Wii: a little *too* simple, sometimes

I understand the concept of Keep It Simple, Stupid... and consumer goods like the Wii are an excellent place to follow that dictum. What I don't care for, however, is when something is "simplified" so much that it obfuscates what's actually going on, in effect patting you on the head and saying "there there, don't worry your pretty little head about it".

I was trying to do my weekly review of Wii bits tonight (sadly, about all I'm using the Wii for these days, thanks to the PS3, with it's Pixeljunk Eden and Disgaea 3 and the like... but that's another story), when error messages start coming up about being unable to "connect to the Internet". Of course, I was able to prove that I could connect to the Internet just fine with my PC... what it should have said was something along the lines of "unable to connect to server(s)". It seems like a quibble on the surface, but it's more than that.

There are a very, very few people out there that lack the brain power or mental construct to be able to understand "technical" messages... rather, they don't bother to learn what they say, because they can almost always crib that knowledge off of somebody else (like a child or co-worker) when they need it, leaving their mind free to think on other things (or not...). However, just because people don't feel the need to understand, that doesn't mean that engineers and programmers should make those who want to understand unable to do so without consulting their local guru... and most of all, they shouldn't lie outright to their end users to cover up potential deficiencies with their own work. Even for a large company like Nintendo, servers can and will fail, or be overwhelmed by requests... even though, by odds, the problem is likely to be with the end-user, your errors shouldn't exclusively assume that any problems they encounter are their fault.

Movie o' the day: The Tale of Desperaux

Back when it was first coming out, the trailers didn't tell you much about this movie. All you could really gather was that it involved an uncommon talking mouse with delusions of chivalry. It was the right choice on the studio's part... the story involved is much more than that, spread among a number of characters, but the whole works best when you don't know the scope of the story at the beginning.

So, I'm not going to tell you much about it at all... but it is a nice little movie, and, unusually for things I write about, suitable for all ages that can stand to watch an entire movie all the way through (unless you're one of those people that thinks a mouse sticking a human with a sewing needle is too much of an "imitatable act"). If it's not already, I'm sure it will be out on DVD in short order... or, if you want the theater experience, it's still playing at the Garland.

Attachment to things

No, I'm not talking about the pretty toys in my life this time... this is more about the mundane objects, the ones that you use without a second thought, and never stop to consider what you would do without.

You see, I broke my comb today. Like many men, my sole concession to orderliness of hair is a small comb tucked in a pocket. In my case, I know I bought my comb back in 1988, through a store on the military base I was stationed on at the time. I know this because I actually had to stop and think... where on earth do you go to buy a comb?

Of course, that brings up the comb's longevity. I don't know if 20+ years of use is average or exceptional for such an item... but either way, I've been carrying that thing around with me for over half of my life. It accompanied me to several foreign ports of call, got used as a makeshift tool on a nuclear reactor, did its duty throughout college, and through all of my working civilian life until today. It's strange, but I almost felt sad that it had finally succumbed to use and time.

So, now I have a new comb (at a minimum, they sell at drugstores, hidden amongst the "girly" hair-care products). What future fun will it get to accompany me for?

Fun with consumer electronics

I don't seem to have much in the way of problems with setting up home electronics (I've even been referred to as a "machine empath" by friends), but I know that I'm not the norm in that respect. So, while I found this bit from the Onion chuckle-worthy, I'm sure some of you will just get a big kick out of it. Be forewarned, it contains more than a fair bit of colorful language... in fact, that's a fair bit of the point of the piece. Enjoy!

One week with the PlayStation 3

Yeah, I picked up a PlayStation 3 last week, in my never-ending quest for toys to entertain myself with... and I've had a Wii to play with for quite some time. There are a few differences that really struck me, and I thought I'd share:

• PS3 is prettier. Both the graphics it produces, and the shiny black case that contains it, are prettier out-of-the-box than the Wii. Of course, the Wii wasn't designed for high-performance graphics, and the Wii's case will probably stand the test of time better, but this is definitely a plus for the PS3.
• PS3 does Blu-Ray and streaming video. Yeah, I've heard that Wii might get a video channel someday... but PS3 has video now. Mind you, it's pricey compared to what you can get through a nice Roku Netflix box, but it's there. Side note: if anybody tells you you can't get good display characteristics out of a 1080p TV below 47", I will gladly call bullshit. My 32" does a very nice job with Blu-Ray movies... but then, I'm only watching from about 6' away - it's not size that matters, it's that ratio between screen size and viewing distance.
• Wii seems to be better thought-out. When you fire up your Wii, you're brought to a screen that just has the various channels that are installed and ready to go... all of the strange settings bits are quietly tucked away until you really want/need to go looking for them. PS3, on the other hand, has one monstrous menuing system, rife with settings tools, installer stubs, and the like. By installer stubs, by the way, I'm talking about icons indistinguishable from installed programs that fire off a download/install program when you click on them, which is rather annoying in some cases... for instance, the photo library program has an icon sitting there, but nothing will tell you that you need to install that program before you use it until you actually click on that icon. Downloadable content is similarly kludgy on PS3... where, on the Wii, your game is playable as soon as the download completes, the PS3 requires you to install programs you download... and with some of the demos I downloaded approaching 1GB, another several minutes of the console locked up while installing your program after a half-hour or more of download time is a bit grating. Wii's definitely got PS3 beat here.
• Wii has a low-power mode. Once the Wii is set up, it can stay connected even when it's "off", to update news and weather info, among other things. PS3 has to stay on at full power to do things like download game demos in the background... it does have a "turn off after downloads complete" option, but when I tried that, something went awry with the downloads, so the machine stayed on all night at full power.
  

So, in a perfect world, I'd love to have a machine with the PS3's power run with the elegant simplicity of the Wii's interface... but I still like both machines well enough as-is.