Practicalmadness

Before I tell you what I have to tell you, you should know that in my life I’ve never identified myself as a hardcore gamer. As a kid I cut my teeth not on the PlayStation or on PC games, but on the old Super Nintendo machine. While many of you craved, and still crave, the adrenaline rush of Quake or the immersive, novelistic aspect of a Zelda or Final Fantasy, I liked Dr. Mario, Mario Kart and, yes, Super Mario Bros.

Anyway, today marks the logical next step in a return to console gaming that began a year or two ago with the purchase of a Nintendo DS, and continued last year when FedEx brought me a much-coveted Wii system. Today, for the first time, there is an Xbox 360 in my house.

The deciding factor for me was the news this week that Rock Band would (finally) be coming to the Wii in late June, where it was announced that Rock Band Wii would feature roughly the same gameplay and graphics as the compromised PlayStation2 version of the game. Even worse, would not offer any downloadable content or online play even though technically the Wii (with its Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service and flash-based storage) theoretically makes such things possible.

Rock Band is an awesome game even with sub-HD graphics and stereo sound, and I’m not so impatient that I can’t wait until June to get my fix. What was telling to me about the announcement was that despite the Wii’s (admittedly basic) internet features, Harmonix simply didn’t consider it worth the effort to try to bring the same online experience enjoyed by Xbox and PS3 users to the Wii platform, and in fact considered the Wii to be about on par with the now eight-year-old PlayStation2. Except that unlike the PS2, Wii users would have to wait eight months for their version of the game to ship.

And though I didn’t know it until I was standing in Best Buy with an Xbox under my arm, the same is true for the Wii version of Beautiful Katamari, the game I chose to inaugurate my new toy. Katamari for Wii is also coming out in June (six months after the 360 version), after its developers originally hinted that the game might never be released for the Wii.

Let me be clear: I love the Wii. It’s an amazing system and I don’t mean to imply that this is some kind of zero-sum game where the Xbox has drunk the Wii’s milkshake. The two consoles will be living side by side next to my TV set, and I’m sure I’ll play them both often.

But the Rock Band announcement got me thinking. There is a lot of money to be made from downloadable content, and Xbox Live has been the gold standard both in that arena and for online multiplayer gaming for ages. One of Rock Band’s killer features is its downloadable content, specifically the ability to buy, download and play new songs and continue to get some great fun out of the game months or years after you’ve finished off the 60+ songs it comes with. And of course, MTV, EA and Harmonix are likely making a fortune from players who, having already shelled out $170 for the main Rock Band bundle, keep coming back to spend money to add new content to the game. It’s a huge opportunity, so for Harmonix to basically say it is not worth the effort to try to bring that feature to the Wii speaks volumes about the Wii’s viability as an online gaming machine.

Another data point was this Slate article which basically rips into Nintendo for the general shittiness of online gaming on the Wii, specifically as pertaining to the just-released Super Smash Bros. Brawl which should be a natural fit for the kind of world-class online play the Xbox is known for. To be honest, I haven’t even tried to play Smash Bros. or any other Wii game online yet, but that’s probably because the Wi-Fi Connection experience is such a pain in the ass on Nintendo’s other online platform — the DS handheld — that it never occurred to me that the Wii would be any better. Even though my best friend also has a DS and the same games, and now has a Wii with the same games, the process of trading and entering Friend Codes is so cumbersome that we’ve found just waiting until she can come over and play works just as well. Oh, and I should tell you: she lives in Vermont.

As much as I love the Wii’s ability to bring people together and provide some quality fun-time to people who’d otherwise never look twice at a console, there’s something kinda perverse about a console that is known for party games and yet is so terrible at online gaming.

Though Speaking of Milkshakes

Having already said that this isn’t a thing where I’m choosing the Xbox over the Wii, there is one device of mine that — if it were a living thing and not a mass of metal and silicon — should really be quaking in its boots right now: my Apple TV. Without giving you a full rundown of my home theater setup, suffice to say there’s a shortage of HD video inputs on my TV and one of those is currently occupied by an Apple TV that hardly ever gets used.

The Apple TV is great at what it does, don’t get me wrong. The problem, both with its original incarnation and the new “Take 2” software update released last month, is that it doesn’t do enough things or the right things.

It’s fine for streaming photos and music from your computer, sure. But really, how often does one do that? For playing music, it’s usually easier to just plug your iPod into your stereo speakers than to set up streaming. And in my experience people are way more likely to use the computer itself for showing off photos (where they have more control and easier access to their stuff) than involve some other piece of gadgetry. I know Steve Jobs likes to say that photos are great on the Apple TV because they’re “already HD,” but his customers are generally smart enough to know that as nice as their pics look on an HDTV, they look even better on the 24-inch iMacs they already own.

The crowning feature of the current “Take 2” Apple TV is movie rental downloads, especially the new HD rentals. But think about that, would you? It’s a $299$229 device whose primary benefit is to let you pay Apple another five bucks a pop to watch movies over the internet. I’ve tried this out, and it’s all right. But the catalog is (at least for now) pretty slim, and most of Apple’s movie studio partners are choosing to wait until weeks after a film’s DVD/Blu-ray release to add their content to the iTunes Store. I happen to think video-on-demand services like iTunes are the wave of the future, but the current iTunes offering is very, very 1.0. And even so, Microsoft’s been offering a similar service through Xbox Live for ages, and unlike the Apple TV the Xbox 360 is a game console and DVD player as well as a set-top box.

The buying and viewing experience on an Apple TV is very nice, and it may very well be a better set-top box than the 360. But the 360 is quite simply a more useful device in any number of ways, and if my day-to-day is any indication it’s likely that people just don’t need set-top media center extenders like the Apple TV unless, as on the 360, those features are just the icing on an already delicious cake.

I’m a pretty casual gamer, but I’m an even more casual internet movie renter. If Microsoft’s on-demand movie rentals can come anywhere near the value, quality and ease-of-use on the Apple TV on a device which is also a world-class online gaming machine, they’ll have earned a loyal customer and I’ll have one fewer Apple device cluttering up my home theater shelf.