4 out of 5.

For me? Subjectively? A 5 out of 5. I'm ready to buy this game for good and keep it on the shelf forever. I love it.

But sadly, today was also the day that Activision put the final nail in the coffin. Its entire music game business is done, as are 500 employees, meaning no more Guitar Hero or DJ Hero. The train stops here. It's only shocking when viewed in light of statements from annual reports and conference as recent as two years ago: that the music genre was one of (only mildly paraphrasing here) "three pillars" of Activision's business.

Not that Activision is some sort of unique bad guy for getting out of the music games business. Harmonix (the geniuses who made this whole thing happen) was put on the block over the holidays and they've already begun shrinking. The only 'bad guy' move here was irrational overinvestment.

Anyway. It was truly a good run. Harmonix wowed and amazed us with the original Guitar Hero during the 2005 holiday season. Let's not forget that sensation of the first time we all played it. And let's face it: Rock Band was the superior product all throughout its fight with Guitar Hero, because it was Harmonix's baby. Activision was just along for the ride.

Want proof? Look at the tie-ins when things started getting skinny. Activision looked at some spreadsheets and came back with some big, mass-market names: Metallica, Aerosmith, Van Halen. Harmonix dug into its heart, looked at the stars and came back with the trump card, the ultimate tie-in: The Beatles.

Activision was just along for the ride... until DJ Hero. Acti dug through its large organization, its celebrity Rolodex, and put together a new and original entry for a whole new set of gamers. And all the muscle that that development exercise built up was fully and satisfyingly flexed for DJH2.

That was for the holiday of 2010. The whole genre has risen and fallen in five neat years. During that time there were some great moments for me, and for everyone I know who's played the genre. The first "oh holy wow, this is cool" moment. The axe battles with friends. The drunken band nights. The stage events.

From here, plastic toy instruments will fade out of use but not out of existence. They'll start going for clearance at game shops, and then stores will refuse to buy used ones, and like the crazy gaming peripherals of our past they'll fade into closets and garage sales. But there are tens of millions of them out there, so they won't become eBay token rarities like some oldies from the 80s and 90s.

So in ten years' time we'll all have old, incompatible plastic toy instruments in our closets and when nostalgia strikes we'll say, "Remember Guitar Hero?"

It was a really good run.

Go read this website

Game Journalists Are Incompetent Fuckwits

It's true. I worked as one. It's a crappy job.

Also, it's very convenient to simply read their aggregation of actual journalism done, the not shit journalism tag. Interesting articles are highlighted and idiots are called out. This is what games blogging is supposed to be.

No wonder everyone's making Facebook games. You can rely on viral effects to spread games instead of insidious marketing types and the hordes of barely-educated, blog-publishing automatons they command.

Shut up Internet, the iPhone 4 is good

25 Jul 2010
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rant tech

In my experience, the iPhone 4 is pretty great. Relative to my 3G, which was on the verge of collapse after two years of software updates, undone jailbreaks and loads of intensive apps, it's way more stable. Not being on AT&T's California network is a refreshing reminder of what cell phone service can actually be like. Everything is way faster, which makes me appreciate how fast the network can actually be when things like Facebook updates load instantly. (Who knew that was a hardware limitation?) TomTom loads and operates quickly and navigates more accurately.

Games are great with the new processor and screen. Between Nike+ and another new Nike app, I'm back to working out with my music. The new glass is more precise and less smudgy. And I haven't taken advantage of the improved camera much yet, but I'm excited for the first time I'll snap a quick picture and think "I'm glad that got updated!"

It's smaller than my old model. And fighting with my car to get it playing music has made me discover that Bluetooth audio works flawlessly, even when I put navigation on top of the audio. It's amazingly cool getting voice navigation and music over my car stereo with the phone in my pocket.

The antenna thing is, in many ways, its Achilles heel. But in the Age of Internet Criticism, people tend to forget that except for that spot, Achilles was an all-around badass.

New rule, amigos.

5 Feb 2010
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rant stupid

New rule, effective immediately:

No directly addressing days of the week. All statements like the ones below are officially verboten:

"Dear Monday: We didn't get along last week. Let's try harder this time, eh? Love, Me"
"Friday, how I love you more than your nearest brethren."
"Tuesday: Stop being so rainy. I'm le bored."

Those who continue to post such statements will be penalized 5 Twitter followers for each subsequent statement.

Look sharp, friends. The Cool Police are watching - and they beat my ass like Rodney King just last week.

Happy is a relative thing

21 Nov 2009
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japan life rant

Life is pretty grand right now. I'm making a niche in San Diego, I've got a dream job for a research gig, I can handle the academic pressures of school, and I'm beginning to be exposed to the joys of southern California, such as lots and lots of promising concerts from artists I love.

Still:

I'd rather be in Japan. I can't spend a day without walking home from school thinking I'd rather be walking home from work somewhere in Japan, following my nose to good food and beer. And sumo on TV. And trying to understand the evening news immediately thereafter.

It's easy to be nostalgic when my life in Japan was so relatively easy, but I think what draws me most is the same thing that sent me there in the first place: the sheer unpredictability of each day. I didn't know where I'd eat, or who I'd meet doing so. I didn't know what I'd learn. For all my training, I still couldn't read a lot of the signs I'd see along the way, and they became miniature intellectual curiosities as I walked along.

And I could really go for some legit sushi right about now.

I still miss that general sensation of "I'm in a foreign land! I'm in Japan! Wowwwwww!" It's still a motivator, even after having lived there. For the last three years, I've been in Japan at least once every 8 months. I'm about to break that trend, and it's disappointing.

Blake Recommends: Winter Edition

It's been a while since I've done a round of recommendations for stuff I'm consuming. Let's fix that!

Stuff I love:

-Last.fm: If you use Pandora, switch to Last.fm now. They've really developed their ad-supported streaming radio service, and it's pretty solid. It's great for being exposed to new artists without falling into the Pandora trap of super-specialized stations that play the same 5 awesome songs over and over. My favorite feature is the presence of international music, so I have stations for J-pop artists like m-flo and Crazy Ken Band that play new tracks from them and their musical cousins. It's also a new feature on the Xbox 360, and I'm pretty sure I have it on non-stop while I'm studying at home. I've especially fallen in love with...

-Crystal Kay: Japanese-born, halfie, bilingual R&B. All the catchiness of Japanese pop music with some seriously solid vocals on top. Lots of fun to listen to, even if you don't speak Japanese.

-DJ Hero: I understand the complaints about DJ Hero. But I don't care. Even if what I'm doing in this game isn't actually what DJs do, it's a fun enough facsimile. There are enough tracks that completely kick ass to make up for the weak ones. And I really don't care about the reportedly blah multiplayer modes. I just want to do cool DJ things, and I get to do that. The art direction is cool and the game is good. DJ Hero is, honestly, what I've wanted ever since Guitar Hero came about. I wanted a game built around an instrument I care about more than guitar, and I got that. I paid the stupidly high price for this game and don't regret it. It's pretty rare that I enjoy a game that isn't critically acclaimed, at least outside the presence of diamond-in-the-rough-seeker John Martone, but this is one such rare moment. I'm going to revel in it, even if no one else does.

-Left 4 Dead 2: I have a little clique of Left 4 Dead playing buddies, and we've really enjoyed the last 6 or so months playing together. We had mixed feelings on whether L4D2 would mess that up, but after a week with the game we're all on the same page. And it's the page I wrote a few months back: It's more Left 4 Dead. How can this be a bad thing?

Stuff I just can't bring it upon myself recommend:

-Modern Warfare 2: It unfortunately fit with the trend in Infinity Ward games: an amazing, innovative, emotionally investing game gets followed up with a solid, but relatively not boundary-pushing, sequel. See: Call of Duty 1&2, Modern Warfare 1&2.

Warning: spoilers. Skip down to Mos Def to avoid.

Clearly IW was trying to break the pattern with the infamous airport scene, but this was a hugely blown opportunity. The setup was this: you're an undercover agent sent in to root out an evil, evil former Soviet dude. So you're supposed to fall in with him, build his trust, and eventually bring down his whole empire. All of that should have been playable, in-game narrative instead of dropping you in this story's climax at the start of level fucking two. What the player gets instead is a paper-thin context from a load-screen briefing and a command: open fire on these innocent people, and go on a terroristic rampage. And when it's done, you get shot in the head and die. You play as a specific character for one level and then you're capped in the face. How much more disposable can your own in-game avatar be?

Compare that to the heaviest moment in the first Modern Warfare: halfway through the game, after you've followed this American soldier through to a climax in the Middle East, you die. You die. It was the biggest moment in gaming in 2007, and the biggest moment in 2009 is the bungled result of a very difficult development schedule dropped on IW. There wasn't time to make the player gain the trust of the evil Soviet guy, but IW couldn't spare the game this seriously heavy moment. Thanks for the mix-up, Activision. Now when anyone wants to explore the 24-esque theme of "doing horrible things to save more people," gamers will have this disappointing precedent to look back to. When will the core game publishers realize that short-term schedules impact the long-run quality of their product and their industry?

-Mos Def, The Ecstatic: I admit, I haven't given it an honest listen yet, but it's every bit as odd as other Mos Def albums. Maybe a little too out there.

-John Mayer, Battle Studies: Mayer's at his best when he's singing about things other people don't think about or can't put into words easily. His first and third albums were great for this reason, not because they were good music. So now he's adopted the most common theme of all, love, and done an entire album around it. It just seems like a waste of talent. At least two songs borrow their structures from tracks from Continuum. And what is Taylor Swift doing in my John Mayer?

PS: The cover of Crossroads is seriously lame. If Mayer is a young Eric Clapton in terms of guitar virtuosity, why isn't he showing it off here?