The Richter Scale^®

As 2006 came to a close, Microsoft did a lot of chest thumping to declare themselves the winner of the next generation console battle, touting console sales (over 10 million Xbox 360s sold) and content (160 high definition Xbox 360 titles). Disregarding the fact that the next generation console battle is really just starting in earnest, and Microsoft merely had an early lead, the 160 titles proclamation puzzled me. After all, I think I am probably one of Microsoft’s best individual consumer clients - I have three Xbox 360s and a couple of dozen Xbox 360 packaged titles - and I add another few every month as they are released, and I did not realize I was missing well over 100 games in my collection. Nor have I seen that many games on shelves at BestBuy or GameStop. So, I asked my media contact at Microsoft for a current list of high definition Xbox 360 titles, and this is what they sent back:

2006 FIFA World Cup
A Train HX
Amped 3
Aqua Zone*
Assault Heroes*
AstroPop*
Bankshot Billiards 2*
Battlefield 2: Modern Combat
Bejeweled 2*
Bionicle Heros
Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WW II
Blitz: The League
Blue Dragon
Bomberman Act: Zero
Bullet Witch
Burger King: Big Bumpin’
Burger King: Pocketbike Racer
Burger King: Sneak King
Burnout: Revenge
Cabela’s African Safari
Cabela’s Alaskan Adventure
Call of Duty 2
Call of Duty 3
Chanbara Beauty X
Chromehounds
Cloning Clyde*
Condemned
Contra*
Crystal Quest*
Culdcept Saga
DEAD OR ALIVE 4
Dead or Alive Xtreme 2
Dead Rising
Defender*
Dig Dug*
Disney/Pixar’s Cars
Doom*
Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires
Earth Defense Force 3
Enchanted Arms
Eragon
Everyparty
F.E.A.R.
Far Cry Instinct: Predator
Far East of Eden ZIRIA
Feeding Frenzy*
FIFA 06 Road to World Cup
FIFA 2007
Fight Night Round 3
Final Fantasy XI
Football Manager 2006
Football Manager 2007
Frogger*
Full Auto
Galaga*
Gauntlet*
Gears of War
Geometry Wars Retro Evolved*
Gun
Hardwood Backgammon*
Hardwood Hearts*
Hardwood Spades*
Hexic*
Hitman: Blood Money
Import Tuner Challenge
Jewel Quest*
Joust*
Just Cause
Kameo
Kengo ZERO
King Kong (Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie)
LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy
LMA Manager 2007
Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
LOVE FOOTBALL
Lumines Live*
Madden NFL 06
Madden NFL 07
Major League Baseball 2K6
Marble Blast 2*
Marvel Ultimate Alliance
Moto GP 2006
Mutant Storm Reloaded*
NBA 2K6
NBA 2K7
NBA Live 06
NBA Live 07
NCAA College Hoops 2K6
NCAA College Hoops 2K7
NCAA Football 07
Need For Speed Most Wanted
Need for Speed: Carbon
New Rally X*
NHL 07
NHL 2K6
NHL 2K7
NINETY-NINE NIGHTS
NovaDrome*
Open Season
Outpost Kaloki*
Over G
Pac-Man*
Perfect Dark Zero
Phantasy Star Universe
Pimp my Ride
Prey
Pro Baseball Spirits 3
Pro Evolution Soccer 6
Project Gotham Racing 3
Project Sylpheed
Quake 4
Ridge Racer 6
RoboBlitz*
Robotron*
Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis
Rumble Roses XX
Saints Row
Samurai Warriors 2
Scramble*
Senko no Ronde Rev. X
Shin Sangoku Musou 4 special
Small Arms*
Smash TV*
Sonic the Hedgehog
SPECTRAL FORCE 3 INNOCENT RAGE
Star Trek Legacy
Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting*
Super Robot Wars XO
Superman Returns: The Videogame
Tenchu Senran
Test Drive Unlimited
Tetris Grand Master 3*
Texas Hold’Em*
The American Civil War
The Conveni 200X
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
The Godfather The Game
The Outfit
Tiger Woods 2007
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06
Time Pilot*
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Double Agent
Tomb Raider Legend
Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland
Tony Hawk’s Project 8
Top Spin 2
Toryumon
Totemball
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
Uno*
Viva Pinata
Wik & the Fable of Souls*
World Championship Poker 3
World Series of Poker: Tournament of Champions
Wrestle Kingdom
WWE SMACKDOWN VS. RAW 2007
Xbox Live Arcade Unplugged Vol. 1
X-Men 3: The Movie Game (aka X-Men: The Official Game)
Zegapain NOT
ZEGAPAIN XOR
Zoids Infinity EX Neo
Zuma*

Okay - I am not into sports games, certain car racing games being an exception - I love Burnout: Revenge, although calling that a sports game is a real stretch. But sports games make up a healthy percentage of the titles on the list. There are also a number of games on the list that are only available outside the U.S., including Bullet Witch (Japan for now, U.S. in the next couple of months) and Chanbara Beauty X. And a few others appear to not be shipping yet anywhere as best I can tell (e.g. Super Robot Wars XO).

But, the other group of games I was surprised (or maybe not) to find Microsoft touting as high definition games were Xbox Live games for the Xbox 360. They may be high definition, I guess, but in Bejeweled 2 that only buys you nice looking cut scenes and prettier sparkles. I guess, however, they really still are high definition titles. And Microsoft never said 160 “packaged” titles, did they? (Although that’s what I thought was implied.)

For now, I guess I actually have all the games that I want and can easily get my hands on and be able to play/read - my Kana and Kanji skills are lacking, so I prefer games in English. And I am eagerly awaiting Lost Planet, which arrives here on Bonaire for me in less than a week. Not that I will have much time to play it. One more thing to delegate to my kids, I suppose.

I have spent the last week setting up over a half dozen new UPSes, a new multimedia receiver, and three high end Windows XP Media Center Edition computers - two fully loaded Dell XPS 710 systems and an HP x565 Digital Entertainment Center. Seeing as these were new installations, I decided to bite the bullet and go ahead an accept Microsoft’s Automatic Update suggestion to install Internet Explorer 7 (IE7).

Well, one of the other things we do here at the Richter high-tech household is use a central file server (running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3), and that file server includes some applications we run on local systems. Well, Microsoft, in it’s desire to help the average user avoid running bad programs has implemented additional security features as part of IE7, features that get really annoying for more advanced users. In particular, when you run applications off a server on a LAN, IE7’s default settings cause a dialog box to pop-up entitled “Security Warning”, and asking you to verify you really really really want to run the program in question.

One application we use in turn spawns calls to a Windows version of the PERL scripting language, dozens of times, and each time we’d get a warning.

We used Google to try to find a solution, and the closest we got to a solution was here. But the real answer was in the comments to that blog post, and not the blog post itself.

In any event, if you have a similar problem, including for the error “Publisher Code Not Be Verified”, try this solution to see if it makes it go away. A concise summary of the solution follows.

First, get to the Internet Options control. Three ways to do this: 1) Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Internet Options; 2) Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Security Center -> Internet Options; and 3) IE7 -> Tools -> Internet Options (works only if you have the menu bar enabled).

Once there, click on the Security tab at top, then in Local Intranet, click Sites, and then unclick “Automatically detect intranet network”. Voila.

Nice of Microsoft to make it so easy to locate and resolve. Not.

Those who have followed my writing over the years know that I have a strong belief that the adult entertainment industry drives a lot of technology forward. The adult industry is credited with making VHS a successful standard resulting in Sony’s Betamax losing the video tape recording standards battle. Likewise, the first profitable commercial uses I witnessed of streaming live compressed video over a network connection (ISDN) were of on-line interactive peep shows. And arguably, multimedia PCs, with speakers and CD-ROM drives, were driven by the adult industry’s foray into MPEG movies, and interactive adult titles.

And now the issue of the importance of the adult industry’s adoption of technology (or the lack of adoption a technology) comes to the fore again with the standards battle between HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

For those not familiar with HD-DVD and Blu-ray, they are competing standards for high definition (HD) content on discs similar to DVDs. But they offer many times the resolution of traditional DVD on a properly equipped high definition television or display. From personal experience I can tell you that the imagery is incredibly crisp with both HD-DVD and Blu-ray, and I now find myself cheated when I have to watch a normal DVD because it seems so grainy and fuzzy.

HD-DVD is supported mainly by Toshiba on the hardware side, while Blu-ray comes from Sony. Each side has its exclusive hardware supporters, as well as exclusive studios which support that format, and there are a few companies that are “bi-definition” - they support both formats. Both sides want the other to just go away. Blu-ray is technologically superior to HD-DVD, but HD-DVD is cheaper and has some perception issues in its favor (I’ll post my Richter Scale column from TechWatch over on http://www.RichterScale.org in a couple of weeks that explains this in greater detail).

But back to the adult industry. A year ago the big production companies in the adult industry were all for Blu-ray - they appreciated the greater disc capacity (50GB vs. 30GB for HD-DVD) and the quality reputation that Sony has. Fast forward one year later where all the top adult studios are now declaring for HD-DVD as their next generation DVD standard.

Why? Well, in speaking with management at two of the studios - Wicked Pictures and Digital Playground - they could not find anyone to replicate their discs in Blu-ray. Joone - an award winning director and manager of Digital Playground told me that Sony forced him to go HD-DVD because they have an agreement with their replicators that they will lose their license to make Blu-ray discs if they duplicate adult content. The head of marketing at Wicked, Jackie Ramos, said much the same thing.

At a meeting I had with Sony Pictures last week during CES, I asked Don Eklund, Vice President of Technology, whether this was true. Eklund indicated that while the three replication facilities Sony itself owned indeed were under agreement not to replicate adult content (see this Computerworld article for more), he was not aware of this restriction applying to the other handful of Blu-ray replicators out there.

One adult publisher - Vivid - appears to not be facing the same issues, or maybe not yet anyway. Vivid plans to release their first high definition disc title ("Debbie Does Dallas Again") in both HD-DVD and Blu-ray format. I was unable to reach Steven Hirsh of Vivid to get more insight into how they are able to claim to do Blu-ray when everyone else that counts in adult entertainment is not able to do Blu-ray.

One thing is for sure, though. The legend of the Adult industry breaking Betamax and making VHS did make an impression on at least some members of the HD-DVD camp, as Wicked’s Ramos disclosed to myself and fellow journalist Dan Nystedt (see here and here) for his article (with quotes from yours truly) during a meeting with Ramos.

Ramos said that in the Fall of 2006 his company was approached by someone in the HD-DVD camp to adopt the HD-DVD format, and once that happened, all sorts of previously closed doors opened up for them. So, after months and months of no progress, they finally got started for earnest in November and last week released their first HD-DVD title - “Camp Cuddly Pines Powertool Massacre”, an HD-DVD re-release of the 2005 AVN Award winning movie by the same name.

Folks in the Blu-ray hardware camp are certainly not making similar overtures to the adult entertainment industry, and it may ultimately be Blu-ray’s downfall.

However, content is still king, and the best weapon Blu-ray has against HD-DVD is exclusive content, such as movies from Disney. Will this become a popularity contest between Disney and adult movies? Time will tell.

One of my many other projects is an e-commerce web site called Patent Fetcher, which provides a way for folks to download complete PDF files of published patents and patent applications. One of the early challenges I faced was finding an easy way to accept payments for these downloads, for which I wanted to charge less than $1 per document. Enter Bitpass.

That was in July of 2003. Since then Patent Fetcher has used the Bitpass payment platform, which worked much like a prepaid phone card, but for on-line purchases, exclusively for the Pay-As-You-Go Patent Fetcher PDF download service, at 65 cents a download. And while the 15% cut that Bitpass took on all purchases was a bit steep, they tended to be very responsive to my unique requirements, adding numerous features to Bitpass for corporate use (as a large percentage of Patent Fetcher users are law firms and large corporations).

However, they were either before their time, or had grander aspirations (and expenditures) than their revenue stream could support. Plus, as their focus was media, they found themselves in competition first with Apple’s iTunes, and then later a bevy of other services which sold content for small amounts of money.

Regardless of the of cause of their demise, last night at 5:52pm EST, I got the following e-mail from Bitpass:

Dear Valued Bitpass Merchant,

We want to thank you for your past business, however due to circumstances beyond our control, we are discontinuing our operations. 

We have partnered with Digital River to provide operational support during the period prior to shut down.  As of today, January 19, 2007, all Bitpass Buyers with US dollar denominated accounts are being notified that they will have seven (7) days to spend any amounts that currently exist in their Bitpass Account. 

During this seven day period, US Buyers will not be able to add additional funds into their account. 

On January 26, all US Bitpass Buyer accounts will be closed and we will begin the process of refunding all unspent monies to the accountholder.

Bitpass Merchant Accounts will be available for viewing until February 28, 2007.  At that time any funds that you have on account or owed to you will be refunded or paid.  All account records and materials will be retained for 60 days and available upon request. 

Again we would like to thank you for your business and support. 

Matthew Graves
Chief Operating Officer
Bitpass Inc.

Our long time customers got the same message at approximately the same time. Talk about a Friday night surprise for all of us. Bitpass was a good thing while it lasted, but giving merchants more notice than consumers would have been greatly appreciated and desired. Instead, Bitpass merchants like myself have to scramble to communicate with our customers and deal with a sudden and near instant loss of revenue until alternatives can be found.

I ended up spending much of Friday evening trying to come up with a stopgap measure that would still allow my customers to use Patent Fetcher, and be able to continue to charge them for the downloads. Most important was to ensure minimal problems for Patent Fetcher users, so I made the service free of charge until I can develop an alternate payment platform. And this time I will bite the bullet and just do my own credit card processing instead of relying on an expensive, yet convenient, proprietary third party solution. On the bright side, this failure of Bitpass forces me to develop and complete some long overdue functionality for Patent Fetcher and should make it a much better service in the coming months.

Lesson learned: Don’t rely exclusively on proprietary technology, no matter how cool.

I admit (and am sure have admitted before) that I am an Internet junkie. Call it an obsession. That’s why I have two data phones (a Blackberry for Bonaire, a Sidekick 3 for everywhere else), a monthly subscription to T-Mobile Spot and Boingo (for WiFi), a T-Mobile GPRS/EDGE data card for my notebook, and Cingular’s GPRS/EDGE service built into my notebook. The latter two services work fine, but they are slow to connect, slow to disconnect, and just slow in general. Enter Sprint.

I had been seeing ads for Sprint Mobile Broadband for some time in USA Today and on the recommendation of good friend and networking guru, Daniel Senie, I committed to the Sprint Mobile Broadband service while in New York City the week before Christmas.

The Pantech Wireless PC Card that the Sprint store on Broadway sold me (net cost about $65 for set-up, with a $59.99/month fee for two years) installed easily in my notebook, and a few hours after I purchased the card I was on-line in my hotel room at Times Square. All I can say is “Wow!” - the download speeds I was seeing were about as good as the wired Internet connection in my room (which was $14.95/day). And while Sprint’s detractors have suggested that Sprint’s coverage is lacking, I’ve found no such problem in all the places I have wanted to use the card: New York City, La Guardia airport, Boston, San Juan, Las Vegas (daily this past week), and Miami (right now).

The only place the card was sluggish was during a press conference at the Sands Expo in Las Vegas about five days ago during the Consumer Electronics Show, and that was no doubt due to many others on the same cell using the service. In my hotel room in Vegas the Sprint data connection performed flawlessly, at high speeds - saving me $11.95/day for hotel room Internet access. And here in Miami, I’m able to watch my Texas DirecTV connection via my Slingbox Pro (more on that in another post) without problems on the Sprint Mobile Broadband connection.

And. on top of that, the time it takes to plug in the Sprint PC Card and establish a data connection is typically less than 30 seconds, compared to 1-2 minutes at least for the Cingular data service built into my computer. Same goes for shutdown when I want to hibernate my notebook (like when the flight attendants give me stern looks to suggest that NOW is the time I need to shut off my notebook in preparation for take-off).

I think it’s time to cancel my $80/month Cingular data service. And perhaps my Boingo service too, as less and less places seem to allow roaming with Boingo. T-Mobile’s a keeper as it works at just about all Admiral’s Clubs (although in San Juan, the Sprint Mobile Broadband connection is faster), Starbucks, and Borders Bookstores, among others. The T-Mobile unlimited data service is only about $30/month, so as a back-up which will work overseas, that’s not unreasonable. I understand that Sprint will not work overseas.

It should also be noted that the Sprint PC Card I have supports the Sprint EVDO data network, using the EVDO Rev. A system. The previous generation EVDO Rev. 0 system is not as fast, which is another thing to look for if you decide to follow in my (large) footsteps.

I give the Sprint Mobile Broadband service a 9.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale. The only thing that could make it better is a lower price. Bravo Sprint!

One of the more creative PC game input devices I have seen in some time (and first reported on here), is the Novint Falcon.

At CES here in Las Vegas this week, Novint finally announced a ship date and pricing for the device. The Falcon will ship on June 18, 2007, and is available for pre-order now in a limited edition bundle at http://www.novintfalcon.com for a price of $189. The pre-order bundle includes the Novint Falcon game controller device, a copy of Newton’s Monkey Business (a set of mini-games strangely reminiscent of Super Monkey Ball on the Nintendo Wii), a free game download from Novint’s Online Game Service and membership in the Falcon First Club.

The full retail price of the Novint Falcon will be $239 when it ships in June.

What makes the Novint Falcon so different is that it is a haptic device, meaning that it provides physical feedback. For example, in the Half-Life 2 demo I tried, I could actually feel the recoil when firing various weapons because the Falcon would jerk up and to the right, just as a real gun would. Similarly, when opponents were firing upon me, the controller would jerk in a direction to indicate the force of being hit, allowing me to quickly locate the source of attack. The use of the Falcon is very intuitive, although I suspect that with extended game play my arm would tire. Although, arguably, that means it might be good exercise too.

The launch price for the device is significantly higher than the $99 price Novint had bandied about last May at the E3 Show in Los Angeles, but for a haptic device of this complexity, probably not unreasonable. The biggest challenge that Novint faces is getting game developers to support their device natively in PC games, but they assured me that they were working on that effort.

I certainly look forward to playing with it when it ships because it really is one cool device. And I hope they overcome the market hurdles such innovation and uniqueness tend to face.

This morning, here in Las Vegas at the start of the Consumer Electronics Show, LG Electronics announced that they will be shipping the first multi-format DVD player during the first week of February, 2007 via retail channels including Best Buy and Circuit City.

The new LG BH100 player, which goes by the decidedly cryptic name of “Super Multi Blue Player”, will retail for $1,199, and offer playback for HD-DVD, Blu-ray, and standard DVD media using a single tray. Full 1080p output, HDMI out, and support for a variety of codecs (VL-1/H.264, DDH, DTS HD, and True HD) is also included. The new player uses a sophisticated beam mirror system (pictured above) to direct the different color laser beams required by the various formats.

LG’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr. H. G. Lee, said that it has been widely perceived that there has been much slower adoption of high definition DVD players, and that LG believes unification between the competing HD-DVD and Blu-ray standards is possible. LG believes their new BH100 player is a first step towards that unification, and should help consumers overcome the hesitation in committing to high definition DVD playback, because now they don’t have to choose (although they will need to pay a small premium, of course).

LG also announced the GGW-H10N Super Multi Blue Drive, an external drive for use with PCs which features support for reading and writing Blu-ray media, DVD, and CD, and can also play HD-DVD. This unit will be available for $1,199 as well, sometime later in Q1 2007.

While the price of the BH100 is not insignificant, it is still cheaper than buying two separate standalone players (and about the same price as buying both a PS3 - which features Blu-ray, and an Xbox 360 with HD-DVD drive separately), and no doubt the price will come down as volumes increase and as other vendors release multi-format players. I only wish LG had chosen a better and more descriptive name, like “Universal High Definition Disc Player”.

There were already a number of hints last week that LG would be announcing a multi-format player at CES. Companies and people who had opted to support one of the two HD formats exclusively had guarded comments, but in some cases expressed concern that LG’s product would further delay the eventual success of their chosen standard, and the demise of the competing standard. The same concerns rang even louder when Warner Bros. last week also announced a dual media disc - the Total High-Definition Disc (or THD), which will play in both HD-DVD and Blu-ray players.

Both products are excellent for consumers, however, and as consumers are the ones who fund the consumer electronics industry, it’s wise to provide products which make consumers happy (or at least less reluctant to adopt new technology).

As an active (some might say hyper-active) consumer of digital media I find DRM (Digital Rights Management) to be annoying at the very least, and downright malodorous at worst. DRM is what prevents you from playing downloaded music from _________ (insert one of: iTunes, Napster (new one), Yahoo Music, Real/Rhapsody, etc.) on any device or platform you want, any time you want, for example.

And DRM is not limited to only music - it applies to eBooks (like those for my Sony Reader or the occasional standards documents I need to purchase from IHS/ANSI); videos (iTunes TV shows, for example), and movies (e.g. Xbox Live movie downloads which can only be stored for a few days, and played only a few times; Microsoft’s Vista operating system will require LCD (or other) displays to have HDCP - High Definition Copy Protection - in order to play back HD video content from Blu-ray and HD-DVD; Apple’s new iTV with iTunes; and the reason I cannot watch TV shows at ABC’s web site while back home on Bonaire because I am outside the U.S.).

The truly scary thing about DRMed content, at least to me, is that the company I bought it through could decide at some point that my right to view or listen to the content should be terminated, and there’s not much I could do about it (other than keep computers in Internet isolation, perhaps). Or that some technological mishap prevents me from playing purchased media forever.

And then there are changing standards and allegiances, as witnessed by Microsoft’s desertion of all of its Plays For Sure partners when the company decided to release the Zune player.

The big media publishers are driven by fear - fear of loss of control, fear of lost revenue, fear of alienating their artists - and that fear has more or less paralyzed them. Their knee jerk response has been to vastly restrict how digital content can be purchased and used, combined with an effort to scare those who don’t respect (or are ignorant of) intellectual property rights into submission. The result is an alienation of their customers. Like me.

With the rare exception of a TV show I may order and download from iTunes for my video iPod, knowing I will only view it once, my form of protest to DRM has taken the form of either viewing/listening to the material for free or simply purchasing physical media that I can play anywhere, anytime, and rip to my computer hard disk if I so wish. And apparently I’m not the only one doing this as is evident from the growing indications that the music industry is looking at options for selling non-DRMed MP3 music files to boost their electronic sales and also reduce their dependence on the monster they created - Apple’s iTunes.

A December 7, 2006 article in USA Today offered one of the first hints of this as Yahoo Music became one place where an MP3 (which is by definition not DRMed) file for a Norah Jones song as well as one from Relient K became available for sale.

Then, a couple of days ago, Billboard magazine (as republished by Yahoo News) released further hints that DRM is being reconsidered by at least some music publishers, especially under pressure from some large on-line sites, such as Amazon.com and MySpace.

I, for one, would be right there with my money in hand to buy non-DRMed MP3 music files at a reasonable price - like $0.50 each - and I suspect that folks who now knowingly steal music for their collections but have the means to pay for their music would do so to to be legal and support the artists they like.

Lower priced, unrestricted music files, combined with a marketing campaign to make the artists seem a bit more human and approachable would do wonders for the music industry, and perhaps create a revival for digital music at large.

A couple of weeks ago in New York City I was lucky enough to score two Nintendo Wii consoles with merely a 2 hour wait in line at the Times Square Toys R Us. I received a ticket to purchase a console when I joined the line, and I roped in my nine year old son to get a ticket too. See pictures below of us in line, along with some new friends, with our tickets; Wii boxes stacked up at the Toys R Us; and my son Bas and I with one of our Wiis.

One of the Wii consoles has been sent on home to Bonaire via slow boat, but we managed to install the other one last week at the in-laws while visiting for Christmas, and it was great fun. We now have the same Wii set up in our living room on our big screen and it’s still fun.

Nintendo has, in my estimation, never been stupid - foolish and foolhardy yes, but not stupid. And the Wii is no exception. While the Wii has been derided by game mavens as having mediocre graphics, the fact is that the Wii is designed to be used with just about all existing televisions. Okay, so it doesn’t look as crisp and awe inspiring as an Xbox 360 or PS3 running in high definition with an appropriately designed game title and all the right cables, but most real folks don’t have HD TVs yet.

So, in contrast to the Sony PS3 and Xbox 360, for which an HD TV is pretty much required, the Wii is effectively plug and play with current display technology (but get a component video cable if you want to get a bit better resolution out of it on a newer TV). And from personal experience, you don’t notice jagged pixels or fuzziness when you’re madly shaking your hands and arms to make your character on the screen run, jump, or whatever - you’re too busy playing the game using the Wii’s innovative input devices.

The three titles I have found so far that make the best use of the Wii remote (and Wii nunchuk in some cases) are the free Wii Sports game disc which comes with the Wii (features Baseball, Tennis, Bowling, and Golf), Excite Truck, and Super Monkey Ball. And the latest Zelda (Twilight Princess) is good too, but it takes quite a bit of game time to get to where you are using the wireless motion controls in a broad range of ways.

Super Monkey Ball in particular features 50 mini-games ranging from darts, running hurdles, races, space shooters, tightrope walking, and much much more. But even Super Monkey Ball probably only scratches the surface on original ways game developers will likely put the wireless controls to use in the future.

I have read and heard a fair bit of commentary from naysayers that the Wii is just a fad, and recreational gamers will soon tire of it, but I’m not so sure. There’s something very satisfying about being able to physically interact with a video game, whether it be swinging a control like a golf club in a golf game, playing tennis with the control as a racket, throwing darts, or even pointing the remote at the screen as an aiming mechanism for some weapon in a first person shooter. Certainly it’s a lot more natural to point your “gun” at a target than it is to use a joystick to rotate your view so that your cross hairs then line up on your target.

And while reports of television destruction and bodily injury from flailing arms, snapping Wii Remote restraint cords, and sweat-induced slipperiness abound, the experience in my family is that the greatest pain resulting from use of the Wii controllers is the day after vigorous play - muscle aches being the most common malady.

I am firmly convinced the Wii will outsell the PS3 and Xbox 360 by mid-2008, if for no other reason than it will work very well with pretty much any TV already in use today, as well as new ones being purchased, combined with the fact that it’s much more attractively priced than the higher end alternatives, meaning it’s more accessible to a larger number of people. It also doesn’t hurt that the game titles available for the Wii are much more family friendly than those for the PS3 (and to some extent, the Xbox 360), at least as things stand now.

I give the Nintendo Wii a 9.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to start reading the freaking manual of any new device and gadget I get (and I have a lot of those in my queue right now). In geek lingo, that’s know as RTFM (and the “F” means something rather more crude than “Freaking” in case you hadn’t guessed.

This all stems from the fact that when we bought the house we are living in now, we remodeled and added ceiling fans to every room in the house. But, Bonaire has flaky power, and for the last two and a half years we have been attributing the fact that the remote controlled lights in the ceiling fans are sometimes dim and sometimes bright (changing over a period of months from one to the other, or at least so it seems) to that power instability.

So imagine our surprise when a couple of days ago we discovered that if we hold the “light” button on our ceiling fan remotes, the corresponding ceiling fan’s light actually dims or brightens gradually over a 10-15 second period from one extreme to the other. We have had dimmer functionality in the lights all along and never known it. Why? Because we didn’t RTFM. So, from now on, I will RTFM, even when the device is seemingly trivial, as everything is definitely not always as simple as it seems.