Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2006 21:04:31 -0400
Subject: [ark] Re: What, nobody's mocked this yet?

In alt.religion.kibology, kibo@world.std.com wrote:

Nick Bensema (nickb@eris.io.com) wrote:
>  James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote:
>  >  Nick Bensema (nickb@eris.io.com) wrote:
>  >  >  I am now having flashbacks to that one time when I watched the Spanish
>  >  >  channel and there was this call-in video game where people would play
>  >  >  by pressing touch tones while the hostess yelled "SEIS!  SEIS!  CUATRO!
>  >  >  CUATRO!" and then they'd press 6 or 4, about 6 or 4 seconds later, and
>  >  >  then the little cartoon car would dodge a cactus or something.
>  >
>  >  That might have been the Fairchild Channel F call-in program ("TV POW"
>  >  was its usual name) which pre-dated the Intellivision one.  
>  
>  No, it wasn't an 80's console.  It was powerful enough to display
>  cartoon-quality animation.  In Spanish.  It aired in the 90's.  If
>  I could remember the exact year, I'd be able to guess the hardware.

Wow.  Maybe it was the evil twin of the people who were doing
"21st Century Vaudeville" (in the Boston area circa 1995, you could
call in and make your voice come out of Amiga drawings that had lips
automatically synced to your voice.  I liked to be the Tiki god.)

>  Also, they were using the touch tones on the phone.

Or at least pretending to, in the same way that TV POW and TV PIXX
pretended to be voice-activated.

>  >  I miss the days when game controllers were big enough that you
>  >  could break them.
>  
>  You can still make them the target of all your blame.

Nuh-uh.  For "Pac-Pix", I assign most of the blame to the way about
5% of the time the gesture-recognition software will decide Pac-Man
is facing sideways because I drew him too fast, and for "WarioWare
Twisted", I assign most of the blame to the power cord whipping me
in the face when I try to twirl the console around three times within
half a second without first unplugging it.  The only "controllers"
for those games, in the conventional sense of the term, are a tiny
inert plastic toothpick for "Pac-Pix" and the Universe's inertial
frame of reference for "WarioWare Twisted".  So you now have to assign
blame to other, weirder parts of the system.  DAMN UNIVERSE!!!

I wish you could break the Universe as easily as you could break those
Gemini brand knockoffs of Atari 2600 controllers.  Highly crushable!

(cue imitation Burt Bacharach music.  Kibo puts on a pair of pointy
foam rubber ears and begins to sing the novelty song "Highly Crushable"
while dancing the Frug as the words "WRITTEN BY GENE RODDENBERRY"
obscure the "Desiderata" poster on the wall behind him.)

Video games achieved perfection with the invention of "Pac-Pix",
except the entire system should be scaled up by 1000% so that the
tiny plastic stick could be the same size as a real graffiti marker
because I feel silly trying to scribble as rapidly as possible
with a toothpick on a business card.  The game would be better if
you had a 17-inch screen and an El Marko.  It already makes the
proper noises for that sort of marker, but the plastic toothpick
is far daintier than anything you'd use to draw a killer Pac-Man
in the real world.

Also you have to keep buying replacements for it because every
time you switch from "Pac-Pix" to "WarioWare Twisted", the plastic
toothpick goes flying across the room and disappears forever.
I predict something similar will happen with Wii -- someone will
develop a hit game that requires you to twirl and catch the
controllers like a drum majorette and it'll sense what the layout
of your home is just so it can try to make you accidentally throw
them out the window.

                                                -- K.

                                                   Have you seen Namco's
                                                  "Taiko Drummer" for
                                                   the PlayStation 2?
                                                   You just know that
                                                   somewhere in Japan,
                                                   someone's about to
                                                   repurpose that controller
                                                   for an S&M game.