Wii, Not for Mii

We procured our Wii in a middle of the night raid on Walmart more than a year ago. It was all candy canes and lolly pops for the first few months and then we wanted a new game. The novelty of Wii Sports has a long tail, but the alternatives outside of it are slim and far between. We tried out Wii Play which was not a game, but an excuse to get another controller. Then it was on to Rayman Raving Rabbids which was fun, but had unresponsive controls on occasion. The dry spell that we braved next was trying, but rewarded us with Mario Galaxy.

Post Galaxy we have yet to buy a game for coming up on a year this November. Turkey dinner games like Zelda and Mario titles are few, while half assed shovelware titles like Carnival Games and Ninjabread Man come out weekly. I can't fathom paying forty some dollars for titles that are essentially waggle based money grabs. Especially when Castle Crashers is fifteen dollars and big production games for the Xbox are sixty. Lack of quality titles on the system only serves to point out what appears to be the systems core flaw.

We were given a system with last gen graphics for the trade off of price and innovative controls. They delivered on price for sure, but have yet to deliver fully on the innovation. Beyond the waggle, point and object simulation systems released on day one there has been very little that is compelling enough to play. Third parties are flooding the market with garbage and Nintendo has no system to filter the wheat from the chaff. Why should third parties struggle to find new uses for Nintendo's controllers when the first party stopped trying a while ago? At an install base of over ten million there is little incentive to change.

Nintendo's solution to date has been to ignore the core gamers (i.e. me) and focus on selling peripherals to their customer base of soccer moms and geriatrics. The latest innovation they have come up with makes the wiimote more accurate. Well unless they plan to send one in the mail to every customer who has a wiimote (send me four please) then they are just wasting their time. Why would anyone take time and resources to produce a game that in theory would be more fit for "hardcore" gamers when the market has been fractured. Sounds good Nintendo, let me go convince my wife to sell the dust collector next to our TV. Good luck in the future when the Wii2 isn't selling because grandma is content to play her original.

Chrome Fail?
New browsers get me excited for some reason, especially from companies I view as tech community aware. So when Google announced Chrome and I read through the feature set and their new approach to web browsing and got excited to try it out. The comic helped too.

Well seeing is believing and after a brief test drive with Chrome last night I don't believe. The first thing I did was essentially a load test to populate the new tabs page with my most visited sites. It slowed to a crawl, then to a stop and then to a crash with just ten tabs open. Now the comic parody makes a little more sense and I a reluctant to go back to it with Firefox just a click away. It is easy to make the "it's still in beta" argument, but gmail has been in beta since Jesus was born.