I’m not going to lie — I still harbor fantasies of being a rock star one day.  Sure, my odds are going down the older I get, but those fantasies are more alive than those of being a professional athlete.

Rock Band (and, right now of focus Beatles Rock Band) lets me, at least for a little while, pretend those fantasies have come true.  Sure, the instruments are plastic, and my TV doesn’t get nearly as loud as the ole Orange amplifier and a drum kit.

But, the tunes are fun to play.  And you really are singing, and you really are beating drums and strumming a guitar.

Of course, you’re not REALLY playing them — Rock Band guitar is easier than the real thing, and more forgiving of mistakes.  The vocals are real, but you can mix the game’s vocals higher so as to drown out the atonal mess coming from the room.  The drums are the closest to the real thing, minus dynamic control and lack of left foot action.

But, Rock Band comes close enough to providing the illusion that you are playing.  It comes closer than any other simulation I know: playing Rock Band puts you closer to making music than Madden Football does to putting you in the NFL; closer than Gran Turismo puts you to auto racing, and, luckily, closer than Grand Theft Auto puts you to being an actual deliquent.

For a few minutes, it’s easy to pretend you really are a rock star, singing, pounding, strumming, away.  Smartly, you can even practice your rock star moves — the guitar is wireless, making it easy to introduce the smooth moves.

Rock Band makes it easy to pretend.  And for that, is a successful game.

Praise for the machine is everywhere, so I won’t waste too much of your time saying how awesome it is.  The screen is bright, it feels good in your hands, game cartridges are small, the touch screen is awesome.  At $130, it all feels like a bargain.

One thing is bugging me, though — the lack of PDA/organizer software.  Nintendo is bringing Opera’s web browser to the system soon, but there is a perfect opportunity for the DS to be not just a gaming machine but also a organizational tool.  When you turn on your DS, up pops a calendar on the top screen.  But no organizer, to-do list, etc.  Just a plain old calendar sitting there taunting you, as if saying “Hey!  I’m a calendar on a machine with a stylus and great connectivity!  But you can’t use me to organize your life!”

Now, I realize that these kind of functions take memory — you have to put the program and the data somewhere.  I understand that.  But, my little cell phone has an organizer built into it, and it remained small — why not the DS?  I don’t know the engineering details behind squeezing the DS Lite into such a pretty and small package, but I’m not convinced they couldn’t have put an organizer in there and not affect the form much, if at all.

I’m not asking for a full out Pocket PC here — just some basic tools that could come in handy if you carry your DS around with you everywhere.  I don’t, but maybe I would if it had more than just games.

Last night, I got to the last boss, but lost against him. I really want to try again, but here’s the problem — right before the last boss is an interminable amount of exposition (that makes little sense) and crappy dialogue. Frankly, I’m pretty sure the story has me nonplussed to the point that I don’t really care that much what the ending is. I just want to beat the last boss for completion’s sake.

So here’s my question — why force the poor gamer to sit through a ton of dialogue potentially more than once? The creators of the game have to know that there’s a good chance of dying at the last boss, since, presumably, as the last boss, he’ll be difficult. Easy solution — stick a save spot after the dialogue and before the actual battle. Voila, you can keep fighting the last boss without having to sit through the exposition over and over.

I’ll probably try again one more time, simply because an uncompleted game nags at me like a mosquito buzzing my ear. But after that, screw it. I might even sell the game back to Gamestop so it won’t be sitting in my room, taunting me that it’s unfinished and that there’s a long, boring dialogue scene to deal with again.

The first thing that struck me, along with probably everyone else, was “Wii? Why? Revolution was fine.” The clearest answers came from Nintendo’s official Wii site.

The Wii has turned into an exercise in language. Gaming and language — a world of fun for the dork in me (which is most of me). Most of the internet world is having fun with punning on Wii, private parts, and bodily functions (my contribution: “Why did Michael Jackson invite those kids to his house? To play with their new Wii.”), but Nintendo’s campaign looks like it will be centered around language, as well.

Watching Nintendo’s Flash movie unveiling the name made me think about the name from a marketing and linguistic perspective – and while the name may be weird, it does provide a foundation for what we can expect from the upcoming marketing campaign. 

• “Wii will break down that wall that separates video game players from everyone else. “Wii will put more people in touch with their games… and each other. [...] “Wii sounds like ‘we,’ which emphasizes this console is for everyone.” Ignoring the fact that Nintendo should have run that second line by someone that thinks like a 14-year-old, they’re throwing out the “togetherness” propaganda pretty hard.  Wii, we, we, we, we, we.  Combined with the new controllers, Nintendo’s focus during their campaigning looks like it won’t be about wowing gamers with technical specs but rather selling their system as the place to go for good old fashioned group fun.  The modern-day board game, so to speak.
• “Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion.  No need to abbreviate.  Just Wii.” They have a point there.  Not that great of a point, but a point.  It’s pretty hard to creation an auditory association with a word that already exists, particularly one as ubiquitous as “we.”  The opposite is true, however, on the visual of the word.  Nintendo has created a simple, Apple-esque black and white logo for Wii, which they hope will become as popular for gaming as iPod for portable music.  The big difference being that there’s no association with the word “iPod” outside of Apple music.  There’s a definite association with the word “we.”
• “Wii has a distinctive ‘ii’ spelling that symbolizes both the unique controllers and the image of people gathering to play.” On the one hand, I dig the creativity of a little word art combined with language play.  On the other hand, any time you have to point out what something means visually, it’s probably not doing that great a job of conveying the message by itself.  Who saw “Wii” and thought to themselves, “Whoa!  It’s a double-you and then two people standing next to each other, but those people might also be Nintendo controllers!”  I’d bet not many.  At does reinforce the whole “togetherness” conceptual theme, though.
• “And Wii, as a name and a console, brings something revolutionary to the world of video games that sets it apart from the crowd. “So that’s Wii.  Now Nintendo needs you. “Because it’s not relaly about you or me. “It’s about Wii. “And together, Wii will change everything.” Way to bring it home, Nintendo!  Anyone have any patriotic, brassy music handy?  Nintendo pounds in one last time the whole multiplayer gaming thing one last time, while stressing their radical thinking will make them unique.  They’re conceding the technical win to Sony — but they want to win the fun side, the unique side.  They’re going to push that — not the technical capabilities of the system.  A great idea, assuming you can bring the system in at a nice price point.  Given the concerns about the Sony PS3 coming in at several hundred dollars, Nintendo can win themselves a big fanbase by providing a quality system with strong games (where the X-box 360 is struggling).

In the end, the name Wii provides Nintendo a starting point to launch a campaign from.  They’ll need to educate people about the name and spend some time and money if they’re serious about equating “Wii” with multiplayer gaming.  But the name won’t affect sales in a negative manner, for certain.  Does a system’s name enter into the equation you buy it?  Not at all.  People bought the Nintendo Entertainment System years ago — even though the word “Nintendo” had no meaning to Americans.  Over time, it because synonymous with gaming — as Nintendo hopes Wii will.  The Super Nintendo?  Boring name.  Nintendo 64?  Boring name.  Nintendo Gamecube?  It described the system’s shape, for pete’s sake.

None of those things affected sales.  People said “let’s play Nintendo” in 1986, and they said it in 2005.  Either that, or they said, “let’s play X-box” or “let’s play Halo” or “let’s play Zelda” or ”let’s play Gamecube.”  When the Wii comes out, people will still say “let’s play Nintendo” or “let’s play Wii” (I admit that one does sound weird) or “let’s play Zelda.”

The ability to get the marketing campaign off to a strong start is going to be important for Nintendo.  They’ll have to win the next round of console wars on rhetoric, games, and innovation — not technical specs.  And they’ll be doing it by playing off the name of their latest console.

It’s a macromedia Flash movie, about 30 minutes long (if not longer). Don’t bother clicking if you’re not a fan of the Final Fantasy videogame series or if you don’t really keep up with gaming console news — it’ll make no sense at all.

But if you do happen to be a videogame geek whose geekdom was raging in the 90s, then click away and enjoy. It really brought back the memories of one of the most classic scenes from what is one of my 3 favorite games of all time — Final Fantasy VI (PSX remake available used on Amazon). But this time we have updated characters in the form of classic and modern consoles. I was so pumped up afterwards I totally felt like digging up my old collection of videogame soundtracks and vegging out to the sweet tunes of Nobuo Uematsu.