Mr eel
The Nintendo Channel - Under-cooked
Nerd that I am, I spent a few minutes of my Saturday morning playing around with the recently released Nintendo Channel for the Wii. It’s pretty dull.
Ads for games. Wow. Watching these is like watching any other ad on television — pointless.
DS Demos… of old or frankly boring-sounding games — Sight Training? *Yawn*
The game catalogue is potentially interesting, since it could prove to be a good way to track upcoming stuff or otherwise find interesting games you might have missed previously.
It’s got no hope of doing that in it’s current form. For starters the catalogue is anemic. It only holds a small proportion of recent releases. Additionally, the actual information on each game is limited and very dry. Marketing copy, bullet list for number of players etc. No screenshots, no videos.
So much more could have been done with this. For example I would like to be able to flag an upcoming release and have new information about it sent to me periodically and a message when it’s finally been released. I forget game release dates sometimes, so that would be useful.
But typical Nintendo, anything outside of making games — which they do very well — tends to be under-cooked. The interface is lovely and it has a lot of potential, but as of now it’s a waste of time.
Let Us Play a Game
What is this?
>>= cs ->
A. Person in a boat?
B. A Fish!?
C. Some Haskell code
Silly, it’s some Haskell code of course.
Communion by Septicflesh
I like a bit of symphonic death metal — blast-beats and choirs ftw. That said, I don’t actually like a lot of the stuff that I hear. Most of it is frankly ridiculous, but I can deal with that as long as the tunes are good. And therein lies the problem. It’s pretty boring to hear metal racket with some strings slung behind it. Too few bands explore the possibilities of orchestration, treating it as mere colour. Additionally too many give into the temptation of writing long tunes, perhaps under the impression that it makes them epic. Few tunes deserve to be ten minutes long though.
Which brings me to Septicflesh. These guys get it. For one, the songs are nice and short. Only a few push five minutes long. The constraint of writing shorter songs seems to have made them focus on songwriting and it’s really paid off.
At the core, these songs are structured like most rock songs. Verse, bridge and chorus. No stupid orchestra only break downs, no martial marches, no weepy acoustic guitar solos. Just short, sharp and epic songs.
And the tiny things matter… one of my favorite moments is the introduction to Sangreal. The double-kicks roll for a bar, then for the next bar hit on the up-beat. It sounds off kilter and distinctly mechanical. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s just one of those little things that keeps me listening again and again.
I can foresee this one being on heavy rotation for awhile now.