My wife says I’m boring since I never update. However, I’ve been working for quite some time on an article on .NET, and finally finished it. I bet she’ll think I’m really boring now.

A couple of quick observations.

First, I was in Sam’s the other day and I saw Unreal Torunament 2003 in a large, full-sized box. This wouldn’t have given me pause, except for the fact that UT2K3 came out in the post-small box era. So apparently Sam’s has an arrangement where they get bigger boxes, which sorta makes sense – Sam’s Clubs are huge so small things are probably harder to sell. Plus they sell it in bulk, so the boxes should match. However, Sam’s is a sister chain of the Wal-Mart corporation – and Wal-Mart was of course the ones that got us the smaller boxes in the first place. How very odd – just as soon as I decide I kinda like the boxes (though not as much as I would if they were DVD cases), they go and give bigger boxes to sister chains. Baffling.

The second thing is that I’ve been informed and have noticed that the popups from Tripod have in fact not gone away. Either I was delusional or Tripod’s popup code got better. Oh well – either block popups to or from members.tripod.com until I get moved to wherever it is I’m going to. We can thank the Australian Military for this apparently.

I have two little ad-banner buttons on this page now above you. Rest assured I’m getting no money whatsoever if you click either of them, I just figured they’re worthy geek causes.

The first is the Bleem! Estate Sale. Bleem! as you may know is a dead software company that made a series of PlayStation emulation products until Sony sued them into oblivion. Over a year later, one of the last two or three employees of Bleem! is still trying to get out of debt. Since Bleem! made no money for a long time (i.e., what they did make was spent on lawyers), this individual recieved no paycheck from Bleem!, but when the company went bust he was given a good chunk of the tons of things Bleem consisted of at that point – mostly T-shirts, imported games, controllers and such. Since he needs the money he’s auctioning off this stuff. Right now wave two is up, whose highlights include the elusive BleemPods, the propretary prototype devices which allow you to use real analog Dual Shock PSX controllers with your Bleemcast games on the Dreamcast. During wave one I bought one of the last Bleem! T-shirts, and they threw in a crapload of Bleem! stickers as well. Too bad I’m too old now to be putting stickers on things, but it makes my Dreamcast look nicer.

The second link is to the Original Trilogy petition site. For a long time I thought I was the only one who cared about this but it looks like I’m not alone. Basically, George Lucas has indicated that the orignal Star Wars trilogy will be released on DVD in 2006 or so, after Episode III hits DVD, and that the cuts of the movies on the DVD’s will be the “Special Edition” cuts. This is all fine and dandy were it not for two things. For starters, the further rumors are that he’s going to add more items to these movies (like actrors and maybe even Jar-Jar from the prequel trilogy), and that the original cuts of the movies will not be available. This petition is an attempt to show support for and persuade Lucas to make the original cuts available as well as the Special Edition cuts, either through some seamless branching trick, or on separate discs, perhaps available exclusively online or something (so as not to clog up retail chains with something only a handful of geeks may want).

In particular, the little button I chose (since it was little) illustrates something that’s been irking geeks for years now – in the original movie during a scene between Han Solo and Greedo, Han shoots and kills Greedo before Greedo can get a shot off, but in the Special Edition, Greedo shoots first, changing the scene from “Han Solo is a Badass” to “Han Solo in Self Defense”. Me personally I could care less who shoots first, but I would like to see the same old 1970’s sci-fi version I remember as a kid.

Right, so after a long time of talking about it and never doing it, I finally hauled off and registered Schnapple.com, so if you go there now you’ll be greeted by this exact page, sans popups. Go ahead and bookmark it. It’s still kinda up in the air as to how we’re gonna handle it in the long run – I was content to have Blogger continue on its FTP thang but the cheap web hosting service I have (read: some guy I know) is having issues in that area, so until we hammer it out Schnapple.com is simply a frame containing this Tripod page. This has the pleasant side effect of getting rid of the popups Tripod inflicts on visitors.

My Wife got a job in Plano, she starts on April 7th. This means I’m now the one holding up the show (she’ll be crashing with relatives until I can get a jobby-job). I have another tech interview in Addison on Friday, so this may be a non-issue before too long, but in any event feel free to click on anything in that little ad above and drop me a line if you want a .NET Programmer in the Dallas area.

And John Scalzi found my rant that mentioned him and let me know the following:

I should note that by the time you wrote your comment, I have in fact sold a novel — two, actually — and that they were sold specifically because I presented them on my Website. I’ve also picked up another book contract due to other writing on the Web site. Agent is still unsold, although right now it’s being looked at by an agent and I have reasonably good hopes for that. Ironically, the book I sold (to Tor, incidentally, Cory’s publisher) is military science fiction, not at all unlike Starship Troopers. Which I guess just proves my point. And aside from these books I have two other books that should be in the stores later this year (one with my byline, the other being a book to which I’ve contributed articles). I still do my consulting work, but the author/novelist part of my workload has definitely gone up.

I believe the book he’s referring to in reference to military science fiction is called Old Man’s War. Good to hear that this sort of thing can work.

Ironically, I’m probably the least psychotic person of the three.

Wendy’s right – I need more shirts.

This past weekend I went to a LAN party in Frisco, TX. I haven’t been to too many LAN parties, and the ones I have gone to have either been three guys in an apartment for an afternoon, or something like QuakeCon, where’s it’s a huge and somewhat clinical affair (i.e., didn’t know most of the people there). This one had like 13 people over two rooms in a house. Couple that with the fact that I got to sit on a nice leather couch the whole weekend and this easily trumped the previous experiences in that regard alone.

The main games we played were Unreal Tournament 2003, Jedi Knight II and Battlefield 1942. Now the problem I had with the insistence on playing Battlefield 1942, aside from the fact that I don’t own the game and had to become a dirty pirate for the course of the evening to join in, is that I really didn’t “get” the game. I knew it was a World War II game. I knew that it was highly rated. I had even tried out the demo and I liked the fact that you could do things like drive tanks and jeeps and planes in addition to being foot soldiers. But I didn’t really get the “point” of the game.

Compare this to the aforementioned UT2K3, where the main game type is straight deathmatch. Guy with gun runs around and kills other guys with guns. Whoever does the most wins. Game looks sweet as hell. This sort of thing I can do easily, so I tend to play this sort of game a lot. Mindless deathmatch is just plain fun.

But everyone at this party is insistent that we play Battlefield 1942, so I cave. And it’s boring. I can’t drive the tanks for crap (they keep tipping over). I walk forever and ever and then get killed in two seconds by someone I can’t see. And every once in a while the game ends and I have no idea why.

Now the funny part is that this party spread two rooms over a house, and though it didn’t really completely work out that one team was in one room and another in the other, it did pretty much work out that the people I was in a room with didn’t know how to play the game (save for one guy who was on the other team and decided to remain mum about the rules). Slowly but surely we “got it” – the controlling of flag and spawn points, the depleting ticket system, the best way to man a tank. Suddenly I realized that everyone is right – this game does kick ass.

So now I wonder – how many games have I missed out on because they needed something other than a twitch nerve to play? I guess I understand Counter-Strike a little better now, and why at certian points in time more than 50,000 people play it online, sometimes to their own deaths. Of course the problem I’ve always had with Counter-Strike is that the matches never last more than a minute or two and usually the people on all the servers are dickholes.

Of course the other problem with the games which require “thinking” is that there’s other limiting factors – namely the intelligence of the other people playing the game. I’m sure I was no fun to play with before I got it, and I’m sure if we didn’t have enthusastic players at this LAN party we would have been right back to those other games. Like I said, one of the problems with Counter-Strike is the lameness of some of the people playing the game – or when I try, most of them. A game which I desparately want to play online more and I probably can once I get my new job on is Neverwinter Nights. I’ve had a few good sessions with the game online, but only after going through several crap servers. Oftentimes I join a server and spend forever trying to find the other players. Then when I do I’m either instantly annihilated by whatever 50th level monster they’re up against or the people are complete jerks. And by this point I’m dead tired so I can’t play long. This game needs a “go to the action” part badly.

Anywho, I wrote this a couple of days ago (as you can see by the post date) and though it didn’t really go anywhere like I wanted it to, but I like it enough to post it.

Last week I learned that KTSR 92.1, my favorite radio station, will be going off the air, this Thursday to be exact. It appears what happened is the station couldn’t afford to stay afloat so its owners sold it to Clear Channel Communications, who will promptly turn it into Candy 95.1, a top 40 radio station.

KTSR is the only “hard rock” station in town, so when it goes away so does that. There’s another station, 103.9 “The X”, but it’s not nearly as good – it plays some rock, but lots of alternative crap (not that all alternative is crap, just a lot of what 103.9 plays). Everything else is either country (Texas – go figure) or Top 40/Pop. Just what we need – another station like that.

I had noticed some weeks back that the rotation of the DJ’s had changed. KTSR had this thing called the “12:15 funny” that I liked to listen to over lunch, but it moved to 4:20 when the DJ who played it, Roxanne Rolls (whose name is a pun), moved slots. Turns out when they told the four main DJ’s about the change looming, two of them left, causing the others to be switched around. I used to listen to it up at work, streaming it off of the Internet, but then when the FCC (or whoever) decided that stations could be double-liable for royalties, they cut that out. I always meant to get a portable radio for work but I never got around to it. Don’t guess I need to now.

Clear Channel Communications is a corporation which makes its money owning radio stations. Specificially, it owns a little over half the radio stations in the country. To put that in perspective, most of the other stations are independently owned or owned by small companies who own a handful of stations each, a dozen or so tops. This makes CCC a behemoth in radio, and it also makes them pretty much a target of the average person. It also has the one very important aspect that to get radio stations to play music, record labels now have to make one very large corporation happy.

CCC is likened to the “Microsoft of Radio”. They drew fire in the wake of 9/11 by sending out a list of songs to their stations that they “should” avoid playing (though there was no direct order). Tom Petty specifically lambasts them in his anti-establishment concept album The Last DJ. And to make it all the more interesting, the CEO of CCC is a member of the Texas A&M Board of Regents, the Govenor-appointed governing body of Texas A&M University. He recently went on record as saying that CCC is “not a monopoly”.

But it’s still kinda sad that KTSR wound up this way. Mainly it’s sad to me that hard rock has no place on radio. I loved heavy metal in the late 80’s (or as much as a 12-year old could), and I loved hard rock in the early 1990’s. I even loved grunge when it turned to that. But somewhere between there and here rock went away, replaced by rap music which formerly complained of no attention, teenybopper queens, and boy bands. If you want to know why white guys my age hate boy bands so badly, that’s why – they killed what we like. The final straw was the cancellation of Headbanger’s Ball on MTV. How ironic then that the most popular show in years has an aging Ozzy Osbourne.

Now rock is “back”, but it’s “Nu Metal”. Suddenly I feel old. I can’t stand most of it, and I think a lot of it sounds the same. That’s one of the things I liked about KTSR – they played the good old stuff, everything from Led Zeppelin to Nirvana.

Now I won’t go on some anti-corporate tirade about how the whole commercial world sucks, I understand all that. I get why hard rock doesn’t pull in the advertiser dollars but the squeaky clean pop does. I just don’t like it. Therefore, I’ve decided that once KTSR goes off the air, that’s it. I’m not listening to radio anymore in College Station. Not that this means much – I’ll be moving to Dallas before too long (in fact some of my prospects are moving in so quickly that I was wondering last week if I’d beat KTSR out of town), but I’m not going to listen to radio anymore before I move. Given that I have hundreds of hours of music I know I like in my car, this shouldn’t be an issue.

Which of course brings up the reason it’s almost nice to not listen to radio. No more annoying commercials (a statement which of course nicely sums up why KTSR folded), no more scratchy reception, no more listening to songs I don’t like. Plus, it’s not like I was going to listen to it much longer anyway. Still, it’s an interesting listen nowadays with the DJ’s confirming the demise, discussing it with callers, and it’ll be really interesting to see what that last day is like. I wonder what they’ll play for their last song. “The Aggie War Hymn” or “Stairway to Heaven”?

Still, Candy 95.1? Could they have found a gayer, dumber name? Almost like they’re trying to be ironic.

I have a modest proposal to PC game publishers. Since I’m not sure if many PC game publishers visit this page, if some of you could do me the favor of propagating this piece or its URL as far as you can (click on the timestamp above to get a static link), I’d appreciate it.

It used to be that PC game publishers put their games out in a variety of boxes, all sizes and proportions. Then in 2001, Wal-Mart requested that publishers release versions of them in standard smaller sized boxes for shelves, since their shelf space in their electronics section is limited. Given that Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the world, the PC game manufacturers agreed, and for a time you could go to Wal-Mart and see smaller versions of the same games you could get in larger boxes at other retailers.

Shortly thereafter, other retailers decided they liked this idea (since it would help their shelf space, too) and PC game publishers liked the idea of potentially selling more, so early in 2002, they all pretty much agreed on the smaller box sizes, and now all PC games ship in them.

Being conservative, I was of course objected to this at first. But then I decided the packaging was irrelevant, and who was I to say screw environmental and economic concerns for my aesthetic tastes? Still, this meant no more cool PC boxes (remember Gabriel Knight?).

But then the real problem surfaced – these smaller boxes meant less space for things like manuals and – more importantly – disc packaging. Many games have flimsy manuals (like twitchy FPS games), so this wasn’t a big loss. Neverwinter Nights however came with a largish spiral bound manual, and as a result the three CD’s the game ships on came in paper sleeves – the ones with large circular holes with clear plastic windows so you can see what disc it is. If the CD’s were merely vehicles for the game to be on my hard drive, I wouldn’t care. However, most games require the CD to be in the drive, so what I wind up having to do is install the game from the CD’s, place the non-required CD’s in the box, then keep the required disc and its sleeve in the gateway folding on the front of the game box (provided the game box does this).

It works, but it’s really not stylish. I mean, for starters it means you have to keep your game boxes around. And since they’re made of cardboard, they’re going to get pretty sad looking before too long. And of course if you pick them up the little CD falls out of the gateway fold. Even this isn’t so horrible, since I usually hold on to game boxes for an unusual amount of time, but most people want to pitch them. So either your games are held in cheap paper sleeves, or you put them in jewel cases you buy yourself, or keep them in one of those CD carrying folders. None of these solutions are what I like.

And the main reason I don’t like the most practical solution – that of putting the discs in empty jewel cases I buy myself – is because it’s ugly. Either you put them in those ultra slim cases or standard sized ones, and unless you’re ultra creative, any labelling solution is going to look pretty crappy – and you shouldn’t have to do that. So you’re left with tons of unlabeled games you have to pilfer through every time you want to play a game. It sucks.

And then I look at my DVD shelf. I like DVD cases, or “keep cases”. I even let my DVD collection and my PS2/GameCube collection sit on the same shelf. DVD cases are perfect – you can put a pretty decent manual in there, you can put numerous discs, the packaging is durable (except for those evil “snapper cases”), and it’s just a handsome way to display what you have, as well as being useful. Plus, whereas jewel cases have a habit of breaking through casual use, DVD cases are pretty solid, since they’re usually one piece.

So you see where this is headed, right? PC game publishers, this is my proposal – you went to the smaller boxes to save shelf space, so I’ll do you one better – go to DVD cases. DVD cases are even smaller, and I can guarantee more people will like them. Well OK, I can’t guarantee, but here’s some perks.

DVD cases can hold multiple discs, so 3-CD games won’t be a problem. Sure. it gets cramped in there after 2 discs, but “double-wide” DVD cases are available. You can even cram four discs in there if you want to. Look at how the Cleopatra DVD worked. If your game covers more than 4 CD’s in 2003, you may want to rethink your strategy (it’s called compression). Plus this is a concern destined to go away – within five years I predict that all games will ship on DVD anyway, since any PC worth playing it will have a DVD drive anyway. It might be like the 5.25″-to-3.5″ days for a while, but it’ll get there.

With a little finagling, manuals can fit in DVD cases. In the case of FPS games they’ll fit anyway, since those games never have long tomes anyway. However, since any manual Master of Orion 3 ships with is going to displease people anyway, trim it down and make the “real” manual either a separate book shrink-wrapped on the box, or available with a send-in coupon (hint – they’re like rebates: not everyone will send it in). Make it a PDF on the disc in any event.

The only “real” problem I can think of this is that of confusion. Namely that people might get the games confused with console games. I don’t think anyone’s going to pick up a $50 DVD case and think it’s a movie, so that’s not a problem. And I don’t see too much conflict since PC games are separate from console games anyway. Plus, how many people buy the wrong version of a cross-platform game? People have noticed the difference between the “GameCube”, “Xbox” and “PS2” logos (though the green Xbox cases help, too), so they’re smarter than people might realize. But of course the PC doesn’t have its own logo, so either the lack of a logo will have to suffice, or a simple agreed-upon logo will have to do (there may already be one). Perhaps when all games move to DVD some variant of the DVD logo with the word “PC GAME” in lieu of “VIDEO” will work.

I already see some PC titles doing this – like when Sid Meir released Anteitam at EB Games only, and the Mechwarrior 4 expansion pack. It would be easy to do, may wind up being cheaper and more profitable, and since everything is attuned to DVD sized cases these days anyway (I even saw a vending machine of them for movie DVD’s at a theater the other day), then the retailers are already ready.

Plus they would look cool as hell on a shelf.

Anyway, that’s my proposal. Any thoughts?

The first day after a haircut, especially on a somewhat cold day, is always weird – it takes me a while to get used to the cold air on the back of my neck.

Anywho, I’m going to devote another post here to Nintendo. Specifically, their current conundrum of being successful yet having problems succeeding conventionally.

Worldwide, Nintendo’s GameCube is selling a little bit better than the Microsoft Xbox (at one point at least it was 10 million versus 8 million). However, in North America and most of Europe, the Xbox is selling better. Most of the reason the GameCube is doing better worldwide is that Japan doesn’t like Xbox at all – and they’re 1/3 of the world’s gamers.

Still, it’s not like the Xbox is obliterating the GameCube (they’re both being obliterated by the PlayStation 2 – with 50 million units worldwide). Plus Nintendo recently instituted a system wherein people who buy a GameCube get one of four free games – one of which is Metroid Prime. That should help sales some more.

Nintendo’s problem, though, is not that the GameCube isn’t selling or hasn’t sold enough. In fact, Nintendo doesn’t really have a problem at all, really. It’s everyone else.

See, what tends to happen is this – people go buy a GameCube, then they get Metroid. And Mario. And they preorder Zelda. And if they’re feeling adventurous they go get Animal Crossing, Pikmin, Starfox Adventures or Eternal Darkness. The problem with this? They’re all Nintendo developed games (first party titles), or made by comapies Nintendo owns part of (or in the case of Starfox, owned) and published by Nintendo themselves (second party). Third party games (by companies with no Nintendo ties) are pretty much ignored by GameCube gamers.

As a result of this, some publishers are pulling support for the GameCube. Sega announced last week that they’re not going to publish any more sports games for the GameCube, and 3DO (who themselves just recently became profitable again) has decided to cut back their GameCube presence, plus EA is thinking about not releasing sports titles on the Cube (which would be a bad thing, as it would pretty much rid the GameCube of sports titles). The reasoning is simple – when they release a game on all three platforms, it’s the GameCube version that doesn’t sell so well, and when the stockholders start to complain about a lack of profit, something has to go.

So what’s caused this problem? Several factors, some of which are obvious and others which are less apparent.

The most obvious is that since fewer people in North America own a GameCube, there’s less sales for fewer consoles. However, if this were the only cause then they would just make fewer copies of those games. If your newspaper only sells 50 copies a day, don’t print 100. However if your newspaper sells zero copies a day then you go out of business.

So what this means is that it’s not just that third party games sell fewer copies, it must be next to no copies. So why then do millions of people buy GameCubes and then buy no third party games?

Probably the biggest part of the problem – and what a part to have – is that Nintendo games are simply too good. I seem to recall several places listing Nintendo as the best developer in the world, and I (of course) think it’s true. These people consistently make games that are so good people buy hardware just to play them. Think of the tons of people who bought a Nintendo 64 just to play Goldeneye (a second party game). People buy Nintendo systems to play Nintendo games.

Since Nintendo does so well with their first party games, they don’t really do all that much to try and ensure exclusive third party games – something that Xbox and PS2 thrive on. PS2 is the only place to get GTA3 and GT3, and Xbox is the only place to get Splinter Cell and Halo. But almost every exclusive GameCube game is by Nintendo themselves. The only third party exclusives I can think of are the recent Resident Evil titles, but Resident Evil was a remake, Resident Evil Zero was a prequel, and the game that people really want, Resident Evil 4, won’t be out until next year.

In some ways the developer reluctance is a holdover from the Nintendo 64 days. Developers didn’t want to do anything for that system, both due to market reasons (the PSX always sold better) and format reasons – cartridges were not only small in storage size but they were expensive as well – as much as $30 per cart. Now Nintendo has a nice disc-based system to develop for but the third party developers still aren’t going for it, and the ones who do are greeted with poor sales.

The Nintendo 64 legacy isn’t just being felt by the developers, it’s being felt by the consumers as well. Many people bought a Nintendo 64 and decided they didn’t like the fact that the games were few and far between, and at comparitively higher prices when they did come around (like the $60 and $70 games). Some let their system fall into neglect, in favor of the PlayStation, some sold their Nintendo 64’s or threw them away. Many came to regard the Nintendo 64 as a system that was good for the occasional Nintendo game and that was it.

So now many of these same people see the GameCube as a system for playing the occasional groundbreaking Nintendo game and that’s it. If they want a game that’s available on all three platforms then they’ll buy it on PS2 or Xbox.

Another part of this thinking is the perception that the GameCube is a toy system and that Nintendo is a kiddie games company. It doesn’t help that the GameCube is tiny and has its own handle – not unlike small 45 record players many of us had as children – and that Nintendo releases Animal Crossing with low-key childish graphics and the Zelda game will look like a cartoon. Of course people also lambast the Xbox for being too large and heavy. Why it occurs to no one that all game systems are in fact toys and that portability concerns mean nothing when you rarely if ever move the systems I don’t know. So what winds up happening is that people don’t want to buy a “serious” game for the GameCube (and many take the sports games very seriously) since it’s a “toy” system.

Plus some people just don’t like the GameCube controller. The game Soul Calibur II is coming out on all three platforms with the twist that each version gets its own bonus character – PS2 gets a fighter from Tekken, Xbox gets Spawn, and GameCube gets Link, probably the most popular of the three (mainly because people are ambivalent about Tekken and Spawn hasn’t been too popular since the movie came out, plus its coming out in close proximity to Wind Waker). But despite this many have stated they won’t buy the GameCube version of SC2 since they can’t stand the GameCube controller – they don’t like the stick/button layout for fighter games.

And another thing which I believe sticks in people’s minds is the small size of the GameCube discs. They’re 3″ DVD’s that hold 1.5GB per layer, so for a 2 layer disc it’s 3GB, which is still less size than the 4.7GB a single layered 5″ DVD can carry (the outer portion has more space than the inner portion). Many people believe that their games must be cut down or scaled back to fit on these smaller discs – another holdover from the Nintendo 64 days, and one I’m not sure is entirely incorrect. Others think the discs are too puny and when you’re talking about sports and fighting games, an inferiority complex is a bad thing. This goes back to the “toy” perception problem. Finally, some games – like Resident Evil Zero – have already spread to two discs. Many gamers figure the reason they moved to DVD in the dirst place was to avoid disc switching (though in RE0‘s defense the multiple disc thing is also a function of how the game works).

Finally, few people have a GameCube as their lone system. Again, this comes back to the “toy” problem. Since most people have multiple game systems, when a game comes out for multiple systems they have to decide which system to get it for. In previous generations, when there were huge and obvious gaps in console power, theseb decisions were easier. Actually, when the gaps in power were bigger, the developers made the calls. If you wanted realt fast action, go Genesis (Sonic), if you want lots of colors, go SNES (256 vs. 32), if you want storage space, go PSX, etc. However these days the three dominant consoles are pretty much the same. Sure, they have different architectures and different programming techniques and such, but when a game comes out for all three consoles, it’s pretty much identical. The publisher doesn’t want to spend the additional cash to come up with minute differences. Plus in the case of movie tie-ins, they want the games to be simultaneous (i.e., the three Spider-Man games available at the movie launch). Finally of course they don’t really want the games to be competing with themselves.

In the N64/PSX generation this easier – there were only two consoles. You made tons of copies for the PSX, and then came out with enough N64 copies to sell, making more as needed. Publishers don’t want to go back to the monopolistic NES days – Nintendo was simply draconian back then with licensing policies as they were the only game in town. So what the publishers would really like is a duopoly again. Of course PS2 is set with the number of consoles out there, so that leaves Nintendo or Xbox. Many would like Microsoft to win – but Microsoft is untested in this area, and they keep dropping hints about the next Xbox (so does Nintendo, but less frequently), as well as having really crappy policies on online usage (imagine how pissed many gamers were when they found out that, despite having broadband built-in, they had to pay more to play Xbox online. Nintendo actually could capitalize on this, and I kinda hope they do).

But Nintendo isn’t going anywhere, and they’ve even confirmed that a GameCube successor is in the works. Plus Nintendo has billions in the bank. They could take tons of losses on GameCube and more than make up for it with whatever Pokemon GBA title they’ll unveil. I can really see why the publishers are pissed that millions and millions of people own this inexpensive video game system and yet don’t buy anything other than Nintendo games for it. It’s not because people are tied to Nintendo per se, it’s just that Nintendo makes really good games.

So we have three companies, each entrenched with money, none of which are going anywhere (if Microsoft leaves, it’ll be because they’re bored – not because they’re going broke). So this leaves the question – if third party development for the GameCube goes away but Nintendo sells millions of units of hardware and tons and tons of their own games, does this mean that the GameCube is a success or a failure? Hardcore gamers won’t limit themselves to this console and they’ll speak highly of the Nintendo-authored games, but they’ll generally dislike the lack of games on the console. But if Nintendo sells a ton, makes a ton, and people who do play the games and buy the system love it, will it matter? Sure, you won’t be able to swing by Wal-Mart on the way home and pick up a Dukes of Hazzard game, but when the next Pikmin comes out then you’ll get more out of it than a roll in the hay. Is this a bad thing? I can see why people got mad when Nintendo 64 games slowed to a trickle, and then the new game was something like A Tigger Adventure, but will the GameCube situatiuon ever become that dire?

SNK’s Neo Geo system lasted for a long time based almost entirely on their own games. They carved out quite a niche for themselves for a long time, before it all caught up with them in 2001. Could Nintendo do the same thing – last a long time selling their own hardware and their own games for that hardware? It would be one hell of a huge niche. Oddly enough this is the same thing that PC gamers like myself make fun of the Macintosh for – the Mac only has a handful of games, and they tend to be the ones that worked well on the PC – but as a result the Mac games have a better chance of being good, since the sorting has been done already.

If nothing else, this pretty much cements the fact that the console market is one with a huge barrier to entry which is going nowhere fast. We’ll never see a 3DO or Atari again, much less an Indrema. This is kinda sad, since it’s hard to really pull for Microsoft or Sony – meaning Nintendo’s the last “true” game company out there. Perhaps this is why I root for them so much – they’re the last of a breed. If they go away it’ll be two major non-game corporations competing, until the next major corporation tries to get in. So if you’re like me, you’ll be buying all your third party games for the GameCube from now on. It’s just a thought.

A really good article explaining Web Services, and specifically why it is that despite the fact that all the different companies have their own plans for them (Microsoft has .NET, Sun has J2EE), they’re taking great pains to get along with each other.

Favorite quote: “Trying to do the job of a mainframe with PCs has been likened to harnessing scores of chickens to pull a carriage”