The Wii U is P.U.

Throughout the day Sunday, I kept hearing reviews of the Wii U and decided to go on the hunt. Two hours and several stores later, I found one at a dark and eerily dead Sears. They informed me had I gotten there any earlier, I wouldn’t have gotten it. Apparently they screwed up an order and the shipment didn’t arrive until shortly before I got there. So, lucky me, I bought the deluxe model for $479 including tax.

What puzzled me was the lack of an Ethernet port. The exclusion was fine for Wii, as it wasn’t really geared for online games, but wasn’t the Wii U supposed to appeal more to “hardcore” gamers? If so, they’re already doing a bad job of it. I’ve got a router that’s literally two feet away from my TV—it’s a shame I simply can’t plug in. So far, most of my games only offer local multiplayer; the “online features” are social networking options that nobody will ever use.

My next complaint is about something that’s understandable in the modern age of gaming, but it still sucks: the day-one patch that takes an hour to download. If you bought one of these for your kids on Christmas, you probably won’t get to play it until noon. You don’t have to update if you only plan on playing disc games, but you do if you want to do literally anything else. On top of that, every game I’ve tried so far requires an individual update, which can take ten to thirty minutes a piece.

I’m also underwhelmed by the graphics. No, graphics aren’t everything, but I’m sick of people pretending graphics are nothing, too. This lower standard in graphical quality is to be expected from Nintendo, but I didn’t expect the graphics to be this bad. Hair looks PS2 era—sometimes worse—and when you play Assassin’s Creed 3, you’re going to be disappointed by the limited draw distances and the way shadows take on a distracting strobe effect. It’s hard to believe this is a next-gen system just by looking at it, though I expect the games will improve as developers get more experience with the system.

As usual, Nintendo shouldn’t be your first choice for FPS games and action titles. If that’s all you’re into, wait for Microsoft and Sony to release their next consoles (better yet: just beef up your home computer). But if you’re looking for something different, the Wii U might be for you. Although the system feels more like a toy than a gaming unit, it’s a fun throwback for those of us who grew up playing games with friends on the same TV.

The gamepad looks big, stupid, and uncomfortable, but the second you pick it up, you’ll wonder how they crammed so many electronics into such a lightweight device. It fits in your hands nicely and the touchscreen works like a charm, despite the lack of multi-touch controls. It’s just as cool and innovative as the Wiimote was in 2006. It’s especially surprising it didn’t make the package cost more than six hundred bucks.

Even so, I returned the system to Sears. I’ll buy it again in a few years, but right now, it isn’t worth the price for anyone but the most loyal of Nintendo fans. Even a few of them will have buyer’s remorse until the library is significantly bigger.

Does Your Computer Play Beethoven?

Here’s one straight from Microsoft’s official support files: If your computer is playing “classical music,” seemingly at random, you’ve got a problem.

From Microsoft’s official support page:

During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play “Fur Elise” or “It’s a Small, Small World” seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer’s BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.

WarGames

The human personnel in a missile silo are faced with the task of maintaining a launch station. They never thought they would actually get the order to launch. To them it’s just a routine job: monitoring the blinking lights while they make idle chitchat. What human could possibly accept what it means to actually push The Button? When men are ordered to fire, unaware that it’s an attack drill, they fail to do so. This convinces the brass at NORAD to take humans out of the equation all together. A super computer, they reason, would have all the capabilities of a human, with none of the pesky conscience.

Following the suspenseful opening is a conventional introduction to our protagonist. Seventeen year old David Lightman (Mathew Broderick) is a high school kid who spends too much time in his bedroom, messing about with his modem-enabled Imsai 8080 computer. His girlfriend’s character is never really fleshed out, but that doesn’t matter because she seems like a real girl and her interest in David never came off phony.

One day David is leafing through a magazine when he discovers an advertisement for a mysteriously marketed video game that won’t be revealed until Christmas. David refuses to wait. He commands his computer to dial every phone number within the game studio’s area code so that he can create a list of every modem in the area. When David accidentally connects to the super computer at NORAD, he thinks he found the studio he’s looking for and launches a game called Global Thermonuclear War. The super computer is more than willing to play, as it’s an artificial intelligence that plays war games 24/7, constantly learning, constantly improving. Unfortunately, David soon learns that he may have inadvertently started the ball rolling towards World War III.

WarGames occasionally insults the intelligence (micro-cassette recorders can be hacked to open keypad-protected doors), but it’s fun and cleverly so. If anything, it really captured the attitude of real life hackers who, though often vilified by the media, are the people who gave us affordable computers and created the internet in the first place. There are some things I didn’t like about the movie, notably the stereotypical computer specialists who help David crack NORAD’s backdoor password, but the climax of the film is unlike any I’ve ever seen. It hit me hard and it stuck with me.