Disney's Golden Age: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

And now for something entirely different! As much as technology and gaming consume a vast breadth of my attention, I have other interests as well. One of them is animation, and starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, I'm going to talk about Disney films of the golden era, spanning a ten-part series ending with Sleeping Beauty. This was inspired by a fellow blogger who calls his page "The Norman Nerd", in which he recounts Disney films during their renaissance period in the 90s. I thought that was a fun idea so I figured I'd give it a try, only this time covering their nascent years and early rise to pop culture stardom.

There's some caveats, though, as I'm going to be skipping much of their musical works such as Saludos Amigos, with the exception of Fantasia. This is equal parts because I'm less familiar with those films, and also because they don't fit the typical Disney cannon.

Let's Really Talk About The Next Generation

What can you say about the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3? It's been a long and illustrious career for both of them, hasn't it? At release, they were powerful systems, and provided a level of graphics and gameplay that has left many people with few complaints. Part of this longevity is owed to the developers who have continually pushed the chips inside past their limits. They've done the impossible at times, porting games that are considered cutting-edge on the PC, and doing so with a surprising amount of their aesthetic intact.

The Last Vita Rambling This Year

Last time I rambled on the Vita, I focused on the problems it faced in a diverse market. I pointed out some things that could be done to improve the situation. I even pointed out some silver-lining in the Vita's upcoming releases, with the biggest being Assassin's Creed III: Liberation. There are others, of course, but what the Vita needs the most is a boost for this holiday season.

Thanks to aggressively-priced bundles, it did get a boost. It sold about 160,000 units during Black Friday, the most active period of the year for gift buying. This is a huge boost for a system that can only manage 50k in an average month. From a microscopic viewpoint, this is really good news. From an industry-wide perspective, this is pretty bad.

Wii U First Impressions

My friend got up early on November 18, Sunday morning so he could pick up a Wii U from GameStop the moment they opened their doors at launch. It's funny, because he didn't even pick up the Wii at launch, or the DS, but every other N-brand console and handheld where he's been old enough to buy on the day of release, he's been there. Naturally, I tagged along.

Now I've made it no secret that the Wii U hasn't generated much excitement out of me. It's hard for me to get jazzed about a system that, essentially, will just offer a resolution bump for games very similar to ones Nintendo released on the Wii. At least, that's been my attitude before I've had a chance to see one in person. But how have my beliefs changed now that it's finally out and I've had a chance to actually play with it?

Gaming on Mini-ITX

We're going to do something different today and put together a parts guide for one of the cooler PC gaming builds you can make these days. Most people naturally go with a mid or full-size ATX case and appropriate motherboard for their gaming rigs, and there are benefits to that, such as the added workspace inside the system, cable management, and improved cooling. But the truth is you can fit a lot of performance, in fact most of the performance of a large tower into a small form factor system. If you want a gaming PC that you can lug around the house or to a friend's place for some LANing, obviously you could just go with a gaming laptop. But if you just want to have the Master Race gaming experience with a smaller footprint, there's mini-ITX.

AMD's Nervous Breakdown Pt.2

One of the things I've loved most about AMD over the years is their forward-looking processors and platforms. In 2004 I upgraded my old Athlon XP system to a spiffy new Socket 939 Athlon 64, and was pretty happy with the improved performance. I had no idea how well the platform would pay off for me, though, when dual-core processors started to take off shortly after. By 2007 my PC was aging, but with a simple BIOS update, an Athlon 64 X2 was just a drop-in upgrade away from adding another two years of life to the system. I imagine it was a lot like how people felt when they put an i486 OverDrive chip into their 1992-era PCs.

Reevaluating Laptops

I used to have a small website called Rep's Simple Page where I first started this whole rambling thing. I sucked at HTML and I would put in all the little markup commands by hand, so it was really primitive looking. It would have felt right at home in the 80s. The cool thing about that little site was that for whatever reason, it felt really private. I would voice my most controversial opinions as brashly as I pleased, basically emulating The Best Page in the Universe but without all the humor or wit, because I didn't think anybody would read them. Last night I went through an archive of some of the ramblings I wrote, and between cringing at the grammar I was struck by how crass and raw it was, something I sadly think I've lost since moving my stuff here. Nothing's really changed -- if anything it's more private here, but I write as if I'm trying to be objective; like I've got the reputation of a major journalistic website riding on it. I'm supposed to be angry, goddammit! Fuck objectivity!

But I digress. A lot of my writings back then were relics of their time, reflecting the trends that were occurring then, and in retrospect bringing to mind the trends that I never saw coming. One particularly good example of this was my Laptops vs Netbooks rambling, which I've taken care to upload here. If ever there was a quaint snapshot of the computing world before tablets, that would be it.

MMO Wars

The ideal in an MMO is still being researched. No one has yet achieved it and in fact, no one knows exactly what it looks it. MMOs started off in possibly the most unideal form, when they took standard RPG tropes of the 80s and ducktaped a modem onto them. Since then developers have been trying to figure out how a large number of players can share their experiences simultaneously in a single world.

I'll preface this by saying that I'm not a big MMO player. I get my knowledge via proxy from a person who has played a large number of them. My observations are often not personal, but I know enough from playing World of Warcraft to have an idea of where I'd like to see MMOs go.

That's why when I read on information for Guild Wars 2, I was intrigued. It seemed to have a lot of really good ideas on how to approach combat, classes, and PVE, and it was different and refreshing enough on paper from what I knew from playing WoW that I wanted to know more.

WeeiiooUUUUU

Hey! Guess what! The price and release date was announced for the WiiU, and it's exactly what everyone thought it would be! Actually, there's a $350 Deluxe SKU we didn't know about, which comes with Nintendo Park and a bunch of other goodies. Shock and awe everybody! The WiiU is coming in 2012!

The Real Problem with Vita

By my count, I've written about the Vita in-depth four times. One of which was technically about the 3DS, but it came hand-in-hand with many Vita comparisons. I seem unable to talk about one without the other, but I realize now I may have been missing the bigger picture.

It's not hard to do, because it seems like they both target the same market, and it's still a market without any other contenders. But while dedicated gaming handhelds is a two-horse race, both the 3DS and the Vita share a daunting fight with many other mobile devices for essentially the same goal: providing on-the-go entertainment.

The 3DS enjoys the safety of Nintendo's protective sphere of niche appeal. Nintendo will always provide experiences with their own franchises that no others can, and that means they'll always have a certain market to themselves, and one that has been proven over and over again to be non-trivial. Whatever happens in the tablet and smartphone space, they're essentially safe.

Ouya Will Fail, But Here's Why it Shouldn't

Admittedly, I don't follow the open source scene very much. I don't care to hack things, I've never rooted a smartphone, jailbroke a console, or done much with homebrew. The closest I got was buying an R4 card for my DS, which allowed some limited media playback and software ROMs to be played. Frankly the homebrew games that I tried on that were forgettable at best, and in general my experience has been that homebrew games are crap, akin to the shovelware on the Android marketplace.

Don't get me wrong, the world of open source has produced some very cool things, and has been very important in the development of computing. In fact, it's unavoidable. These days, the most useful things coming from the open source community are utilitarian in nature, from running simple file servers to streaming media. Open hardware platforms are a slightly different beast, but still very cool in concept, and sometimes even in practice.

Vita in progress

The Vita launched in North America and Europe with a lot of fanfare from those already seeking it, but with little allure for those who weren't. This was despite a hard marketing push and one of the strongest launch line-ups in gaming history. Many will cite the price, and with a short supply of evidence going against that theory, one can't help but agree. Memory cards obviously aren't helping that either.

Fueling this reputation is a score of those who will call the system nearly DOA, and overall the picture being painted by industry pundits is one of doom and gloom. As an avid peruser of videogame forums, I don't have to tell you how ugly discussions can get when the subject is brought up. Obviously a lot of people feel the system has hit a dry spell of software, and enthusiasm levels are low, whereas others (namely people who bought the system) would rather view things more optimistically. Obviously the Vita suffers from unfavorable comparisons from the nearly-a-year-older Nintendo competitor, which has sold over 17 million units worldwide after almost 15 months on shelves.

The Vita has sold...almost 2 million. At first glance it seems as though you might as well bury the thing in a coffin and move on with your life. After all it doesn't have a Mario Kart or Pokemon to pull it out of the ditch, and it doesn't look like it'll have a price drop any time soon either.

Consoles in the Cloud

I meant to write about cloud gaming a long time ago. Actually all the way back to when OnLive first debuted. Back then, most people didn't think it was possible. Gamers who made a living managing networks would argue tirelessly on forums about how it wasn't physically possible. The latency would be too great, the image quality would suck ass, and it wouldn't be cost-effective. To their credit, they were partially right, except for the whole impossible thing.

So OnLive debuted, and it was actually shockingly new technology, enough so to make jaded technology buffs gape in awe. No, the latency wouldn't make twitch gaming very enjoyable, and the image quality might have served only slightly above current-gen consoles, with some compression artifacts that non-cloud gamers would never encounter. But it was working. You could in fact play games with all the electronic muscle hiding away behind miles of wiring. It was an extremely novel concept, and while it didn't take off with any great zeal, it was a step towards what some might say is the future.

Why is that though? Why does cloud gaming necessarily have to be the future?

Looking ahead at the WiiU

In my first rambling about the WiiU, I made the following statement:

Reggie went on stage and told the E3 audience that many felt the hardcore folks weren't being catered to by Nintendo. This is something they wanted to change with the new system, so they created a system for "you", meaning the audience he was speaking to at the presentation consisting mostly of hardcore gamers. We're so confident this system will appeal to you, he said, that we're even putting it in the name. So, that in a nutshell is how they explained away the reason behind the U.

So we're a couple months away from the next E3, and that is when the real selling is going to have to happen. Nintendo is going to have to pimp their next home console like it's the last home console they make. Why? Well, if they don't sell anybody on it now, what are they going to do? Drop the price on it four months later?

We're saddled with two burning questions that need answering when the big June convention takes place:

• What does the WiiU offer hardcore gamers?

• What does the WiiU offer casual gamers?

Sega is the Most Fun to Collect For

Title says it all. But here's a thousand more words just to say it more elaborately. Everything from Sega is way more fun as a retro gamer to collect for than any other game company. It's true, and if you don't already agree, or if you do and you just need to hear someone else corroborate your opinion, then here's why:

What do retro game collectors like to collect? Whatever's plentiful, pretty much. The more obscure or notable, the better. What did Sega produce all of its life? Tons of shit. Consoles, add-ons, accessories, games... Just a buttload of everything they could think of, all of it interesting in some way.

Sega embraced the cutting edge. This started with the arcades, particularly in the late 80s with games like Hang-On and Out Run, which not only used state-of-the-art sprite-scaling hardware but featured super-sized cabinet systems with ridable vehicles that moved and interacted with the game. Later when it came to 3D, they scaled multi-million dollar aerospace simulator parts down to consumer-level arcade systems, and eventually the Sega Saturn. They were among the first fully-featured 3D consumer graphics in the industry. Unquestionably Sega was always on the cusp of innovation.

Looking ahead at the Vita

It's 2012, and as of today, the PlayStation Vita is only two weeks away. New games are continuously being announced for it, like Unit 13 and Mortal Kombat. Games are up for sale on PSN, Taco Bell is doing a promotion for giving away the system, and the early bundles are getting ready to ship out a week early to impatient pre-orderers. Hype is mounting for the new handheld that could, and it's taking on a lot more followers as it grows.

The Vita is not without its challenges. Heavy on the minds of Sony and the most hardcore industry followers is the abysmal sales in Japan following a single week of decent launch numbers. Like the 3DS before it, many take it as a bad omen with far-reaching implications. Calling it dead before it's had a chance at long-term success might seem dumb to most, but there a handful of folks with a mentality of absolutes, and a whole news industry that makes that sort of speculative sensationalism their business. Of course, some said the same things about the PSP, but somewhere out there it eventually felt out a place for a foothold, and rose to phenomenal success in an isolated, but no less fervent niche. It's always better late than never.