• For those about to take criminal justice classes, be ready for heated debates. What can’t everyone see I’m right? #

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• Found my dvd of Office Space finally. I wonder if my work would get the joke if I get a red stapler. #

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I’m pretty excited about Ys Book 1 & 2 coming out on the virtual console. I loved playing book one on my old 8088 XT computer. Unfortunately, I never did finish it all the way. Now I get to beat that one and play book 2 as well. Plus, it’s the really good TG-16 version to boot! I’m going to download this as soon as I finish up a couple of my other games that I’ve been meaning to beat. I’m a little behind and perhapse this will motovate me to finish them before starting another game.

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• Thinking of getting an Edubuntu box for my daughter. #

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• Big announcements coming in this week’s CGA Radio… #

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• Open source projects now can claim copyright infringement. http://tinyurl.com/6qwbrg. It may be hard to enforce, but it’s there at least. #

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• @nikolaidis I never thought about twitterfeed.com. I use friendfeed, but there’s no identi.ca there. Maybe it’s time to switch. #

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• @nikolaidis Maybe when the cross-posting to Twitter works, it’ll be a better option to switch to identi.ca. Too many people are on Twitter #

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• Reinstalling Magix to record the show tomorrow and playing Chrono Trigger. Life is good #
• Hmm…the game mode icon on my Samsung TV looks a lot like a Xbox 360 controller #

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E3 Nintendo news was kind of a bust for the more “core gamer” that owns a Wii. With the “news” of Animal Crossing, Wii Sports Resort, and Wii Music, it seems like Nintendo has lost their perspective of what their fans want.

I think Nintendo has split their thinking when it comes to selling their products now. The one way is for the long-time fans. The ones that want the Mario and Zelda games. The other way is for the newcomers. The ones that don’t want a complicated game that takes forever. They just want to have some fun.

Back when Nintendo first brought out the NES, they did not sell it as a video game system. The crash made stores wary of video games and didn’t want to put them on the shelves. So Nintendo sold it as a toy instead, allowing more stores to be more willing to give it shelf space. People bought it to play games. They just wanted to have some fun. It brought more people to video games.

The Super Nintendo came out after that and touted that you were now playing with power..super power. Once again, people were playing with a “toy”, but by this time Nintendo didn’t have to sell it as such. It was a video game system. The fans of the NES were willing to upgrade and new fans came as well.

Of course, after that came the N64 and the Game Cube. Both of these tried to appeal to the fans and both had varying degrees of success. Some of the fans stopped playing video games and the new consumers were not buying Nintendo products as much as before.

Nintendo saw this and decided they wanted to change how things were going. They wanted to push the reset button in other words. They needed to figure out how to bring back the old fans and bring in new ones as well. And of course, they needed to keep the current fans happy as well. They brought a new way to play video games and figured out how to bring back some of the old classics people remember playing.

They’re bringing back the “toy” label and bringing in new fans to play the simple games like Wii Sports. I know a couple of people that own nothing but Wii Sports and are just fine with that. It allows them to have fun with their family and friends or by themselves. Which, in my opinion, is the core element to video games. Fun.  For the people that have fond memories of Mario in his simpler days, there’s the Virtual Console. While not covering every gamers wishes, it has allowed some fans of the past to become fans of the present again.

Nintendo has brought people back and brought new people in to the gaming scene while trying to keep the people that have been around Nintendo systems all their life happy as well. It’s quite a task to undertake when you sit back and look at it. Have they succeeded? Partially. There are new gamers and gamers that have came back, but Nintendo has lost some people as well. Xbox 360 is a huge success and the PS3 also has a respectible fan base.  Nintendo is starting to address some of the “core gamers” and their concerns finally, although not all of them will be delt with I’m sure.

Maybe when the Wii 2 has been out for a year or two, we’ll look back at this and realize what Nintendo was doing or not doing and understand why they did what they did. Who knows, in a few years we could hear a catch prase like “Experience the new Revolution” when the Wii 2 comes out. Okay, so it may not be as catchy as playing with super power, but it gets the job done.

As for me, I’m going to take Nintendo with a grain of salt. I’ll buy the games that I really want and ignore a lot of the games that seem to appeal to the more casual gamer and the shovelware out there. I mean how many times do I need to buy a party game before they start looking the same? The new MotionPlus accessory probably won’t be used in my house unless a Wii Remote breaks for some reason. Wii Music will be pointed and laughed at every time I see it on the store shelves. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed will be bought the day it comes out or soon after. The Virtual Console and WiiWare will continue to be mostly ignored. And I will seriously look and getting the Wii 2 when it comes out and compare to the rest of the next generation of game systems.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play with the shiny white “toy” sitting in my living room.

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