Here’s something annoying. At some point, Amazon.com decided to offer its services to other companies. If you go to Borders.com, you really get redirected to a page on Amazon.com. Same thing for Waldenbooks.com (which is a sister company of Borders). Another site which is really powered by Amazon is Target.com though, for some reason, it retains the “target.com” in the URL.

Now this wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for one thing – it makes the site basically useless. You’re not buying your items from Target or Borders, you’re buying them from Amazon.com. On the surface it makes sense, Amazon.com stocks a lot of the same things as these stores, and in fact a lot more of them. Barnes & Noble sells a lot more stuff on their website than their store can carry, so it sort of makes sense that Target.com carries more than a Target store can carry.

The thing is, it’s something of a crapshoot. Target.com is the worst. There’s some sort of venn diagram out there of what items are available in Target stores, what items are available at Target stores but not for the same price, and what items are only on the website. So when you go to Target and you look for something you saw on Target.com, you likely won’t find it. And if you do find it, it will likely be for a different price than what you found online. And not just because the website will discount it, there’s different base prices entirely.

So Target.com isn’t really a website for Target. It’s just another front for Amazon.com only the people who run Target thought of it. When you go to the Target store and you find something you found on Target.com and it’s for a different price, when you ask someone there the person just shrugs and says “the website has nothing to do with what’s in the store”. Like I said, this makes the company’s website useless.

Moe once recieved a Target “e-giftcard” for a birthday. She then proceeded to Target.com and bought DVD’s twice, each time failing to actually use the giftcard. The reason was because even though she got the gift card through the Internet and tried to buy something through the Internet, the particular “e-giftcard” won’t work through the Internet. As I follow it, it only works if she actually printed out and took it to a brick-and-mortar Target – where I’d be willing to bet the cashiers then tried to tell her it only worked online. Plus, I’d be willing to bet that the website she had to check her balance on was hosted at Target.com.

For the most part there’s two big chains for video games – GameStop and Electronics Boutique. They both have pretty good websites – their websites’ inventory is more akin to what you’d find in one of their stores, their gift cards work at both online and brick-and-mortar stores, and their prices usually match between the store and the website. However, of the two for the longest time I found myself going to GameStop stores instead of EB stores. Part of the reason was because the closest GameStop was in a strip mall (ironically next to a Target) and the closest EB is in the middle of Stonebriar Centre which is a fantastic mall but a total bitch to get in and out of. But the other really big reason was the fact that GameStop.com has inventory lookup. You can search a 200-mile radius of a zip code and see which stores in your area have the thing you’re looking for. If you’re looking for Halo 2 then every GameStop has it. If you’re looking for the DOOM 3 expansion then you need to make sure the GameStop you’re headed to over lunch actually carries PC games (some are console-only). But if you’re looking for an old, out of print GBA cart, the inventory lookup is a godsend. Heck, you can even look up weird-ass old titles and see if you can find them locally. Apparently EB figured this out finally and put their inventory online.

The day I went to go find the GBA port of DOOM I had to travel out to an obscure GameStop location in Lewisville to find it. It was in a strip mall, so instead of mall locations where people flow in and out all day, a strip mall location has a more “apprehensive” feel to it. What I mean is, if you’re feeling antisocial then don’t go there since they say hello to you and ask what you’re looking for. Since I actually had something to look for I said I was looking for the GBA port of DOOM.

“Oooh… not sure if we have it”
“Well the website says you do”
“Well the website is usually wrong…”

By this point I’ve started scouring over the used GBA carts which are sitting under a glass display case like they’re watches in a jewelry store. I’m ignoring the person at this point since he’s already defending the store and demonizing the website. I was thinking “well, so long as I took the effort to come out here couldn’t we just go ahead and look for the stupid thing instead of making excuses?” but I didn’t say it. And sure enough the game was there. But it just killed me that the first thing the guy did was try and belittle the reason I came there in the first place. Sure, I’ve been in his shoes – sometimes customers get pissed when you tell them the thing they came there for isn’t there. Usually it involves a wrestling game. You start bullshitting excuses like “yeah the game got delayed because…” or the now ever popular “we only got four copies and they were all pre-ordered” (the latter of which is supposed to guilt them into preordering, which is in all actuality a method of ensuring that absolutely everybody in the world who didn’t preorder gets the game before you do).

But I think what was also going on there was a little apprehension abouit the website. Back when I worked for a Babbage’s (now a GameStop) they were putting these huge demands on how much we were supposed to be selling – then telling us to hang these signs saying to go to this website named something different and go buy the game there instead. But we didn’t get it – people were already in the store. They weren’t going to then go and leave the store and buy the game online, and be hit with waiting for it and paying for shipping (and tax too in this case since the Babbage’s was in Texas as was GameStop.com, which is in Grapevine).

GameStop has an incredibly useful website in that it compliments the stores, not tries to replace them. It doesn’t matter if B&N.com has a book for $11.99 if the store carries it for the full $19.99. If I want to buy the book online I’ll do it at Amazon.com. Yes, Amazon has won that little race, with their first-mover advantage. B&N.com might be cheaper when it comes to being able to use my Reader’s Advantage card (or whatever it’s called) but something about the fact that they almost expect me to go home, order, and wait irks me. I know they don’t really expect me to do it, but I never think to go to B&N.com. I think to go to Amazon.com.

Ironically this is something the Borders.com/Amazon.com gets right – you can check on Borders inventory, and even buy it online to pick it up in the store. Of course you pay full price for the book this way. It’s funny – they want to pass on a savings on a physical, shipped product – but if you buy a computer game like Half-Life 2 or Galactic Civilizations online, you’re expected to pay full price, since they don’t want to piss off the retailers.

So I guess I’m annoyed either way.

Despite my being a fairly serious gamer, one of the things I’ve never done is purchased a console on day one. The latest opportunity to do so came with the release of the Nintendo DS and I missed that one, too. I’m also going to miss the March release of the PSP but that’s less of a consequence since I really just don’t plan on getting that one at all.

It never fails that the consoles tend to launch when I just don’t have a lot of money to spend. Plus the last several console launches have seen the system launch without a lot of strong titles, so early adopters tend to get hosed. The DS had a PSX-ish port of Madden 2005 and Super Mario 64 DS which, despite what everyone says, looks worse than the Nintendo 64 version. The Metroid Prime: Hunters demo looks interesting but the game isn’t out yet.

Instead – I bought a Game Boy Advance SP. Seriously. While the Nintendo DS is reverse compatible with GBA games, it’s not reverse compatible with Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. Plus it can’t do multiplayer on those GBA games. So, I decided to go with the GBA SP, a purchase I had been avoiding long enough.

I bought a GBA over Christmas 2001. In January of 2002, Nintendo announced the GBA SP. I’m a big Nintendo fan, but this is the biggest chickenshit move they’ve ever pulled (waiting until after the Christmas buying season to announce the SP). Still, I had bought an Afterburner kit and decided I was going to make it work.

Well, the Afterburner kit was a disaster. The instructions for the kit left a lot to be desired and as a result, the installation attempts were all botched. The resulting trauma meant that my GBA never quite worked right again – the screen would intermittently crap out and I had to rig the insides with plastic shards to get the connection to the screen to work properly. This precluded me from being able to play GBA games for the most part. I got the Game Boy Player for the GameCube and it helped things, but I never really could get into the GBA.

In June or so of 2004, though, Nintendo released the “Limited Edition Classic NES” GBA. This, I decided, I wanted. They had released a Famicom version in Japan so I decided to wait and see if they were going to do a NES one and they did. Of course I pissed around and didn’t get one until Christmas 2004. Most of the time when a company lists something as “Limited Edition” they mean “Limited to however many we sell”. Not Nintendo. They don’t fuck around. I found out that these things were thin on the ground.

Luckily the Circuit City website lists the locations in the area where the item you find can be purchased. There were two within a hundred miles – one in Addison, and the other in South Lake, TX. So I darted out to the Addison one and found the empty box for the unit, of which there were like 2-3. When I went to the counter, the clerk told me “We only have one of these left”. To which I paused and replied “…ok, well I’ll take it.” I’m wasn’t sure why he thought I’d care that this was the last one left. Whatever. Then I had to go to the customer service desk and get the actual unit. After several minutes the woman came out to tell me that there wasn’t one in the back after all. I told them that they might want to get the other “Classic NES GBA” boxes off of the store floor then, since it looks to the average person that they had several. She said that they had to keep the boxes out there to reflect the GBA’s they had in inventory, “kinda like Xbox”. I refrained from telling her that Xboxen are usually identical and that people actually want different versions of the GBA. I then told her that the reason I was out here in the first place was the fact that the website said they had one in inventory to which she gave me some weird bullshit response which I can’t remember now, but it was essentially the “hey the website’s wrong sometimes” response. I refrained from telling her that the point of having the website tied into the inventory was so that it wouldn’t be wrong and perhaps she should see about getting it fixed. After getting a refund, I realized that the person who ran the register and this woman were both really young – perhaps someone had stolen the last one and they were covering for that person? Or perhaps they just wanted me gone. Whatever, I left.

I got smart about the second attempt – I actually called the South Lake store and verified that there was one in stock. Of course, it was a crapshoot if the person I was talking to was right, but whatever. I then did the “purchase online to pick up in store” bit, after which I noticed the website didn’t say they had it in stock anymore, so literally the last one. I drove out to South Lake before work (turns out it was closer to my workplace than my home) and sure enough, they had it. Probably the factor that helped was the fact that they were the only store in a brand new complex.

I was initially a little bit disappointed with the GBA SP’s illumination – mainly that it’s just a little bit on the blue side. Like the aforementioned botched Afterburner solution, it’s a “frontlit” soluition, not a “backlit” (for a frame of reference, your color cell phone screen is probably backlit – as opposed to puttng a light on a plastic screen in front of the screen). However, I got over it and I discovered – this thing is probably the most pefect little device I’ve ever encountered. As much as I curse Nintendo for pulling that maneuver in January 2002, I’m kicking myself for not getting one of these sooner.

Of course the first game I go buy is The Legend of Zelda from the “Classic NES Series”. I figure between the two times I bought it for the old NES (gold and grey cartridges), the special disc for the GameCube with the old Zeldas on it, and this GBA cartridge, this is probably the fourth or fifth time I’ve bought this same game. And they say emulation will cannibalize these sales. And it’s just inheriently cool to run it on a screen with an old NES controller layout below it.

I then bought the GBA “port” of DOOM. It’s still pretty damn impressive. It’s just close enough to make you feel like you’re really playing DOOM, and just different and flawed enough to remind you you’re not. It’s a really really impressive tech demo and it’s a lot of fun, but the menu interface kinda sucks and in a few places the limitations of the hardware come out. Plus it just throws you off when the music is all different – I guess they didn’t want to re-license Bobby Prince’s music. Still, that I can run freaking DOOM and The Legend of Zelda on the same machine – one that I can carry to bed with me.

Of course therein lies part of the problem. My Wife got a little annoyed since I played it all the freaking time. I’ve had to learn how to balance play time with real life again. At least I can put the GBA away easily, which is more than I can say for those poor WoW players. I finally got around to beating Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission, the second of which was particularly cool since the unlockable extra on completion is the original NES Metroid. Nintendo actually also came out with this on a separate $14.99 cartridge and I almost got it – not because I didn’t know about the unlockable feature but rather because of the way my mind works – I’d rather have the cartridges separated. Fortunately common sense won out. It’s funny, I beat Fusion and then beat Zero Mission and they were both incredible games and I did well and it occurs to me – I never really did beat the original Metroid. I watched friends beat it but I never did myself. One of my college roomates could go through the entire game in one sitting. I figured, while I was on a roll, I’d go beat Metroid and I’ve come to realize why I never beat it – that game is freaking hard. Well not only that but whereas in a “modern” game there’s all these gameplay conventions like being able to save in a bunch of spots and get recharged – in Metroid there’s none of that. You get a password (which the game saves for you – nice) and you start from one of like four places and have 30 health. Period. You have to build that back up yourself. Unless I’m forgetting some special trick, the only real way to get back to fully charged easily is to pick up another energy tank. Ouch. Plus the shock of going back to 8-bit graphics is bigger than I anticipated. Still, I’m having fun – this game is seriously hardcore.

Back to more current handhelds – I do plan on getting a Nintendo DS, mostly because I played Wario Ware Touched! at Target the other day. Yeah, I don’t see the DS as something long lasting. It’s neat as hell and I think when Nintendo or one of their partners writes games for it and it alone (not ported from some other game) it’ll get its due. The usage of the screen and stylus in WWT was nothing short of brilliant. But the Target unit’s screen already had scratches on it. I know your average kid at Target is a threat and all but I’m not sure that bodes well.

The thing that gets me is this – yeah it runs GBA games and all but the DS is somewhat close to the Virtual Boy – it’s not a GB/GBA replacement, it’s got an unusal, untested gimmick, and the standard development and porting process just won’t work for it. Unlike the Virtual Boy it’s not some sort of stopgap until Nintendo’s next “real” home console, but I’m just wondering what it’s like to have to develop for two screens now and take ergonomics into account.

The PSP though, I think I might skip. It’s supposedly got horrible battery life and I’m not thinking that the usual graphical yardstick applies. Nintendo comes up with souped-up SNES graphics for the GBA and it’s golden. I’m not sure it’s going to matter in the long run how many polygons the PSP port of Gran Turismo will run if the thing kills the battery in a couple of hours. Does anyone really want to play detailed games on a tiny screen? Maybe they do. But I can’t believe people are actually excited about UMD Movies. Let’s see, a movie I probably already own on DVD on a smaller disc with a substandard resolution and no extras that I can watch on a tiny screen and pay the same price as a DVD for? I’ll pass.

Of course to some degree what the PSP is doing is taking what Nintendo does and throwing more at it, hoping that will win out. They see that Nintendo has a huge hit with the GBA so they say “hey let’s do better hardware!” which the PSP is, but at the expense of battery life. Nintendo was so concerned about battery life that they waited from 1989 until 2002 – thirteen years – to give the GBA a lit screen. And the only way they’d do it is if the GBA had its own battery. Sure, people like me think the light thing is more important than batteries, unil we remember what it was like to play the Sega Game Gear and have six AA batteries last eight hours, tops. And more people care about batteries than light. By 2001 the Game Boy line had sold over 100 million hardware units, so Nintendo was doing something right.

Nintendo came out with “Game Boy Advance Video” carts. These were carts that somehow held video. I think their choices of content (Pokemon and Spongebob Squarepants episodes, for example) help witht he compression (animated content has the potential to compress better) but I thought these were stupid when they came out. But at $20 a pop for ~2 hours of content, they basically pan out with DVD’s and videos for kids. And kids watch the same DVD’s and videos over and over again. And these carts are more durable (I saw a child at someone’s house break one of their DVD’s in half trying to get it out of a case). And they’re portable and easier than a portable DVD player. So they sold truckloads. Again, Nintendo is the Apple of gaming – doing things that seem idiotic and turning them brilliant (usually). Sony said “hell, we have actual movies like Spider-Man 2 we could put on this thing! Stuff adults would want!”. I just don’t see it working. Why wouldn’t an adult just get one of the many existing portable DVD players I see people using at airports all the time – you can use your existing DVD collections (which adults tend to have), pop in a copy of one of the LOTR movies, and viola. Entertainment for hours.

Anywho, another month, another freakishly long post. I’m off to go play some more Zelda.