I'm more than willing to talk out of my ass at this site, and the reason for that is not that I think I'm so great, but rather that I'm frequently able to twist what I've said into looking like good preditions. Actually, I feel I just need to carefully mark where I'm wrong, and where I'm right to make bold predictions. I always get annoyed that the mainstream sites end everything with question marks: "Wii wins this console round?"
Then again, I'm not gaming journalist, so I don't have to be neutral, and I'm not analyst, so I don't need to make up numbers (PS3 sells 38 million units in five years? 360 sells 32 million?). I'm a pundit. A gaming pundit. So I get to revel in it when I'm right. And, unlike political pundits on TV, I'll admit where I was wrong.
On to the point of this article. I was right with some of my implied points in my article about the Wii's future. Here's my article. Next, gander at this in-depth article from Bit-Tech on the Wii. Pay attention to the talk about Zelda on the second and third pages.
"The wrist flicks correspond to what button presses would have done in years gone by and so ultimately you end up with a game that is not drastically different to what you're used to (except you do wrist flicks instead of button bashing)."
Now 5 months
ago I said:
"Navigating dungeons, finding enemy weakspots,
puzzle solving conventions. Even if you don't have to hit the right buttons to
use a grappling hook, you still have to learn when you would use one."
I was busy making the point that the controls in Zelda will still be intimidating
and implied that you would be doing the same thing in a different way. So not only
was my prediction about Zelda just being Zelda with fancy controls right (don't
get me wrong, it'll still be a great game), it was an implied prediction along
the way to a larger point, that I expect to be proven a year or two in the future.
Also, I'd like to note that I didn't need to actually play a Wii to figure that out.
On to part two.
So a while ago I said:
"Sony wants
to control every aspect of our entertainment top to bottom. Like
the DVD consortium, only for all kinds of media. They have the electronics,
they have the music studios, they have the film studios, they have every
thing they need to provide you with every form of entertainment possible.
Sony truely hopes to cover all your entertainment needs, and the Playstation
is the platform that will give them the power to do it."
With the Playstation 3, you can play games, watch Blu-Ray movies, download music and movies,
browse the web, it's like a mini computer. Sony's made claims that it's a computer
because it has so much functionality. I don't think their wrong. It is a computer,
just one that is a bit more closed than we're used to.
So when did I say that? It's in an article I wrote on Feb 12th, 2001. You can look at it here and see how I was very wrong about much of what I state in the piece (Internet TV, where are you?). While everyone seems to be busy hating on Sony for their "Jack into the Matrix" claims for the PS2, everyone seems to have forgotten Sony's big claims for the media capabilities of the PS2. They've actually put them into the PS3, and my article shows that what they claimed the PS2 would be and what the PS3 IS are very similar.
The article's main point was that the Xbox (announced mere weeks earlier) was
a defensive move by Microsoft to block Sony from hurting their PC cash cow. Check out
this
article from Next Generation where an anylist states:
"The company was concerned that a PlayStation successor would become
the default gateway to networked entertainment in the home—Ken Kutaragi promised
as much—and cut into consumer PC sales."
Nice to know that something I said 5 years ago is now assumed to be common knowledge.
So there you have it. But selectively picking from the wide nets I've cast in the past,
I've proven myself able to catch a fish or two.
