A little over the top

Chris Hecker has apologized for calling the Wii a piece of shit! If you missed out, Chris Hecker, one of the developers for Spore, attacked Nintendo during a session at GDC 2007 this week. Calling the Wii “…Two Gamecubes haphazardly stuck together with duct tape”, and saying that “Nintendo for not taking games as a serious art form”.

Chris has done a complete 180 today, apologizing and saying that he “was trying to be thought provoking and entertaining and fun, and a lot of the stuff went too far over the top”.

You think?

Chris won an award at last year’s GDC for his very thought-provoking speech on how we, as a people, are privileged to be living at a time when the medium of video games is emerging, and how we need to be careful how we craft it. He’s not a stupid guy. I really do believe he was speaking out of personal frustration with the processing limitations of the Wii from the perspective of someone who’s trying to implement a very processor heavy game. That said, there’s a time and place to vent those frustrations, and blasting Nintendo up and down during a public talk is not exactly what we would refer to as Politico.

The Wii was never supposed to be a power-house. Nintendo decided to move in a risky and wildly different direction as one would expect they would, because that’s how Nintendo avoids playing in a three way tug of war for quality content. Criticize that if you like for being the wrong move, but don’t just upend them as if they have, in some way, completely taken a face-plant just because the platform isn’t appropriate for YOUR game.

I suspect that a lot of his friends and co-workers ripped him a new one after that talk. Lesson learned I hope. Go back to making Spore as good as it should be and leave Nintendo to do their thing.

Sony’s Trophies

Maybe I spoke too soon. The big buzz around the GDC is Sony’s online Matchmaking System “Home”. Essentially a more structured version of Second Life, but fully integrated into the PS3 Matchmaking service. The video below shows it off pretty well.

Kinda makes Miis look pretty chinsy.The gorgeous open visuals are really starting to tempt me on that system. Unfortunately a lot of the content they’re pitching will probably suffer the same problem us Canadians have with Apple’s iTMS, Microsoft’s Video Marketplace, and Amazon’s Unbox… in that the content is only sold in the US, not in Canada. Somehow I don’t see Sony being the ones to carry that torch up north.

Sony’s Trophy room or “Hall of Fame” as they call it looks pretty sweet. And while I can imagine playing around in there for my person ego boost, somehow I don’t see myself spending that much time playing around in OTHER people’s Halls of Fame. The only time I really look at other people’s Achievements in Xbox Live is when i’m sitting around in a lobby waiting for a game to start, and that doesn’t require me to start rendering gorgeous 3D visuals. Nevertheless, probably something you should check out. See the video below for more details.

It’s here.