Wii are the Future.

I have been reading for over a year how the Wii is a fad and that the novelty of its unique motion sensitive controller will wear off. Video game experts “in the know” repeat over and over this old chestnut and state that either the Xbox 360 or the PS3, depending on their personal favorite, is going to “win” in the next-gen war. The theory is that because the Wii cannot compete against the graphic and processing prowess of the Xbox 360 and PS3, that the Wii’s huge sales numbers are going to begin to fall as gamers move back to “traditional” video games.

In my mind, this past weekend proved that the people “in the know” don’t know what they are talking about. And it is because they are too close to the industry as it was, to see where the industry is going. Anna and I hosted about 13 members of her family for a small weekend family reunion. During this time, it seemed our poor little Wii was never turned off. After countless games of baseball, tennis, snowboarding, bowling, billiards and tennis, both Anna’s brother (who hasn’t owned a gaming console since the Atari) and her uncle (who has never owned a video gaming console) have decided that they are going to get their very own Wii.



What the industry experts don’t realize is the intense appeal of a gaming system that is obviously fun to the non-gaming public. These family members would never have been enticed to play a traditional video game with people sitting around holding a controller pushing buttons, but the wild gyrations involved in playing a Wii game are irresistible. Video game pundits just can not grasp the fact that Nintendo has effectively tapped an untapped market that the conventional wisdom did not believe existed.






Coming in the spring of 2008 we are going to see the release of Wii Fit which will include everything from aerobics to yoga poses to muscle conditioning, and it will even measure your BMI. It is titles like these that will persuade people to purchase a Wii that never would have dreamed of buying a 360 or PS3.

This means that hardcore fanboys are not going to be the only audience in town. Right now the average production cost of a traditional first person shooter is in excess of $50 million dollars. If you aren’t a first person shooter or sports fan, then console gaming really wasn’t up your alley. Things are going to change. With such a large audience in place that doesn’t really care about these type of games, you are going to see a decrease in the amount of resources a video game publisher will be willing to invest in these sorts of titles, when they could concentrate on a cheaper to produce and more widely accepted title for the Wii. I recently read a quote from an EA Games executive that they can have four to five teams working on various Wii games for the same cost as one PS3 game.

For me personally this revolution is a wonderful thing. I don’t really care about Halo or Madden ’08, but love games like Civilization, SimCity and Alpha Centari. In the past these types of games only appeared on a computer and usually required a top of the line computer to run them effectively. That all started to change today. Will Wright, the legendary creator SimCity, announced that his newest project called Spore will be released on the Wii. The interview that announced this wonderful news quoted Mr. Wright as stating that “Somebody asked me what I thought next generation meant and what about the PlayStation 3 was next generation. The only next gen system I've seen is the Wii – the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement, but the Wii feels like a major jump – not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic. In some sense I see the Wii as the most significant thing that's happened, at least on the console side, in quite a while.”

Spore is my idea of a dream game, the game allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its existence as a multicellular organism to a spacefaring sapient creature. The game is mindboggling in its scope. For example, just in the spacefaring section, you will be able to beam down your creature to interact directly with an alien species. You may interbreed different species genetically, or place a "monolith" (in the style of 2001: A Space Odyssey) on a planet, triggering evolution of intelligent life, then come back later to see what has evolved. Also, Will Wright explained that there would be over half a million different stars, each one having its own planets, more than anyone could visit in a lifetime. If your console is connected to the internet, many of these worlds will be populated with creatures and civilizations created by other players. The creatures, vehicles, and buildings the player can create will be uploaded automatically to a central database, catalogued and rated for quality (based on how many users have downloaded the object or creature in question), and then re-distributed to populate other players' games. As is traditional with most of Will Wright's games, the game never presents the player with an absolute ending and the Space Phase continues for as long as the player wishes.

Viva La Revolucion!

Gratuitous Cuteness

Just a couple of picture to fulfill your daily quota of cuteness.





And for good measure, this is the license plate that I designed for the back of Sophie's car that you saw a few posts back. Do you get the joke?

Tomb of Horrors!

The only thing worse than a bad president, is a bad DM. The picture below also explains Iraq. In the entire history of gaming there has never been a roleplaying group that does what the Dungeon Master thinks they ought to do. Why should the Iraqis be any different?



By the way, America just rolled a 1 on credibility.

The Humanity!

Last night while innocently reading the Freeman Academy newsletter, I received a shock to the system. The Juniors of Freeman Academy are sponsoring a young girl from Bolivia and a single sentence sent my mind reeling.

"Her birth date is February 7, 1991; the same age as our class."

1991?!?!?!?!

Juniors in High School were born in 1991? What?!?

I don't know what to say. If this does not shock you, then you fall within three categories. Either you are too young to understand my shock, too old to understand or have internalized the reality of your age FAR better than I have.

I turned 30 at the beginning of the month and was amazed how little it effected me, but this simple fact is almost impossible for my mind to accept.

Now that I think about, it is probably just that the kids in Freeman are all geniuses and have skipped about five or six grade levels.

Yeah thats it.

Blow Up The TV! Throw Away The Paper!

I have come to a decision that many of you (including myself) are not going to believe. I no longer care about the 2008 Presidential race. Really. In the foreseeable future I am going to conscientiously tune out all of the rhetoric, spin and propaganda.

The mental turmoil that has been slowly building within me has reached the point that I simply have to throw in the towel. How the the nomination process works, since I live in Kentucky, makes my vote and voice worth less than a city-wide straw poll in Iowa or New Hampshire.

You have to understand that I haven't reached this point because I don't care about the world, my country or even politics in general. In fact, it is because I care about those things too much that I have decided to tune out. It all started with an online calculator. This calculator asks whether you support various issues and the level of importance that you place upon each issue. Your results are then compared to the various presidential candidates' stances and you are given the candidate that most matches your beliefs. It was a foregone conclusion that I should be supporting one of the "extreme" candidates that has no real shot at the nomination, much less the actual Presidency. As predicted, when I got the results back it showed that I should be supporting Dennis Kucinich with a 93.10% match.

How does that lead to me no longer giving a shit about the presidential race? You see, I am becoming more and more worried about the direction we are headed as a country and it is becoming abundantly clear that I can't do a damn thing about it. Hillary Clinton is looking more and more likely to receive the Democratic nomination. I have several reasons that I can not support Hillary (e.g. Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton dynasty where as of TODAY 40% of Americans have never lived without a Bush or a Clinton in the White House) but my primary reason for opposing Hillary is that our country needs healing. George Bush has been one of the most divisive Presidents in our history. Almost half the country loathes the man and this hatred has polarized our political process on all levels. The Attorney General race in Kentucky is an excellent example of how far this partisan polarization has come. The last thing this country needs is four more years of a person in the White House that half the country is going to hate. I don't care that I will be on the other side of the fence this time. This is a road that will lead to a very bleak future.

Because of the above reasons and the strong tendency I have towards pragmatism, I have been supporting Barack Obama. In fact Anna and I attended a fund raiser for Obama here in Lexington.



But I am tired. I am tired of trying to talk people into supporting a candidate that isn't my best match politically. Most of all, I am tired of the fact that even if I do convince them, it won't amount to a hill of beans. By the time we in Kentucky get to vote on a nominee, the process is over for all practical purposes. Whomever has won the earlier states has enough delegates to secure the nomination.

This isn't all. In the spirit of "Blog Action Day", none of the candidates (including Kucinich) has taken Al Gore up on his challenge to make Global Warming a top priority issue. This issue has to be addressed today, not tomorrow. And my party isn't giving the issue more than token air time.

So I am quitting. I am going to concentrate on getting the city council to install speed bumps on my street. I am going to become active in my neighborhood association. I am going to press my local officials on keeping their promises about proposed neighborhood centers. But I am going to quit caring on whom becomes president because I just can't take it anymore. I will vote in the primary and general election and hope like hell that our President isn't Fred Thompson, but if it is...oh well.

If you are interested in taking the candidate calculator that I spoke of earlier, here is the link. And, old habits die hard, so if you do take the test, would you be so kind to post the results in the comments section. I may not care, but I am curious.

Update!!

My vacation from caring about Presidential politics lasted a whole 24 hours. As many of you are aware, Stephen Colbert has thrown his hat in the ring for the 2008 election. This is really exciting news. Mainly because I think Colbert's candidacy is going to offer an excellent contrast to the other candidates by showing how little difference exists between his absurd parody of political rhetoric and the actual political rhetoric espoused by the "real" candidates.

In fact, I feel so strong that his candidacy is a good thing for the country that I have written him a letter offering my services in order to get his name on the ballot in Kentucky. I suggested that his message in Kentucky should be that since Kentucky's primary election is so late in the cycle, you might as well for vote for Colbert because nobody in the nation gives a shit who wins here.

Just Call Me Cassandra

You might as well start calling me Cassandra with as much good as this blog post is going to do but I am writing it anyway. I am currently reading Lawrence Wright's excellent book The Looming Tower and also this week we got Seymour Hersh's new article on the Bush Administrations push for war with Iran. Taken together it has gotten me thinking about what might happen if we did indeed begin a bombing campaign.

For the sake of arguement, let's not discuss IF we are going to attack Iran, but concentrate on what the ramifications of such an attack might be. If we accept Hersh's reporting that the planning now is moving towards a more "surgical" strike against Republican Guard targets (many of which are in the urban area of Tehran), what would the Iranian response be?

I think we can safely assume that Iran would use their numerous missles to attack the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq training camps inside Iraq that we are protecting with American military forces. Iran could simply make the arguement that they are protecting their national security interests based upon America making the exact same arguement for invading Iraq in the first place.

Remember also that Mahmoud Ahmandinejad has said on numerous occasions that he feels that oil is being sold way too cheap. If he indeed believes this to be true, wouldn't an attack on his soil provide a great justification for driving up the price of oil? I can hear some of you ask, "How could he substantially drive up the price of oil?" Pretty easily. Take a look at the map below.



The Strait of Hormuz is the only path in and out of the Persian Gulf and if you look closely at the map you will see that Iran controls at least 75% of the land surronding the strait. Sink one or two supertankers and the next thing you know oil is trading at $200 a barrel. That would make the price of gas at the pump to be about $6 to $8 a gallon. Remember as gas rises, so does EVERYTHING else. America today is completely dependent upon cheap gasoline. Approximately 50% to 75% of the cost of food at the grocery store is based upon the cost of transporting that food.

I had an anthropology teacher that told us that UK did a study and found that without regular shipments arriving by truck, Lexington would have enough food to feed its citizens for 72 hours. If new shipments couldn't come in, there would be no more food. Don't believe it? Next time you are at the store look at the shelves. Imagine if you wanted to buy enough of any particular good to last you for several months and how much of it you would buy. Now imagine what happens if everyone in the store also wanted to buy the same amount of that same good. Modern grocery stores don't have a back stock room. What you see on the shelves is all they have.

I will let you decide for yourself what that does to the American economy.

We haven't even gotten to the worst. Remember that Hezbollah is financed and primarilly controlled by Iran. They are considered the most organized and dangerous terrorist organization in the world. We know for a fact that they have 1000s of cells in Europe and Asia, and it is believed that they have numerous cells in America. If Iran unleashes Hezbollah in Europe, Asia and America, the economies that have already taken a big hit, get hit even harder.

So, at present we have gas prices double or triple current levels, the economy is collapsing, people can barely feed their families, huge unemployment, people losing their homes due to spiraling credit card debt and mortgages they can no longer afford and a strong possibility of major terrorist attacks on US soil. I don't think it is too far a stretch to assume that there will be some pretty substantial civil unrest.

Given the above possibilities, let us not forget that the Bush Administration has gotten rid of Posse Comitatus, the prohibition of US military forces to police American citizens, given Halliburton subsidary KBR contracts to build detention camps in America, and steps have been taken to allow the imposition of martial law in America.

Do I think that everything above is going to happen? No, I do not. But the fact that it is possible is terrifying. The Bush administration keeps stating that prefer diplomay with Iran over military action, but how can you have diplomacy when you refuse to talk with someone.

Monday, Monday. Ba-da Ba-da-da-da.

Today I turned 30. I am amazed on how little impact this birthday has had upon my psyche other than reminiscing about the last few years and remembering how lucky I am. I thought I would share with you some of the things that I am thankful for.



My beautiful bride. Everyday I am reminded me how she loves me despite my "peculiarities", opened my mind to worlds I never knew existed and brings a joy to my life that makes me one of the luckiest bastards on the planet.



My marriage. On the surface this may appear to be a duplication of the above, but it is not. Our marriage is more special than my feeble attempts at wordsmithing can bare. I am not going to attempt to describe it in words. Just know that I am very thankful for this wonderful union.



Riley. He is now 9 years old and the first glimmers are beginning to appear of the adult that he will become. I could not have asked for a more loving, intelligent and curious son. No one could be a better big brother. Oh yeah, and he has finally started to enjoy Lord of the Rings. Whew.



Sophie. Just look at her and tell me how anyone could not fall in love.



Friends. The past 30 years would have been a complete bore if it hadn't been for those individuals that have made it more fun than can be described on a public blog.



Good times and their memories. Just look at the picture and tell me that it doesn't look fun.



So turning 30 isn't really a big deal. Maybe if I had sat on my hands for the last 30 years, I would be freaking out, but as it is, I know that I have had an amazing life. Are there things I regret? You bet. Is there things that I would do differently? Of course. But here is the thing. I love who I am and the life I have. The past 30 years (the good and bad) have made me who I am, and for that I am grateful.