Ntuple Indemnity

I echo what Carter asks Mysterioso in Carter Beats the Devil, but here I direct my question to Nintendo instead. It concerns their wireless networking plan, which I briefly discussed in this post. As it turns out, I should have waited for the full transcript of the Iwata keynote, as it appears some of my questions have already been answered.

Quoth Iwata-san:

Every aspect of DS is designed to be friendly to all audiences. Therefore, Wi-Fi should be easy for everyone, too. Our goal is to make this process simple and seamless. Users shouldn’t have to give it a thought. Wi-Fi connections will feel like local area network connections because they will use a common API. We will let DS owners enjoy Wi-Fi without the difficulty of entering an SSID or WEP key. And maybe most importantly, we will remove the most important consumer barrier – Nintendo’s Wi-Fi connections will be free. As I said, simple and seamless.

How? How? What dark magic has been invoked to perform this miracle? How can this happen without compromising wireless security? What of the legal implications, if any, of using neighbouring private networks as hot-spots? Has Nintendo somehow conjured some new unheard-of infrastructure? I appreciate answers from any Wi-Fi experts in the audience who are not already bound by non-disclosure agreements.

For a long time, I have perceived Wi-Fi as the one key area where Sony has an edge over Nintendo, given its in-house expertise in developing personal computers and related hardware. No evidence of this was greater than how the PSP has wireless network configuration – SSIDs and WEP keys – embedded in its firmware, whereas with the DS, Nintendo seems to have left wireless support entirely to the software end. Now it looks like Nintendo’s pulled an Apple, playing the “ease of use” card and negating its competitor’s advantage – if it delivers on its promise.

On a related note, IGN is really on the ball with their GDC coverage: here’s their preview of Animal Crossing DS, with a video attached that at one point, shows how your character can change out of the goofy horns in the original game in favour of more fashionable headwear. They also have the complete GDC keynote on video, which has not yet been banished to the infernal realm of subscriber-only content.

Lastly, I have indeed seen the outstanding trailer for Revenge of the Sith. Comments will hopefully come when a stable, high-quality version is linkable.

Today was Nintendo’s big day at the Game Developers Conference. Satoru Iwata spoke of the GameCube’s successor, tentatively named the Nintendo Revolution, as being Wi-Fi enabled and compatible with GameCube discs. As could be expected from a keynote speech at a conference more for developers than consumers, most of the details revealed were of a technical nature. Then there’s the confirmation that the Nintendo DS will indeed have its own online network for wireless multiplayer, with Animal Crossing DS as the flagship title for global connectivity.

Some questions: If the Revolution is backward-compatible with the GameCube, what of the controller? Does it just feature additional GameCube controller ports, or perhaps a WaveBird receiver? What, if any, is the fee structure for playing the DS online? Nintendo has traditionally shared my reluctance to ascribe to the monthly fee model of Xbox Live and desktop MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, but I do wonder how they plan to move away from it. Also – and this has been a burning question for a long time now – if DS wireless connectivity is done via hotspots, is there support for routers secured by encryption mechanisms like WEP keys? I do not plan to compromise my network security every time I want to connect my DS to the rest of the world.

On the other hand, a month ago it was brought to my attention that Steeps is wireless-enabled. Problem solved, sort of.

From a consumer-geek standpoint, Nintendo’s other big unveiling was a minute-long teaser for the new Zelda game. Between this and the Revenge of the Sith teaser that is to be released tonight, there is plenty to keep your video player very, very busy as you rewind and repeat, rewind and repeat. (A direct, albeit slow MOV download lieth hither; a smaller, faster download in WMV format lieth thither.)

Allow me to confirm what you are seeing. Yes, Link rides a boar and with it, tramples an assortment of vermin underfoot. Yes, he shields himself against a mighty boxing Goron. Yes, he shoots down various flying creatures with a bow and arrow whilst on horseback. Yes, he is chased by a one-eyed arachnid that may or may not be an iteration of Gohma (who was more of a crustacean, to be honest). Yes, enemies burst into a cloud of purple haze upon destruction.

Yes, this is, holistically speaking, awesome.

I’ll close with a link to the Gateway story du jour. Linguistics and video games? As Fred Astaire famously sang in Top Hat (“Cheek to Cheek”), I’m in heaven.

So, how did I do for predictions? Passing on the two Documentary awards leaves 22 categories, of which I managed to guess 15; curiously, I underestimated The Aviator in the technical categories, yet I incorrectly pegged it for Best Picture. In the eight “majors” (Picture, Director, acting and screenplays) I got everything but Picture and to some extent Supporting Actor, though I was definitely fence-sitting when it came to Owen and Freeman.

In retrospect, as much as I enjoyed Million Dollar Baby, I do stand disappointed that Scorsese and The Aviator did not take home the top two. Once again, the Academy went for the safe, perhaps even slightly compensatory choice. Honestly, what does Martin Scorsese have to do to win an Oscar? But then one thinks of the usual stable of examples – Howard Hawks, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock – and quite frankly, this is the Academy’s loss.

The best acceptance speech of the evening was, without question, Jorge Drexler singing after winning for “Al Otro Lado Del Rio” – a deserving winner.

Film clips were by and large absent, and nowhere was this more noticeable than in the Animated Short category. Chris Landreth had to accept his award in the aisle instead of onstage, and I wonder if some technical budgets were slashed this year. Speaking of which, it has come to my attention that the National Film Board has Ryan available on its website for viewing online. Take fifteen minutes out of your busy schedule and watch it.

And that closes the book on 2004, minus any straggling films I did not catch, of which the most notable is Hotel Rwanda. But given that March consists of exactly one and only one new release that strikes me as interesting – Robots – I have plenty of time.

I want to discuss Oscars of a different sort: the Rainbow Oscars that are the centrepiece of the wacky film-spoofing video game Viewtiful Joe 2. Well, not the Rainbow Oscars themselves, but what you need to do to get them; as with most video games, it involves the systematic defeating of what a Campbellian mythologist would call “threshold guardians” – in vulgar terms, bosses.

The original Viewtiful Joe was, in terms of a niche GameCube action title that was somehow enough of a sleeper hit to be named the best game of 2003 by USA Today, legendary in many ways. As a 2D side-scrolling anime-styled beat-em-up in a market favouring photorealistic 3D environments, it was a daring and unique blend of old-school values and modern technology. What really made it stand out, though, was its rogue’s gallery. If I were to name the most exhilirating, albeit frustrating boss battles of the past five years, Viewtiful Joe would claim at least three of them.

One of the toughest challenges in the original Joe was the sixth chapter of seven, “The Magnificent Five.” Basically, it was a slap in the face of anyone who might have emerged from the first few boss battles scathed, but self-satisfied. This chapter pitted you against the Raging Stones, tougher versions of the first four bosses in the game in back-to-back succession with no saving or powering up in between. Not only did you have to beat them all over again, you had to do it cleanly and without taking a whole lot of pain, or start from the very beginning. Then you were rewarded with a duel against none other than Fire Leo, a nine-foot flaming beast in a volcanic cavern, who had a tendency to dispose of you in about ten seconds until you figured out how to exploit his weakness, after which he would dispose of you in the more gracious span of two minutes. On the standard Adults difficulty, Fire Leo dragged me to the “Game Over” screen kicking and screaming no less than thirty times. He gave my delicate piano hands cramps.

Viewtiful Joe 2 is in many ways as great a game as the original, boasting a selection of bosses that have a lot more personality – the squid-like mad scientist Dr. Cranken, for example, or Fire Leo’s brother Frost Tiger, a cool-as-ice samurai who punctuates his entrance with lyric poetry in the style of Basho. (The exception to the rule is the rocket-powered Egyptian sphinx Flinty Stone, who spends half his showdown asleep.) It also has a similar sixth chapter where you fight your way through iterations of four earlier bosses that move faster and take a lot more punishment before yielding. The problem is that the sequel, unlike its predecessor, is merciful; you get a chance to save and heal between every battle, which turns the entire exercise into a purely temporal endurance test as opposed to an attritional one. This is Viewtiful Joe, for crying out loud! I expect to be punished. Every point of damage should strike terror in my heart.

I should note that this is one of the few irritations in an otherwise phenomenal game that was sadly ignored when it was released in November (thanks to the blitz of Halo 2, Metroid Prime: Echoes, Half-Life 2 and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and World of Warcraft), but I do find it a concern when such a fast-paced game repeats itself for such a long stretch. Really, though, if you have a GameCube, there is absolutely no excuse to not have the two Viewtiful Joe titles in your collection.

Still to come: a preview of film in what looks to be a busy 2005, and Students’ Union election coverage in tandem with the campaign season kickoff this morning. Disappointingly, both Katz and Bazin pulled out, leaving the Presidential race as the only one of interest.

You see a lot of chatter about the unpredictability of future not just with respect to science fiction writings, but in all speculative fields in general. There was a time when 2005 was far, far away, and its only certainty was the arrival of Episode III. Nobody could have told you back then that the Mozilla project, which demanded a hefty 128MB of RAM to facilitate compilation, would lead us to the modern comforts of Firefox and Thunderbird; that a little-known boy with a lightning scar would come to rule the world and prepare to assert that grip for the sixth time; that the University of British Columbia would successfully bid to host the World Universities Debating Championship in 2007; that ten thousand unfortunate souls would be so cruelly robbed of that future by forces of nature we may never fully conquer, all in one fell swoop. (No condolences I am able to offer are appropriate next to the magnitude of the tragedy.)

But we did have that one point of reference – what we now know as Revenge of the Sith. And while 2005 was the future, that made 2006 the far future, the point where territory became uncharted. Beyond the Wall, you might say if you have read George R.R. Martin’s ongoing saga, as I have recently been doing.

This is the time of year when people write lists, prepronderantly following the traditional format of the Lettermanian decuple. I would do the same for film, only I am quite unqualified to do so until I at least have a shot at Kinsey, Sideways, Million Dollar Baby, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and House of Flying Daggers – and I am quite unqualified to talk about House of Flying Daggers until I have seen Hero. A martial arts film enthusiast being almost three years behind on Zhang Yimou is like your most fervent Potterhead still making his way through The Goblet of Fire, and it’s getting embarrassing. Indeed, it is when you read and see everything that you know you have read nothing, seen nothing. Mastery of literature in any medium is the recognition that only the repeatable skills of interpretation can be mastered; the works themselves cannot.

I will say, however, that if I have time I will finish writing about at least some, but hopefully all of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Aviator and A Very Long Engagement. As for the Cliff Notes: The first is a visual feast to behold, but as always, that is not the only consideration. The second is not the best film I have seen this year, but would be a deserving Best Picture winner in many respects, and Scorsese may have earned his first directing Oscar in every way he didn’t in Gangs of New York. Of the three, Jeunet’s First World War drama is my favourite, and there is no need to wait for my elaboration of that recommendation before you go see it.

Another great thing about having passed through another season of giving is that now, more people own a Nintendo DS. In other words, the Metroid Prime: Hunters demo that comes with the unit is finally useful. The single-player practice modes are hardly that exciting, but get in a room with three other players and a glass of Pinot Noir and you can pretty much cancel all your other plans for that evening. It’s the handheld equivalent of what the shareware release of Doom did for DOS PCs over a decade ago – a minimal single-player experience consisting of reaching endpoints and hitting switches, unless you find joy in punching in your IDDQD and IDKFA and blasting every pink rubbery demon in sight, but a groundbreaking deathmatch mode unlike any ever seen on the platform.

While on the subject of video games, thirty hours and six Crystal Stars into Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door have been sufficient to establish it as being one of the best RPGs I have played – yes, at least on par with the SNES-era classics. Certainly it is the best-localized game I have seen, on the opposite end of the spectrum from Zero Wing. The writing trumps that of most games sprouted on North American soil – I refrain from saying all of them because as everybody should know, the LucasArts adventures of Tim Schafer and others (Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, Grim Fandango and the Monkey Island series) still boast the most thoroughly clever harnessing of the English language in the short history of interactive games. It’s a crying shame that getting your hands on them is so difficult nowadays; the industry has not yet reached a stage where it has an interest in the preservation of its past.

Of course, even in the film industry, that did not happen until the proliferation of DVDs at the turn of the millennium. You could argue that DVD was preceded by LaserDisc, but the format never really caught on in the West. You could not argue that DVD was preceded by the videotape, in the dark times when hastily cropped aspect ratios and haphazard restorations on degradable media demonstrated no genuine interest in keeping the classics alive.

The Prequel Trilogy and the initial negotiations and pre-production of The Lord of the Rings, cultural guideposts for everything up until this year, came into being at around the time DVD was beginning to rear its beautiful, shiny head. Could we have predicted that by 2005, not only would it become a ubiquitous format rendering videotape as obsolete as the 1.44MB floppy, but its lifecycle would already be at the point where mainstream absorption produced such abominations as poorly-labeled Pan-and-Scan editions sold alongside the real ones?

Now, the big question there is whether or not Blu-ray will catch on, and just how bad the format wars will be. We still don’t have a clear winner when it comes to recordable DVDs.

Bear in mind that one should never overestimate the future. For crying out loud, it’s the twenty-first century, and we don’t even have moon colonies.

Somebody get a hold of Adam, or anyone who can read Japanese. I have need of your services.

Sources indicate that a Japanese magazine has announced in some capacity that the title of the next Zelda game is Zelda no Denetsu: Yuushuu no Tadzuna. The literal word-for-word translation – recognizing, of course, that the Nintendo of today takes some measures to ensure that the titles of the American releases make sense in English – is reported to be “The Legend of Zelda: The Ride of Melancholy.” There’s one claim that contextually speaking, it should be the Bridle of Melancholy. The most reasonable hypothesis so far, in terms of a translation that also preserves it semantically, is Reins of Sorrow. Then again, the whole thing could be a hoax.

Speaking of Nintendo franchises, IGN has a neat little what-if feature on next-generation sequels, though their idea of what constitutes a revolution in gameplay is mostly limited to “bigger, prettier and online.” Maybe that’s why they’re not designers. Still, some of the concepts make you think. For my part, I’m interested in what the Nintendo Revolution will bring to the table in terms of opening new avenues of design, and game design lies in the nature of interactivity in which the player engages. Not saying I’d have a problem with things being bigger and prettier, of course. As far as online play goes, I still fail to see why the games industry is so hell-bent on putting the cart before the horse. To them I say, get rid of monthly fees and then we’ll talk. (I’m looking at you, World of Warcraft.)

Also on the subject of expanding video game markets is this editorial piece on the Nintendo DS’ potential to uncover an untapped demographic that wants to play games, but without pushing any buttons. Personally, while the DS is as a device a glorious, fascinating system and the developmental epitome of handheld gaming, Super Mario 64 DS is only going to sustain people for so long. Having one competent (nay, really bloody addictive) piece of software on your platform kind of defeats the purpose of having a modular system with substitutable software cards. Mario 64 is doing fine by itself right now, but it’s not going to hold up the system forever. Please, sir, I want some more.

An interesting followup regarding Sherlock Holmes, whom I discussed in my post on The Final Solution:

Holmes solves death of a fan

Maurice Chittenden

The mystery of how Britain’s leading expert on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came to be lying garrotted to death on his own bed may have been solved by the author’s greatest creation, Sherlock Holmes.

Amateur sleuths probing the unsolved death of Richard Lancelyn Green believe he took a leaf out of one of the Victorian detective’s adventures.

In one inquiry Holmes deduces that a woman arranged her suicide to look like murder. Friends of Lancelyn Green now believe he might have tried the same tactic in an attempt to get revenge from beyond the grave for an imagined deception.

Read the whole story.

Here’s a neat little theoretical reference for the sci-fi readers in the crowd, or anyone in particular who notices commonplace annoyances in literature of any genre but can’t put a finger on what they are: Louis Shiner’s Turkey City Lexicon (and in case you want more, its elaborated cousin). Plot Coupons, “As You Know Bob,” Burly Detective Syndrome, and my favourite, Eyeball Kicks – read all about it.

On a final note, it’s been two days now, and I can’t believe I haven’t even seen the Extended Edition of The Return of the King, much less written ten thousand words about it.