Rock Band for Wii

Rock Band will finally be out for the Wii on June 22. That’s the good news. The big question is whether or not the game will support the ability to download new songs. No Wii game yet has featured major downloadable content. The Wii itself has a small hard drive that’s not really suited to adding much stuff to it, but it also has a SD Card expansion slots, so files could go on there. From the Rock Band forums:

The feature-set is a lot closer to the PS2 version of Rock Band which was also developed by Pi Studios. We’ve decided to focus on getting the core gameplay on to the Wii and focus on making that awesome.

This almost certainly means that it won’t feature downloadable content. It was recently reported that Harmonix had sold six million songs for Rock Band. Being that the Wii is the top-selling video console now, it seems strange that they don’t want a piece of that pie. I have two guesses here:

1. They phoned in the Wii version. Clearly they didn’t consider it enough of a cash cow to justify developing for the game’s launch. I’m assuming that, once the Wii turned out to be a huge hit, they reversed course and threw some resources at it to get it out onto another platform. Either they just want the quick sell and don’t care about making money via downloads to Wii owners (unlikely), or they didn’t put the resources into developing downloadable content for the Wii because no other Wii game has it; or
2. Nintendo’s not cooperating, or hasn’t made it easy to offer downloadable content. I can see it being possible that Nintendo has a rule in place prohibiting third party companies from taking microtransactions, but doesn’t yet have their own first-party payment service set up yet. Or maybe the Wii’s file system can’t read that sort of stuff off of the SD cards. Harmonix may well have tried to offer downloadable content on the Wii and been stopped by Nintendo.

I’m a Wii owner and fan, but I’m also a Wii skeptic. Frankly, Nintendo has botched a lot of stuff with this system and ceded a lot of features to Microsoft, especially in the online arena. If it does indeed turn out that Rock Band won’t let you download new songs on the Wii, it’ll be easy to blame Harmonix, but it could well be Nintendo’s fault. Question is, is the game even worth owning if you can’t add new songs to it? To me, that’s the attractive part. No matter what, you’ll get sick of the songs that come with the game, and with a $170 investment to play, it needs to be able to justify that it has longer legs than the stock configuration.

Another tidbit:

The instruments don’t use the Wiimote. They function the same as our peripherals on the other platforms.

This likely means that you won’t be able to use the Guitar Hero III guitar, as it does use the Wii Remote.

Game companies tend to send out PR guys to do their press, and frank interviews with the right people are hard to come by. Video game “journalists” often agree not to talk about a game until it comes out for fear of losing access, stories of people getting fired for writing bad reviews are common, and game companies usually spit out only talking points, but it would be very nice for someone to get in there and find out why such half-assed products make it to market.

Update: Kotaku follows up with a response from Harmonix that sound a lot like my #2 above:

Regarding downloadable content: During Rock Band for the Wii development Harmonix focused on making the core gameplay experience as solid and enjoyable as possible while tailoring it specifically to the strengths of the platform. The Wii version still contains the robust four-player band experience and all the fun at the core of other versions of Rock Band. However, because the Wii’s online capabilities and potential have yet to be fully realized, we wanted to wait before we explored online functionality for Rock Band to ensure that players get the high-quality of online performance they’ve come to expect.

It may well have been a question of shipping the game in the summer or waiting until the fall or later for Nintendo to get its act together and release programming hooks for their online stuff.

SNL on Hulu

I’ve been watching some Saturday Night Live sketches on Hulu. There are lots of classic sketches missing (no Andy Kaufman Mighty Mouse?), but here are some greats that I’ve found:

• Word Association, Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase
• Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood, Eddie Murphy
• White Like Me, Eddie Murphy
• President Reagan Mastermind, Phil Hartman
• George Bush Debate, Dana Carvey
• Cooking with the Anal Retentive Chef, Phil Hartman
• Wayne’s World with Aerosmith, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Tom Hanks, and Aerosmith
• The Chris Farley Show, Chris Farley and Jeff Daniels
• Down by the River, Chris Farley
• Clinton at McDonalds, Phil Hartman
• Celebrity Jeopardy: Tom Cruise, Adam Sandler, and Sean Connery, Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Jimmy Fallen, and Darrell Hammond
• NPR’s Delicious Dish: Schweddy Balls, Ana Gasteyer, Molly Shannon, and Alec Baldwin
• Celebrity Jeopardy: French Stewart, Burt Reynolds, and Sean Connery, Will Ferrell, Jimmy Fallen, Norm MacDonald, and Darrell Hammond
• Census Taker, Christopher Walken and Tim Meadows
• Inside the Actor’s Studio, Will Farrell and Alec Baldwin
• Pranksters, Seth Myers and Robert DeNiro

Time Machine with AirPort Extreme AirDisk

Yesterday’s updates now allow you to back up to an external drive attached to an AirPort Extreme base station, a feature that was previously announced, then yanked, then recently only available through Apple’s Time Capsule. TUAW reported it last night, and now MacWorld and Gizmodo both have the story as well. I set it up last night on my iMac, and the feature works as expected. Attached a drive to your base station, open up the drive in the Finder to mount it, and then go into Time Machine’s preferences and you can select that drive from the list. What I haven’t tested is what will happen when a laptop enters and leaves the network frequently. I’ll be playing with that this weekend.

Caprica

IGN reports that the Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica will get a two-hour pilot episode, which will air in the fall.

Energy to Make a Hybrid

Slate debunks the myth that it takes more energy to make a hybrid car than it saves.

Hulu

NBC and Fox have launched Hulu, which has free streaming video of their TV shows and many movies, with limited commercial interruption. It’s nice actually to have a permalink to a TV show, like if you want to reference a joke on The Simpsons, you could link right to it. I’d like to see Google build a good index of what’s available, though, so that I don’t have to remember what network a show was on to find its videos.

Does Cuteness Get Cuter with Better Graphics?

Does Cuteness Get Cuter with Better Graphics?

60

If you’re playing Super Mario Galaxy, I recommend fighting Bowser as soon as they give you the chance (at 60 stars, I think). You can’t unlock the purple comets until you do, and it’s best to not have to do all those at the end.

Games in Star Trek

A short page about games in Star Trek. What, no 3-D chess?

On the St. Elsewhere Multiverse

St. Elsewhere (spoiler!) ended with the reveal that the entire series happened inside the imagination of Tommy Westphall, an autistic child in the series. Homicide featured an episode in which one of the doctors on St. Elsewhere was investigated. Thus, both shows share a continuity, and, since St. Elsewhere was a figment of Westphall’s imagination, so must be Homicide. Turns out that 278 other shows cross over with Homicide.

Very neat, but I do have some qualms with their methodology. They include a show, with some exceptions, whenever a character or event crosses over with another show, or when a character, event, or item from a show is mentioned within another show. The first is a given. The second, I’m not so sure.

Direct character crossovers certainly apply and confer status that two shows exist within the same multiverse. All the events of Friends coexist with the events of Joey, as do those of Mad About You, via sisters Phoebe and Ursula.

All of the Star Trek series feature character crossovers, but I don’t buy this connection: “John Larroquette Show referenced Yoyodyne. Many years in the future the same Yoyodyne built starships for Starfleet in the 24th century, including the U.S.S. Brattain and the U.S.S. Phoenix on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which features the adventures of the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D.” They also use Yoyodyne to connect to the Buffyverse. Must it be the same Yoyodyne? It’s not just a funny name that happened to be in all the series?

Often TV shows are produced by the same companies (as with Star Trek), and little easter eggs pop in. An example: “Charlie from Lost was in a band named Driveshaft. Alias Sydney threw a party and the music playing at the party was Driveshaft song.” Is the existence of Driveshaft’s We All Everybody on Alias enough to say that both exist in the same continuity? Probably. How about this one: “In the Jan 25th episode of Veronica Mars Veronica’s fortune contained the numbers that won Hurley from Lost the lottery.” Here I’d have to say no. The numbers are important to Lost, and their appearance all over the place on that show is a plot point, but their appearance on Veronica Mars is an homage. Inside Veronica Mars’s continuity, those numbers would just be numbers. (Battlestar Galactica, however, is explicitly reference as a work of fiction in episodes of Veronica Mars and The Office (USA).)

“Charlie of Lost once dated a girl whose father worked for a paper factory in Slough. The paper factory in Slough is the paper factory of The Office (UK).” (My memory is that Hurley also owns this company, and I think Locke worked there.) Does the mention of a paper factory in Slough necessitate that the factory is The Office’s Wernham Hogg? Again, I’d say no. It’s a coincidence, but it’s not enough for me. The Office was a BBC documentary within its own universe. If we saw characters of another show watching it, I think we could say that they share a universe, or even if we saw its logo somewhere on some stationary, but just mentioning the factory doesn’t cut it. I think a concrete crossover (a character, a direct reference to an event, a recognizable physical item) is enough to justify a link, but an homage or some sort of reference which would be mere coincidence inside the diagesis isn’t.

Now here’s a very good one: “On a balloon capsule on Lost all of its sponsors are listed and among them is Nozz-a-la Cola. Nozz-a-la Cola is a fictional product created by Stephen King & mentioned and consumed in Kingdom Hospital.” Even better, though the writers of this page don’t seem to know it, is that Nozz-a-la Cola appears in The Dark Tower, which establishes that all of Stephen King’s books are connected, and establishes its own multiverse containing “a billion” other worlds. Stephen King himself appears in the story as the author of itself. This being true, it means that not only did Tommy Westphall imagine the world of St. Elsewhere and those of all the other shows connected to is, but also Stephen King the author, all of his books, and their sprawling multiverse which all spin around The Dark Tower. And all things follow ka.