Video games

[mmcirvin]

Jorie can now consistently beat me at Wii Sports Bowling. She has an incredible strike throw and I think her record score is 200. One game ended in a sequence of five strikes (she'd thrown a sixth earlier in the game). Her modus operandi involves screaming "Hi-YAAAA!" while swinging with her left arm as hard as she can. She's gotten pretty good at picking up spares as well.

She's also fond of Baseball (there, she's only beaten me once) and Mario Kart, where she favors solo time trials and switches characters every race. She has renamed her Mii "Quincy" for reasons that remain obscure.

Comments

TANKY-TANKY!

[timchuma.livejournal.com]

I just can't get interested in the new games any more.

Even the old games bore me after a while.

Hard to believe I played the Atari 2600 for 10 years and the Megadrive for another 10. The life for current generation of consoles is measured in months.

Re: TANKY-TANKY!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The Wii Play disc actually has a minigame that is a mildly updated Tanky-Tanky.

The old games usually had very simple mechanics, and it was a rare one that actually managed to get a lot of extended play interest out of that. Of course, those are the ones we remember. I think the Wii Sports games appeal to non-gamers in part because they have that simplicity, but with motion control. Today, though, the core gamer population wants more.

Re: TANKY-TANKY!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, I'm not so sure about lifetime. The Wii, XBox 360 and PS3 have all been around for years now and there isn't yet a lot of buzz about replacing them, even though the Wii in particular is a decade behind the times technologically. Nintendo did come out with a substantially new handheld recently.

What's short-lived are most individual game titles. Atari used to keep selling essentially their whole back catalog for years and years.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...What Jorie can't manage yet is anything making significant use of the Wii's screen-pointer facility; she can't hold the Wiimote steadily enough, she tends to tilt it up toward the ceiling, and she tends to gradually inch up so close to the screen that it can't register the sensor bar. Most of the Wii Play minigames are intensely frustrating to her, and she still needs a little help with the Mii editor.

But anything that's purely accelerometer and buttons, she can do, and that's Wii Sports and Mario Kart.