Ntuple Indemnity

Back in June when the title of the sixth Harry Potter book was announced, I inquired: “Who is the Half Blood Prince – and is there, or is there not a hyphen?” At long last, we have an answer to the second question, and it will indeed be Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, “half-blood” hyphenated as it is in the books themselves.

While on the subject of correct punctuation, I am aware that I do not practice it on this site. I refer not to the placement of periods and commas, but how I do not differentiate between em and en dashes, or curly quotes and primes. Part of it is because I have enough trouble remembering web-ready identities like & (&) and é (é) to even begin using the numerical ones on the fly. In fact, I see the misuse of dashes, apostrophes and quotations marks as a larger problem within society as a whole that can only be corrected via better keyboard designs. Add quotation mark and em dash keys, I say. Make them mappable to HTML identities. Take Microsoft’s automatic entry of em dashes, curly quotes and correct apostrophes and have them default to Unicode characters rather than proprietary Windows ones, not that this will ever actually happen, given Microsoft’s predilection to all things proprietary.

At some point or another, I might correct the non-ASCII extended characters littered throughout the site to their corresponding identities so the blasted thing validates properly, but the day I find time to comb through every post to do this will also be the day I do a table-free redesign and move to my own server; in other words, not for a while.

Interesting scoop on the Nintendo DS today, stating that it has a square port with an as-yet-undisclosed secret purpose. Nintendo is also reportedly considering releasing the device in multiple colours, in which case you can expect me to head straight for the purple (sorry, ‘indigo’) model, unless they release a retro-styled NES gamepad design like the one that graced the Game Boy Advance SP.

One minor detail requires clarification. I quote: “The stylus pen is going to be connected to the back.” Does that mean it merely slides into a stylus-holding slot at the back of the unit, as one would assume, or is it physically attached to the device itself – say, by a retractable cord? If it is the former, I can guarantee that Nintendo is going to be receiving a lot of warranty calls for replacement styli. Not to make overly sweeping generalizations, but the target consumer that will be purchasing and playing the Nintendo DS is more likely to lose a stylus than a Palm-piloting businessman. A stylus connected to the DS would make a lot of sense as long as the cord is long and flexible enough to not impede gameplay, yet short enough so as to avoid getting all tangled up.

The Sign of the Apocalypse du jour comes courtesy of the official website to the video game BloodRayne:

Rayne Makes Her PlayBoy Debut

If you felt teased by her sexy Girls of Gaming cover, then this new feature art is going to blow your mind! Rayne is 100% topless and smokin’ hot in the October issue of Playboy magazine. This is a first in videogame history and trust us when we say that Rayne does not disappoint. The magazine hits newsstands in early September so here’s a great excuse to get a copy!

Keep in mind that this is an imaginary computer-generated vampire chick we are talking about. Who is in direr need of getting out more, the BloodRayne team behind all this or the kids who will go out and actually buy the issue? (And yes, I said ‘kids’.)

This is going to be one of those entries where I step aside and let the more qualified do the talking.

Throughout the week, Slate has been running a five-part feature on the National Scrabble Championship by Division 1 player Dan Wachtell. It’s more of a bird’s-eye-view, or at least a Division-1-player’s-eye-view, of the action in New Orleans and covers a great deal about the Scrabble culture that I did not. For example, I have yet to defeat Scrabble legend Brian Cappelletto, still considered by some to be the best player in North America. Wachtell also imparts some wisdom about the strength of second-language players, the world-class Thai contingent in particular. Naturally, one of the entries also concerns the LEZ scandal. If you liked my Scrabble coverage earlier this month, get reading, because this is even better and a lot more accessible.

For those of you interested in where video games are headed with Nintendo and Sony’s new portable systems, right now there is no better analysis than the “State of the Handheld Industry: DS vs. PSP” feature at GameCube Advanced. It features interviews with some of the biggest names in both electronic gaming journalism and software development, some heavily favouring one system, the others undecided. At times the views and predictions about certain issues are so disparate that the only certainty is, somebody will turn out wrong.

This isn’t the only fight Sony has been picking lately. It is one of the companies that has pledged support for the Blu-ray disc format (BD-ROM), one of the two competing specifications vying to succeed DVDs as standard optical media. Regardless of who wins, format wars are always a headache for consumers; every now and then, what we really need is a side-by-side comparison of state-of-the-art technology.

There is a hilarious visual gag in Finding Nemo so subtle that I never caught it until I watched it for at least the fifth or sixth time just yesterday. Pay close attention to the ornaments in the saltwater tank where Nemo ends up; among them is a human skull. Next to the skull is a sign that appears in only two or three quick shots in the entire movie. Read it, and remember, the tank is in a dentist’s office.

A week ago at the Ziff Davis Electronic Gaming Summit, Reggie Fils-Aime of Nintendo delivered a speech about the company’s portable gaming strategy; IGN has the transcript. It clarifies a lot about Nintendo’s controversial philosophy that higher specs and better graphics are a technological dead end, and new frontiers in interface design are the way to go. “While we’ve steadily improved the technology of the Game Boy,” he says, “Nintendo has never considered itself in the technology business. We are in the entertainment business.”

This guy is right on the money. Observe:

On the other hand, if we are talking about a hard core 20-something gamer, the question of consumer desire becomes more pertinent – just what, exactly, does that avid player want? The initial thought is pretty obvious – if they love Grand Theft Auto on their PlayStations… they should love it just as much on the PSP, right? Well, leaving aside the issue of specific content not jumping platforms very well, game developers have to consider how these older consumers will play. The vast majority of older hard core players have made a leisure time commitment to gaming. Your mother may play solitaire or hearts for ten minutes at a time. Your most passionate gaming buddies probably play for entire nights or weekends at a time… because that’s what they love.

Now, consider those games they play to immersion – Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Madden, Zelda – and ask yourself this. Are they away from home for sufficient blocks of uninterrupted free time to repeat that immersion on a handheld device? How many 20 year olds really take regular three hour plane flights? Eleven-year-olds spend half-day car trips in the back seat, playing Game Boy. 21-year-olds spend half-day car trips in the front seat, driving. Even if those blocks of time were available to them, how many older gamers wouldn’t really rather wait and play those games at home, lying on the couch, blasting away on their big screens?

I give the Nintendo DS a fair amount of coverage here and virtually none for the PSP, and there’s a reason why I am excited about one and not the other. It is because the PSP is and fully intends to be a Game Boy that plays PlayStation games (albeit on an absolutely gorgeous display). There is nothing that it offers that cannot be done with a home console, except for additional features like music playback. Now, it’s no secret that part of why the PlayStation 2 sold so well is that it doubled as a DVD player at a time when most consumers did not have a DVD player, but were about to purchase one. Portable music players, on the other hand, are really nothing new. Nokia discovered this last year with their game-playing phone, the N-Gage: people would much rather buy a superior phone and a superior game system as separate, specialized units. This is why a hardware-driven approach falls flat on its face.

One may point out that the Game Boy is subject to a similar criticism: that in terms of pure gameplay, there is nothing that distinguishes it from what home systems can do aside from its inherent portability. That is only half true, because here, the innovations are driven by software developers. These range from using the unit as a control pad with a private screen in Four Swords Adventures and Crystal Chronicles to, say, monitoring and tuning your car. Still, it is quite correct that some Game Boy titles are just as playable on a TV screen, if not moreso. Take the phenomenal Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, for instance. As a traditional RPG where you have to play in long stretches to get from one save point to the next, it’s far more playable on the Game Boy Player accessory that puts it on a television and routes control to the wireless GameCube controller. Most of the biggest titles on the GBA are re-releases of NES and SNES classics, but they are still more playable on the old systems for which they were designed. (Part of it is because of the GBA’s lack of X and Y buttons, but that’s a different story.)

The thing that makes the DS so exciting is that almost everything about it takes advantage of the fact that you can take it with you and hold it right in your hands. You cannot implement two independent screens and stylus control on a console that plugs into a television set, any more than you can use a Duck Hunt Zapper gun on a cell phone. That means we are going to have new software that takes advantage of PDA-style features, like touch keyboards to replace that age-old method of scrolling with the directional pad to select each individual letter. At the same time, it sports the most effective button design of any system in history, the diamond/shoulder layout of the Super Nintendo controller that is simple enough to be intuitive, but consists of just enough buttons to play Street Fighter II.

Heck, you can play Scrabble on this thing, so long as Hasbro doesn’t screw up the software license. Put the rack and board on the touchscreen with a drag-and-drop interface, and use the other screen for scores, timers, tile tracking and the whole gamut.

There is one little problem, though: Hasbro doesn’t own the software license.

Since the acquisition of Hasbro Interactive in 2001, Scrabble has been owned by Infogrames, which has since renamed itself Atari to fool the unsuspecting into feeling nostalgic. As was pointed out at the Nationals town meeting, this is the major stumbling block that has prevented the rise of an online Scrabble network tied directly into the competitive world of the National Scrabble Association. Instead, the independent Internet Scrabble Club reigns supreme.

The other problem with the official distributions of Scrabble software is that they use the censored dictionary. While on a PC there are ways to edit the dictionary data under the table, cartridges are a different story. With the biggest dictionary revision in ten years just over the horizon, it is not the best time to buy a Scrabble program anyhow. But this is the part where in a stroke of genius, one suddenly recalls that the DS is Wireless LAN-enabled. Why not connect to a central server, download a dictionary update and flash it like a game save file?

The possibilities are fascinating, and it would take a lot to stop the DS from being the next big thing. Underpromotion and overpricing of software are culprits to watch. As Fils-Aime points out in his speech, software is the one determinant of success when you boil things down. The Game Boy sold because of Tetris, and the Game Boy Color sold because of Pokémon. Build the hits, and they will come.

I still think the DS version of Animal Crossing is the one to watch. The original for the GameCube is a niche title with a word-of-mouth cult following, but almost everything in its design would work even better on a portable system with a touchscreen that you play in bursts. But one area where Sony has consistently beaten Nintendo is promotion and marketing. Advertisements like the Santa Claus commercial for the PlayStation 2 are the ones that get the public to spend. Right now, the Nintendo DS is almost unknown outside of circles that read game industry news or University of Alberta student blogs. This needs to change.

Final note goes to Square/Enix: get your act together and work on Chrono Trigger DS already.

The Nintendo DS has a brand new look – and compared to the one revealed back in May, the form factor is sleeker in a curvaceous, aerodynamic way. Plus, I can put aside fears of Nintendo, say, forgetting to include a slot for the stylus and magnifying the warranty service nightmare they are boldly trying to avoid. I like the new shape; whereas the last one was a rounded rectangular prism that could slip around in your sweaty fingers, this one invites a firmer grip with its intrusions and extrusions. In the initial photographs, the black and silver make for a somewhat awkward contrast, and I will likely want the machine in prettier colours (or even a retro design like the NES-style Game Boy Advance SP); purple, mayhaps?

Also, the Nintendo DS will not be renamed prior to release, which is a good sign. To change it at this stage when it has already established itself as a brand name to which the gaming public is accustomed would be folly, unless they had something really nifty-sounding in mind, like the Double Deuce.

On the software end of things, Square Enix has been sending out polling cards concerning what games to port or update for a DS release. To me, this is a no-brainer: Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI (III in North America) and the curiously unlisted Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. Imagine playing these games with maps and status screens put on a separate display, not to mention all the speech and battle status boxes that cover half the picture and in Chrono Trigger‘s case, even block enemies from your field of vision. Also: Square, you’re developing for a Nintendo system. Everybody in that consumer demographic wants Super Mario RPG back, especially with its descendants (Mario & Luigi and the upcoming Paper Mario 2) bringing the Mario-themed role-player back in vogue for a new generation. To understate things, porting SNES-era RPGs and leaving this one out would be a bit of an oversight.

The DS itself is looking pretty solid at this stage, even though we have yet to see a retail price. But given that its projected release is within the next four months, and Nintendo absolutely must get the unit shipped before Christmas to get a jump on Sony, it is disconcerting how little we have heard about the software to be available at launch since the E3 unveiling. We are getting Animal Crossing DS at launch, right?

The province-wide hunt for an available retail copy of Tales of Symphonia came to an end yesterday, thanks to a Best Buy somewhere en route from Edmonton to Calgary, or so I’m told – which had just that one copy remaining, and not even on the shelf. I spent some time with the two-disc Japanese role-playing game for the Nintendo GameCube, and will undoubtedly be investing countless hours to come fighting monsters and making sandwiches in the world of Sylvarant.

Tales of Symphonia is best described as refreshing. For the most part it follows the familiar RPG conventions: you have a party of characters with finite hit points and technique points and equip them with weapons and armor, there is some kind of epic save-the-world quest to accomplish, you see the occasional save point lying around, and you fight monsters that crawl up and down the area you are exploring. The combat, however, is real-time button-mashing, where you can move your lead character towards and away from a given enemy in Street Fighter fashion. Although I quite like the patient strategizing that comes along with the turn-based menu systems that characterize the vast majority of the genre, this is a design that provides the experience with a brisk tempo that puts the player’s reflexes and sandwich-making skills to the test.

The art style is anime to the core, with a cel-shading engine that produces a look and feel closer to Viewtiful Joe than The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. It’s imperfect, especially on a large-screen television, but the artwork is still a sight to behold. I have a lot of respect for the cel-shading technique; the two-dimensional sprites of the Super Nintendo era have aged a lot better than the rudimentary polygons of the PlayStation generation, and the illusion of cartoon textures in a three-dimensional environment is a natural extension of the former. The in-engine graphics are nowhere near the quality of the full-motion, pre-recorded animation, and the disparity is noticeable – but the technology will get there someday. Wind Waker shows that with sophisticated light and shadow, engine-driven cel-shading can already approximate full-motion animated video of moderate quality.

So far, the story has proved to be pretty involving – that is, ever since I got used to the funny fantasy names and sorted out who was whom. By the way, a note to the translators, because I have spotted this error at least once and it bugged me to no end: who is a subject. Whom is an object. Wrong: “Whom has bases that are belong to us?” Right (sort of): “All your base are belong to whom?” You don’t replace “who” with “whom” just to sound all formal and fancy, because all you end up looking is stupid.

I also wasn’t kidding about the sandwiches.

While on the subject of GameCube RPGs, be sure to check out this IGN article on the import version of Paper Mario 2, which has already been released in Japan. If you are of the traditional text-based persuasion when it comes to adventure games, a word of advice: don’t pick up the phone booth.