Jem Alexander

The internet has been around for a little while and it’s easy to assume that it now caters for everything that we require of it. Whether that includes forms of entertainment, advertising opportunities or online services. Thankfully this is not the case and there are myriad gaps to fill in the internet market. The tricky part is thinking them up in the first place.

When a new website comes along that is fresh and unique, with a function that isn’t found elsewhere, it can be very successful and lucrative. This is true of all the examples that I linked to above. They have all generated a large income, simply through offering something that couldn’t be found elsewhere.

They say that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. They also say that ‘you cannot re-invent the wheel’. The latter is what inevitably happens after new internet meme is unveiled. Homestarrunner.com arguably inspired a large amount of people to get into flash animation. Netflix’s success is responsible for many other sites of a similar nature, like Swapgame (which, itself, has had a great amount of success by taking a winning formula and playing with the ingredients). The million dollar homepage spawned a huge amount of clones overnight after people looked at it and said ‘I wish I’d thought of that’.

‘I wish I’d thought of that’ is the key to a successful internet meme. An idea so obvious that users kick themselves when they see it. That same thought is what drives people to recreate the site for themselves, in order to cash in on the new idea. This rarely works as it is the trendsetters that get the attention for being fresh and innovative. Everything that comes after that is doomed to be referred to as ‘that —-.com clone’.

On the other hand, ‘I wish I’d thought of that’ can work on a more powerful level, but in the opposite direction. It can drive people to be productive and aid the expansion of an idea. This isn’t unique to websites. Fan-fiction is the product of people loving an idea so much that they want to be involved. Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy of films is another example of this. He didn’t re-write the books, instead he expanded the books onto the next medium up: film. ‘I wish I’d thought of that’ gets people involved through an emotional connection.

This isn’t the case for every successful internet meme, of course. Sometimes the service alone is good enough to get people hooked and to stick around for a long time.

I’ve been following the development of a new website quite closely for the last few months. Jappleng.com promises to be a bridge between the eastern (particularly, Japan) and western worlds. With Japanophilia on the rise and anime and manga selling increasingly well in the west, this site comes at a perfect time.

The site promises to deliver news from Japan, Japanese language learning aids, anime and manga reviews, analysis on Japanese culture and a community section. Individually these features can be found elsewhere on the internet. Bringing them all together, however is a service which many people will appreciate. This isn’t just a complilation of content found on other sites, however. Everything on Jappleng appears to be written especially for it.

Jappleng has the potential to be a new trendsetter, closing another gap in the market. There are still plenty more, they just require a little imagination and a lot of work to fill convincingly.

Yes, the London Nintendo conference recently ended. This conference had a far smaller online audience than the Japanese and American conferences did. This is understandable. Most of the world have received their information. I spent the conference sat in the n-sider chat room, watching the Eurogamer.net liveblog.

The conference was padded out with a lot of self-congratulatory DS sales discussion at the beginning. Nothing very new there. Iwata then made his appearance at the beginning of the Wii discussion. Finally, after a live demonstration of Wii Tennis, the news we were waiting for was announced.

Here’s the comparison table for all three regions, in Great British Pounds (to the nearest pound for converted currencies). For the exact prices in each region’s native currency, see the other conference posts.

Release date: Japan: 2nd Dec | America: 19th Nov | Europe: 8th Dec
Console price: Japan: £113 | America: £132 | Europe: £179
Game prices: Japan: £20 to £30 | America: £26 | Europe: £34 to £39
Wii remote price: Japan: £17 | America: £21 | Europe: Unknown
Nunchuck attachment price: Japan: £8 | America: £10 | Europe: Unknown
Virtual Console game prices: Japan: £2 to £4 | America: £2 to £4 | Europe: Unknown

So there you have it. These are the price and release results from all three conferences. What’s that, you ask? Where are all the European prices? Not a clue. Clearly Nintendo were too busy setting up the ridiculous Wii Tennis game between Shibata, Iwata, Tim Henman and Greg Rusedksi to actually bother giving us any real information. A short note to Nintendo: We get it. Anyone can play the Wii. Even washed up pro tennis players.

I’m disappointed in the release date and the price. However, I’m not particularly surprised. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by stating that we’re paying £60 more than Japan and £40 more than America. Nor by telling you that we’ll be getting the Wii nearly a month after those across the pond. You can all see these things in the above table without my help. It was also stated that there will be 15 Virtual Console titles at launch. With an extra 5 to 10 coming every month. Interestingly, this is half the amount promised in both Japanese and American territories.

Thankfully there’s some good news regarding all of this. It has been confirmed in a Wired.com Q&A that the Wii will be region free for all first party titles. Third party developers are given the option to region lock games if they wish. This makes importing far less of a hassle. It is now cheaper to import the PS3 and the Wii than it is to buy it in our home territory. It also means that we’ll get games earlier if we import them as they come out in America.

Are Nintendo and Sony pushing us in this direction on purpose? If so it’d be an interesting 180 degree turn around from previous years when they’ve done their best to quash import gaming (for example, by suing modchip companies). I suspect it will be the case that people who are hardcore gamers will look at other countries for the best deals, whereas more ‘casual’ game players will pick one off the shelves at a whim. I’ll be getting someone to send me one over from the US of A on launch day, you can count on it.
With the Wii conferences all over we will probably see more game and channel information leaked out between now and launch. There are two videos on Wii.com which are labelled ‘coming soon’. No doubt they will be activated before too long.

A little under an hour ago the American Nintendo Conference ended. This time there were no delays and the chat room, over at www.n-sider.com, was a lot more civil than the one I sat in ‘during’ the Japanese conference. But let’s get right down to business.

Price and date breakdown:

American Release: 19th Nov
American Price: $250 - Around 132 pounds at the current exchange rate
How many consoles released: 4 million this year worldwide
First party game price: $50 - Around 26 pounds at the current exchange rate
Third party game price: Unknown - Though Nintendo assure us that they encourage third party developers to “price appropriately”
Second party game price: You tell me…
Wii remote price: $40 - Around 21 poounds at the current exchange rate
Classic controller price: Unknown
Nunchuck attachment price: $20 - Around 10 pounds at the current exchange rate
Virtual Console game prices: $5 standard price. $8 for SNES games. $10 for N64 games.

In the box: “Hardware, all the cables, the sensor bar. One Wii remote and one nunchuck controller.” Wii Sports is also included.

These prices are pretty good, in my opinion. They convert over from the Japanese prices fairly well. A little bit more expensive, but not by enough to get angry over. The American console itself is more expensive by about 20 quid, however it -does- contain Wii Sports in the box, which the Japanese version doesn’t. The remote price is unsettling, considering there is only one in the box. People in the chat room were pointing out that to have the full multiplayer experience, with four remotes + nunchucks would set you back $180 on top of the console cost. It does feel slightly counterproductive to release the console with a multiplayer game and only one controller.

It is excellent news that the Virtual Console price is converted directly over from the Japanese price. I predict for Europe a price of between 10 and 15 pounds for 2000 Wii points. The release date is also a very nice surprise. I expected the December 2nd Japanese release to be the first one. I’m estimating that an end-of-November release might be occuring for Europe. Hopefully. :)

There has also been some news regarding two highly anticipated games. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (Wii version) will launch with the Wii as promised. The Gamecube version, however, has been pushed back to December 11th. Metroid Prime 3 is now a 2007 title. This game would easily have given Zelda a run for its money if released at the same time and I was personally very much looking forward to it being one of the first Wii games I purchased. Likewise, when I bought my DS I did so with the assumption that Metroid Prime: Hunters would be a launch or near-launch release. We could be waiting another year or so for Metroid Prime 3 if the past is anything to go by.

The Wii channels look like an interesting feature. They allow you to view news and weather on your Wii. They could turn out to be handy applets which you find yourself using every day. On the other hand they could never be touched. That will almost certainly depend on the user. If you download Virtual Console games then they will be added as new channels.

There is also a ‘Mii channel’ which allows you to create a 3D avatar for yourself. There is a very high level of customisation available and it seems like it’s possible to make you Mii look exactly like you fairly easily. These Miis will be your player characters in Wii Sports and can be transfered to the Wii Remote. This will allow you to take your Mii with you to a friend’s house and play Wii Tennis against them with your own customised character, just by carrying over your own controller. Currently it is unknown as to whether these Miis will be online avatars as well. I’m hoping that that is the case.

Especially since the WiiConnect24 service will have a BBS system for people to chat on and send pictures over. Inserting an SD card with images on into your Wii will immediately bring up a slideshow-style browser so you can save them quickly and easily. Video files can also be transferred to the Wii easily and, once there, they can be viewed and ‘modified’ in real time. What exactly is meant by ‘modified’ remains a mystery. I’m intrigued to see if the Wii acts as an editing suite as well as a news and weather hub, bulletin board and picture viewer. Oh, I think it plays games too. :)

On a final note, Wii.com has been updated again for an American audience. Here you can see videos of the Wii Menu as well as the Wii News, Wii Weather and Wii Mii channels.

I’ll be back here tomorrow with the news on the European conference. I have been reliably informed that Iwata-san is jetting over to London to give the presentation himself. I can therefor confirm that Iwata will be up again soon!

As always, feedback is most appreciated. I can be e-mailed at YemblesSPLATbtinternet.com, or you can just click the link on your right. Please be advised: I’m not just a Video Game geek, I just happened to start this blog during a particularly hectic time for the industry. Got something you’d like to hear my opinion on? Let me know! :)

The Japanese Nintendo conference is now officially over and has been for a wee while. The public now has their hands on details regarding the Japanese release, from which they can draw their own estimations on how the release will pan out in their region. Before I get to that, however, I’d like to tell you about what occured last night, before the conference began.

The original report I received regarding an 8pm EDT (midnight GMT) start time for the conference was erroneous. Predictably, Digg.com went into overdrive with multiple links to sites promising to be ‘the site for all updates, as and when they happen!’. I loaded up a couple of these sites - one of which ended up dying from the attention it received after having been dugg. Before the site went down an announcement could be seen telling viewers to make their way to the chat room for updates.

The chat consisted of two rooms on IRC. One was moderated and kept for announcements regarding updates, the other was a room for idle banter. Not only was this second room full of several hundred people but they all seemed to be from the GameFAQs forum, 4chan or other similarly hideous areas of the internet. The room was moving at an unreadable speed as excited gamers, hungry for news, took advantage of their anonymity and spammed the room to heck.

We all know what happens when you put geeks in a group together. The in-jokes and memes begin. For over three hours I watched the chatters (who already belonged to established groups, as mentioned before, and so already have their own running jokes) do their thing. Links were posted to ‘live feeds’ (more on the live feed fiasco a little later) which turned out to be 4chan videos, people were constantly repeating ‘CONFERENCE CANCELLED DUE TO STINGRAYS AND AIDS’ and Captain Planet was summoned around twenty times over the three and a half hours.

Tragically, this was all more interesting (barely) than what was going on in the announcement room. For the first hour there were delays with the ‘live feed’. Eventually at around 2am GMT the announcement came that ‘The conference has begun!’ and then the cry went out. ‘Iwata is up!‘.

Iwata remained up for a good 20 minutes until the announcement changed to ‘Iwata discusses DS, PSP and PS2 sales figures’. It was around this time that people began to smell a rat. GWN.com’s own ‘live coverage’ reflected what was being said in the announcement chat room, however they had posted a couple of ‘photos’ (read: screen caps) from the conference. It was then that people realised that they were watching an old conference. This one, in fact. I’m not certain how old it is, but it seems to be at least three months old - some people have claimed that it occured a year ago.

So all the blogs and news sites started realising what was going on. Site admins quickly did their best to recover from their embarrassment and new announcements were made - namely that there was no available feed from the conference until around 1am EDT (5am GMT). This would be just in time for the keynotes speech. Sadly, I could already feel myself slipping into unconciousness by this point and decided that waiting for another hour and a half wasn’t much of an option. I watched as people changed their nicks to ‘THIS_IS_A_WASTE_OF_TIME’ and ‘FAKE_FEED_YOU_LOSE’ in the announcement room, which got them kickbanned by the administrator (who was clearly flustered and embarrassed - and rightly so). After this I decided to call it a night and went to sleep.

With all the information in the public domain, I’m now able to give my opinions on the Japanese launch situation. I’m going to save any feature discussion (such as the Mii avatar creation tool) until the American conference has occured and I can learn everything there is to know about them, rather than going off Japanese videos. :)

So here’s the price and date breakdown:

Japanese release: 2nd Dec
Japanese Price: 25,000 yen - Around 113 pounds at the current exchange rate. Don’t expect this to be the European price, however. It rarely translates over as cleanly as that.
Game prices: Between 4,800 and 6,800 yen each - That’s between 20 to 30 pounds at the current exchange rate.
Wii remote price: 3,800 yen - Around 17 pounds at the current exchange rate.
Classic controller price: 1,800 - Around 8 pounds at the current exchange rate.
Nunchuck price: 1,800 - See above.
Virtual Console Game Prices: 500 yen standard price. 800 yen for SNES games. 1000 yen for N64 games. - That’s around 2 pounds standard price, with N64 games being around 4 pounds each.

As far as I can see, these are good prices. They don’t much help in detemining the American or European prices, but they show that the games and controllers will, in general, be fairly cheap. I’m reserving judgement until the American and European conferences, but this list makes me optimistic.

The Virtual Console game prices are excitingly low. If they keep these prices for all regions (which is more likely, as they are only available online) then these will sell very well indeed. A couple of quid is nothing for a piece of gaming history. This bodes very well for the Wii, and video gaming in general (see my earlier blog entry entitled ‘In 15 years time, will we still be paying for the Playstation 3?’).

The release date, however, is a disappointment. Those of us hoping for an early release have had our hopes dashed at this point. Rumours still run rampant that a mid October release for non-Japanese regions is on the cards, though I’m not going to hold my breath.

The Wii box will contain:

1x Nintendo Wii
1x Wii Remote
1x Nunchuck Attachment
1x AC Adapter
1x AV Cable
1x Console Stand
1x Sensor Bar
1x Sensor Bar Stand
2x AA Batteries

So it looks like the ‘two controllers and Wii Sports in the box’ rumour was 100% speculation. This is also quite disappointing. For a console that is making such a big deal about the multiplayer aspect I thought it was fairly safe to assume that there would be a couple of controllers bundled with it. That’s another 25 quid for another controller + nunchuck, plus another 8 if you fancy a classic controller for the Virtual Console play (though, I’m hoping those games are compatible with the Gamecube controllers).

Finally: Wii.com is up! There are some fun looking videos on there, including a new Wii promo video that shows some more footage of all of our most anticipated games.

Overall, this conference tells us what sort of thing to expect from the American and European ones (the former of which begins in 2 hours). Price won’t be an issue, I feel. We could, however, be in for a let down with regards to the release date. As for the box content, I don’t see that changing from region to region.

I will report back with more info either during or after the American conference - keep watching! :)

Feel free to comment or e-mail me at YemblesSPLATbtinternet.com with feedback or questions - all appreciated!

Tenuous title, I know. Especially considering the three day worldwide Nintendo conference extravaganza isn’t actually happening over a weekend.

For those that don’t know, the first of three Nintendo Conferences has just began in Japan. The next will occur in America tomorrow and the third will take place in London on Friday. These seven hour conferences are expected to be the big news events with regards to the Wii. The last few weeks have seen rumour after rumour about the Wii’s release date, price and launch title list and everyone is finally ready to have every secret the Wii has laid bare.

While the Japanese conference isn’t expected to shed any light specifically on American and European prices or release dates, it will hopefully set a benchmark around which a conservative estimate can be made. For example, an announcement of a November 15th release in Japan will clearly debunk all rumours of an early release for America or Europe.

I will be staying up for as long as my body is willing in order to get the news as and when it comes. Expect a post tomorrow detailing the announcements as well as my feelings on them. :)

Sorry to disappoint, but no, this isn’t about bashing the price of the PS3. I’m talking about games. In 15 years the PS3 will be as retro as the Super Nintendo is today. Despite this a lot of us are still paying for games from the SNES era, or even earlier. We’re constantly rebuying our favourite games of yesterdecade. No wonder the market is saturated with sequels.

One of the Wii’s big selling features is its ‘Virtual Console’, which allows users to legally download their favourite retro games to play again on their Wii. It’s unknown at this point how much each game will cost to download. Needless to say, however, it will cost something. The games range from the NES era (Excitebike and Ninja Gaiden having been announced for the Wii’s launch) all the way through to the N64 (Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time having also been announced). At the right price these will sell incredibly.

This isn’t a new idea for Nintendo. They’ve been refeeding us the same games for years now. Just check out these NES Classics for the Gameboy Advance. These games are over 20 years old now, yet they still sell for £10 to £15 each (and they clearly do sell - Mario, Zelda and Castlevania are sold out at the current time of writing).

Nintendo aren’t the only company who are guilty of this. Capcom and Sega have been re-releasing their old games for years. The latter even has a handful of titles available on the Wii’s ‘Virtual Console’ at launch. One look at Square-Enix’s Tokyo Game Show lineup shows three Final Fantasy remakes in the near future. All of which were originally available on the NES and SNES 15+ years ago. This will be the second re-release for Final Fantasy VI as it was ported over to the Playstation several years ago, along with Final Fantasy I and II. Final Fantasies IV and V were also re-released together for the Playstation in America. Nevertheless, they will sell again now.

It’s difficult to discern why people are willing to pay for the same thing again and again. There are numerous factors involved. For one thing, mobile technology is constantly advancing. Those games that were once required to be inserted into big clunky boxes ten or fifteen years ago can now be played on the move. A lot of re-releases are for the portable market. However, in a fair few cases (one big one being the Wii’s ‘Virtual Console’), this is not so. Sonic Mega Collection was developed for all three then-current-gen consoles. People started to feel stuck in a time warp, finding themselves in the same position playing the same games that they were playing over ten years earlier.

Yet the Sonic Mega Collection sold well. The explanation for this is a simple one - nostalgia. Re-playing old classics takes you back to your childhood and can make for a better gaming experience than playing an ultra-new title just released on the market. This is both a good reason why developers keep handing us the same games every few years as well as why we keep buying them. I’m guilty of this myself. I recently bought a PSP copy of Breath of Fire III for no other reason than because the Playstation version is one of my very favourite games. There’re no extras in the PSP version, it’s just the same old game ported over. I’m currently saving it for a special occasion. :)

So far my discussions have assumed that the gaming population has not changed since the early days of video games. Clearly there are new gamers approaching the market all the time. Gamers that may not have experienced such classics as Sonic the Hedgehog or the original Super Mario games the first time around. The fact that they have the opportunity to play these classics on their current gaming systems is brilliant. It is my opinion that in order to truly appreciate video games in their current form it is important to see where they came from. If Nintendo (via the Wii ‘Virtual Console’) and Sony (via their upcoming downloadable Playstation1 service for PSP) get their pricing right, they can preserve and keep alive the history of video games, whilst continuing to push new games in a unique and exciting direction.

So will we still be paying for PS3 games in fifteen years? Almost certainly. But we’ll be playing them on the move and getting glassy eyed over the first time we experienced them ‘way back in 2007′ as we do so. :)

It is unfortunate that my first post on Neek has a negative tone. It is also regrettable that my first post references a well known blog and sheds a negative light upon it. Despite this, however, I do feel that is necessary to blog about the recent events over at Joystiq as well as my thoughts on them.

For those of you who don’t already know, last week the gaming blog ‘Joystiq’ posted a teaser article promising a ‘BIG next-gen console announcement’ to be posted one minute after midnight (permalink). Whilst normally something to do with next gen consoles would be big news anyway, the timing of this teaser, just a week before Nintendo’s big North American conference, set the hype machine into overdrive. The piece got dugg within minutes, spreading the hype even further. When 12:01 finally arrived a large percentage of the online gaming population were disappointed (and overtly vocal about being so) at what they found. It was an article announcing that IBM have been shipping the Broadway chip, which will serve as the nerve-center of the Wii, since July (permalink).

I woke up on the morning of the 8th of September (yes, I was excited about the upcoming announcement, I just didn’t fancy staying up until 6am GMT to hear it. ) I was disappointed that the news had not been something a little bit more exciting. It’s interesting news and, to the right people, it is BIG news. At the very least it lends credence to the rumours that Nintendo might be organising an early release of the Wii, but that’s a topic for another post.

It would be an understatement to say that a lot of people were angry. Simple anger implies controlled outbursts in private, among friends or family. The users of Joystiq were incensed. So much so they called for the author of the teaser (Robert Summa) to be fired from Joystiq.com.

And fire him they did. Not only that, but they also wrote an official apology stating that the teaser should not have made such grand proclamations. Indeed, they said that there should have been no teaser. That the news was essentially unremarkable and not particularly noteworthy. That their credibility has now been threatened.

Frankly, I’m shocked that Joystiq would fire Mr. Summa from his position as a contributor to the gaming blog’s news team (and, as I understand it, a very prolific and celebrated contributor) for a simple teaser. As I said before, to some people that is big news. Just because it doesn’t have anything to do with games or with release dates and prices it doesn’t mean it has no newsworthy merit.

Consoles are made out of microchips. They are needed to function. The fact that a large amount of these chips have been shipping since July is news that production is already underway. That’s good news!

The fact that a large proportion of gaming enthusiasts already know that the Nintendo Conference is coming this thursday makes this decision even more disgusting, in my opinion. It speaks volumes of those who demanded this blogger’s resignation. This man has been fired because he built up so much hype (and not necessarilly intentionally) that many gamers were hoping for a Wii release date and price announcement. He was fired because these people could not wait another seven days.

That’s a generalisation, I know. There are other factors involved. When I found out about this, however, that was what stuck with me most. These ‘other factors’ include Joystiq’s damaged credibility, according to the official apology. Yes it has been damaged, but not by Robert Summa’s teaser. The damage was done by Joystiq’s upper management and their decision to let Mr. Summa go.

– Robert Summa now writes for the Hardcore Gamer Community ‘Destructoid’. Check out his public farewell on that very site.

E-mail me at YemblesSPLATbtinternet.com with comments and feedback. Know something interesting you’d like to see my thoughts on? Let me know!