Rants

Social media is a fundamentally exploitative business model. Social media platforms work by providing a communications medium that can then be used as an advertising platform far more powerful than previous Internet direct response systems. They work on the basis of getting detailed profiles of all of their members and using it to shape what advertising they get. It's barely effective; enough to pay the bills but not to provide a sustainable, long-term growth model.

YouTube is not a good service. It's traditionally been poorly designed and often redesigned in ways that just shift the shit around rather than actually fix people's problems. It's community is downright terrible and practically unmoderated.

Alongside the Lucas amiibo figure for Smash, at least in Japan, is a pleasant surprise: MOTHER 3 is finally coming to Virtual Console! At least, in Japan. But, while I appreciate having actual honest-to-goodness EarthBound merchandise I can actually buy in a US shop, I should also note that a VC release of MOTHER 3 basically means any hopes for a localization are dead in the water.

One thing I think is definitely going to disappear in the next five years is third-party application repositories (aka "app stores"). Whether that be in the form of sketchy download websites, torrent services, or even the venerable Steam.

(In the coming analysis I'm discounting advanced persistent threats like the NSA or similar intelligence agencies as their motives and capabilities are completely different from that of the kind of malware we're concerned about here. APTs are mainly concerned about breaching a very specific target and ideally leaving no evidence.)

Yesterday I found myself made to play the latest in a long series of fighting games based off young adult Japanese comic book series, most of which I don't particularly care for. It felt like what I imagine non-Nintendo fans feel trying to play Super Smash Brothers, except in a world where Mario never was a household name. The game itself, "Jump Super Plus Victory Versus Ultra Stars" (or whatever), I wasn't particularly interested in to begin with, and it didn't redeem itself with gameplay.

The mechanics of how technology is built and marketed leads to the inevitable formation of walled garden ecosystems. When an entity is large enough, it becomes viable for other smaller entities to make money through their technical compatibility with the larger entity. The former is known as a "platform" and the latter an "app". The actions and policies of the platform determines what kinds of services, behaviors, and cross-platform compatibilities are easy, hard, or impossible to achieve.

It's shit. Deeply, deeply anti-consumer shit.

So thanks to the recent eShop release of Metroid Prime I've had a chance to experience FPS controls on a Wii remote, and I have to say it's probably the best you'll see on a console. With sensitivity turned up to "Advanced" you have a rough approximation of mouse aiming that more than does the job, even without the generous auto-aim that this particular game came with. I honestly think this was a much better step forward for gaming than the successor, the Wii U's unwieldy tablet controller thing.

NFC figurine games are a new type of game, involving a line of figurines with RFID tags embedded within and typically a proprietary hardware NFC peripheral. Scanning these figures into the game typically allows the player to play as the character depicted on the figure, saving the character's progress within the RFID tag in the toy, among other ancillary gameplay benefits.