Author Archives: "The Administrator"

Candidate, eXtreme!

Since everyone is throwing around amendments, why not lower the voting age? I remember being in high school and debating this candidate versus that candidate. I’m not sure if those conversations were as thoughtful as they would be now, but I can say that it would be interesting. MTV’s rock the vote campaign might actually matter. Political candidates with pop star endorsements. Big Soda would join Big Tobacco and Big Oil.

On the other hand, how can you reach out to a constituency whose parents can ground them so that they can’t reach the polls? It’s an interesting idea, one worth thinking about.

About right

Junk mail is something that we deal with on a daily basis. Whether it’s putting envelopes in a shredder or moving email to the trash bin, it’s a task that is necessary and a waste of time.

Which is why I have my junk mail folder automated to delete email after one month. That’s enough time for people to ask me, “Hey, did you get my email?” Then, I can wade through the viagra offers to see if they were lost in the deluge. I appear to have reached an equilibrium point with my junk folder. It sorts out the correct mail, and deletes the month old items. For the last few weeks, I’ve received the same number of emails that have been deleted.

The number of unread emails in my junk mail folder: 666

Eh, okay, I guess I will

Like any good web netizen info zombie, I pass along the McDonald’s i-am-asian.com infovirus.

Julietz80: wow…
Julietz80: I mean… wow
Julietz80: ~sigh~
Julietz80: hey, at least they noticed us
Praxis Loki: Y’know, Julie, even though our peoples have traditionally hated each other, I feel like putting all that history behind us, and weaving the threads of our cultures into the everyday fabric of everyday life–let’s go to McDonald’s!
Julietz80: the cultural glue that binds us, made with chicken by-products.

I think the time is right for appropriate i-am-<insert race here>.com and i-am-overweight.com parody sites. I just did a quick search and more than a few names are still available.

Behind the Failure

Some of you may remember my fondness for Nokia’s portable gaming device. It looks like everyone was right, and Nokia was wrong. Now that it’s a complete failure, opinions are starting to trickle out from larger game developers. Even Nokia’s talked about some “difficulties.”

I predict that either Forbes or Fortune is going to have a “What Went Wrong” article about Nokia’s foray into portable interactive entertainment. Undoubtedly, this article will be well researched and will probably contain an interview or two with the head of the N-Gage development team, more than a few graphs comparing the sales of the N-Gage in comparison to the GameBoy Advance, and a reference to the millions of Atari 2600 cartridges of ET: the Extra Terrestrial buried somewhere in the New Mexico desert. In the meantime, I’m going to state the obvious.

I’m not going to blame Nokia for trying something ahead of its time. I am going to blame them for abysmal design and poor market research. A focus group might have helped. The N-Gage design looks like it’s trying too hard. Sure, it’s black, it’s shiny, but it’s aimed at the wrong crowd. This isn’t a $3,000 stereo receiver. It is a game playing device that happens to be a phone. Nokia marketed the device as something for “hardcore gamers,” people who live, breathe and eat games. People who play games for hours and hours. The truth of the matter is that the N-Gage is a device that is at best, awkward to play games on.

If we look at Nintendo’s offering, we get a device that has a large screen, and an easy to use controller. As soon as you put it in your hand you know that you’ll be able to play games with it. Having played with the N-Gage demo unit for a few minutes, I can attest that the ergonomics are piss poor. Raised bumps on a numeric keypad do not make “A” and “B” buttons. The joypad is a circle with vague raised, curved sections defining the cardinal directions. Microsoft moved away from this type of joypad after their initial run and changed their production model to one with a cross. This gives the player a clear tactile definition of up-down-left-right. They also made it smaller, because it was so damn big in the first place, but that’s another issue.

Just looking at the N-Gage screen is bad enough. You’re not going to want to play games on it, nor are you going to be able to. There’s just no way. There is also the issue of having to remove the battery before you can change the cartridge. The truly “hardcore” gamers like to play more than one game when they leave the house. They, like the rest of the American consumer whores, enjoy a little variety every now and again.

Don’t get me started on the whole “sidetalking” issue.

A limited production beta device would have revealed these inherent ergonomic and usage flaws before spending hundreds of millions on a gaming deck that nobody would buy. All that Nokia accomplished by rushing to market was creating an inferior product, and a disenchanted user base. Congratulations Nokia, on creating the Ford Edsel of portable gaming devices.

I think the far future is wireless, community gaming. There’s a rising trend in console games that support online play. Eventually, that trend will move to the portable gaming devices. People are tired of playing <Ed. Note: *cough*> by themselves. As we continue to migrate our social lives away from landline phones and wires in general, there will be a niche for people that want to play games on the metro against other people. It’s the future.

However, that future will not include the N-Gage.

Don't mess with that guy

Lego is able to capture the imagination in ways that no “conventional” toys can. I remember when I was younger, building toys that my parents wouldn’t buy for me. In a lot of ways, they were superior. I built them. I added on special features, usually transformation into a secondary vehicle form, or the extra escape pod/shuttlecraft (which was always really easy to “dock” with the main ship).

I made the Battlestar Galactica and led a “rag tag fugitive fleet” against the Cylon Tyranny. I made a Thundertank, a VENOM SwitchBlade, and more than a few iterations of the TIE fighter. Probably the best part of Legos is their built in “exploding damage” action. As imaginative (or derivative) as I was, Legos did not inspire my imagination as much as they did this artist.

Awesome.