Good news everyone /Hubert Farnsworth

Well, good news for anyone who gives a rot about our podcast. It turns out that we don't need to re-record our 100th episode. However I still had some snags along the way, so only today can I actually get down to editing the thing hardcore. So hopefully you should see it up after this weekend. Is it worth waiting for? Well, it's just us rambling as we always do, cussing and yelping and listening to Tony berate his wife, who berates him right the hell back and then some. So yeah, it's worth waiting for. In the meantime, keep sending in your questions. I am leaning on NOT recording tomorrow to give myself a few extra hours to work things out, but who knows. Send stuff in anyway: mailbag AT trigames DOT net.

So much for quick standardization.

Last week I commented briefly (or not-so-briefly, depending on how long a two-paragraph comment seems to you) about how Wii Motion Plus, a technology I personally find great, needs to be standardized and handled correctly lest it simply become wasted potential. Then I gave them credit for at least bundling it in with Wii Sports Resort, thereby automatically putting it in the hands of several consumers, instead of just settling with hanging blisterpacks of the thing up on store shelves for people to buy randomly. It wasn't ideal, but at least by bundling it in with something, this takes it one step closer to either (a) bundling the thing into systems or (b) incorporating the tech into future Wii remotes.

Turns out, it might not matter much if you want to see it in your favorite third party's games. They're pretty pissed, it seems, and I can completely understand why: Nintendo kept this thing mum from them.

Excuse me, for a second, while I blow my second and third gaskets.

All right. Now that I've calmed down, I can understand a few things:

1) Nintendo doesn't "have to" do anything, least of all make its third party publishers happy. People are buying Wiis and Nintendo DSes in droves. Wii Fit is already hard to find. Wii Play is still friggin' in the top ten in NPD sales every. Single. Month. Most of us aren't Nintendo's market at this point -- the people who buy Wii Play, Wii Fit, and other FIRST PARTY products are. (Well, there's that little thing about Guitar Hero III... but I digress.)

2) Nintendo is making money off of item (1) hand over fist. Wiis sell at a profit as opposed to a loss. If all Nintendo did was sell a Wii and a copy of Wii Play, without selling any other titles, third party or otherwise, it'd still be making some semblance of money (though of course that's not the ideal situation).

3) Also off of item (1), we can derive that people will buy Wii Sports Resort any-friggin-way. If Nintendo never so much as got a third party developer involved in its business, the mainstream market would still likely have its hands on Wii Motion Plus attachments everywhere.

Ok. Now, take items (1), (2) and (3). Ball them up in your fist and -- are you watching? repeat after me! -- throw that **** out the window.

I'm betting that enough of you Wii owners are like me in that you want good third party offerings on your Wii. Think about something like The Force Unleashed with Wii Motion Plus, for instance. Think about another game like Zak and Wiki, now MORE accurate and immersive than ever before. How about a baseball game that tracks the height and rotation of your swing?

But now, we have to rely on third parties to not be angry to the point where they decide not to develop for the thing. Look at the quote from the ArsTechnica blog I linked to:

"We asked several third-party Wii developers about the Wii Motion Plus, and the general feeling was one of annoyance and betrayal. None of them said they had any advance notice about the peripheral, and we were told that they were as surprised as everyone else when Nintendo revealed its existence on stage," GameInformer is reporting. "That lack of prior notice means that, aside from Nintendo's own roster of games, users won't likely see any support for the device for at least six to nine months."

Now, perhaps the thing isn't coming out for six to nine months anyway -- Wii Sports Resort, with which Wii Motion Plus is debuting, comes out in Spring 2009. I'm not so worried about the time frame quoted as I am in the mindset of the third parties who feel annoyed and betrayed. Nintendo is in a much better place than Sega was during the Saturn launch, but nevertheless it smells very much like that situation. Remember that day? When Sega surprise-announced the availability of the Saturn had been pushed forward to the day of that very same announcement? "Hey guess what! You get this early!" But in doing so it only had a short list of retailers, and those who were left out were pissed.

This feels kinda like that. Oh hey -- we're working on this thing that, you know, you could have used for The Force Unleashed or at least made plans to, but yeah we didn't think you needed to know until now. What's that? You're almost done with the game and it's coming out in the fall and had you had advance notice you might have held off and put in some Wii Motion Plus action in there? Oh that's okay; don't worry about it. We'll still be selling tons of Wii Play this holiday season. What'd you say? That doesn't help you at all? That's fine -- we don't really care anyway.

I admit to making mountains out of molehills when problems like this arise. But looking at it from the developer's perspective, this is like a slap to the face. It feels disrespectful. Doing the right thing could only have helped Nintendo's success even more. Furthermore, it would have made ME happy in knowing that the company responsible for some of my favorite software decided to do the right thing and not succumb to its own arrogance (refer to Penny Arcade comic again). Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe in the end, third parties -- despite their anger -- will see Wii Sports Resort sell and realize that they have to hurry up and do something. Though, really, wouldn't it be nice if Nintendo had given them some preliminary dev kits by now? They wouldn't have to "hurry", leading to better games, and sooner, instead of either getting a rushed piece of crap carnival minigame collection not far after Spring 2009 or having to wait until 2010 to see what -- say -- Ubisoft could do with the thing.

I'm going back to my trailer.

Thought bubble: Would it be stretching to call the vaporized Phantom console "ahead of its time"?

I just read that THQ will be offering its catalog on GameTap, Turner Broadcasting's videogame digital distribution service. That includes Titan Quest, whose "Gold" version I had not two weeks ago purchased off of Steam for $20. Steam, for anyone who's been living under a rock, is Half Life developer Valve's own digital distribution service. The differences between the two services include games offered and pricing model (GameTap is subscription-based and offers some older console games; Steam is pay-per-game and offers only PC titles), but the message is the same: "Welcome to the age of gaming where you don't need to leave the house to get product."

The age of digital distribution is a fascinating one in which we can get what we want on-demand just by lifting a finger or two. For a long while, though, some of us remained skeptical that we'd see a reliable conduit for delivering our beloved videogames. We countered the iTunes and HBO On Demand arguments with the simple issues of size and bandwidth. MP3s are a few megabytes a pop while games can fill nine-gigabyte DVDs. Movies are (a) streamed, and (b) delivered over the same dedicated line used by our cable provider, not via the internet; games have to process a motherlode of variables.

Yet with Steam and GameTap, we're seeing two robust, high-quality services that manage your downloads efficiently -- and don't require you to install a single game once you've downloaded it, because it'll install itself. With Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, Sony's Playstation Network, and Wii's Virtual Console and WiiWare services, this same "instantly-available, no fuss, no muss" mentality carries over to our living room home consoles. Now we're seeing glimpses of a future where we won't even need intense hardware to play games that stream in from a server and run out of browser windows, with Quake Live and Instant Action providing a hands-on look at what we can look forward to. People have already been able to play Lair on their PSPs -- albeit not perfectly -- from the comfort of their toilets, thanks to the Playstation 3's Remote Play functionality. Can you imagine former Sony executive Phil Harrison's statement about a disc-less Playstation 4 -- made as recently as last year but still sneered at (I plead guilty as well) -- coming true, not only with regards to discs, but maybe hardware as well? Could we see a future where we need not buy hardware on which to play our games, but merely a simple box that connects to a remote server which does all the processing for us?

I've thinking about all of this on and off again, and in a fit of crow-eating I always find myself tracing these marvels back to one oft-mocked, failed endeavor: the Phantom console from Infinium Labs, now named Phantom Entertainment. Perhaps you've heard of it (no, the first line of this editorial doesn't count). Way back in 2002, a brash man by the name of Tim Roberts founded Infinium and announced to the world that he'd spearhead the development and distribution of a console that couldn't accept discs -- nay, wouldn't need discs. Everything was available online and ready to download for a subscription fee. Oh, and hey, it wouldn't require you to manually install the software you downloaded. You'd be capturing the essence of consoles for a seamless PC gaming experience.

Of course back then, the entire thing was a laughingstock. Quite a few people, myself included, didn't believe that the plan was feasible. Like so many other shortsighted dissenters, my gripe was that I was unconvinced that someone would want to sit through the hours it took to download a gigabytes-large game (...uh, Titan Quest found its home on my hard drive in 120 minutes while I was asleep, and furthermore it installed itself...) when they could drive to the store and get the game in far less time (...erm, have you seen gas prices lately?...) and have a physical disc in hand that wasn't contingent on a hard drive staying healthy (...see, Steam offers backups you can burn to disc...).

Rewind for a second and look at those parenthetical statements. For all the derision that it received back then, the Phantom console's completely disc-less plan has actually come to fruition in some capacity, and it works incredibly well. It's just that it's not coming from Phantom. That's not to say that the Phantom should have been a guaranteed success. Not all of its detractors were necessarily worried about the digital-distribution-only scheme. For instance, some intrepid investigators came up with highly suspicious findings when trying to get a closer glimpse of the company. It was also easy to see that, from a hardware standpoint, it just wouldn't hold up to the demands of the constantly shifting PC gaming landscape. After all, with such meager specs being offered up-front, how often would you have to open up your Phantom to get it re-jiggered for the latest, hottest games? Could you even open the thing in the first place, considering the whole "console experience" idea?

Yet, regardless of its failures as a hardware device, the concept that drove it is alive and kicking. No, Tim Roberts and company shouldn't be praised for highly flawed execution and lack of foresight in other areas. To be sure, it's not as if Infinium Labs was the only company that saw a future in digital distribution, either. It is, however, interesting to note how the driving force behind a failure as massive as the Phantom has become as successful and popular as it is today. Perhaps with the backing of brighter minds and a more effective, well-timed plan, we'd be seeing Phantom consoles in living rooms today instead of the empty shell of a product we're left with.

No matter -- the Phantom's spirit (is that redundant or what?) unwittingly lives on in our broadband-connected Xbox 360s, Playstation 3s, Wiis and PCs. For all of the things this joke of a console had going against it, the Phantom got that one thing right, and there's probably a grumpy, unshaven entrepreneur named Tim Roberts sitting in a corner mumbling to himself, "I told you so."

I'm predestined to never climb out of this pit of quicksand. It's not so much that the backlog grows at an alarming rate but more that I keep doing things to put it on the backburner.

Recently, I finished Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. It's a game I enjoyed quite a bit, though I found myself agreeing with some of Aaron's contentions -- namely that the cast of characters left me missing the people I encountered during the original Phoenix Wright trilogy. But hey -- I finished it, so that gets scratched off the backlog. My Etrian Odyssey 2 review was just over a week ago, and I just turned in my review for Wonder World Amusement Park (hint: save thine cash). So what do I do? Go back to Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin and finish it, as dictated by my backlog schedule? Pick up Devil May Cry and try to finish THAT, also dictated by my backlog schedule?

No. How about, put in the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney just because I missed the old characters?

How's that for an excuse to procrastinate? Oh, and mind you, I'm also leveling up my characters in Final Fantasy VI Advance in preparation for the final dungeon. Stupid thing is, I beat the damned thing like three times back in the SNES days. I could probably live without seeing this one to the end, or at least not putting off my backlog for this.

Here's another thing I did while I could have been catching up on my backlog -- see The Dark Knight. Of course, it was totally worth it...

Oh, also, an alert to our podcast fans: we may have to re-record episode 100. Something disastrous may have happened to one of our files. Yeah. The good news keeps on coming, right? Friggin' christ... *sigh*

My laptop is back. I scooped the sucker into my bag and took it to the office. The techie there discovered that it wasn't the hard drive, but the laptop chassis that was faulty. He plugged it into another chassis of the same model and the hard drive sprang to life. I guess the proprietary HDD connector got knocked asunder and just wouldn't read the drive anymore. Luckily, this means that all of my data is intact.

It also means that I can get back to editing podcasts during the week. I'm in the midst of editing Episode 100 and recording some video of the lame bag-o-deuce games we brought up for the 100th Episode Bonus Video. Sword of Vermilion video, here we come! Speaking of podcasts, we did not record today. I am on call for work, meaning that at any point during the day I could get a call from the office to go in and help test or fix something, which would take an unspecified amount of time. Better to just save it 'til next week.

So, E3. I saw so very little of it, because I had no internet access thanks to my dead laptop. I got a glut of info on Friday, and here's what's jumping out at me:

- The Conduit (Wii) - I don't think this game got much coverage outside of IGN. It's a first-person shooter on Wii, and in my opinion, it looks like quite a bit of fun. The controls look dead-on, though with the advent of Medal of Honor Heroes 2, no first-person shooter on Wii should ever come with shoddy controls. I mean, come on -- just learn something from the studios that do it right. (i.e. NOT the Red Steel team.) This game looks like one of the rare occasions in which a third party developer tries to push the Wii's graphics a bit. The environments look a little crappy, but the character models look pretty spiffy, for once using normal mapping -- or something that simulates normal mapping. Their details, then, end up popping off the screen pretty nicely. I expect the environments to get better as development continues, and I'll be a bit disappointed in the lack of effort if they don't.

- Final Fantasy XIII (X360) - Wow. What a big win for Microsoft. As I own a Playstation 3, I would have been able to play this either way -- but if there are any enhancements that come to the game by way of Xbox Live, of course that might sway my purchase decision. There's also the fact that my Playstation 3 sits in the living room, and I usually like playing videogames from the comfort of my bedroom so that my father or roommate can watch television as they please.

- God of War 3 (PS3) - Yeah, it's God of War. Yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to it. No, this wasn't a surprise and nor did I really care much about the trailer. It was like half a second long and just showed him being pissed off. The spoiled brat in me would have liked to see a little more.

- Wii MotionPlus (Wii) - Dual Shock. I hope Nintendo looks this up in the history books. Remember what happened? The original Playstation controller ended up getting completely dumped in favor of this puppy. The dual analog sticks presented a significant enhancement that designers could take advantage of. Splintering the market, though, was a risk. Do developers take the time to develop for a controller feature that not everyone would have? No matter -- by standardizing the Dual Shock as the PSone's controller, Sony ensured that this would become less and less of a worry. In this case, Wii MotionPlus is being bundled in with Wii Sports Resort. That's not the ideal situation, but it's better than what my skeptical side predicted Nintendo would do (sell standalone, and for some asinine price).

(Yeah, I'm taking two paragraphs on this. Sue me.) I'm not sold, though, on one of the Nintendo personnel's contention that "maybe it'd be best to keep the technology limited to a few games". I'm paraphrasing of course. But when I read that, the first thing that popped into my head was, "e-Reader". Remember that thing? Compatible with... how many games? What about back in the day -- Super Scope 6. Yeah. Besides, think of how beneficial Wii MotionPlus would be if used properly in games. Right now, a lot of people complain about the very vague approximation of your movements with the current WiiMote. I found the swordplay in Red Steel mostly dull and clumsy. What about those clumsy, unresponsive gestures that constitute "punching" in Wii Sports boxing? Now, fast forward to something like Top Spin 4, should this game ever surface. Think of it being played with Wii MotionPlus. Think about how much more responsive your top- or back-spin on the ball could be. Standardize this thing, Nintendo. If you're going to wait for a year before you do, at least make it affordable. And for chrissakes, don't make two games for it and let that be the end of it.

- Netflix (Xbox 360) - My sister has a Netflix subscription. I have XBL Gold. 'Nuff said. (For those who are still wondering, those who have XBL Gold and a Netflix subscription can use their Netflix account on their 360s without paying extra for the service.)

-Home (Playstation 3) - I'm not mentioning this because I'm excited about it, but rather because I felt sorry for those eager to hear SOMETHING about the software. Instead, there's a 30-second trailer and no release date. How much did they really progress on it? If a lot, they sure as hell didn't show it. Still, this isn't as bad as my biggest gripe, which as...

- Storage Solution, or lack therof (Wii) - A short story. Yesterday I went online with my Wii for the first time in months to do some WiiWare/VC shopping. I pick Lost Winds, but instead of being allowed to pay for it, I'm told to move my data onto an SD card. Wii, off. Mood, sullied. Yes, I have an SD card. Yes, I've moved data before. It's still immensely annoying, though. I was ready to play some of Lost Winds right then and there, and I really wasn't in a waiting mood. Now, if Nintendo let us play stuff from the SD card -- or if they had a mass storage solution available (like I don't know, a USB hard drive?), I wouldn't have this problem. Was this at all talked about during the conference? No. Instead we were regaled with tales of how much Nintendogs and Pokemon and Brain Age sold. All right. We get it. You're the market leader (at least as of the recent NPDs).You're making grandma happy. Now please make ME happy.