Does anyone (this is mostly for, but not restricted to, any Portuguese readers) reading this know of a Portuguese-language equivalent of PRWeb, a site to which you can (by paying some amount of money) send a press release, which is then picked by many news sites and aggregators?

Thanks in advance.

P.S. – this is related to my new Nintendo forum, in case you’re curious. See, full disclosure.

This is likely to be of interest only to Portuguese readers, but since there are a bunch of them reading this through Prt.Sc, here goes…

A couple of days ago, NintendoPT, the biggest Nintendo-related forum in Portugal, closed down. I was already thinking (see here if you don’t believe me) about expanding my Nintendo DS forum, NDS-PT, either to add the Wii as an “equal partner console”, or to expand it to a full Nintendo forum, but was inclined toward the former because I didn’t want to compete directly with NintendoPT. But since the latter is no more, there is a big gap to fill, and…

… I am pleased to announce the transformation of NDS-PT into NintenForum-PT, possibly the biggest Nintendo forum in Portugal nowadays. More than 500 members, more than 16000 posts, and no longer invaded by Pokémon fans (who scared many of the NDS-PT old timers away in February, but who then moved en masse to a separate Pokémon forum).

• Planeta Asterisco is now PrintScreen (or Prt.Sc). I like the new look a lot, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to convince them to make the post titles clickable. The Tlog is proud (well, I am; the blog isn’t sentient, at least not yet…) to be aggregated there.
• Bill Gates denies the Wii’s existence. Loved this one: “No, that’s not it. You can’t pick up your tennis racket. And swing it.”. Uh, Bill…
• Top 10 underrated WordPress plugins. No need to say more, really.
• Could you pass 8th grade Science? I haven’t done the test yet, but it’s on my to-do list for today. Looks quite nice.
• Fórum Arte de Blogar, a companion forum to my Arte de Blogar blog, in Portuguese. It’s about blogging, SEO, website marketing, and so on. Still relatively empty, but it’s up to you to change that.

If, like me, you have a Google News alert for “wii”, yesterday and today you’ve surely been inundated with rumors about a forthcoming announcement at E3 for a hard drive for the Nintendo Wii. Its main use would be for Virtual Console games, since the Wii only has 512 MB of flash memory for them (you can move some to an SD card, but they aren’t directly playable from there).

Their justification? The fact that some time ago it was announced that Neo Geo games would be coming to the Wii, and, as they keep saying, “Neo Geo games can use up to 330 MB”.

Really?

I’m betting they’re taking that number from the Neo Geo common intro screen (you can see it using MAME, on older games), which says “MAX 330 MEGA”.

However, those are not megabytes, but megaBITS. 330 megabits = about 41 megabytes. Still bigger than all current virtual console games, but not more than half of the Wii’s flash memory.

Amazingly, I’ve seen about a dozen news sites repeating that mistake. It seems that nobody researches anything these days; “news reporting” is simply repeating what others already said, using different words so that it looks “original”.

Incidentally, the 330 megabits Neo Geo limit was passed some years ago. The biggest Neo Geo game I have on MAME (King of Fighters 2003) is about 100 megabytes (or 800 megabits).

NOTE: the following is translated and adapted from a post of mine on the Nintendo DS – Portugal forum.

I have it at home, since yesterday.

I’ve been playing with it for several hours, now. Unfortunately, my brother (who is the one who bought it for me; I wasn’t in the country on release day) was only able to buy the basic package: the console itself, Wii Sports, one wiimote and one nunchuk.

I haven’t been able to explore Wii Sports thoroughly, as my TV is in my bedroom, and the bed is in the way. I’m going to move the TV to the living room today or tomorrow, hopefully. I’ve won a couple of tennis games (which is much more fun than you’d imagine), but the “real thing” will be when I can play with more room, and with more people (which will require more wiimotes, and they’re completely sold out right now).

Besides disk-based games, the Wii supports several channels, and can go online. Connecting it to the Internet was extremely easy; there were no compatibility problems with my Linksys WRK54G router, which I already use for the Nintendo DS. The wireless range seems to be better than that of the DS, and it now supports WPA encryption (which I’m not using, though, because of the DS – only WEP there). As soon as you go online, the console updates its firmware, which takes a little while, but no effort at all.

News and weather channels are available on the channel selection screen, but they’re not working yet; according to Wikipedia, they’ll be up and running either this month, or in January. Same thing about the Opera browser, whose release date is apparently December 23.

One of the most interesting channels is, of course, the Virtual Console. Apparently, new games will be released every friday. I’ve already bought a few: Donkey Kong (NES) due to nostalgia (even though it’s a relatively poor version, quite inferior to the original arcade), F-Zero (SNES), Super Mario 64 (N64), Donkey Kong Country (SNES), Sonic the Hedgehog (Mega Drive), Super Star Soldier (PC Engine) and Dungeon Explorer (PC Engine). A special note about Mario 64: I never had an N64, and, though I had already played the game using emulators, and later on the DS, I had never played it using an analog controller (in this case, a GameCube one) until yesterday. And the game really needs one; it’s like I was playing a different game! Moves and tricks that I had to struggle with on the DS come up absolutely naturally here. The N64 version doesn’t include the DS extras (3 new characters, more stars, better graphics), but this game really requires an analog stick…

A couple of PC Engine games support 5 players at a time. Dungeon Explorer is a more complex Gauntlet clone, and Bomberman 93 probably needs no introduction. Since the Wii can only support 4 wiimotes or classic controllers at a time, and up to 4 GameCube controllers, you need to use a combination of both. I have 4 GC controllers, so I will, hopefully, be able to play 5-player Dungeon Explorer after the next lunch here.

One warning: some (not all) NES, SNES and Mega Drive games (not PC Engine, oddly enough) weren’t, originally, properly converted from NTSC (60 Hz) to PAL (50 Hz); they had black borders on the screen, and were about 13% slower than the original versions. Since they’re perfectly emulated here, and the European Wii uses emulated PAL versions, the problem persists. If you’ve played the original versions and were OK with them, you won’t see a difference here, but it’s a pity that Nintendo didn’t do the extra work of fixing this problem… after all, the Wii supports 60 Hz PAL, unlike the original consoles.

And that’s it for now. When they’re available again, I hope to buy Wii Play (which includes an extra wiimote), a second nunchuk, and a couple of classic controllers. As for games, I want Zelda, Red Steel, DBZ: Tenkaichi 2 and Call of Duty 3. It’s likely that I’ll only be able to get most of those next year, though…

Unlike Ricardo, I am — hopefully — getting a Wii this Christmas. In a few hours, in fact.

I don’t have a pre-reservation, and I won’t be here this weekend; I’m going to Barcelona tomorrow morning — and, by “morning”, I mean before sunrise. I could get one there, of course, but the Spaniards have a nasty habit of translating absolutely everything, so I prefer to get it here. Therefore, my brother will try to buy one at midnight, or tomorrow morning. Which means that, if he succeeds, I won’t get to play it until Sunday or Monday…

Why do I want to get one? Well, I’d get it for Wii Sports alone. Zelda is a bonus. I’m also interested in the Virtual Console; even though emulators and roms are easy to get, having perfect versions (some even slightly enhanced, like the N64 games), playable with gamepads on a TV, is something that you simply can’t get — easily, at least — using emulators on a PC.

Unlike Ricardo, I have exactly zero interest in the PS3; if I was going to buy something like that, I’d go for the Xbox360, which has Dead Rising, the Jeff Minter lightsynth, and which Minter is developing small games for. Besides, Sony is one of the few companies in the world that make Microsoft look ethical…

As for Wii games, there are many more interesting ones than it seems. As I said, Wii Sports is a game I still expect to play 2 years from now. Zelda is Zelda. Then there’s Super Monkey Ball, Call of Duty 3, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Trauma Center, Dragon Ball Z: Tenkaichi 2, and, coming sometime in the future, Wario Ware, Super Mario Galaxy, Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles (zombies!), Metroid Prime 3, Sadness, the inevitable Mario Kart, and many more. There will be new games released for the Virtual Console, too; it won’t just be used for past games. It’s a great time to be a gamer.

Guys, guys… it’s quite simple.

One PS3 has already been sold on eBay for $9000. Most people who got one on launch day stood in lines for days for a reason, you know. It makes sense: spend $600, sell it for several times that much… easy money.

The Wii sold out as well in the U.S., even though there were many more consoles available. A lot are also on eBay, but they’re a much smaller percentage, since Wiis aren’t so rare, and Nintendo has promised to keep getting more of them to stores every week until the end of the year. Extra wiimotes also seem to be selling out in many places, which shows that many people are keeping their consoles. After all, their owners (cheap shot, I know) tend to actually enjoy playing with them (imagine that!), instead of just thinking of them as an “investment”.

Well, I’ve had it for a couple of days now. As far as I know, it hasn’t yet been released in Portugal, but I ordered it from Amazon.co.uk.

If you’ve used Opera Mobile version 8.x, you have an idea of what to expect, as the browser (while it has the “Opera” brand, it’s referred to as “Nintendo DS Browser”) is mostly the same, with the necessary changes for the different hardware, naturally.

The biggest problem, in my opinion, is this: it’s a bit slow. Not unbearably so, but scrolling is far from smooth, especially on more complex pages. It also loads and renders them slower than you’re probably used to, even with a fast connection. It’s usable, sure, but it’s far from the experience of using Firefox on a PC, of course. In fact, Opera in my Nokia 6630 is faster than this one (but, then, modern cell phones are more powerful, hardware-wise, than a DS).

The browser has two vieweing modes: Small Screen Rendering mode (SSR), and Overview mode. The first works mostly like the mobile version: it ensures that you never have to scroll horizontally, by making every frame / column appear on top of each other. You can read pages perfectly, but you lose a lot of the formatting. One problem is that in sites with a menu on the left, the entire menu appears before the content, which means you have to scroll down a lot to start reading. Anyway, this mode is perfectly fine for reading blogs, for instance, but a forum (such as a phpBB one) is more complicated.

Overview mode shows the entire page with the original formatting. You see a “zoomed out” version on one of the screens, and a zoomed in section on the other. You can drag the zoomed in part with the stylus, of course. This way, you can see a site with its original look, but navigation becomes more difficult.

Personally, I stay in SSR mode most of the time, except when a site really requires its original formatting. One interesting example is GameKnot, an online chess server. With Overview mode and maximum zoom out, you can actually have the entire chess board on the clickable screen, and make your moves with the stylus! I’ve tried it and it works, which shows that Javascript support is acceptable.

You can write using a virtual keyboard, in the same way you write your name in a game, or use handwriting recognition. I didn’t like the latter; maybe it’s because I’m used to my old Palm, which recognizes characters differently. Many times, it didn’t recognize the letter I typed, and I’ve found no way to write accented characters. Anyway, the virtual keyboard works quite well, and you can certainly write faster than using T9 in a cell phone.

One problem, though: maybe it’s because this is the UK version, instead of a localized Portuguese one, but, as far as I can see, there is no way to write vowels like A and O with a tilde, like “ã” or “õ”. The browser shows them perfectly in pages, but they’re not available on the virtual keyboard. You can select which national keyboard you want (US, UK, SP, etc.), but there’s no Portuguese one. Maybe it’ll be available when (and if) they release the browser here. It’s not the end of the world, but it can be annoying if you want to use it for writing or commenting in Portuguese sites or blogs.

Personally, I use this browser mostly for reading in bed (blogs and other sites). It’s much more comfortable to use the small, light DS than a comparatively huge and heavy laptop. And I don’t currently have one of those, anyway.

No Java or Flash, but I don’t miss them.

It saves bookmarks and the browser configuration to the card, but not cookies or files. Cookies are lost when you turn the DS off, which means that you have to log in again in any site you access. A little annoying, but, as I said, you can write usernames and passwords quickly using the virtual keyboard.

So far, it hasn’t crashed once.

There are two versions, one for the old DS (“Phat”), and another for the DS Lite. The reason is that the browser comes with a memory expansion, which is inserted into the GBA port, and they include a smaller one for the DS Lite, which doesn’t stick out of the port (like GBA games do). The Phat version works on both DSs (sticking out of the GBA port on the Lite), but the Lite version is for the Lite only.

Curiously, this isn’t out in the US yet… one of the few times us Europeans got a better deal.

Rumors of a portable Nintendo GameCube console, or at least a portable which plays GC disks, have been seen on gaming news sites for the last few days. The cause is that, apparently, Nintendo has got IBM to shrink their Broadway chip recently.

Now, I doubt these rumors are true, for several reasons. First, it would steal the thunder from their October / November Wii launch. Second, they already have a portable console which is selling like hot cakes – in fact, it’s currently the best selling console world wide, by far. Third, I don’t know if current technology allows a console with optical disks to have a decent battery duration, and yet be low cost – just ask Sony. Fourth, while the GC sold as much as the Xbox world wide, and made money for Nintendo, a lot of people still associate the name “GameCube” with failure, and with lost market share.

On the other hand, a portable GC would be interesting:

• Big software library, with many more games than the PSP, including a lot of classics
• GC games have very short load times, unlike the PSP
• The GC is much more powerful, graphics-wise, than the PSP (or even the PS2)
• Most Nintendo fans (like me) already have a relatively big collection of games, and would love to play them on the go

In conclusion? I doubt it’ll happen, but it would be nice.

EDIT: of course, Nintendo wouldn’t call it “a portable GC”, since it would look old, and, as I said, the GC brand isn’t very popular. More like the “Game Boy Ultra”, which, whaddyaknow, is also compatible with GC games.

… the UMD movies section in the average store is bigger than the Nintendo DS games display.

Really, how many people are buying UMD movies? Last time I heard, the format was dying (has Netcraft confirmed it yet? )…

But I guess that retailers just see the fact that it has “PlayStation” in the name, so it must be a huge success… except that it isn’t.

Or… scary thought… could I be living in the only country in the world where people actually buy UMD movies?

(Note: I’m not talking about the PSP itself, or PSP games, just movies in the UMD format, which for some reason have huge displays in most stores here in Portugal.)

I don’t like Microsoft, but I have to admit that they’re right, this time. You’d have to be a complete moron (or a Final Fantasy fanatic) to buy a PS3 instead of an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo Wii (and probably one or two games for each, too).

Think about it. If you like “normal” games (sports, cars, FPSs), they’ll all be available for the 360 (yes, even GTA), and probably looking as good as the PS3 versions. If you want something different, original, accessible, great for parties, and which your girlfriend/wife will actually enjoy playing as well, you get a Wii. You can get both for less than the price of the PS3. Is this rocket science?

Unfortunately, in the country of sheep I live in, where everyone seems to be obsessed with Sony and the “Playstation” brand, I’m sure there will be a lot of morons paying 600 € (!) for the PS3.

Even Jeff Minter thinks it’s stupid. What more can anyone say?

First, let me say that I love Nintendo’s games. I have both a GameCube and a Nintendo DS, and I love both. I wouldn’t trade my ‘Cube for an Xbox 360, unless I could sell it, then buy a new ‘Cube and half a dozen games with the rest of the money. I think that the DS is the only place (including other consoles and the PC) where there is still any innovation in gaming, sometimes making me feel like I’m in the early 80s, with 8-bit computers when almost every game started a new genre, and it felt “magical” (OK, I was quite younger then, too), instead of being yet another sequel, or fitting right into the accepted parameters of an established genre (FPS, RTS, etc.).

And I was quite excited about the Revolution, too. Unlike the other two console makers, whose idea of innovation seems to be “better graphics”, the Revo actually promised something new. A lot of older gamers, who’ve had a ZX Spectrum or a C64, like myself, were enthusiastic about the Revolution, too.

But now, Nintendo have announced the Revo’s final name: Wii. Pronounced like “we”… or “wee”.

Really, what were they thinking? This actually makes me angry – they had everything to succeed this time: a sleek, small, beautiful console, selling for half the price of the competition, with a radical yet accessible new controller, and able to play games from all of Nintendo’s previous consoles.

And they ruin it with the dumbest, most idiotic name I’ve ever seen.

Are they aware that, in English, “wee” is slang for “small”, “urine” or “urinating”, and “penis”? Do they realize that the “I’m going to play with my Wii” jokes will never end? Do they actually imagine anyone going to a store and asking for a “Wii”?

Really, I hope someone gets fired for this. Hard. And I also hope they realize their error, and call it what it should always have been called: Revolution. Otherwise, it’s corporate suicide. (Not really, the DS is selling like hot cakes, but nobody will take them seriously in relation to non-handheld consoles again.)

Nintendo’s ugly duckling grows up is the name of a recent article in gamesindustry.biz. As a happy DS owner, I loved it.

Excerpt:

When the Nintendo DS was shown to the public for the first time, both vocal fanboys and many media correspondents who should have known better were quick to dismiss it as large, clunky, ugly and most of all, a gimmick. It was viewed by many as a rushed and desperate attempt by Nintendo to claw back some attention from Sony’s PSP; at best, a stopgap Virtual Boy style curiosity that would fill in the gap before the arrival of a “proper” new handheld platform, unofficially dubbed Game Boy Advance 2.

Right up to the launch of the device, analysts were down on its prospects, swayed – as they assumed consumers would be – by the power and shiny design of the PlayStation Portable. Even though journalists and analysts alike hedged their bets to some extent, the tone of their comments on the DS made it clear that they expected the PSP to do to the DS what the PlayStation had done to the N64.

And yet…

For Portuguese-speaking readers: I’ve just created a new phpBB forum, Nintendo DS – Portugal.

It’s still in the beginning, but I hope it’ll be successful – and I hope that I don’t own the only Nintendo DS in Portugal.

So, if you speak Portuguese, and have a Nintendo DS or are considering buying one, you’ll be welcome there.

Here it is, my 7th blog: A Revolution in Gaming.

It’s about the only announced console that actually has me interested – because I’m too old to be swayed by “even more polygons than the generation before!!!”.

Go on, visit it.

Warning: that site is somewhat green.

New developments here, and not all of them are good.

To begin with, in the first part, I made a mistake (I was at work when writing it, just like now): my OpenBSD box isn’t connected to the “Internet” port in the Linksys, but to one of the “normal” ports. If I connect it to the former, it doesn’t work

Second, it still isn’t working perfectly. I’m still trying out stuff; however, it’s like this: if I haven’t gone online with the DS for a while, and I try to do so, it doesn’t work. I simply have to go to the OpenBSD server and ping the router’s internal address… and it works afterwards. It’s as if the server “forgets” that the DS is behind the router (as they’re in the same network – otherwise, the router would have to do NAT), and has to find it for itself first – if it’s “forgotten” about it, then connections from the DS go out, but the return packets aren’t routed to it.

I’m going to try a static ARP for it later tonight. I really, really don’t want to use a crontab to ping the router every 5 minutes.

I’ve also tried another possibility, which was to connect the switch’s “Internet” port to the server, and connect one of the ports to the switch for my old network, 192.168.0.0/24. I have to enable NAT in the Linksys between the 192.168.0 and 192.168.1. This way allows the router to update its clock using NTP, which it does every time it’s turned on, but then the DS can only connect while I’m pinging it from the server (!).

This is weird. This Linksys model isn’t exactly great – for instance, it basically “reboots” itself for every configuration change, unlike the Linux models (which I’ve seen at my father’s place).

I know, I know – I could have avoided all of this by just connecting the Linksys to the Internet, doing NAT there, and redirecting ports 22, 80 and 443 to the OpenBSD server. But I’m stubborn, and I trust OpenBSD to be “in the front lines” much more than I do the Linksys. Besides, pf (the OpenBSD firewall) is great.

Continuing from the previous post, Nintendo DS: First Impressions, here’s a more technical bit. Still to come is a post more related to actual gaming – more precisely, Mario Kart DS, the only DS game I own.

As I said, since Mario Kart DS is the first DS game playable online (instead of simply using the DS’s normal wi-fi, which requries players to be near each other), using a normal Internet connection, to access NintendoWiFi. It doesn’t use a cable, though, but connects to a wi-fi access point.

So far, so good. However, since I’m not one of those filthy rich people who own laptops , my home network was (and is) based on that highly advanced and incredibly modern technology called “ethernet cables”.

Now, Nintendo sells a wi-fi dongle, and you can use any other one as long as it supports WEP encryption. So I thought about buying a dongle. However, I also figured out that, eventually, I’ll have some more hardware, such as a laptop, which will need a wi-fi connection. Therefore, to avoid wasting money, I bought a router, the Linksys WRK54G, which was the cheapest one I could find.

So far, so good, right? Not so fast. Those routers expect – indeed, they’re made for exactly such a purpose – to be directly connected to the Internet, and then to “give” access to other boxes – it can do NAT, port redirection, firewalling and also serves as a DHCP server.

But I already have one firewall, my OpenBSD box, which is also the server where all my blogs and sites reside. And I had no intention of putting it behind the Linksys.

After many tries and changes, what worked was the following:

• I added a third NIC to the OpenBSD box, and created a new network (192.168.1.0/24, the already active one is 192.168.0.0/24), to be used for wireless stuff. The new card has the IP address 192.168.1.1.
• The Linksys’s “Internet” port was connected to that new port.
• The “Internet” port in the Linksys got a new address in that new network, 192.168.1.2. It also has an “internal” address, 192.168.1.3. No other (ethernet) ports on the Linksys are used.
• I disabled NAT in the Linksys, and enabled it for the new network in the OpenBSD box.
• I activated a new dnscache process to listen on 192.168.1.1 in OpenBSD.
• In the Linksys, the default Internet gateway is, of course, 192.168.1.1.
• I configured the DS to have a static IP, 192.168.1.4, and the gateway is 192.168.1.3. The DNS server is 192.168.1.1. (I think I tried using 192.168.1.1 as the gateway in the DS, but it didn’t work)
• I activated WEP encryption in the router, generated a key, and typed it on the DS.
• “Connection test successful”… yes!
• I also configured OpenBSD to do NAT between the two internal networks, so I can use a browser in my desktop (192.168.0.3) to administer the Linksys (at 192.168.1.3).

Most users wouldn’t be in this situation, they’d just use the Linksys to connect to the Internet. But I didn’t want to, so…

EDIT: the above isn’t 100% correct. See Part 2.

I bought it! Finally!

Bought the Mario Kart DS Pak, which includes that game, all for 150 euros. Also bought a Linksys WRK54G wireless router, because I had no wireless stuff at home, to allow the DS to use my internet connection to play Mario Kart DS (and future games, of course) online.

I didn’t have a lot of time to play with it, as I arrived home late, and today is a work day. Also, I spent more than an hour “fighting” with the wireless connection – but more on that later (in another post).

So, a few random impressions about the hardware:

• It’s big – about the same size as a PSP, though the screens are smaller – there are two of them, though, and you can use a stylus with the bottom one, as everyone probably knows. It’s certainly too big to carry in a pocket, unless it’s a large one in a coat.
• It’s light – much lighter than you’d guess by looking at it. I’ve used heavier mobile phones.
• The screens actually feel “bigger” when you’re looking at them – much more “real estate” than in almost any portable stuff. Except a PSP, of course, but that one’s screen is huge.
• Most screenshots on the web look quite “blocky”, but when you’re using the “real thing”, they don’t look or “feel” blocky at all – they’re perfect for the screen size. Of course, static screenshots on the web look different.
• Mario Kart DS (more on that game later, in another post) is really fast and smooth – no matter what was on the screen, I never experienced the slightest slowdown or frame skipping. This is certainly not your dad’s Game Boy
• I haven’t had enough time to test how long a full battery lasts. The manual says it should last for more than 6 hours of constant playing.
• DS games come in a kind of memory cards, though they’re still referred to as “carts”. The DS also has a larger slot for GBA games.
• When you close the DS, it automatically pauses the game and goes into “sleep mode”, which uses less battery power. Opening it goes instantly to where you left it. Great if you’re leaving a bus, or something.

No photos yet, I hadn’t enough time yesterday.

The Nintendo DS tempts me more and more. Will I be able to resist it for long?

A curiosity: I went to two stores today in Lisbon (Vobis and Worten, in Vasco da Gama), and console availability was like this:

- Both had lots of Gameboy Micros and PSPs.
- One of them had GBA SPs, the other didn’t.
- Neither had DSes (although they had DS games).

If I can find them tonight at Fnac, in Colombo, maybe — just maybe — I’ll do something crazy.

All of the following are rumors, coming from my “Nintendo” subscription in Google News:

• The Revolution should be released around Thanksgiving 2006 – which, to non-Americans, means November.
• The “Revolution” name still isn’t final, though I personally love it.
• It will use 2 kinds of DVDs: single-layer (4.7 GB) and dual-layer (8.5 GB). It will also read GameCube mini-DVDs (1.5 GB), as it’s fully backward compatible.
• Specs-wise, it doesn’t look too impressive compared to the Xbox 360 and the PS3 – it’ll be basically a “Super GameCube”, with about 2-3 times the power as the GC. Still way ahead of the first Xbox, though – and, knowing Nintendo, they’ll be able to do more with less. Remember that the “tiny” ‘Cube had games, such as Metroid Prime and Resident Evil 4, which looked better than anything on the (better on paper) Xbox.
• It’s also rumored to be ridiculously cheap – $200, or even $150 – at launch. Wasn’t the PS3 going to cost $600?
• Nintendo has also stated that the ways in which people moved the controller in the demonstration video were exaggerated – instead of arms swinging wildly, it will be more like using a mouse (in 3D, of course). For most games, at least – in some, however, the point will be to do realistic movements, such as in a swordfighting game.
• Confirmed games include a new, seamlessly online Super Smash Bros., a new Hideo Kojima game, and Metroid Prime 3.

I’m tired of this stupid argument by ignorant people, so I just had to copy this comment I just saw on Slashdot (it’s by an AC so I can’t give proper credit, unfortunately):

What the fuck does a game’s rating have to do with who it’s aimed at? Just because a game doesn’t feature exploding corpses, lakes of blood, automatic weapons, random senseless violence, demonic possession, bouncing boobies, or gratuitous sex, it doesn’t mean that it’s “for kids”. In fact, games with stuff that earns them an M rating are exactly the kind of games that are intended for kids, specifically teenagers between 13 and 18 – the hormonally imbalanced “I want to be grown up” lot, who think that playing a game where you go around beating up prostitutes makes them more of a man.

Games that are aimed exclusively at young children (in the way you seem to think Nintendo’s games are) are extremely rare, and far more likely to be released for everything that’s electronic and plays games (PS2, Gamecube, Xbox, PC, GBA, DS, PSP, possibly others). Stuff like the endless stream of Spongebob Squarepants or Disney games, or whatever. These games are absolutely awful, because they’re developed with the idea that kids are too stupid to know any different, and they largely sell because parents who don’t know any better buy them. Anyone over the age of 6 finds them unplayable, and even then they aren’t very good games.

That’s not even close to what Nintendo’s games are like. Nintendo’s games are designed for everyone. They aren’t intended to exclude everyone over a certain age as kids’ games are, and they aren’t intended to exclude everyone under a certain age either. In order to be playable by everyone, they need to qualify for the appropriate ratings, so that means they can’t include content that would kick their rating too high.

If you thing those ratings are the same as the age ratings on a toy, or a jigsaw puzzle, or whatever (the ones that say things like “Ages 6 – 11″ or “12 and up”), you’re seriously deluded.

Ricardo has already mentioned it in his blog, though I saw the article on 1up mentioned on Slashdot initially.

It’s a very nice comparison, which makes a lot of sense, although some of the points are stretching it a little (rich bald guy spotted at promotions!?). In fact, the original Xbox was already seen by many as having a lot to do with the Dreamcast, including, among other things, the controller. Now, apparently, it’s even closer.

The article also mentions how the Xbox 360 will probably not be a failure, unlike the Dreamcast (which wasn’t really a failure, it just couldn’t make Sega recover from their losses, and loss of confidence, created by the Mega 32X, the Mega CD and the Saturn.) I’m guessing it’s true – MS has the money to throw into it to make sure it sells, even if they sell it at a huge loss and costs them billions (like the first Xbox did). They’re not doing it to make money, but to get a piece of “your living room” – and Sony is after the same thing. Nintendo, of course, is still about games and nothing else, which is why I love them.

• Jeff Minter Xbox 360 Collaboration
• Yak is back with new psychedelic Xbox visuals
• Jeff Minter’s X360 ‘light synth’
• Llamasoft Visualiser Built Into XBox 360
• Minter’s madness on Xbox 360

Need I say more?

Press release.

What can they do with it? Turn it into a great PDA? Allow a new generation of text adventure games? Or simply use it for messaging and similar stuff?

Oh, well, I’ll get mine before Christmas.