Great week

First off, Nintendo has announced their next system. Which is going to be, finally, backward compatible. So Prince or Persia won’t be obsolete as soon as I plug it in!. ;-)

Better yet, there’s apparently some sort of plan to open up the Nintendo archives and allow downloadable games all the way back to the Nintendo Entertainment System. I will say this sounds good, with a few provisos.

  1. This “feature” isn’t going to do well if Nintendo can’t get at least partial access to the third party titles. I’d pay to play Super Metroid, but I’m willing to bet many more people would pay to play Final Fantasy VI.
  2. There are many programs out there which will play old NES and SNES games. Nintendo’s next system needs to adopt some of their features, including pausing the game whenever, enhanced graphics and sound. Save states (where you can save the game literally anywhere by dumping the memory) would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath.
  3. Also, don’t make people have to pay every time. Either do a subscription model, or let people pay a one-time higher fee to keep the game.
  4. Finally, there has been an active ROM Hack/Translation community around, which has performed a lot of neat (and not so neat) things with various games. It would be neat if Nintendo could enhance the replay value of their old classics by promoting some of the better alterations.

I was worried at first when I heard that the system would “only” be 3 times as powerful as the Gamecube. But then I remembered a few years ago, when the Gamecube was coming out, and it was looking like PS2 was supposed to kill the Gamecube in performance. It turned out that Nintendo had been quoting real-world performance figures the whole time, while MS and Sony were quoting absolute top-peak-in-theory numbers. The Gamecube ended up as one of the more powerful systems of its time. And while I don’t expect the next system to top either XBox 360 or PS3 in performance, it doesn’t need to. It just needs to remain fun.

I was thinking that I might pick up a PS3 or XBox 360 in addition to the Nintendo. But they both look like they’re going to be expensive, and they both look like they’ll need a shoulder strap. I hate huge systems, which makes the Nintendo even more appealing. I’ve seen a lot of positive comments about the PS3’s styling, but I’d be afraid I’d drop it because of all the round edges. ;-)

Also, I watched Star Wars Episode III last night. Let me tell you, nothing will make you feel better about yourself than seeing a line for of people in Darth Vader and Jedi and Sith outfits, engaged in mock lightsaber battles. Unless you’re one of them I guess.

I thought of a great idea, I was going to go in line dressed up a Spock from Star Trek. Unfortunately, I thought up the idea while I was in line, so nothing came of it. ;-)

As far as the movie itself goes, I think think that George Lucas should get hired to write dialogue for soap operas. Because that seems to be the upper range of his romantic-writing skills. Luckily the rest of the movie more than made up for it. It was really quite good overall.