This Javascript Nintendo emulator works amazingly well in Google Chrome. You can play Dr. Mario, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, The Legend of Zelda, etc.
I highly recommend you use Google Chrome to play JSNES. Thanks to its high performance canvas element, and a clever optimisation by Connor Dunn, it runs at full speed on modern computers. Mac builds are also available. Otherwise, it just about runs on Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4, but it's hardly playable.
We've come a long way from the days of the 5K Awards.
Features include four-player collaborative play (!!) and something called "demo play".
The game will also be the first game on the Wii to feature "demo play", where players will be able to pause the game, let the game complete the level for them, and resume play at any time by unpausing.
In my house, this was called the "give the controller to my 11-year-old cousin and let him show you how it's done" feature. I both hated and loved that feature. (via object of my obsession)
Punch-Out is coming to the Wii (@ Amazon)...the teaser commercial features Isiah Whitlock, Jr., who played Clay Davis on The Wire, as Little Mac's trainer. It's worth watching to hear Whitlock's comparison of comebacks and yo-yos. (thx, rob)
Tetris didn't start with the Game Boy, of course (Pajitnov created it for the PC in 1985), but the Game Boy made it mainstream. Ultimately, Tetris proved so popular that it quickly drove sales of Nintendo's handheld console into the millions. Tetris's grown-up gameplay also attracted adults to Nintendo's new platform, expanding Game Boy's potential audience beyond the usual adolescent NES set.
Somewhere, I still have an original Game Boy with a Tetris cart wedged into it.
"Actually I think it's pretty good," she said. "You can definitely get a workout. When I started doing it, I realized all the activities were pretty much on point. There were some things I didn't like, like the alignment in a couple of places. But over all, I thought they did a good job and this will be a good tool for people who can't make it to the gym."
The Wii Balance Board will be released in the US and Canada early next week.
Ooh, there's going to be a Dr. Mario game available for the Wii at some point, playable over the network. It's already downloadable via WiiWare in Japan...which should not be confused with the Virtual Console downloadable games even though the difference is really confusing.
This game has been announced as supporting the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service. This will feature online racing and battle modes, both of which are capable of up to 12 simultaneous players. It has also been confirmed that there will be online leagues, with international and local rankings. This will take place from within an entirely separate Wii Channel. This channel will also feature the option of sending saved time-trial ghost data.
A pair of videos showing off Wii Fit, a balance board device for the Wii. Looks pretty interesting, although if it's marketed as exercise equipment, I fear it may not do so well. The board and a Wiimote in each hand could make for a pretty convincing skiing experience.
Update: Hmm, the Honda Fit and Wii Fit logos look pretty similar. (thx, dave)
The latest installment of Super Mario has received plenty of notice for its revolutionary style of gameplay. But just as striking is the intricacy of its sound design. One convention of the game is a Pull Star, a floating anchor that Mario can grab with some sort of magical, musical force which, when activated emits a creepy, almost theremin-like wail, wavering just a bit before solemnly sliding down in pitch. This sound is one of those elemental formulas for touching an emotional soft spot. The other day I was playing a level with a series of Pull Stars in succession and my girlfriend implored me to stop, as it was making her sad, and not only because I'm a grown man playing a child's video game. Here is an example of the Wailing Pull Star (and a taste of the very Vangelis-like score scattered throughout the game).
Also: via Boing Boing Gadgets, footage from a live orchestra scoring session for the game. Mario's creator, Shigeru Miyamoto sits aside and supervises.
Also also: I noticed that the menu for selecting levels to play is a musical instrument in its own right, allowing the player to create melody with chord changes and everything. It's a subtle touch.
He explained that no matter how large you make the playing field, if you walk long enough you will run into a wall, and that will make you turn around, which makes the camera turn around and runs the risk of making the player lost. With a sphere, Mario can run all he wants without falling or hitting a wall... a useful concept for getting players totally absorbed in the moment. Koizumi added that the best thing about spherical worlds is the "unity of surface," and the "connectedness." Neither will the player get lost easily, or need to adjust the camera - by using spheres, Koizumi said, they had created a game field that never ended.
They also talk about the Galaxy's two-player (well, 1.5-player really) feature, which is a really nice way of getting a second passive player involved in what is essentially a one-player game. (via snarkmarket)
An appreciation of the Real Super Mario Bros 2. The game was released in Japan in 1986 but was considered too difficult/weird for US gamers and a different Mario 2 (based on a Japanese game called Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic) was released to the US.
In most games, you trust that the designer is guiding you, through the usual signposts and landmarks, in the direction that you ought to go. In the Real Super Mario Bros. 2, you have no such faith. Here, Miyamoto is not God but the devil. Maybe he really was depressed while making it -- I kept wanting to ask him, Why have you forsaken me? The online reviewer who sizes up the game as "a giant puzzle and practical joke" isn't far off.
The whole upshot is that RSMB2 is now available on the Wii Virtual Console as Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels. And for the record, I loved SMB2.
Update: Just to be clear, this is my second time through the book. (Last time was, what, 4 years ago?) Trying to make more of a study of it this time.
Update: Suggestion from Ian: "Get 3 bookmarks. 1 for where you are reading, 1 for the footnotes, 1 to mark the page that lists the subsidized years in order." I'm currently using two bookmarks...will get a third for the sub. years list.
In the Kottke/Hourihan household, much of the past 4 weeks has been spent determining which has the most sensitive built-in accelerometer: an iPhone, a Nintendo Wiimote, or our newborn son.
The iPhone was eliminated fairly quickly...the portrait-to-landscape flip is easy to circumvent if you do it slow enough or at an odd angle. The Wiimote might be the winner; it registers small, slow movements with ease, as when executing a drop shot in tennis or tapping in a putt in golf.
Newborns, however, are born with something called the Moro reflex. When infants feel themselves fall backwards, they startle and throw their arms out to the sides, as illustrated in this video. Even fast asleep they will do this, often waking up in the process. So while the Wiimote's accelerometer may be more sensitive, the psychological pressure exerted on the parent while lowering a sleeping baby slowly and smoothly enough so as not to wake them with the Moro reflex and thereby squandering 40 minutes of walking-the-baby-to-sleep time is beyond intense and so much greater than any stress one might feel serving for the match in tennis or getting that final strike in bowling.
The Nintendo Wii, and the bowling game in particular, is a big hit at an Illinois retirement community (average age: 77). "'I've never been into video games,' said 72-year-old Flora Dierbach last week as her husband took a twirl with the Nintendo Wii's bowling game. 'But this is addictive.'"
Blah, got sick yesterday somehow, so things will be a little sparse around here today. Back to the TV. The Wii isn't fun when you're sick...the last thing I want to do this afternoon is stand up.
Steven Johnson has written up some thoughts on the Nintendo Wii. His fifth point is especially interesting and I can't help quoting almost the entire thing:
Wii Sports trades the onscreen complexity of goals and objectives and puzzles for the physical, haptic complexity of bodily movement. Since the days of Pong, games have been simplifying the intricacies of movement into unified codes of button pressing and joystick manipulation. What strikes you immediately playing Wii Sports -- and particularly Tennis -- is this feeling of fluidity, the feeling that subtle, organic shifts in your body's motion will lead to different results onscreen. My wife has a crosscourt slam she hits at the net that for the life of me I haven't been able to figure out; I have a topspin return of soft serves that I've half-perfected that's unhittable. We both got to those techniques through our own athletic experimentation with various gestures, and I'm not sure I could even fully explain what I'm doing with my killer topspin shot. In a traditional game, I'd know exactly what I was doing: hitting the B button, say, while holding down the right trigger. Instead, my expertise with the shot has evolved through the physical trial-and-error of swinging the controller, experimenting with different gestures and timings. And that's ultimately what's so amazing about the device. Games for years have borrowed the structures and rules -- as well as the imagery -- of athletic competition, but the Wii adds something genuinely new to the mix, something we'd ignored so long we stopped noticing that it was missing: athleticism itself.
He's not exactly right -- for example, drifting in Mario Kart is difficult to do until you develop a "touch" for it and is not easy to explain to others -- but the Wii does take it to a new level.
Browsing the various Nintendo Wii forums around the web, I've noticed more and more people pratically bragging that they play the Wii sitting down, flicking their wrists instead of the beautiful and healthful full-body motion that nature intended. These couch potatoes shall not be suffered. For the Wii purist, I made this prototype for a tshirt:
A ladies version is also in the works, even though the pun doesn't work as well.
How do motion-sensing video game controllers (like the Wii remote) work? "The accelerometers used in the Nintendo controller are thinner than a penny, small enough to fit twelve on a postage stamp, and sell for under $6 a piece. They can accurately measure forces more than three times stronger than the pull of gravity in three directions - up and down, side to side, and forward and back."
From over 220 entries in the Celebrity Mii Contest, the judges have selected their favorite celebrity avatar created with the Nintendo Wii. And the winner is Dave Curry with his Zach Braff Mii:
Judge Spencer Sloan of Goldenfiddle said of this entry: "What's beautiful about this one is the truth in this piece. Yes, Braff, you're a nose and some lip. Bravo to the artist for taking a risk." Judge Jen Bekman of the Jen Bekman gallery said of the Braff: "There is this eerily human quality - I mean it really looks like him, as a person, in a weird way." The Braff Mii was not the most faithfully rendered celebrity Mii but with a few broad strokes, Curry created something more than the sum of its parts and ventured close to art. Well done. As the winner, Dave will receive the Wii game of his choice and a 3-D statuette of the Zach Braff Mii provided by Fabjectory.
Here are some other entries the judges felt strongly about (i.e. the runners-up) with commentary:
Jack Black by both Brandon Erickson and Shane Walsh
Jen: "Faithfully rendered."
Spencer: "The artist really captured Black's unsettling feline qualities with confidence and skill, and for that he/she must be congratulated."
Condoleezza Rice by Alex Chang
Jen: "The Condi one looks like her and also is a caricature at the same time, embodying the devil-essence that surely corrupts her soul."
Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Stephanie Goins
Spencer: "This one is like the Mona Lisa. I cannot escape her glazy stare, try as I may. She's perfect in every way."
Woody Allen by Adam Preble
Jen: "Great, immediately recognizable, somewhat of an easy target though."
Frida Kahlo by Adriana Tatum
Vito Corleone by Benjamin Lim
Jen: "Don Corleone came close to being my top pick before I decided that he too, was a bit too easy."
Steve Zissou by Mark Husson
Spencer: "Nice work on the hat, I guess, but the moustache is weird. Plus, no pock marks. And Stevie definitely needs him a frown."
Admiral Ackbar by Eric Eberhardt and Mike Boccieri
Spencer: "Admiral Ackbar is fantastic, obviously, because I immediately knew who he was, and maybe you didn't. I'm interested to find out whether the artist went in with Ackbar in mind or saw him in some of the available features. Very well done, indeed."
Klaus Nomi by D.J. Ross' girlfriend
Spencer: "The Klaus Nomi is a strong work but possesses little confidence. This Klaus is all fear.
More timid mime than weirdo alien swagger."
And here are the rest of the finalists that the judges had to choose from. You may notice a few excellent cartoon entries...the judges felt that while they were worthy finalists, they did not merit the top spots because of a lower degree of difficulty involved in their construction (i.e. making a cartoon character with what is essentially a cartoon editor).
From top to bottom, left to right: Velma from Scooby Doo, Hannibal Lecter, Jack Skellington from A Nightmare Before Christmas, Dick Cheney, Tom Cruise, Hulk Hogan, Jennifer Wilbanks (aka The Runaway Bride), George Costanza, Charlie Brown, and V from V for Vendetta.
Missing from the finalists are the multiple Michael Jacksons, Hitlers, Satans, Walter Sobchaks, Beatles, and Kim Jong Ils. So many Mii versions of all these people exist online that it didn't feel right including them in the final round because they were both too easy and too easily copied from elsewhere.
Finally, a personal favorite that didn't make it into the final round:
David Foster Wallace by Nick Maniatis
I get the feeling that in the Maniatis household, there are a lot of Wii Tennis matches pitting Wallace and Hal Incandenza against Tracy Austin and Michael Joyce. Awesome.
Thanks to everyone who entered and to the judges for deciding amongst such a strong field of entrants.
Missed this article from a few weeks ago: Why you shouldn't buy the Nintendo Wii. I almost didn't have time to read this because I'm having WAY too much fun playing the Wii.
The Celebrity Mii Contest is going swimmingly, lots of good entries so far. Three announcements to make:
1. Mike Buckbee of Fabjectory has offered to make a physical statuette of the winner's celebrity Mii. So cool! The company currently does characters from SecondLife and SketchUp models, but they're branching out into making Miis and the winner's Mii statuette will be among the first that they produce.
2. I have extended the contest deadline until the end of the day on Wednesday, Dec 13. Lots have entered, but there's room for more.
3. Spencer Sloan of the excellent celebrity gossip site, Goldenfiddle, has agreed to lend his celebrity expertise to help judge the contest. I am working on getting another judge as well...stay tuned for further information.
Just the other day I was thinking, "gosh it would be neat if they made a painting game for the Wii". But a Bob Ross painting game for the Wii? Holy crap!
Meg and I set out to do a John Lennon Mii last nght, but as soon as we saw these eyes, we switched to Paul McCartney:
Not too shabby for a few minutes work, but I know you can do better. So, I'm having a contest to see who can make the best celebrity Mii. The rules are as follows:
1. All Miis must be made with the Nintendo Wii editor, not this Flash editor (which is cool, but not the same).
2. No cheating! Make your own Mii, don't just copy someone else's.
3. I love your mom, but she's not a celebrity. Frances Bean, you can ignore this rule.
4. You retain exclusive worldwide rights to your Mii and its image, save for giving me permission to post it on kottke.org as part of the contest.
5. Judging will be done by me and possibly a panel of "celebrity" judges if I can scrounge some up. The family and friends of the judges can enter, but will be held to much higher standards than everyone else, just as in real life.
6. Only two entries per person. (And don't enter two in your own name and then have your friend email in two more. Pick your best two, send 'em in, and take your chances.)
7. Entry deadline is Monday, December 11th at 11:59 pm ET. The entry deadline has been moved to Wednesday, December 13th at 11:59 pm ET. I will announce the winner at some time shortly after that.
To enter, make your Mii, take a photo of it on the screen (make sure the Mii is clearly visible in the photo), and send a link to the photo to jason@kottke.org with a subject line of "Celebrity Mii Contest" (no quotes). You can also send attachments but because of my spam situation, I cannot guarantee that they will get through to me...send a link to your entry to make sure. There will be some still-as-yet-unspecified prize (I'm thinking a Wii game or something like that) awarded to the winner. Good luck!
1. Not only do I want to play it again right now (so badly) despite having to stand up and move around and stuff, I want to play it again right now (so badly) because I want to stand up and move around and stuff. Reminds me of my 15yo self; all he wanted to do was play hours and hours of basketball in my driveway.
2. With the Wii Sports Pack, Nintendo has made it possible for those who are not physically gifted to nonetheless discover and explore their athletic gifts (like manual dexterity, quickness, timing, etc.). Even your gray-haired relatives can excel at bowling: "It was her 1st time ever playing video games and she has a high of 155 so far. Wii rocks!"
3. Possibly the best thing about the Wii is that you don't really need to be told how to use the controller. The boxing game has zero learning curve (just punch!).
4. Nintendo is betting the farm that just like megapixels don't matter as much nowadays when buying digital cameras as lens quality, camera features, etc., the number of polygons your console's processor spits out at what resolution matters less than how fun the games are. As someone who's nonplussed by fancy graphics in video games, I'll take that bet.
5. The menu interface is a little clunky. Did they not have time to get it right?
6. The day it's possible to buy NHL '94 through the Wii's Virtual Console, my life, such as it is, will be complete.
7. I'm curious how much fine control is possible with the Wiimote after a couple weeks of practice. With a conventional controller, very tiny adjustments are possible by pulsing or tapping the joypad or joystick...you can easily move Mario right to the edge of the staircase or subtly adjust your direction your kart is pointed on the track. But I found it difficult being that precise with the Wiimote while playing Super Monkey Ball.
Of all the news over the past few days about the launches of Sony's PS3 and Nintendo's Wii, the most interesting has been the differing responses of the people waiting to purchase the different consoles. While the launch of the PS3 was marred by violence (people robbed of their PS3s in mall parking lots, crowds trampling people in a mad rush for games, police needing to quiet unruly crowds waiting to buy with pepper bullets, etc.), the launch of the Wii was peaceful, with no reports of violence that I can find. This comment on Digg is typical of the sentiment I've seen expressed online about the two groups of fans:
Try working at a Circuit City... went in for a 7am meeting and got badgered by the losers. I have to say the "wii-tards" were much more tame than the "ps three-tards."
There are several obvious reasons for the PS3 violence: the PS3 was possibly more anticipated, their initial supply was more limited than that of the Wii, and the machine is more expensive. But the difference in reaction also has something to do with the goals of each company in regard to their respective systems and the types of people each system tends to attract. Nintendo is focused on play and fun: the Wii is the fun system...about people of all ages enjoying the process of playing games. The PS3 is more about competition, who wins, who loses, and who frags the most enemies in the most spectacular fashion; cutthroat survival of the fittest. These are generalizations of course, but I find it interesting that the Nintendo gamers, who are attracted to play and fun, didn't cause as much trouble as the PS3 fans, who are more into competition.
After we had waited in line for almost two hours, Nintendo World closed the store early (at 5:30) and instead of making the announcement themselves, the Nintendo World employees sent Rockefeller Center security out to intimidate the crowd into dispersing. It was surreal - on what should have been Nintendo World's finest day, they were closing early and sending out fake police to scare away their customers.
Nintendo released the Wii at midnight today. Predictably, bloggers and media outlets are having a bit of fun with the gaming console's name. Here's a sampling of headlines from newspaper stories and blog posts with Wii wordplay:
Gone with the Wii
Gamers Wii bit excited
Are Wii Ready?
Playtesters say 'Wii' to console war question
Wii Won't Rock You
And away Wii go
Gamers Go Wii Wii Wii All the Way Home
The things Wii do for love
'Wii'kend So Far
No Wii for Mii... for now :(
Wii were successful (barely)
Wii Are The World: War Of The "Hard To Resist" Game Consoles
Wii Will, Wii Will Rock You.
Oh Wii Oh...
A Wii bit of gougery
Come On Over and Wii'll Play!
Wii-lcome to the Twilight Zone
Wii would like to play!
What Wii can do
Only a Wii Bit of Excitement
PS3 Fans: "Wii are a bunch of idiots"
Wii Wish You an Early Christmas (If You're Famous Enough)
Be Kind to the Wii Folk
Wii Love It! All about Nintendo's new gaming console
A Wii-bit too late
Are Wii ready?
Wii Want to Play
Wii for Yoo and Mee
To Wii or not to Wii, that is the question!
A Wii Bit More
Oh, the humani'wii'. (Apologies...I'm so'wii'. (No, 'wii'lly. (I can't stop, send help! Hurr'wii'!)))
Driving on the Interstate through the metropolitan tri-state area during a 1.5 hour downpour is like playing 700 continuous laps of Baby Park against 7 other players. I'm beat. (ps. It's a simile anyway.)
The following is a great 2004 BBC documentary about Tetris, the man who created it, and the lengths that several companies went to in order to procure the rights to distribute it. Tetris - From Russia With Love:
Alexey Pazhitnov, a computer programmer from Moscow, created Tetris in 1985 but as the Soviet Union was Communist and all, the state owned the game and any rights to it. Who procured the rights from whom on the other side of the Iron Curtain became the basis of legal wranglings and lawsuits; the Atari/Nintendo battle over Tetris wasn't settled until 1993. There's an abbreviated version of the story, but the documentary is a lot more fun. A rare copy of the Tengen version of Tetris, which was pulled from the shelves due to legal troubles, is available on eBay for $50.
Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers -- whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming -- are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of cliches that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular cliches just happen to be true.
Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task -- playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
"Deliberate practice" reminds me of a video game a bunch of my friends are currently hooked on called Brain Age. Available for the handheld Nintendo DS, Brain Age is based on a Japanese brain training "game" developed by Dr. Ryuta Kawashima. The game measures the "age" of your brain based on your performance of simple tasks like memorizing a list of words or addition of small numbers. As you practice (deliberately), you get faster and more skilled at solving these mini-games and your brain age approaches that of a smarty-pants, twitchy-fingered teenager.
Speaking of talented teenagers, this week's New Yorker contains an article (not online) on Ivan Lendl's golfing daughters. In it, Lendl agrees that talent is created, not born:
"Can you create athletes, or do they just happen?" [Lendl] asked me not long ago. "I think you can create them, and I think that Tiger Woods's father proved that. People will sometimes ask me, 'How much talent did you have in tennis?' I say, 'Well, how do you measure talent?' Yeah, sure, McEnroe had more feel for the ball. But I knew how to work, and I worked harder than he did. Is that a talent in itself? I think it is."
Translation: there's more than one way to be good at something. There's something very encouraging and American about it, this idea that through hard work, you can become proficient and talented at pretty much anything.
Very high on the list of things that don't need to be advertised is Tetris. Chances are you remember this Tetris commercial from the 80s anyway. "Use your thumbs, use your eyes, find yourself Tetrisized!"
