Paul Haine | Tales from the city
Games
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Game On
Currently in London at the Science Museum, there lives a beautiful thing. It is Game On, an exhibition that purports to explore the history, technology and culture of computer games but is basically an excuse to play Xevious with all the free credits you can eat. Starting with Space War on the Vectrex and ending with Wii Sports, it’s also how I imagine my house would look, if I could only disregard time, money, space and reality.
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In-Game Music
Modern videogames do not provide ringtone-friendly music. It was Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children that started this particular train of thought more than a year ago, so bear with me; there’s a point in the film when a character’s mobile phone goes off, and the ringtone it uses is the opening part of the fanfare music that appears in most Final Fantasy games. For the uninitiated among you, you can listen to that music, in glorious MIDI, here.
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Cost and Effect, II
Last week saw me ramble on for far too long about Apple product updates, leaving me with no space to talk about the Nintendo announcements that took place around the same time. Unlike Apple, Nintendo didn’t release news of any new or updated products, just launch details — dates and prices — for the Wii, something they’ve held off doing for some time now.
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Gaming for Girls
As I seem to be making the confession genre on Joeblade my own special domain, here’s another: I’m a girl. And I really, really enjoy playing computer games. (Come closer so I can whisper in your ear: Sometimes, I even play them on my own.)
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Bandai Wonderswan SwanCrystal
It haunts me. To this day, it haunts me. The SwanCrystal, the third and final iteration of Bandai’s Wonderswan handheld console, is precisely the sort of hardware that a hardcore gaming nerd such as myself ought to possess — displaying it proudly alongside his Hello Kitty Dreamcast and his Sam Coupé — but having owned one for only a few months, I re-sold it in a fit of financial realism.
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Nintendo name their console 'Wii'
So, though I am technically supposed to be spending my time on something else at the moment, I felt unable to let this one pass by unmentioned. As you may have heard already, seeing as the internet exploded with the news last Thursday, Nintendo have revealed that their next console, previously known as the Revolution, will, in actual fact, be known as Wii.
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Nintendogs Revisited
I thought I’d just update you all on the state of my puppies, Buckley the beagle, Titus the King Charles spaniel and Cardigan the dachshund; they are dead. I killed them.
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Nintendogs
I had a dog, once upon a time. He was a cocker spaniel and he was called Jasper, and when he was a puppy he was friendly, loved to meet new people and was full of life. As he got older he grew into a cantankerous, arthritic old bastard, attacking anybody he didn’t know at first, then eventually turning on those he did know until only my mother could control him. Eventually, he was put to sleep.
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Game Boy Micro
It’s a bit of hardware that doesn’t do anything my DS doesn’t do already. It has a tiny screen, it’s so small that it may cause my hands to cramp into tiny little claws, it’s more expensive than a GBA SP (which would also play Gameboy Color and Gameboy games) and is essentially just another cynical attempt by Nintendo to flog the same ageing product again to the remaining few that don’t already own it in one form or another. Naturally, I had to get one.
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That Nintendo Controller
So, Nintendo finally release details of their much-hyped revolutionary game controller that will accompany the Revolution console, the successor to the Gamecube. Some people hate it; naturally, I love it.
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I Own No DS Games
I’ve been going on another of my periodic possession purges recently, clearing out the clutter on ebay and giving away whatever doesn’t sell. The two DS games I owned — Mario 64 and Project Rub — were both great games, but I’d completed them and they were just sitting there, so off they went.
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The Next Generation
Each of The Big Three have now released images and details of their next consoles. Microsoft appear to be aiming at the hardcore online gamer, Sony at the home media centre owner and Nintendo at the Existing Nintendo Fan. So far, so predictable.
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The PSP and Me
It’s hard not to like the PSP; you just have to look at it running. I’ve seen many handheld consoles in my time, the original Gameboy, the Sega GameGear, the NeoGeo Pocket, the Bandai Wonderswan, right up to the GBA SP and the DS, and some of them have been acceptable and some have been arse-ugly but the PSP…well, it’s clearly got the iPod gene.
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Nintendo DS
It’s often been noted that Nintendo appears to hate the general public, in particular that part of the general public that actually buys its products. It can be difficult to be a Nintendo fan, relying almost entirely upon them for your drip-feed of games and always ending up with strangely featureless hardware.
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Bongo Bong
The embittered old cynic in me is deeply, deeply ashamed. The old cynic watched in horror as I entered Game, stylishly sauntered over to the Gamecube demonstration pod, checked to make sure there weren’t any attractive, single blonde girls (with black-rimmed glasses) watching, and with the minimum of fuss, started whacking the bongos.
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20 Minutes of Online Gaming
Online gaming, as far as I’ve been concerned, is just something that happens to other people. There’s been a few reasons as to why I’ve never delved into this particular gaming nook; lack of decent hardware, firewalls, only able to go online with my mobile phone, dislike of Counter-Strike, owning Nintendo hardware, and so on. Preferring the likes of Final Fantasy VII over Quake II meant that for the most part, gaming has been a solitary pursuit, and that was fine by me.
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Some Thoughts on Pikmin
As noted previously, Nintendo owns me. When it comes to the Gamecube, I accept that it doesn’t have as many games available as the Xbox or PS2, but what it lacks in 3rd party support, it more than makes up for with the quality of its 1st party releases.
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The Xbox and I
We all have our weaknesses. For some, it’s drink. For others, it’s chocolate. For me, it’s consoles. I love them, I want to own them all, and it’s a testament to my own will power that I don’t own them all. They’d bankrupt me, given half the chance. It’s not even really about the games that come on them; I owned, for a while, a Bandai Crystal Wonderswan, an obscure little Japanese handheld. I owned the grand total of one game for it, Final Fantasy IV, all in Japanese, which I can’t read. A pointless purchase, but I wept real tears when I sold it on to someone else.
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