Wii Music Too Casual for Casual Gamers?

With the release of Wii Music this week, a lot of gamers are paying special attention to how it’s received by the general public. Why would that be?

Because, for many gamers, Wii Music is symbolic of Nintendo’s movement away from traditional “games.” When it was first presented at E3, the buzz was hardly positive. With no rules and essentially no way to win at the game, some critics considered it nothing but a toy. For core gamers, it seemed outright alien. It was a game you couldn’t play.

Now, the release imminent, gamers are wondering whether Nintendo’s full shift to casual will replicate the successes of Wii Play and Wii Fit. If the game does well, it could very well mean the end of core Nintendo games. After all, the games will go where the money goes.

So with that in mind, it’s interesting to see that the game’s launch in New York was pretty tame by Nintendo’s standards. As Kotaku wondered aloud, does a poor launch mean that Wii Music is the first failure in Nintendo’s casual foray, or does it just mean that casual gamers aren’t likely to attend launch events. I have my own thoughts on Wii music – and they go down like this:

I have a suspicion that Wii music won’t be successful (or as successful as Nintendo’s other casual games) and the reason is that it’s too casual for even casual gamers.

The problem is, casual gamers are already used to rhythm-based games and these games are not nearly as casual as Wii Music.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band are phenomenal successes and certainly a large reason for that is their wide adoption by those that fit into the casual game territory. As Gamesutra points out, the term causal game is pretty broad and Guitar Hero and Rock Band definitely fall under the genre. What that means is that a large percentage of the people Nintendo has targeted previously with the likes of Wii Play and Wii Fit have likely played a plastic guitar or drum set before.

That said, these people are already familiar with the structures of these games, which arguably are a grey area between casual and non-casual. Sure, you can pick up Guitar Hero and just start playing, but it adheres to some pretty traditional structures, such as points, bonuses for doing well, and penalties or ending the game for failing. Though the rhythm and music components of these games give them a broad appeal, they still play like core games.

Now, Nintendo is trying to entice this audience to play a similar rhythm and music-based game, except without the need for points, or even winning. I would argue that this won’t appeal to casual gamers coming up on Guitar Hero or Rock Band because they’ve already been socialized by these other game structures – they’ve come to expect points for playing well and losing for not playing well – and by removing this aspect of the game, you are removing one of the, now, key reasons they play it.

I could certainly be proven wrong this December at the registers, but I’m betting that the people Nintendo hopes will play Wii Music are the same ones saving up to get Guitar Hero and Rock Band instead.

Call of Duty 5 Beta Impressions

So somehow the gods smiled on me and I got a beta test for Call of Duty 5. After the highly successful Modern Warfare, we turn back to World War 2 and back to Treyarch, the much-maligned maker of the lackluster Call of Duty 3. So what’s the verdict? Did Treyarch make good on a promise to improve on their last effort? Did they top Infinity Ward’s gem?

The answer is yes, but it’s also no….the beta gave me access to World at War’s (WAW) multiplayer with five modes and three maps to try. Here’s my point-by-point breakdown:

Maps

Good

• Castle and Roundhouse are solidly put together; there’s a ton of variety – open spaces and tight quarters. This makes for interesting matches.
• The artistic design is well done for these levels; varied colors and textures between vegetation, buildings and items.
• The ancient Japanese setting of Castle brings something novel to the table. The level takes place on a steep incline which adds some interesting dynamics.
• Roundhouse takes place in a massive trainyard with blown-out buildings and some clever catwalks. There are a ton of nooks and crannies to hide.

Bad

• Malkin takes place on a Japanese island outpost – sounds promising but…
• It feels a little off. The set design is too cluttered. It’s a case of there being too much lying around. I found it bottlenecks the action.
• Everything in this level is dark brown. I realize that it’s supposed to be night, but it’s almost impossible to distinguish friend from foe, or foe from vegetation, or foe from building.

Gameplay

Good

• Since WAW runs on the same engine that built Modern Warfare, the gameplay is similar – same controls, same movement, same framerate.
• But it’s thankfully slightly different as well – moving seems faster, especially running.
• The bonuses for kill streaks have changed – for 7 kills, it’s dogs, which works surprisingly well. The dogs aren’t invincible, but they can surprise you. Plus, they’re great at rooting out campers because the dogs can pretty much go anywhere a person can. That means walkways aren’t always safe.
• Another positive is that the Tanks feel fairly balanced. They are powerful (they are tanks after all), but a couple of good rocket strikes can take them out. Driving them is pretty intuitive and there’s nothing more satisfying that firing a shell into a sniper’s nest (at least for me on Roundhouse anyway).
• The gametypes are decent and varied – War is a welcome change – you have to consecutively capture points which adds a new challenge because it’s a single flag to attack or defend. Plus, all the standard modes seem to be intact.

Bad

• It’s probably just a beta thing, but the spawns are atrocious. Modern Warfare’s were pretty good for the genre. WAW’s are not at all. You’ll find yourself dying at least 2-3 times just because of spawns where you’ll magically appear in front of a group of enemies or worse, someone will spawn right after you on Free for All, garnering them a free shot at your back.
• The artillery strikes are loud and mostly useless. Unlike an air strike, the artillery lasts a long time and hits a large patch of map. The problem here is that it’s too spread out to accurately pinpoint a group of enemies and it’s length and effects can distract you and your team as much as the enemies.

Weapons

Good

• Sniping is easier – it doesn’t take as long to stop breathing (just half a second as opposed to two seconds) and the action of the rifles feels more stable.
• There’s extra modding ability – now you can add surpressors, sights or extra ammunition as part of a weapon’s upgrades.
• For what they are, there’s a good stable of weapons and anachronistic mods to make the guns feel similar to Modern Warfare.

Bad

• Grenades feel underpowered. It takes a near direct hit to take out an enemy.
• Molotov cocktails don’t work at all – unless you hit the person directly, the flames render no damage. You can stand in a room on fire and not be hurt.
• Flares aren’t useful – they’re meant to blind, but they don’t. You can still pretty much see so they don’t accomplish the same thing as a flash bang.

Perks

Bad

• Juggernaut – since a lot of the guns seem to come with less power than in Modern Warfare, I found myself getting 8-9 assists in a match. That’s because it can be near impossible to kill an opponent without having to shoot them multiple times.
• Revive isn’t useful – Revive gives you last stand, but it also lets you revive an ally who’s in last stand. Because players are so used to last stand, the latter perk never comes into play – at least not in multiplayer mode.

Overall

The game is a reasonable step forward, but it’s not without its issues. While the engine is the same as Modern Warfare, Treyarch’s the driver and they don’t bring the same level of polish to the game. It’s a case where Treyarch has added new features, but without fully considering the impact of them on the game play.

Sure some things in WAW sound cool, but it ends there in actual use. Infinity Ward seems to get this concept and regrettably it’s lost in translation for Treyarch. WAW has potential and some good ideas, but it remains to be seen if the myriad of rough spots will mar the game’s lasting power.

pawnshop

I never meant to be rich, oh
but my tiara polarizes people
into true and false questions

has been

this is wisdom I don’t want
waiting for the wishbone
drama of a leafless autumn

hairpin

snake light these car lengths
shine idle cherry guts on the
midnight side of dangerous

Brett Favre and the Madden Curse

Back in 1999, Electronic Arts (EA) decided to stop putting John Madden on the front cover of its Madden NFL video game. Instead, EA started featuring football players instead. What followed out of that is an increasingly odd trend – that whatever athlete makes the cover tends to have either a down season or their worst season period. Otherwise known as the Madden Curse.

Curses!

Take for example the 1999 cover – Eddie George. In 1998 George had a spectacular season and helped his team to the Super Bowl. Then he appeared on the Madden cover. His next season was filled with injuries and he never fully recovered, going into a slow decline. The year Michael Vick appeared on the cover – he broke his leg and didn’t play the whole season. The year Shaun Alexander appeared on the cover, he injured his foot, missed a bunch of games and looked terrible in the rest. The year Ray Lewis appeared on the cover, he fought injuries the whole season and ended up with his worst statistical year, plus his team missed the playoffs after winning the Super Bowl the year before.

Unretirement is a verb

So this year, perhaps EA tried to play it safe. They put a retired player on their cover. He can’t get injured right? Well, what he can do is not stay retired – as the current cover jockey just did.

For Madden 2009, EA decided to feature Brett Favre – and it’s going to be a mistake that haunts them all year. With Favre a) announcing his un-retirement and b) creating a Minnesota Vikings-sized boatload of drama and now c) getting traded to the New York Jets – the curse has clearly struck again.

So now, Madden 2009 will feature Favre in a Packers uniform – a team he won’t be playing with this year and a team he clearly left on bad terms, damaging his legacy in the NFL.

The one thing I have to wonder is – since EA won’t be updating their cover – will they be updating the roster so that the Jets have Favre?

flowchart

I have a thesis that fails to explain
why my fake-white collar friends
cascade like empty water bottles

campfire

If they’re cold, there’s still a little
wine behind the leftover kerosene
handcuffs, pamphlets and torches

Music Review: Depreciation Guild, Helio Sequence, JDSY

Depreciation Guild
In Her Gentle Jaws

One part Kevin Shields, one part Mario bros., the Depreciation Guild make fuzzed-out shoegaze music that sounds like some long-lost super Nintendo soundtrack – all gauzy effects-laden guitars mashing it up with MIDI bleeps and beats. While it’s not in the same camp as the neo-gazing of M83, it’s at least in the same campground, sharing the same penchant for woozy vocals and melancholic textures. Where it differs is in the percussion, which buzzes with the energy of a hungry arcade – throbbing drum machines and pulsing keyboards kick the whole affair into a decidedly different atmosphere, making for an invigoratingly unique listen.
Highlights: Butterfly Kisses, Digital Solace, In Her Gentle Jaws

Helio Sequence
Keep Your Eyes Ahead

Who knew that losing your voice could make you a better singer? In the case of Brandon Summers of Helio Sequence, losing his voice forced him to re-learn how to sing – good thing though because it’s a boon to the already dynamic mix of effects-heavy guitar and off-kilter drums. With past albums, the instruments did the heavy lifting and Summer’s voice barely tread water. Here, vocals are as strong as the music, fleshing in new bits of melody and context – that said, some lyrics borrow a bit too much from Dylan (Shed Your Love), but it’s a minor misstep on a mostly promising release.
Highlights: Lately, Back to This, Hallelujah

JDSY
Adage of Known

Intelligent dance music isn’t dead, it’s just sleeping – so proves JDSY (Joey Sims) straight from New York with the kaleidoscope Adage of Known – a dance album that smartly left dance at the door. JDSY isn’t looking to get feet moving, he’s looking to get heads spinning with electronic songs that are actual songs, with actual verses, melodies, choruses, climaxes and denouements. It’s oddly claustrophobic and sparse at the same time – the beats are dense and closet in the vocals, but the tone and pace is warm and welcoming – it’s a fascinating tension that sculpts the unexpected into audio satisfaction.
Highlights: Staircase, Drifter, Horizon Line

Public relations: Google owns you

The day of the newspaper is almost over. So says David Meerman Scott in the New Rules of Marketing and PR. He implores PR professionals to stop spending time writing “press releases” where we hammer out a lifeless sheet that’s been vetted through a million committees, legal departments and the like – and then cross our fingers, post it to a PR wire and hope some journalist likes it enough to contact us. It’s such a convoluted process and with the democratization of information via the Internet, it’s brutally ineffective.

The truth is – traditional PR isn’t working anymore. That’s because traditional media isn’t working anymore. The latest statistics show that newspaper readership continues to decline, and the same for television. Less and less people are reading or watching traditional news. That means less and less people are going to read our stories through these channels.

The Internet is growing significantly as the news medium of choice. And it’s not just traditional sites like CNN, its user-generated sites like Digg, stumbleupon, del.ici.ous where the readers decide what’s most relevant to them. The Internet is democratizing Journalism and that means it’s also democratizing public relations.

Our landscape is changing significantly – half of what I learned in PR school no longer applies. In ten years, I’m sure most of it won’t apply at all. With that said, the guiding principles of public relations, communicating, will always be relevant. The rise of the Internet isn’t the end of PR – it’s just means re-evaluating how the cycle works.

Instead of creating “push” pieces, we need to start creating “pull” pieces. Instead of talking at our audiences with press releases, glossy newsletters, over-produced annual reports, we need to start having genuine conversations. In marketing, guru Seth Godin coined the term “permission marketing” for this approach. For us, it’s should be called “permission communication.”

We need to start creating “news releases” that any person can find on the Internet easily, read and understand. That means optimizing our releases for searching on the Internet, which means eliminating the jargon, eliminating the PR-speak, and writing plainly and simply.

It’s quite simple: Google owns you. That’s how the majority of people will look for your company, your products and your news. The “pull” approach means that you stop writing at your audience and instead let them come to you. Let them find you easily with Google, and when they do, make it easy for them to do what they want on your site, so that it’s rewarding and meaningful for them.

Once you show that you’re genuine about delivering the best and most useful content and information to the people that want to read about you. They will trust you and they will keep coming back.

Video Games: Guess what, Wii Fit sucks

Wii Virus

A while back, the President of Epic games compared the Nintendo Wii to a virus. Basically, he explained that the Wii was the perfect PR hype machine. It’s the kind of product everyone talks about, but once they own, they stop playing it. As an early adopter of the Wii, unfortunately, I’d have to agree. Essentially, the Wii’s endless hype, and subsequent retail dominance can be traced to two factors: first experience and word-of-mouth.

First experience basically means that the Wii is built to be awesome when you first try it. Who can’t remember trying out Wii sports tennis for the first time and being blown away by how much fun it was to swing the remote? The problem is, this experience doesn’t become more rewarding the more you play the game – if anything it stays the same or drops as familiarity leads to tedium. The reason for this is that Wii sports is a casual game, and by nature, it’s game play is shallow. There’s no real progress and there’s no real depth to continually playing. It’s the same exact game each time you turn it on.

However, because the first experience is totally awesome, it leads to a lot of positive word-of-mouth. Here’s the typical scenario: Your friends try Wii at a friend’s house, and the next you thing you know, they’re telling everyone how great it was. It’s not reflective of actually owning the Wii, but that hardly matters. The word-of-mouth spreads like wildfire, increasing demand, decreasing supply, which just reinforces the cycle.

Wii aren’t Fit

Now, here comes the Wii fit to replicate the experience of Wii Sports. It’s the same exact situation. There’s uncontrollable hype for the game because it is a lot of fun to play for the first 10-15 minutes. Add in promises of getting fit and you have another game that’s being driven by word of mouth. The reality however, is that Wii fit is just as shallow as Wii Sports and owning it, isn’t nearly as fun as just trying it. The evidence can be seen in growing dissatisfied Amazon posts or the huge number of gamers who are already giving up on Wii Fit’s fitness programs.

Couple this with the fact that the Wii is still struggling to sell third-party games and my earlier prediction still holds strong. I feel strongly that the Wii’s innovation, while unique and needed in the video game market, simply isn’t enough.

The Wii’s technical limitations mean that it’s not appealing for most developers who are concentrating on next-generation titles. Add that to the fact that the Wii’s glut of cheap imitation games makes it different for its consumers to choose quality games – resulting in people only buying name brand games (Nintendo games) means that third-party developers will be less willing to design games that just won’t sell.

Music Review: The 1900s, The Foals and Al Green

The 1900s
Cold and Kind

Most breakups result in tubs of ice cream, not creative epiphanies; fortunately, for the seven-member The 1900s, emotional disaster has turned into a pretty, and pretty cohesive, record. Employing various boy-girl vocals, the album mines the same personal wreckage as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, while adding enough surprises to separate it from the 70’s lite-rock cannon. If there’s one thing The 1900s share with their idols, it’s the fact that they’ve made an album, album – from the urgent piano of the first tracks, to the gospel-ish choir in the middle to the aching coda at the end, Cold and Kind is best experienced, for all its beautiful ebbs and flows, as a whole. Highlights: The whole thing…(also: Wool of the Lamb, Georgia, When I Say Go)

The Foals
Antidotes

The Foals are their own genre, and that genre should be called divisive listening. If you hate kinetically-charged math rock with a Battles meets Brit-rock aesthetic, then you’ll hate the Foals; if you love lyrics that repeat every third word because it sounds cool and random thrown-together subject matter that came freshly picked out of a hat, then you’ll love the Foals. Antidotes is simply a frustratingly, enjoyable, unbearably, wondrous album. Highlights: Red Sock Pugie, Olympic Airways, Cassius

Al Green
Lay it Down

You know the drill – trot out former all-star, dominate the record with “supporting” new all-stars and let everybody collect a cheque. Well, Al Green isn’t going down so easy – Lay it Down might “feature” John Legend and half of The Roots, but it’s still Green’s show. Green’s falsetto still has its stunning wattage, and it basks in the syrupy sweetness of the AM radio horns, old-school Hammond organ buzz, and fat bass lines. Of course it’s not Green’s best work (that’s Call Me), but it is his best work since returning to recording in 2003, and it captures the essence of satin soul better than anything else released since Green retired the first time around. Highlights: Lay it Down, Just for Me, You’ve Got the Love I Need

Balzac Mall Maul

Who puts a mall in Balzac?

Somewhere right now there is a group of people, probably seasoned professionals, sitting around a table. These people are agreeing that building a mall in Balzac is a good idea. Not only do they think that a mall is a good idea, they think it should be a super-mall ala West Edmonton Mall.

No doubt they have charts, they have research and they have statistics that support this idea. These people not only think that a super-mall is financially tenable, but that it’s likely to turn some kind of profit. While I’m no expert, my gut feelings says no, they’re totally wrong.

The news of course, sounds like a regurgitated press release and states that most of the retail space is already leased, that the mall will feature wondrous shopping and entertainment and will take advantage of a booming Alberta market. They’re forgetting the most important thing though – will anybody go there?

I realize Calgary’s exponential outward growth makes Balzac pretty close to the city limits, but unless you actually live on the northwest/northeast corner of the city, it’s not a convenient location. One of the things that makes West Edmonton Mall appealing for its core shoppers, Edmontonians, is that it’s reasonably fixated within the city. A Balzac mall is a drive for someone relatively central and is almost Odyssey-an for anyone living in the deep southwest or southeast.

And, unless you can get Calgarians to go there regularly, you’re not going to turn a tidy profit. Tourists alone won’t be enough to carry a mall of this size.

I’m all for ambition, but this venture already has a bad location on its side. If Canada (and partly Alberta) ever slides into recession like the US, we could be looking at one of the biggest and most expensive financial disasters in Calgary, or not quite-Calgary’s, history.

Music Review: Crystal Castles, Health, Gutter Twins

Crystal Castles
s/t

It’s an Atari game and now it’s also a Toronto two-piece who twist an 8-bit aesthetic into dark, danceable post-rave. Singer Alice Glass contorts over Ethan Kath’s combination of warped Nintendo squeals and heavy synthesizers – the resulting sound isn’t just cold – it’s positively frozen. Crystal Castles sound as though they’re playing frost covered instruments in a meat locker while wearing black hoodies and black sunglasses with the lights off – in other words, it’s menacingly good. Highlights: Untrust Us, Courtship Date, XXZXCUZX ME

Health
DISCO

If there’s one release that could probably do with a drastic remix it’s Health’s underwhelming self-titled release from this year. While their first album did add some interesting thematic elements to the sludge-rock genre (pop, noise and ambience), it felt a little too much like Boris’ Pink redux than an original release from an original band. DISCO re-imagines Health through the lens of some wickedly aggressive electro – it’s an impressive mix of brontosaurus rock with razor sharp synthesizers – and it comes across like a raving LCD Soundsystem hopped-up on angel dust running naked through the streets. Highlights: Lost Time (Picture Plane Remix), Heaven (Narctrax Remix), Zoothorns (Nastique’s Remix)

The Gutter Twins
Saturnalia

Remember when gothic meant something other than wearing dark make-up and scribbling in a skull and cross-bones diary? Me neither, but The Gutter Twins (former Afghan whig Greg Dhulli and former Screaming Trees Mark Lanegan) conjure up a dark and sensuous record that would soundtrack perfectly to Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. Whether its white noise strings, growling stand up bass, rumbling synthesizers, or whispery come-hither lyrics, the whole record effortlessly melds into a smoky vision of wax candles and crushed velvet. Highlights: The Stations, Circle the Fringes, God’s Children

Boy Scout

cue the bones of my alpha
male countryside littered with
everlasting high school muscles

Rye coke

in the bar where i play my air guitar
there’s shards of a disconsolate animal
self stealing hands under blouses

Long distance

lapels and crowns scorn your own
disowned brother by the yellow
birch boys wring the tire swing

PR: People Don't Care About Your Crappy Website

A dedicated web-writer is not a popular person. Here’s why. You meet your project manager. They proceed to tell you all the things they want on a website/microsite/e-mail/banner. Their strategic plan says the outcome of all this communication is action by the customer. Your response? Nope. Not happening. Nothing doing.

It’s a common argument I have everyday. You can say all the things you want in an online world. Your audience doesn’t care.

Websites are not books, and they don’t just operate differently. People using websites approach them differently. They are not looking to read, they are looking to do.

People are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online. A recent study by Jakob Nielsen found that people only read about 20 per cent of the words on a page.

Research also shows users are ignoring any attempts to keep people on a page (people will stay on a page for 4.4 seconds per 100 words). People have become better at knowing where to go, and like the TV commercials we skip, people are better at ignoring marketing/pr information that is irrelevant to their task.

The key? People want websites to get to the point. This is especially important when you consider that roughly 75 per cent of people will find your homepage by search engine. The key is to help people do exactly what they want, and make it seamless – from search engine – to your homepage – to their task.

Your website/microsite/email is a tool- no different from a hammer or a measuring tape – if you make it easy and useful, people will keep using it.

Update

Update

Sorry for the lapse in posts – I’m in a bit of a transitional period with this site.

With the end of 11th transmission, I’ve been unsure how to use this site for both comic and text posts.

Ultimately, I’ve decided this site will be dedicated to text posts and that a new site will be delivering the much-delayed comics. I’m in the process of building that new site, but in the meantime, I’ll keep updating permanent hiatus with articles.

double suicide

double suicide
it dribbles onto the newspaper and
you are a parable that I can erase in
falling these beads of bright ochre