Mario Kart Wii - Good, familiar controls, and bad new ones

Mario Kart Wii - Kotaku

According to Bulent Yusuf from the blog WiiWii, the new officially licensed Wii Wheel is crap, noted by Kotaku staff today.

Even more noteworthy is the pull quote I nabbed later via Kotaku:

Fortunately, you can play using the standard Wiimote and Nunchuk, or you can bust out the GameCube pad and be proper old school.

What? I know it was confirmed for Smash Bros. Brawl, but you can use Gamecube controllers on Mario Kart Wii? And the crowds rejoice.

Wii at Oscars, pushes buttons

Wii Shows Up At Oscars, Goes Berserk, Devours Audience, Etc

Here's my comment on the matter:

I consider the Oscars the most reputable of all the award shows. There's still a great deal of regard and respect for the art of film and the medium itself, and the ceremony has a high tendency to highlight that.

What seems to shit on it all are the entertainment outlets like E! that care about a) who wins, b) who gets "snubbed," and especially c) what people are wearing on the red carpet. But the ceremony deals a lot with the medium as an art, and there are plenty of films and artists in the industry that they honor for their work that I know I haven't heard of, because they represent the medium at its finest. And obviously popular media outlets would rather talk about Miley Cyrus.

The Grammy's are a whole other story, though...

Anyways, I really didn't care for Wii Sports being highlighted at the Oscars. Here are my issues with it:

1) Jon Stewart was playing tennis against the 11 year-old that sang earlier in the show. This only furthers the stereotype that games are for kids and are only toys.

2) They played Wii Sports. Though old, the game is shown to represent the gaming industry as a whole. All Jon needed to say was "Am I supposed to be tired," to also further the idea of games as a novelty.

3) It was played at the Oscars. As I talked about earlier, many feel as well the Oscars are actually more reputable of an awards ceremony. It represents an art that we can all relate to and appreciate. Now we're shown a snippet of a game to represent it as a child's toy, or a novelty for adults, and this juxtaposes a misrepresented art medium with the much loved and beheld Oscars.

It actually could easily offend those that hold, justly, Video Games as an art medium itself, though young. In many ways, this only furthered these unjust stereotypes of the medium we cherish, and I can't help but feel it was done intentionally. After all, aren't movie producers nervous that Xbox Live will ruin their box office profits?

Initial opinions: Cobalt Blue DS is sexy

I won't lie, I'm writing this on my new cobalt blue DS Lite. In bed.

See, this is the kind of handheld you *want* to take to bed with you. It can cradle you in it's soft glow while you fall asleep to the loop you made on Electroplankton.

But you won't sleep. You can't keep your hands off the silky black matte finish on the backside. You'll find yourself putting the game in standby when you constantly close the cover to admire this blue beauty.

Is it worth it? If you don't already own a functioning DS Lite, then yes. I'm selling my polar white Lite to a friend, and traded in the big-silver-brick DS to nab one of these, and I couldn't be happier.