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.

WIMP Environment [noun]: Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device (or Pull-down menu) - A graphical-user-interface environment such as X or the Macintosh interface, esp. as described by a hacker who prefers command-line interfaces.

- The Jargon File

These wonderful, powerful, magic boxes of ours can turn long strings of ones and zeroes into dazzling graphics with breathtaking speed, perform tremendous, complicated mathematical computations in the blink of an eye, and, in a pinch, do a fair impersonation of a space heater. They are ours to command, ready to do our (possibly nefarious) bidding. Whether we know what we want or not, if it's within the operational parameters and capabilities, a PC will do exactly what we tell it to do.

Of course, there's a catch or two. First, we need to know how to tell it to what we want. Heuristics be damned, other than on-the-fly spell-checking, no matter how sophisticated the modern PC is, it's not clairvoyant. Ask anyone who's done time in a call center how much disconnect can exist between what a user wants, and what they say they want. Unlike our not-so-hypothetical phone staffer, the computer can't ask questions or make inferences. They're fabulously literal.

The second catch is having some way to communicate our wants and needs to our willing digital minions. And that's where our input devices come into play.

If you want to play console games on a PC you could turn a console into a PC (such as in the above picture from Regal Hardware) Now, a once secret online marketing survey from a company called Intellisponse has been uncovered by the forum folks over at NeoGAF. Among the products supposedly revealed in this survey is something called "Trioxide". What is it? Well according to the leak it's a product that will allow PCs to play PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii game disks.

There's not much else on the forum post about this supposed product, saying only that the games will require the original console controllers to be played on the PC as well. That's pretty much it; no pricing, no word on who the company behind this reported project is nor a release date. Frankly, even if such a product actually existed (which we seriously doubt) we think Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony would do everything in their legal power to stop this product from ever reaching fruition. Stay tuned . . . (By the way, there is an arsenic trioxide that is used as a cancer medication)