3 Green Fish

My good friend Cerebral Cortex of Strollingbrain.net just came out with a list of 10 “Sins of the Internets.” If you currently own, or ever plan on making your own website, this is a list you must read and obey:

Blinking text and marquees

No. Just fucking no. Unless you’re using it facetiously or to mock someone else, there is absolutely no reason that you have the right to give your visitors seizures. Even if you are using blinking text to mock the local Interwebs Troll, you should still consider it a weapon of last resort. It’s like a weapon of mass destruction, but more annoying. If you need to emphasize something, make it larger, a different color, bold, italic, underlined, or what-the-fucking-ever. But don’t make me suffer through your ineptitude just because you went to the ADD School of Web Design.

It’s grumpy, sarcastic, and caustic to the point of actually burning a hole through my screen. However, pretty much every point he makes is valid. All of these have caused me pain.

A few weeks ago I gave you my first impressions of Nintendo’s Wii video game console. My experience so far with the Wii has been a little iffy — while there’s a lot possibility in the Wii’s controller, it’s also a major gamble and an attempt to shift gaming into a more non-traditional mode. I’m still on the fence about the console in general, as I noted in my previous post. Since then, I’ve had the chance to try out some more Wii games, and I’ve given the console a little more thought.

The following are all essentially mini-reviews, with an eye towards usage of the Wii controller (after all, that’s the main selling point of the Wii). I will readily admit to having finished none of them (as I don’t own a Wii myself); the amount of time I spent on each varied from about 30 minutes to several hours. A console is only as good as the games that come out for it, so I don’t have huge qualms about using the games as a measure of the system itself. After all, the reason you’re going to buy a Wii rather than an Xbox 360 or a PS3 is because you’re looking for that Wii-style gaming.

WarioWare: Smooth Moves:

Like Wii Sports, WarioWare: Smooth Moves feels a lot like a showcase for the Wii controller, more than an actual game. Gameplay consists of a whole bunch of “microgames” that last less than 6 seconds each, requiring the player to perform various actions with the Wii remote.

The games range from silly (shave off nose hair) to completely incomprehensible (focus the picture? How do you do that??), often with little indication of what exactly you’re supposed to do, and there’s minimal story (if you can really call it a story). I played it for about 30 minutes and then set it aside.

Long story short? This may be some people’s cup of tea, but I don’t drink tea. Especially not this kind.

Sonic and the Secret Rings

Okay, I enjoyed Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast, and I love platformers in general. The graphics are pretty. This should be the perfect game. You hold the controller with both hands and steer left and right to make Sonic turn as he runs, lift it up to make him jump, and push towards the screen to rocket forward and attack while he’s in the air. The problem is, I felt even less in control during this game than I did when I was playing Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast. Half the time it felt practically like a cinematic, and while I applaud games that really have a cinematic visual feel, that doesn’t mean a game should be or feel like a non-playable cinematic. Games are supposed to be about the player’s actions. At other times, while I felt like I was actually controlling the character, the controls themselves were awkward. Not really impressive.

Basically, the Wii controller should make playing games more natural, not less. Sonic didn’t succeed in that regard. Boo.

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

I loved Zelda. It’s a piece of solid action-adventure and platformer gaming. Very enjoyable to play, with good graphics and a few mini-games to boot. I haven’t had a chance to play the whole thing, not owning a Wii of my own, but it’s one I look forward to playing more of in the future.

On the other hand, I have to wonder how much the Wii really adds to the game. Does the controller really make it better? Sure, you can swing your arm to attack with the sword, or pretend to lob things to throw them. I’d have to play the Gamecube version to be sure, but I suspect that the controller isn’t what makes the game great – rather, it’s the well-developed story and gameplay (by which I mean the fun and creative enemies and puzzles).

Excite Truck

A racing game involving, you guessed it, trucks. There’s some neat stuff going on here, like power-ups that deform and reform the terrain, allowing you to make really high jumps and such, or even drop the ground out from under your opponents when they’re in the lead. With some interesting variation and a lot of neat stuff going on, it’s about as much fun as a racing game can be, with one problem:

The learning curve.

See, this is a Wii game. You drive your truck by holding the remote sideways, and tilting it from side to side. Supposedly, this is like holding a steering wheel or something. It works out well when you’re flying through the air after a jump, and you’re trying to land on all four wheels at once so you can get a “nice landing” boost, but trying to even steer at the beginning isn’t easy. Unless you’re a whiz gamer, you’ll probably need to take the tutorial, which takes a while to get through (there are a couple parts of the tutorial that are really hard to do, and it doesn’t give you any feedback beyond “you failed, try again”). Again, I’m looking for that intuitive control scheme, and I haven’t found it.

Excite Truck is ultimately enjoyable, but it’s not the killer app that the Wii needs to put me firmly in its camp.

A note on the controller

In my last Wii Impressions I commented on how the controller requires a certain amount of attention to where you’re pointing it — unlike a regular remote, you have to be very precise about pointing it towards the screen. This is most noticeable in the menus, actually, when you’re trying to select options with a pointer.

“So it’s just in the menus, then,” you say, “not a problem in games?”

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think that it is a problem. In Wii Sports Tennis, for instance, there’s a move you can do to make a power shot (which, strangely, isn’t documented anywhere). I’m sure it requires a certain movement, and if you’re a little sloppy, it’s really hard to get. The games don’t really give you any indication of what you’re doing wrong. In a non-Wii console, the cause is pretty self evident when your character doesn’t jump in time: you hit the button too late, or not at all. On the Wii, you don’t know if a failure was caused by, say, not turning the remote enough, or not flicking it enough, or perhaps you raised it too much. Still, this is early on in the console’s lifecycle, and these issues may be addressed in future games.

It’s all about the pies. If you like pie, then you should be sure to have one waiting for you back home when you go to see Waitress. There are so many pies in Waitress, of all varieties, most with funny names and a wide assortment of ingredients, that you’d have to be a card-carrying pie hater to not want a pie after leaving the theatre.

Pie-making is Jenna’s talent, and the film presents it as a process that is alternately funny and sensual — stirring the chocolate or pouring berries into the crust, Jenna seems at one with her pies. Her process of creation is a beautiful thing, and pie-making acts as a kind of backbone to the film, a look into the character’s heart and inner thoughts.

In addition to making numerous creative pies, Jenna waitresses at a pie restaurant, is trapped in a marriage to a horribly controlling man, learns she’s pregnant with his child, and winds up in an affair with her gynecologist.

It’s a romantic comedy.

The amazing thing about Waitress is that it’s a romantic comedy that doesn’t fall into the realm of the cliché. It’s a comedy with heart and romance, but it avoids all the romantic comedy tropes that are now so stale that they give such movies a bad name. Every character feels unique and plausible, and the comedy is based in the characters rather than in slapstick. In many ways Waitress takes a situation and a story that is very serious and makes it lighthearted and fun. Marital infidelity is a serious topic. So is the psychological abuse Jenna’s husband puts her through. By all rights, this story should not be funny, and yet, somehow, it is.

As for the acting, Keri Russell is perfect as Jenna, and Nathan Fillion does an excellent job (as usual) playing Dr. Pomatter, her love interest. Another standout performance comes from Andy Griffith as the advice-giving Old Joe, but all of the characters have a certain life to them, and there really didn’t seem to be any weak spots in the acting at all. Like pretty much everything in the film, the actors all seemed to just fit.

Really, if you’re going to go see a movie in the next couple weeks, this is the one to see.

(Waitress is supposed to be in limited theatrical release as of May 2nd. The film showed up in Santa Cruz on May 17th, so I don’t know how widespread the distribution is.)

I have a couple reviews almost ready, but due to my hectic schedule I haven’t had a chance to edit them yet. They should show up soon, don’t worry. In the meantime, here’s a quickly written and minimally edited review of a web-based “video game” for you to read and enjoy. No really, enjoy the review.

“Super Fun Web Game” by Cerebral Cortex of strollingbrain.net (full disclosure: Cerebral Cortex is a good friend of mine). The game is not linked to on the main page, so you’ll need to go here to visit it. If you really want to.

The thing about Super Fun Web Game is that, despite the name, it is none of those things. Well, I suppose that you could argue that it is, indeed, web-based; however, there is nothing intrinsic about the game that requires that it be on the web. As for “super” and “fun,” well, not so much. The game has a single button that you press to get more points, only you don’t always get more points. When you start not getting points (usually the second time you click the button), the game displays your current probability of getting more points, a percentage that goes down with every click.*

That’s pretty much all there is to it. So, is it “fun,” as the name implies? Not so much. There isn’t really much to do, and no room for strategy. Fans of the card game War will probably enjoy it.

Is it “super”? Well, given the bare presentation, lack of graphics, and simplistic “gameplay,” it’s hard to imagine a version of it that was less “super” than this. You can’t have a “super” game without at least implying a corresponding “non-super” game, and it doesn’t get much less super than this.

Is it a “game”? This is a thornier question. Ultimately, I’d have to say that no, it isn’t. There’s really only one control. Most games require at least two elements, I would argue. In this case, the only element is clicking the button, unless you want to argue that deciding when you’re done playing the game is also a game element – and really, that’s getting much closer to meta-gaming. I’ll admit that in the past I’ve played games with only one control, however, they included an additional element of strategy and/or timing. NS Tower was a game that features a character running back and forth at a constant speed, having players choose when for the little guy to jump in order to slowly make their way up a series of platforms. Thus, NS Tower has only one control, but three elements: the structure of the level, the choice of when to jump, and the choice of how high/far to jump. Super Fun Web Game has only one element, could easily be played by computers without human interaction, and thus, I believe, is not actually a game.

Adding another button would help. I could easily see this as the underlying structure for a gambling game, with a pot of money and a choice of how much to spend on each pull. The odds are pretty much the same. A description of what’s going on behind the scenes would also make this more interesting – there’s no indication of whether the percentage is just an average calculated from previous clicks, or if it actively reduces the chances each time.

*Actually, not quite every click. I’ve noticed that the third click usually (always?) ups the percentage a small amount, and I’m not quite sure why.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last five months, you’ve probably seen or heard about the Nintendo Wii. You’re probably heard about it even if you do live in a cave. Osama bin Laden probably calls it “the Unholy Remote Controlled Box of Western Imperialism.” Since I’m not on dialysis in the mountains of Afghanistan, I actually had a chance to try out the Wii recently.

The thing about the Wii (indeed, its main selling point) is its motion-sensing controller. It’s a remote. Ironically, from the time I spent trying out Wii sports, I discovered that people are pretty lackadaisical about their remote usage. When you have to point directly at the screen to see your cursor, you begin to realize just how much you point your regular remotes in the general direction of your television and just expect them to work. The first thing you have to get used to with the Wii is just how much you need to pay attention to where you’re pointing the remote.

A lot of people are hailing the Wii as the killer of the PS3 and the Xbox 360. I’m not quite so sure. Here are my thoughts, neatly categorized into pluses, minuses, and question marks.

Pluses:

• Okay, I have to admit that it is fun to play. I tried out Wii sports and in general, all of the different games are amusing. I played Tennis, Bowling, Baseball, and Golf, and each one used motion as the primary form of control. I generally don’t care for sports games, but this did make them fun.
• It’s easy for non-gamers to pick up and play. When what you’re doing is essentially mimicking the motion of the sport in question, it’s pretty straightforward. I saw at least one initially reluctant player become very enthusiastic about playing more.
• Having a remote for a controller similarly makes it non-threatening to the average Joe, or the average Josephine.
• Because of the above reasons, it’s a great console for parties – easily accessible and fun to play with multiple people.
• It’s cheap. Really cheap.
• Miis are amusing.

Minuses:

• In a way the controller seems designed for this kind of sports game, and in the long run I want to play non-sports games much more. I’d generally rather sit down with an action-adventure type game a la God of War or Prince of Persia.
• Wii sports shows off what the controller can do but it remains to be seen whether or not that controller will really work well for “regular” games. One of my favorite games has been Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time, and part of the allure of that was how impressive all the acrobatics were. That game really made it feel effortless, giving the player a sense of being, well, really awesome. Do we really want to wave our hands around to do the same thing? I’m thinking no.
• Graphics. While an improvement over the Gamecube, the Wii’s graphics power isn’t too impressive. In the long run the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 will have many more options for graphics. I don’t think photorealism is something that’s good in and of itself, but there are games that make very good use of it. Something like Gears of War, or a next generation Okami, need that graphics power and I wonder if the Wii will be able to deliver.
• While it’s fun to make Miis that look like family members (and puffy-cheeked muggers on drugs), I’m not sure how many games I’d want to play featuring such overly cartoony characters.
• Playing bowling and tennis made my shoulder sore.
• No television is safe.

Question Marks:

• Why am I, a healthy guy in his twenties, playing fake tennis or bowling instead of doing the actual thing? It’s like Guitar Hero – when it gets right down to it, I’d rather learn how to play the guitar.
• What is the staying power of the Wii? The console has really sold like hotcakes (which raises the question of what exactly is a hotcake in the first place), so it looks like it’s in a good position. However, given the way it has captivated a “mainstream” audience, I wonder if it will end up being more of a fad. The competition is honestly capable of a lot more in terms of traditional gaming, so the Wii really has all its eggs in the controller basket.

Addendum: After writing this review, I had a chance to play a few other Wii games. I’ll post my thoughts about them in my review next week.

Okay, this site has sorely lacked for content for some time. That’s about to change. I’m planning on having reviews about once a week, maybe more often, depending on when I encounter new stuff and have a chance to write about it. At some point in the near future I will set up a special page for readers like you to suggest things to review, but for the moment, please add a comment to this post. Also, please comment on any and all reviews, and let me know what you think.

My mission is to review practically everything. I might write about games, books, or movies, or I might discuss cheese as a blanket category. For that matter, I might review blankets. Or a specific blanket.

Nothing is safe. Well, almost, nothing. I am limited by time, money, my sense of morality, and the desire for a little privacy. Thus, you can probably not expect to see reviews of really expensive items, strangling a goat, or sexual techniques from the Kama Sutra. Unless it’s something that I can address entirely intellectually, such things probably won’t appear here.

Let’s see, I think I’m supposed to review something this week. Let me check my lists.

Huh. Well, that’s interesting. It appears I’m supposed to review this very website, in a bout of post-modern existentialist self-oriented meta-criticism. Neat. Here we go.

Review: www.3greenfish.net

You know what distinguishes real websites from not so real ones? It’s content, that’s what. That’s what 3 Green Fish has lacked for all this time. There has been so little content that reading its content is like trying to drink sand, in the desert. You just can’t stay hydrated that way. There’s only so much you can do with test posts.

Here are a few things this site has lacked:

• Text
• Pictures
• Reviews
• Content
• Content?

Yes. There hasn’t been any content. This is a horrible disappointment, I’m sure. But rest assured, there is content coming.