nintendo-wii posts

Apparently, there's some big event of some sort happening in Los Angeles this week. Supposed to be a huge deal in the video game industry, something like that? Lots of news? Anyone know what all the fuss is about?

BI just keeps seeing poorly-lit phone-cam pictures of hotel rooms from Callaham's Twitter feed and snarky IM's from our head honcho about how long the line at Starbucks is.

Why, yes, BI wasn't able to make it to the E3 party (apologies to the fine folks at $Unspecified_Vendor, at whose party we were not able to cause chaos the likes of which would be spoken of in hushed tones for decades to come; maybe next year). Truthfully, we're not actually bitter about it. Given the flood of news that's been coming from this year's edition of the expo, hardware, especially for anyone not using a console and/or prone to waving things around, seems to be pretty much an afterthought.

Well, there was a particularly festive flight sim joystick. Thank you, Logitech.

Nintendo's Wii console has been a massive hit and part of the reason is it's wireless motion sensing Wiimote controller. Now PC maker Asus has announced plans to release what they are calling the Eee Stick, their own wireless PC game controller that physically looks an awful lot like the Wiimote.

The controller itself, which will be bundled with certain models of Asus's popular Eee PC and Eee Box products, consists of a navigation stick and a activation stick along with 2.4 Ghz wireless dongle. The press release claims that the Eee Stick will also come bundled with a selection of unnamed games designed specifically for use with the device. There's no word when the controller will be made available or if Asus plans to release the Eee Stick as a separate product at some point.

Former GameSpot writer Alex Navarro told MTV Multiplayer an anecdote that paints an embarrassing picture of the relationship between the enthusiast gaming press and game publishers. Navarro had been assigned "a certain Wii launch title" to review. The game's publisher sent him a note, which read: "If the review is 9.0 or higher you can post immediately. Lower than 9.0, could you please hold until launch day, November 19th? Thanks."

According to Navarro, this was par for the course. And there's no doubt this sort of thing is also common with PC games. In the end, GameSpot chose to buy the game at retail rather than use a review copy provided by the publisher. Navarro gave the game a very poor review. He was unwilling to share the name of the game or the publisher, but if you're really savvy with GameSpot's content browsing features, you can narrow it down a bit using the information provided.

This kind of problem is not unique to the video game medium; it's unfortunately common for movie studios to refuse to screen films to critics until opening weekend if they fear those critics might get a little too, well ... critical.