|
RefBan
Thursday, April 18, 2013
25 Bright Ways To Harness The Sun
The Wii U's Biggest Problem Is The 3DS
April 18th, 2013Top StoryThe Wii U's Biggest Problem Is The 3DSBy Patricia Hernandez
Trying to pit a Wii U against other consoles doesn't work. Third-party wise, it's as if the console is playing catch-up with current gen titles (do people really want to buy a console to play stuff that's been out for over a year?), and despite promises, the support isn't likely to improve in the future. I don't note this because I want to continue the tiring narrative of Nintendo's Impending Doom. Hell, for all I know Nintendo has some aces up their sleeves this E3, and the 3DS itself waded for a bit before finding its stride. The 3DS had to drop its price first before it got any traction. So maybe things will change for the Wii U. But right here, right now, between titles like Fire Emblem, Professor Layton, Mario & Luigi, Etrian Odyssey, Bravely Default, a new Zelda game and countless other recently announced titles, the 3DS is the best system out there. That's exactly the problem. It's too good. If the appeal of a Nintendo system is Nintendo games, then it also means that Nintendo is only ever in competition with itself. You can't pit a Wii U against an Xbox 360 or a PS4 because, despite Microsoft and PlayStation's attempts to court the same wide audience Nintendo appeals to, despite the copycat attempts, and despite the aggressive focus on the casual market, other consoles don't give people the Nintendo Experience. That's what it comes down to: people buy a Nintendo system to play Nintendo games, because Nintendo games are fantastic. Nintendo knows it, otherwise they wouldn't keep trying to harp on our nostalgia by resurrecting older titles. In that sense, Nintendo's shaky third-party support doesn't matter so long as they have their awesome first-party games. Yesterday, during Nintendo's presentation to the press prior to the preview event, it struck me that even the worst Nintendo games tend to score rather high on Metacritic—85 and above! The only things that can provide the Nintendo experience are the Wii U and the 3DS, not other consoles. But if someone were to ask me right now, what should I buy? A Wii U or a 3DS? There would be no contest; I'd suggest the 3DS. Having a 3DS means I have zero desire to acquire a Wii U. You can get nearly every big franchise that Nintendo has to offer on the 3DS, and for cheaper: both the system and its games are less expensive than dropping cash on a new Wii U or any of its games. You can take the games with you, and you can play them in the in-between moments of your life—while on a bus, while waiting for something to finish—or you can sit down for extended periods of time to seriously play something. Whatever you'd like. The Wii U gives you some portability thanks to its tablet-like controller, which allows you to play games without the usage of a TV, but you're still chained to the living room. With the 3DS, you can experience Nintendo games however you'd like, and at nearly the graphical fidelity of a Wii U to boot. Let me tell you, Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D, which I played a bit of yesterday, looks freaking amazing on the 3DS. Usually, Nintendo's handhelds don't nearly match up, graphics-wise, to its console offerings. That's not the case anymore. While there's nothing wrong with wanting to play your games on the big screen, more and more I'm finding that I want to play Nintendo's games on a handheld device. I don't want to play the new Animal Crossing on my TV, and turn-based games like Fire Emblem feel best when played on-the-go. While I'm sure games in the Mario franchises play just fine on the Wii U, I'm more in love with the design decisions made on the portable iterations—I want to play the follow-up to Super Mario 3D Land more than I do the next big Mario game on the Wii U. Maybe that one is just me, though. Regardless, the 3DS is excellent, perhaps too excellent. Nintendo has had this "problem" before; in previous generations, the DS was a top contender. Only, the DS provided a substantially different experience from that of the Gamecube and the Wii; the Wii was all about motion controls whereas the DS gave you a dual screen. I would have recommended buying both at the time. The Wii's U's one gimmick is its tablet, which gives you two screens and a touch interface. Except...the 3DS already has that. If you're the economical sort, good news, the 3DS gives you the double-screen gimmick and a touch interface along with one more novelty: 3D. Underutilized, sure, but still, it's there. What else? Earthbound, I guess, and Miiverse. The two desirable things I can name on the Wii U, guess what? I want them both on the 3DS instead. |
|
Is the New York Post Edited by a Bigoted Drunk Who Fucks Pigs?
April 18th, 2013Top StoryIs the New York Post Edited by a Bigoted Drunk Who Fucks Pigs?By Tom Scocca
"Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon," the giant subhead added. The two had nothing to do with the bombing. One of them, whose face is clearly shown on the front page, is a 17-year-old high-school runner. They were among the many bag-toting people whose images were being studied by the internet hive-mind yesterday, and there was no good reason to think they were the bombers. Yet there they were, on every newsstand in New York: "Feds seek these two." As it has been all week, the New York Post was wrong. And as it has all week, the Post denied being wrong. This afternoon—after the Post had run a story conceding that the two were not suspects—Col Allan, the paper's editor, issued a statement defending the front page:
This is legalistic horseshit. In small type, the cover did say that "there is no direct evidence linking them to the crime, but authorities want to identify them." But it was the front page image in the newspaper. The whole point of putting them on the cover was to imply that these two—rather than the dozens of other backpack-bearing figures being scrutinized yesterday—were under serious suspicion. A normal newspaper editor—someone who wanted a scoop yet was concerned about embarrassing the paper or harming an innocent person—would not have slapped that picture on Page One without some deep underlying confidence that the two were serious suspects, and that the absence of "direct evidence" was a temporary condition. There is no sign that Col Allan had such confidence. Given all the surrounding discussion and the shaky performance of the Post and its law-enforcement sources, one might even conclude that to have slapped the photo on the front page, an editor would have had to have been cripplingly stupid, cripplingly reckless, or both. We do not know for sure that Col Allan is cripplingly stupid and reckless. We may have heard from sources that Col Allan is stupid and reckless. But we do not know it, so we are not saying it. Sources have also suggested that Col Allan may drink to excess, but we have no direct knowledge that he is an alcoholic, or that he was drunk at any time that he was guiding the Post through its various blunders in the marathon coverage. Col Allan may have been too drunk to recognize the mistakes that the Post was making—say, to see that it was publishing a front-page photo of young man carrying a royal-blue duffel bag when the authorities were saying the bombs had been in black bags. That is a mistake that a drunk person could conceivably have made, but we do not know that Col Allan was drunk when the Post made it. The Post had previously identified an innocent Saudi as a suspect before it decided to put this brown-skinned teenager on the front page. The back-to-back focus on innocent people of non-European ancestry could imply that the Post is systematically hostile to nonwhite people, and that the paper's editors are so wedded to the notion that all Muslims are terrorists that they literally do not care which Muslim or "Muslim-looking" person they happen to be targeting on any particular day. We are not saying that Col Allan, motivated by bigotry, is intentionally trying to use the Post to stir up hostility against Muslims. We do not know that Col Allan is a racist. The evidence may suggest that he is a racist, but we are not saying that Col Allan is a racist. It does seem clear, based on the flow of images and facts through Internet and the media yesterday, that the New York Post found itself sewed to the far end of an informational Human Centipede—evidently beginning with a crowd photo published on Deadspin, passing through Reddit and 4chan and Reddit and Reddit, being passed on to the investigators actively working the Boston case, then trickling through gossip-mongering New York law-enforcement officials, till it flowed over Col Allan's taste buds. But we are not drawing any conclusions about that. Perhaps Col Allan and the New York Post are having an incredibly unlucky week. Perhaps the worthlessness of every single scoop the Post has had—its inability even to get the body count straight—does not prove that the editor is a booze-addled, race-baiting, information-illiterate moron who has neither the common sense nor the journalistic skills to avoid repeatedly humiliating his newspaper. We would not say that, any more than we would say that Col Allan fucks pigs. He is from Australia; if he were to engage in bestiality, it's much more likely that it would be with sheep. But we are not saying Col Allan fucks sheep, either. It could be that Col Allan fucks pigs or sheep. We do not know. It would be irresponsible to speculate. [Image via AP]  |
|
Daily Investor Briefing: Wall Street ends lower after weak...
 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)