Nintendo posts

An 8 bit video game is a far cry from the HD resolution games on the market today, but for one lucky couple in Kansas found that one game in their 8-bit gaming stash is worth enough to purchase the entire catalog of Xbox 360 games.

The lucky seller, Dave (whose last name wasn't used), tells Yahoo that he found "Stadium Events" sitting with a collection of games in his basement and recently sold it on eBay for $41,300, three times that of the last copy sold which made headlines last month.

Recently nearly $2 million in grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation were awarded to nine research teams working on strengthening the evidence that playing games - video games that is - is good for your health.

The awards, which come from the Foundation's Health Games Research national program based at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will be used to research how gaming supports the development and use of digital interactive games to improve players' health.

Forget Halloween. For retailers, the scariest thing lurking around the corner is the specter of a bad holiday shopping season. Perhaps that explains why Toys R' Us is releasing its annual "hot list" of toys before the leaves have even fallen from the trees. It wants parents to take the list, check it twice...and please, please, please buy an expensive toy from it (preferably at your nearest Toys R' Us).

These 36 toys are the season's alleged "it" toys, the ones the kids all want to see under the tree. They include everything from a tricycle to a toy that lets you move a ball using the powers of your mind. But if last year's experience is any gauge, (comparable-store sales for the nine-week holiday shopping season fell 3.4% domestically and 5% internationally) parents are unlikely to be swayed by even the noisiest bells and whistles.

Pricey toys, in particular, didn't move too well last year. Perhaps that's why there are only a handful of items -- mostly electronics and toys with movie-tie-ins (Toy Story, Transformers etc.) priced at or around $100. The rest of the toys on the list run the gamut from toddler fare (The Laugh & Learn Learning Farm from Fisher-Price: $79) to 'tweens (Nintendo DSi handhelds: $169) and many of them carry much more moderate price tags, from about $11 for dolls to $35 for a Nerf gun.

You can check out the list here. But here's this mom's reaction:

Most of these toys reflect the state of American culture. For boys, lots of electronics and battle toys. For girls, there is all that pressure to be hotly-dressed rock superstars. There is even a "Little Superstar Jammin' Band" toy for your toddlers. Might as well start 'em early, right? Sigh. Aren't there any kids who want to be firemen or veterinarians anymore?

Despite the declared focus on price and value, this year's list features a couple of pretty pricey "Ooh-ahh" toys.

The $80 MindFlex Mental Acuity game by Mattel is one of those, "So-cool!" games you'll lay down the cash for your kid to play with that evening and then all-too-soon watch it get banished to the corner as they lose interest. Yeah, it's cool to try and move a ball through a maze using only your brain -- show me a 9-year-old boy who's not gonna go for that? -- but that's all you can do with it. Once you've tried it a few times...what then? Break it down for parts? The guys at our sister site Engadget had fun with it here.

I'd rather drop $100 on a bike. Old-fashioned, sure. No sexy mind-control stuff, but your kid will play on it happily until he grows out of it.

There's been a lot of fanfare surrounding the Nintendo DSi (most of it created by Nintendo), but upon closer inspection shoppers will realize it's just a Nintendo DS Lite that can take pictures ... for about $70 more than a DS Lite. Why? Even my 9-year-old Nintendo fanatic said "meh."

Most over-hyped toy on the list, IMHO? The Barbie All D'oll'd Up nail printer. For just $179, your budding little party girl can hook this thing up to a computer and print out one of hundreds of designs for her nails. Or design her very own!

Wow. Call me nutty, but $179 will buy nearly two years' worth of manicures from the local mini-mall nail place. Those ladies can do amazing things with rhinestones and glitter if you let them. And, in any case, if my girl were that into her nails, I'd ban her from Hannah Montana for good and make her go outside and climb trees.

So for this mom of two, there's nothing on this list that would compel me to whip out my checkbook.

Am I in good, frugal company? Who knows? Maybe it will be up to the original Tickle Me Elmo doll, back again and exclusively at Toys R Us, to stage a one-monster rescue of the season.

Parents and gamers coming of age may be in for a break later this year, as it is rumored that both the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 will have price cuts. Technology site Ars Technica claims that both Sony and Microsoft will drop their prices in order to better compete with the Nintendo Wii, later this year.

While there are always rumors about price drops in the video game market, Joystiq.com points out that the Mole at Ars Technica has a solid reputation in knowing what's going on in the industry.

On top of the Mole's past performance, history shows that it's time for another price drop, and a significant one at that. The Xbox 360 has already seen three price drops, which have given it an edge over the pricier PlayStation 3; but it hasn't yet reached the halfway price point that its predecessor, the Xbox, did by the fourth year of its release.

Given Microsoft's focus on digital downloads, I'd venture a guess that Microsoft will try to offer an Xbox 360 with hard drive for $199 -- half of what it cost when it launched in 2005. The Mole also predicts that Sony will be introducing a new, slimmer PlayStation 3, which will also cost less, although it's harder to estimate exactly how much less.

What do you get for the video-game-obsessed constitutional monarch who has everything? The Queen of England now has another toy to play with, something we commoners can't get even if we had the money: a gold-plated Nintendo Wii.

Publisher THQ gave the Wii to the royal family, along with a copy of BIG Family Games.

"The Royal Family is arguably the most important family in the country, so we felt that they had to have a copy of the new game," said THQ product manager Danielle Robinson on 1up.com, a gaming website. "But we thought that Her Majesty the Queen wouldn't want to play on any old console, so an extra-special gold one was commissioned. We hope that she and the rest of the Royal Family enjoy the game," Robinson said.

Queen Elizabeth became a Wii fan at Christmas, when her grandson, Prince William, received one as a gift from his girlfriend. The queen enjoys Wii bowling. She's become a notorious gadget freak: She got her first mobile phone in 2001 and has regularly upgraded to one with the latest features; she set up her own e-mail account years ago; she got an iPod in 2005 that can store more than 100,000 tunes (and received another iPod this year, a gift from President and Mrs. Obama); and last June she added a BlackBerry to her techno treasure trove.

Playing video games used to be a fun excuse for sitting on the couch, relaxing and doing much of nothing. Then came along the Nintendo Wii, and its healthy counterpart, the Wii Fit, and video games were sedentary no more.

Losing fat, or lowering your body mass index (BMI) while exercising on the Wii Fit's balance board is supposed to be easy if you're less inclined to go outside or to the gym. Moving around on the small pad may not look like much of a workout, but anyone who has even tried the Nintendo Wii without the Fit, knows that Nintendo has figured out how to make it fun while keeping your heart rate up.

The board measures a user's weight and center of gravity in about 40 different activities such as hula hoop, yoga, snowboarding and pushups, and balance games, strength training and aerobics. The user's "fitness age" can be tracked.

The base system retails for $89.99, and you already have to have a Nintendo Wii to hook the Fit up to. But they can be difficult to find in stores. On the Monday after Thanksgiving, for example, the Wii game console was the most popular product sold on eBay -- 3,017 sold for an average price of $349, according to the New York Times. The Wii Fit was also popular, with 1,305 units sold for an average of $143.

The Wii is a pretty amazing piece of technology. Not only has it brought casual gamers of all ages together, but it did it in a way which disillusioned many hardcore gamers frustrated by the lack of many features we have come to expect from the current crop of video game consoles. For lack of a better analogy, the Wii is a lot like sex -- the more people you have to play with, the better, and, well, playing by yourself just feels...wrong.

Toss in the fact that online play is about as much fun as smacking your shins with a splintered 2x4, due to the lack of voice chat and the inability to create a friends list which spans all games, and you'll begin to see where I am coming from. Nintendo reasons that it doesn't support these features in order to make the system more family friendly, but its competitors have managed to provide these features while giving parents the ability to limit the use of voice chat. These factors have turned me off of the Wii even as it sits there taunting me with its pulsating blue light.

Don't miss the rest of our series on Overrated people, places and things!

The final push over the edge into overrated for me comes from the lack of quality control, which has led to a slew of gimmicky games worth less than the plastic case they come in. Even Nintendo Fanboys admit that the lack of Nintendo's Seal of Quality has lead to an abundance of crap for the Wii. Unfortunately, other than Guitar Hero, games for the Wii without Mario or Luigi have, as a whole, been a disappointment. For every Mario Kart and Super Smash Brothers, there are hundreds of games which could barely pass for a lame web game.

Sure, playing the Wii is fun and it has even inspired three kids to get off their couch and lose weight. However, the novelty of swinging around a Wii 'mote to play a game wears off about the time your last party guest heads home. As a gamer who owns a Wii, I can't help but notice that the Wii seems to get the majority of its use when I haul it to a friend's or to my grandparents for Christmas. As a whole, the Wii is lacking in games, online support and single player fun, leading me to the conclusion that it is overrated.

So when I was a little kid, my family was always a "generation" behind the times in terms of video games. When everyone else had Nintendo, my brother and I had Atari 2600. When they got Super Nintendo, we had regular Nintendo. And guess what: I didn't care. I was 7 years old!

For those parents out there who are feeling pressure to buy their kids Nintendo Wii's or Playstations 3's, here's my rule of thumb: When your kids are mature enough to need the latest, greatest, coolest, video game system, they have hit the age where they are also cool enough to pay for it themselves ... with their own money.

Buying a 5-year old a $300 video game system is stupid. Do you really think he'll enjoy it any more than this $25.95 Nintendo 64 system, available used on Amazon? Of course not! Nintendo 64 was fun 10 years ago and it's fun now, gosh darnet. These days you can buy a lot of N64 games for a little more than 2 dollars apiece, and young kids have short attention spans so a wide variety is key.