Macbook Air's Reserved Reactions (Rant)

It has been a few days since the Macbook Air was announced and I have been very surprised at the reserved reactions from the announcement, because normally anything Apple announces is eaten up by Mac fans, but with the Macbook Air everybody has been very sober. Even the mighty Kevin Rose was like, meh:



Normally the reaction that I give to most things Apple is "I don't need it" or "I can get the same thing cheaper and better elsewhere", but with the Macbook Air I would have bought one already if I had £1,199 to spend.

When I saw the Macbook Air for the first time I envisioned being able to carry it around in my backpack, without feeling like I was carrying around a brick. And then being able to surf the web and do work wherever I wanted because it's so portable. So for me the fact that it doesn't have anykind of built in diskdrive or ethernet port doesn't bother me in the slightest.

Personally I find laptop keyboards to be horrible to type with, track pads and nipples are cumbersome compared to a mouse, the machines themselves are slower than a comparable desktop of the same specification, they are difficult to fix, break more often and will need to be replaced sooner than the same specification machine as a desktop. So the reactions that the Macbook Air has been receiving has reinforced my long held view that computer users in-general don't want a laptop because it is portable, but because it is somekind of status symbol and most people would be happier sitting infront of a Black Widescreen Brick than something you could actually take outside, carry in a bag or use comfortably like desktop computer. And yet with all the 'meh' reactions this for me this is the first product that has made me seriously considering a Mac (other than Windows 98).

Crackdown Achievement Annoyance

There is one type of achievement that I hate and that is the kind that requires you to become the number one player in the world, but just today I think I found another.

There are two achievements that I have been trying to get in Crackdown and they are to get all the Agility Orbs and the Hidden Orbs. Firstly I didn't care about the Hidden Orbs, but after getting 499 of 500 Agility Orbs I started to look for all the hidden Orbs with Some Help in the hope that the last Agility Orb would appear. I now have 299 of 300 Hidden Orbs and I still haven't found the last Agility Orb.

So after putting in more than eight hours respecify on these two achievements with no sign of completion (as I don't know where either Orb is, even after checking off all the orbs on walkthroughs). I feel a little bit dejected and wish the game offered just a little more help than what it does for finding that last Orb. Even the Official Prima Guide is missing Orbs from their walkthrough so I guess I won't be the only one in this position, but I am not happy after putting so much time into searching.

If there was some stats for each island on how many Orbs where available still to collect, that would help me a lot and on that it would also be helpful to have stats on race times as I don't know witch races I am competing against my best time and which are set for the race achievement, which is another annoyance. Good game though.

Bursting the Wii Controller Bubble

I know a lot of people have high hopes and dream about the possibilities the Wii controller represents. I have reserved excitement because those Wii ads with GAP Models hiding behind sofas, rolling around and generally looking goofy are obviously not people playing any games. I need to see this stuff working otherwise I don't believe it. And this I have unfortunately learned over the years the hard way by following the work of Various Designers.
Many people have envisioned a true sword fighting experience with the Wii across continents and very real possibilities for applications for Serious Games to do with training. Well I am about to deflate a few bubbles slightly because the Wii Remote isn't what you think it is.

What everybody seems to think that the controller will do is choreograph motion made by the player directly into the game, and this does happen on pointer games that require infared input with the controller bar, but games that use accelerometer data don't which is a surprise to a lot of people. What Wii games do is recognise the orientation input from the remote and translate that into in-game commands. So in a sword fighting game you can swing from the right, swing from the left, block and thrust, but you can't actually sword fight with the in-game sword choreographing every motion made by the real world remote.

Actions like swinging a bat in a Wii game are event triggered just like they are with a traditional gamepad's button press, analogue input through a stick or even an analogue trigger. The player performs a motion and the game activates the corresponding in-game event.

This is mentioned in Ryan Garside's bit-tech Preview where he talks about how quick wrist flicks respond to stronger arm motions than real strong arm motions like those with ball bowling. Matt Casamassina's IGN Blog mentions this too. He praises WII Sport's Bowling game, allowing the player to control when the ball is released and the ability to spin the ball, but I have watched videos of the game being demonstrated and it isn't possible to aim the ball in any diagonal direction direction. So again choreographed motion captured motion of the player bowling the ball isn't there. Motion is not translated directly into the game as you would think, but is instead a rasterized interpretation of the action being preformed.

So not what a lot of people had assumed, but still nifty. And Nintendo isn't marketing the Wii at hardcore gamers anyway so you got to give them a lot of credit for that. My Mum wouldn't buy one but someone else's Mum might.