What Wednesday #29
Today I switch sides in the console war, play some iMario, and hope that violence will continue its decline in 2017.
What I’m Playing: Xbox One S
With Baby Burnett (not her actual name) almost here, I wanted my last Christmas as a somewhat irresponsible adult to be special. So I asked Santa for what all irresponsible adults want: a video game console. And wouldn’t you know it, Santa delivered.
With Nintendo my primary console of choice (see below), the battle for the no. 2 spot between Xbox and PlayStation has always gone to the PS (save for some loooooooong Halo sessions in college on the original Xbox). With my PS3 looking a little long in the tooth, I was counting on Sony to push me into the next gen with the PS4 Pro. But Sony, one of Blu-ray’s biggest supporters, didn’t give the Pro a 4K Blu-ray player for some insane reason, while the almost half as expensive Xbox One S has one. Since I watch more movies than video games these days, and even my glorious gigabit fiber internet can’t make a heavily compressed Netflix “4K” stream look anywhere close to as nice as an uncompressed 4K Blu-ray, back to Xbox land I go.
First impressions: it’s quite nice here. The interface is smooth and easy to get around; the design of the console, unlike the bulky original Xbox, is quite svelte and attractive; and the controller is a joy to use, also unlike the insanely bulky original Xbox controller:
Thankfully, the games aren’t much different than the PS4 (though someday I’ll definitely want to pick up a PS4 on the cheap to play Sony exclusives like Uncharted and The Last Guardian) and I’ve been enjoying the couple I got with the system. Battlefield 1 has been an intense reintroduction to first-person shooters (after Halo, I stopped playing shooters and never got into Call of Duty…and I call myself a gamer, tsk tsk), and Final Fantasy XV has been enjoyably beautiful and weird, just as any proper Final Fantasy game should be.
I’m sure my game playing will take a nosedive around mid-March, but it’ll pick back up a few short years later when Baby Burnett (again, not her actual name) is old enough to hold a controller and join me in some Halo co-op.
What I’m Also Playing: Super Mario Run (iPhone)
The Xbox is cool and all, but my true love is Nintendo. And not just the Nintendo of my youth, but the Nintendo of now. The now discontinued Wii U sees way more use in our house than any other console — I’ve dumped close to 500 hours just between Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon (which is just like Battlefield, but with paint instead of bullets, and squids instead of soldiers. Yep, just like it). And I couldn’t be more excited for the Nintendo Switch, their console/tablet hybrid that comes out in March (just like Baby Burnett!)
I’ve owned every Nintendo console except the Virtual Boy (dodged a bullet there) and the N64 (I’m still sad about that one. Rented it plenty of times from Blockbuster, though). That includes handhelds, like the DS and classic Game Boy. Kids, a Game Boy was a portable device you carried around with you to play games on the go. Like a smartphone. Except you could only play games on it. And it was a lot bigger. And the battery died a lot quicker. And the screen was way worse. But it was awesome, I swear!
Speaking of smartphones, a few weeks ago Nintendo officially released the first Mario game not on a Nintendo machine since some hilariously bad looking edutainment PC games in the mid 90s. When Nintendo announced Mario was coming to smartphones, iPhones first, everyone got their jimmies rustled; when they announced the price ($10), everyone’s jimmies got rustled again. With some estimates putting the percentage of people actually paying for the game after downloading in the low single digits, it seems like those jimmies might never stop rustling.
Which is a shame, because it’s about as good a Mario game as you can expect on a smartphone. Since Mario automatically runs, many people have compared it to runner games like Temple Run. But it’s not like that at all, because there’s actually an end to each level. And those levels are actually designed — in typically excellent Nintendo fashion — and not randomly generated. Plus, collecting progressively difficult coins is a smart mechanic that increases replayability. Without a physical controller, touching the screen would never work for a full on Mario game. Believe me. As much as people say they want that, those same people would be saying how terrible it is.
So, are we now doomed to toil away on our phones with free-to-play soul and wallet suckers like Candy Crush? Probably. As for me, you best believe I’ve already collected all those pesky coins and unlocked all of the secret levels and hidden characters. Because you know what’s better than Candy Crush? A game you can actually finish.
What I’m Reading: Better Angels of Our Nature, by Steven Pinker (Amazon)
I also got a few sweet books for Christmas. One that I’m really enjoying is Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), by prolific cognitive scientist and psychologist Steven Pinker. I’ve read one of his other books (How the Mind Works), and while I enjoy his writing, it was his premise that really caught me: over the course of human history, the human race has mercifully gotten less violent, not more. While I’m not qualified to speak on its accuracy — there are plenty of smarter people that question some of his numbers — he amasses enough evidence that makes the thrust of his argument very compelling.
The book has already been enjoyable and thought provoking, though I couldn’t help but skip ahead to the section on our modern era. One counterintuitive fact: worldwide, the number of deaths from terrorists peaked in the early 80’s, and has declined in fits and starts (most notably with 9/11) ever since. It just doesn’t feel like it, because our brains focus more on things in the present than in the past; and it’s easier to recall exceptional events — which is why you can remember where you were when 9/11 happened, but not what you did on this day last year. While that doesn’t negate the tragedies that seem to happen every week, it does call into question their outsized affect on the public psyche. Not only are terrorist attack deaths still incredibly rare, they’re rarer than they have been in decades. And not being afraid of them robs terrorists their primary weapon.
