Channel Surfing

Nintendo's official Wii website recently put up some short videos of the various Wii Channels in action, and overall I'm impressed. The News Channel is still unnecessary, and surprisingly bare-bones, but the equally unnecessary Forecast Channel at least has a fairly neat interface. I'm not sure that spinning a virtual globe is integral to the process of looking up weather information, but it certainly looks fun. Rounding out the redundant features is the Photo Channel, which, despite looking robust and intuitive, remains silly and unnecessary. Personally, I think it would at least be neat if I could take screenshots, save them as photos, and then edit them or transfer them to a camera, but I don't expect to see any such functionality.

Finally, the previously mentioned Opera web browser, originally said to be a one-time paid download but newly announced to be a free download until June 2007, is powering the Internet Channel. It supports flash, lets you zoom in on sections, and just generally looks pretty slick. I'd suggest you use a real PC if you want to do any typing though, because, regardless of what solution Nintendo implements (as yet unspecified), it will be woefully insufficient in that regard. I still think that the browser is not necessarily a welcome add-on, but I can kind of see the appeal (or, more accurately, have come to see it after a discussion with Nathan) in web-browsing from your couch.

I'm getting really excited about this thing, and I wish that EB would let me order one already. There is apparently some kind of Gamestop/EBGames managers' conference taking place in Texas today where the final details will be hammered out, so I hope to be able to preorder one by Monday. Unless of course they implement their crazy required trade-in plan, in which case I'll be joining the rest of the gaming community in boycotting them. At this point, I'm just hoping for a bundle that won't entirely screw me, and that there will be a midnight Saturday launch.

My Favourite Kind of Call Stack

Well, I had decided previously that I wasn't going to post about my adventures in gambling, given that they aren't something that I should necessarily be advertising, but, as it's coming up on two weeks since I last posted, I feel compelled to fill this space, and it's the only thing of note that I've done lately. Besides-- I would rate the likelihood (and justification) of my arrest for illegal gaming at somewhere just more likely than being arrested for the episode of Boston Legal that I downloaded this week (I taped over it on my VCR by mistake-- D'oh!).

I'm sure that everyone is at least peripherally aware of the surge in popularity that poker has enjoyed in the last couple of years-- Texas Hold'Em in particular. I never really saw what all of the fuss was about at first-- I was never much of a poker fan, and TH struck me as needlessly complicated poker for wusses. Since then, though, I have very much come around, and have actually been playing a fair bit over the last year or so. Texas Hold'Em is easy to learn, but very nuanced for more experienced players. It can be as mathematically deep or shallow as you like, and provides just enough information to make the betting very interesting. It gives the player a lot more power while decreasing luck's impact-- good luck can help a bad player win, but bad luck doesn't necessarily doom a good player. It also has the "well gee, I could do that" factor going for it, making it tantalizingly accessible to the average person, fueling dreams of attainable wealth and stardom.

I'm not looking for wealth or stardom, though, and I think that gambling as a rule is a bit silly (in fact, that philosophy extends far beyond mere monetary concerns, dictating such things as my social behaviour and career decisions). So why am I playing Texas Hold'Em? Well, primarily for the social aspect, believe it or not. Poker is very much about getting together and having fun as a group, and TH in particular is a very engaging and interesting game, which is a bonus. I generally don't play for high stakes-- only the required minimum to serve as a bluffing disincentive. That being said, I would like to walk into a casino and plop down a few hundred just once, for the experience alone if for nothing else. However, I need to have a bit more confidence in my game before I'd be willing to that.

I've actually weathered a bit of a crisis in that regard as of late. Although I enjoyed a lot of success early in my poker career, as of last week I'd lost quite badly during my previous couple of outings, and was starting to wonder if I should re-evaluate my entire playing strategy and start from square one. After a particularly awful night this past Friday, in which an aggressive veteran player I'd never met before threw me off my game completely, I was ready to do just that. And then Saturday night happened.

I was in the zone. I was playing in a small "tournament", with a dozen people at two tables and prize money going to the top four (although third and fourth only got their initial stake back, and first place got the lion's share). I was enjoying some pretty solid luck, which I would characterize as just a little bit towards the good side of average, but, more importantly, I was playing really well. I was reading the other players well, choosing my hands well, and doing a good job of scaring (within the context of the game) a couple of the new guys. I personally knocked out a couple of players pretty quickly, and before I knew it I had made it to the final table as the big stack, enjoying roughly a two to one chip lead over my nearest competitor and playing with a great deal of confidence.

I was actually a little concerned about this, as I didn't have a lot of experience playing from a chip advantage, and was worried that I couldn't leverage it properly. Suffice it to say, I was wrong. It may or may not surprise some of you to know that I can apparently be an excellent bully when I want to be. So, my initial play at the final table was characterized by shoving a lot of chips into the middle, and my already large stack was slowly getting larger. However, after knocking out only one of these final seven other players, I ran into a bit of a snag.

[Note: I'm actually going to start getting into specifics now, and I apologize in advance to anyone who doesn't know how to play. I'd be happy to teach anyone who wants to learn-- I have my own chipset.]

The fellow on the opposite end of the table from me, who had the second-largest chip count, had come out betting. Everyone else folded in response, but I was sitting on the big blind with a suited Queen-seven, and decided that I would pay to see a flop. The flop was four-five-Queen, and since I had hit top pair I opened up with a moderate bet. He re-raised a similar amount, and I called. The turn card was a seven, giving me two pair. I opened with a fairly large raise, and then he went all-in over top of me. I thought about it briefly, and then decided to call, since, given his betting, I was pretty sure that he was sitting on a pocket pair between six and Jack, but I was pretty confident that he hadn't hit trip-sevens. We flipped over our cards, and the guy had three-six. Three-six! He'd come out betting from a fairly early position with a three-six off-suit, and then caught a fucking straight! Lucky bastard. The river card offered me no help, and he took the pot, which was the largest of the night at that point.

Needless to say, that hand was somewhat disheartening, and I was left as one of the shorter stacks. I persevered, though, and slowly built my chip count back up by stealing blinds and winning the occasional hand. There were no dramatic hands for me as the next three players busted out, and I managed to last until we were four-handed, which guaranteed, given the prize structure, that I would at least break even on the night. We actually played four-handed for quite some time (at least an hour, I think), shifting chips back and forth, until the steadily increasing blinds (they went up every twenty minutes) forced us to start playing a little more aggressively. It was at this point that I ran into my other bad hand of the night. At least, I think it was bad. It's certainly the one I'm still kicking myself about, even now, and, unlike the earlier bad hand, I can't defend how I played this one.

The short stack had been getting quite aggressive lately, and had gone all-in on two of the last four hands. He did so again on this one, and I was sitting on the big blind with pocket Jacks. And I folded. I folded! I still don't know what I was thinking. I thought about it long and hard, and a quick chip count revealed that if I called and lost I'd be as good as eliminated, but I knew that common sense dictated that I had to call. And yet, my gut was screaming at me to fold. So I did. I still don't know what he had, so it's possible that I was right to fold, but overwhelming chances are that I wasn't, and I really wish that I had called, if for no more reason than to not have this damning uncertainty. But, I didn't, and half an hour later it was that same player who eliminated me, when I called his all-in king-queen with my own king-jack.

So, what went wrong? Was I subconsciously perceiving something about the other player's behaviour, or was I simply being influenced by my previous loss against Mr. straight-draw (who, incidentally, was eliminated soon after me in third place)? I wish I knew. In the end, though, it doesn't matter, and I need to stop obsessing about it. That one bad hand aside, I brought my A-game Saturday night, and it was a real confidence boost to have played as aggressively as I did and watch everyone else wilt as I shoved my chips around, and to personally knock out three other players. It's definitely an improvement over my last tournament, where I ran into a Queen-high flush with a Jack-high flush early on and got to watch everyone else play for most of the night. I feel like I'm definitely settling into my own style of play, and I'm looking forward to my next game, during which I'll no doubt lose horribly and blame it all on bad luck. Because, if there's anything that I've learned, it's that poker players don't ever play badly-- if you lose, it was bad luck, but if you win, it was all skill.

More Nintendo News Than You Can Shake A Motion-Sensitive Controller At

Today was the big day that Nintendo fans have been waiting for since E3-- the final launch details have been revealed for the Wii at simultaneous press conferences in New York and Japan (note that all three of those links are distinct, and that the final two are to information on the respective press conferences, not Nathan-style links to general Wikipedia articles on New York and Japan). Some of the news could be better (I was hoping for a better price point), but none of it is awful, and I'm excited to finally know when I'll be able to get my hands on a Wii [insert obvious dick joke here].

To start things off, a wealth of multimedia features have been announced, and I for one could care less. I've gone on record on this very page as stating that I want a game console, not a multimedia centre (I quote: "I don't want my fucking game systems to show movies and let me make phone calls and give me blow jobs-- I want them to PLAY GAMES"), and, Nintendo fanboy-ism aside, I stand by that. So, I probably won't use any of the following bells and whistles, but I guess it's good that they're there if that's your bag. I'd be much happier if they were gone, but at least they don't seem to have inflated the price any.

Basically, the whole system is designed around the concept of Wii Channels, each of which offers different functionality. The first such "Channel", and the only one that might interest me, is the Mii Channel, which will allow user to create custom avatars for themselves using face-sculpting tools that will appear in any game that supports the feature. That is to say, you can make a small cartoon face for yourself, and then put that face on your character in certain games. This avatar will be persistent across all games and will be stored on your controller, which can then be taken to a friend's house and used to include your avatar in games on their Wii.

Next up is a photo-editing suite, which, given that I haven't owned a non-disposable camera in my life, is of absolutely zero interest to me. An SD card (which is what the Wii will use to store game/save data as well) from a camera or mobile phone can be inserted into a slot in the front of the Wii, which will then allow you to edit photos in a variety of standard ways. The Wii will also allow users to organize hundreds of these photos and send them to friends and family over the Web. I think that there already exists these fancy gray boxes called "computers" that allow people to do just that, but whatever.

The Wii will also have its own news and weather Channels, which will presumably just be culled from standard feeds and wire services. I can't fathom why anyone would want such a thing is this day and age, since I'm sure 99% of Wii owners will also be PC and TV owners. It makes even less sense when you consider that yet another Channel will be THE INTERNET, accessed via the Opera web-browser. However, the kicker here is that there will be a separate one-time charge to purchase the browser, although details on this were a little sketchy, and I don't know what that might imply for the other Channels. Presumably this Channeling concept will be expandable, but for the moment the last two channels known to exist are some kind of messaging service, and some kind of calendar function, although there are no details on either of these at present. Finally, the system will, like everything else these days, support DVD playback.

Moving on to actual gaming functionality, details were finally released on the service that I'm most excited about, the Wii Virtual Console. The pricing scheme for these games (a topic that Nathan and I have discussed at length) is EXACTLY as I predicted it would be, at $5 per NES game, $8 per SNES game, and $10 per N64 game. Like the XBox Live Marketplace, these purchases will be abstracted away as silly proprietary money, or "points", with 100 points being worth one US dollar. I hate crap like that, but it seems to be the way that things are headed, and at least they picked a nicer points to dollar ratio than Microsoft, where 100 points is something like $1.25. Roughly thirty Virtual Console games will be available at launch, including unnamed installments from the Donkey Kong, Zelda, and Mario franchises, with a total of 60 arriving by the end of the year. After that, the library will grow by 10 titles a month, which puts XBox Live's growth rate to shame (holding steady at roughly 3-4 games a months right now, but barely any releases for the first eight months after launch).

And now we come to the important details. The Wii will be launching in North America on November 19, two days after the Playstation 3 (followed by Japan two weeks later, and a presumably comparable European launch date to be announced tomorrow). I'm kind of speechless on this one, to tell you the truth-- I was sure that it would be launching at least a week earlier than that. I'd love it if someone explained to me how this makes any sense. I'm pretty sure that Nintendo could have pushed it a week earlier with few problems and beat Sony out of the gate. Surely this isn't them just being cocky? On the plus side, they'll have at least twice as many Wii's available at launch as Sony will PS3's, so hopefully I'll be able to get my hands on one on launch day without difficulty (although I'm probably going to take the morning off and show up bright and early, just to be safe).

The Wii will cost $250 US, which is the maximum price point that Nintendo declared back at E3. I was really hoping that it was going to be $199, but $250 is a still a good price when compared to the 360 and PS3. This $250 will net you, in addition to the console itself (which will only be available in iPod white initially, with other colours to come later), a standard Wii-mote controller with a nunchaku attachment (and possibly a second controller-- still unclear), a wrist-strap, standard cabling, the sensor bar, a small console stand, and one pack-in title: Wii Sports. I was worried that it might get saddled with a shitty pack-in, and I was really hoping for Twilight Princess, but it could have been much worse. I'm not a big sports game fan, but I like them well enough, and I suspect that Wii Sports (which includes baseball, bowling, golf, tennis, and boxing) will be a better introduction to the Wii and showcase of its abilities than the new Zelda would have been (which is presumably why it was chosen).

As for the games, there will be 25 different games immediately available, which is almost unprecedented, with another five games due in December, and plenty more to come early in the new year. Notably, Twilight Princess is confirmed to be available at launch (although the Gamecube version won't be available until a few weeks later), there will be no Mario game at launch, and Metroid Prime 3, previously considered to be a high-profile launch title, has been pushed back until 2007. All first party games will cost $50 ($10 less than PS3 and Xbox games, although still pricier than I was hoping for), and third-party game prices are still up in the air.

So, there you have it. The news wasn't as good as I was expecting in several different respects, but there was none of the back-pedaling and screw jobs that are characterizing all of the PS3 launch news as of late. My enthusiasm is still alive and well, and I'll be doing my damndest to make sure that I have a Wii from day one, in sharp contrast to two days before that, on PS3 launch day, which I'll be ignoring completely, content in the knowledge that I probably won't have to buy one for at least a year, when Final Fantasy XIII is released.

UPDATE: Wii news is still trickling out, and I have a few extra details to bring to everyon's attention...

First off, unlike everyone else, Nintendo has announced that they'll actually be making money on each console sold. Second, apparently, despite the fact that it was announced as a feature months ago, the Wii will not support DVD playback after all, which they claim is a cost-saving decision. I don't think that anyone was going to play DVDs on the thing in the first place, so sounds fine to me. Finally, and this is the big news: the Wii will be REGION FREE, just like the DS. It's about damn time. The important part about this is that I'll be able to play Eyeshield 21 on my Wii now.

A Diagram

In lieu of content, I bring you more bitching about traffic-- with pictures! I'm given to understand that that's only worth 1000 words, so I guess that this will be shorter than my usual posts. :-)


The image above is a poorly drawn MS Paint representation of the Regent Street entrance to the Regent Mall, seen from above. I am represented by the red vaguely car-shaped area, in the middle lane of the three lanes heading towards New Maryland. I had just finished some uptown errands after work yesterday, and was heading home, which, when I'm uptown, requires me to loop out and around the mall to get onto the highway. Traffic was moving very slowly, and as I neared the intersection I could see that there was construction going on in front of me (denoted by the large yellow circle) and that all thru-traffic was being directed into the left-most lane by a worker holding a sign (denoted by the small orange circle). When I reached the front of the line, shortly after the light had turned green, the green car stopped and waved me in, and just as I started to move forward, the blue truck behind me suddenly jumped on the gas and shot through the gap, narrowly missing both of us. It may have been that he thought the fellow in the green car was waving him in instead of me, or it may have been that he didn't see the construction, but I'm pretty sure that he was just a stupid asshat (see diagram).

In a classic case of bad driving breeding bad driving, I sped after him and stayed on his ass until I caught him at the intersection on the other side of the mall, where I pulled up beside him and gave him the finger. We had both rolled down our windows to start yelling at each other when the light turned green and we went our separate ways, although we did have enough time to yell "Fuck you!" at almost the same time as we parted. Asshole.