Tag: Nintendo Switch

Nintendo’s Labo: A stunning new addition to the hot selling Switch platform that is a real innovation in the foundations of “play”

With all the things going on in the world, one of the best things I have observed is the wonderful outside the box thinking by the people at Nintendo with their invention of the Switch console device. As anyone who knows me understands, I love innovative learning technology. While there likely will never be a better substitute for learning than the function of a book, there are a lot of neat technological developments that inspire learning while having fun and the most innovative that I have seen in recent years is the Nintendo Switch. I have spent hours and hours on it playing games like Zelda and Mario Odyssey, and I was stunned to see that Doom was available for the little device. I think the portability of such a powerful device is absolutely astonishing—you can essentially sit in an airport waiting on a flight and play complicated video games on the move. The experience can be paused to resume in your hotel later and can then be put back up on your television when you get home. For a massive experience like Zelda, I think the game portability combined with the intricacies of the game itself provided me with a once in a lifetime game experience that I cherished in 2017.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/gaming/nintendo-labo-almost-tossed-in-trash-at-ratings-board/ar-AAuUavo

I have been sharing more and more the Switch experience with my oldest grandson and my nieces are heavily involved in their Switch, so its been fun to watch this whole thing flowing into such a positive family bonding experience. The Nintendo Switch games aren’t just fun, they are quite smart and seem inclined to inspire intelligence among their players. I was very impressed with the kind of games my grandson wanted to play on the Switch, of note—titles like Stick it to the Man—which is a remarkably complex game geared toward the early teen market. As I watched him play it I was amazed at how clever it was. Culturally there is a lot to be anxious about in our political landscape, but I see a lot of hope and yearning in video game designers and producers of the hardware of this Switch console. That it brings so much joy to my grandson is enough for me, but I am very excited about every new Switch release because of the inclination toward innovation that is on full display within the industry.

Usually a device like the Switch wears out its technical prowess after the first year and we all look toward the next great thing. But the people at Nintendo had just began to touch the magic of their Switch device apparently, and in April they have a new addition coming out for it called Nintendo Labo which essentially lets you turn the Nintendo Switch into just about anything, from a working piano to a complex robot using cardboard cutouts. I was just a little shocked at the simplicity of the whole presentation when Nintendo released their first look at the incredible technology during the middle of January 2018. What it aims to do is essentially take the raw imaginative power of playing with paper and cardboard and adds a technical dimension to it all to bridge fantasy to reality. My impression is that it was a stunning undertaking that has real possibilities in the realm of personal education.

https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/news/nintendo-switch-gets-diy-cardboard-accessories-and-more-w515556

One of the big criticisms of video gaming as opposed to books and classroom instruction is that the belief is that video games inspire antisocial skills for the introvert in all of us, and does not inspire proper interaction with other people. I don’t agree with any of that. If anything, video games these days are very community based and devices like the Switch allow young people who cannot yet participate in the greater aspects of the world to have access to that freedom early under supervised conditions. I can’t think of a better way to teach young people how to function in the world than to put the world in their hands along with all the possibilities and to let them play around with what works and what doesn’t. After all, isn’t that why kids play to begin with? We let them play so they can learn. Heck, as an adult I still play at lots of things because playing and learning go hand in hand. Kids should not learn to play less as they get older, adults need to learn to play more.

Kids love attention with adults to work on projects, whether its model rockets, Lego projects or back yard science experiments. If an adult will sit down with a child and play with them, both get a lot out of the experience. Obviously for the children, they have the most to gain and they always appreciate the attention—and that is what the fine people at Nintendo have uncovered with their new Labo concept. Who hasn’t built model vehicles and buildings out of cardboard, but to allow the Switch to bring life to them gives that extra incentive to put a bit more effort into the task, and to have those sit downs with the children in your life to allow them to have those critical teaching moments—the learning of basic physics and mechanical applications of known construction methods. It’s a brilliant concept that takes an already great device, the Nintendo Switch, and really ramps up its appeal and market influence.

Pessimists will declare that the new Labo offering is just another way for Nintendo to make money—but isn’t that the name of the game? To offer the public something of value with just cardboard seems like a damn good idea to me. We will likely get all the Labo kits which will run us many hundreds of dollars, but if it gives us good times with the children in our lives we’ll consider it all worthwhile. Still to this very day my kids remember all the little things we built together, and those moments are very sentimental to them. Kids neve forget no matter how old they get. What Nintendo has done is to take those opportunities for family bonding and brought life to them with the wonderful features of the very technically malleable Switch device.

More and more my grandson has been taking our Switch home with him to play with, and I let him because I think the device is a miracle that can really inspire intelligence. I can’t help but think of Neolithic man building shelters against inclement weather and spending half of their day hunting for food and the other half trying to procreate. Then to think how far we’ve come as a species where we can get food in five minutes and spend the rest of our day playing a video game on such a portable device. A Nintendo Switch can take the mind to places once though unimaginable and encourage the brain development that took thousands of years of evolution to otherwise muster, and we can now achieve so much before a child even turns ten—if only we could turn the switch on in their minds and ignite their imaginations with an expectation of greatness. And while the people at Nintendo Switch are in business to make money, they really didn’t have to go this far to make it—they are offering nothing less than a positive device for all of human kind to inspire in them the best that it means to be human—and they put it into a very small, and easy to use device that actually accentuates our very lives as people. And that is quite remarkable.

Rich Hoffman

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Zelda: Breath of the Wild–The best video game ever

Mythology as people who know me best is my favorite topic.  I talk about politics because it has a direct impact on culture and mythology informs the philosophy which becomes politics.  But the foundations are always in mythology and to be entirely honest the latest Nintendo game Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of the most powerful tools of mythology to ever hit human culture.  I’ve been playing it now for about six weeks with no end in sight and I have to say—it may well be the best video game ever made.  I’ve talked about some great video games before, but this latest Zelda game is just something special. It is unbelievably good.  It is worth buying a Nintendo Switch just to play this game. It is astonishing.

I have no idea how they did it, or even why, but what the makers of Zelda: Breath of the Wild did was make a video game that has at least 200 hours of potential game play, perhaps even a 1000.  The world of Hyrule as presented in this game has so much in it, and it’s so vast that I’m not sure a video game player could do and see everything.  The amount of programming and planning that had to have gone into this game is simply mind-blowing.  I continue to be impressed with it even after playing it for nearly two months now.  It has become our primary source of entertainment at my house and is enjoyed by all ages.  My wife and I would rather play Zelda together than watch anything on television.  Its compelling, it’s adventurous and it is full of optimism.  It has been and continues to be a real treat—one I never came close to expecting.

Before I was able to get a Nintendo Switch I was at a local Target department store and saw two moms and about four little girls sitting in the floor with a long check list buying up hundreds of dollars of Amiibos that were on display.  Amiibos are little Nintendo characters that can be scanned into their game systems to give bonus rewards.  I looked at them as a pure gimmick and as a rip-off until I did manage to get Zelda: Breath of the Wild.  After that, I completely understood.  Adding up the cost of the Switch and the new Zelda video game, my wife and I have put in nearly $1000 into playing it.  We’ve had to go to Ebay to find special Zelda Amiibos which are sold out everywhere thus making them extremely rare and expensive online, and the whole adventure has turned out to be quite a nice journey.  While it’s possible to play Zelda without all the accessories, my wife and I have enjoyed using those accessories to enhance our experience.  For instance I am not a guide-book kind of video game player, but there is just so much in this game that without a good map and some details on how to find all the hidden parts of the game—you really wouldn’t get your money’s worth.  So we have gone all out on Zelda: Breath of the Wild knowing that we were likely to be playing it five years from now still.  It’s that kind of experience.

We were playing the game with our grandson and he was so into it that he spread out a big map that I have from the guidebook of the entire realm of Hyrule and he was comparing things on the map to what was in the book.  He’s too young to know how to read yet, but it was wonderful to see him take to getting the book on his own and pretend to read it the way I do in trying to unlock as many of the game’s secrets as possible.  For him this is his first big experience where an entertainment option extends over into other parts of his life which is what a great adventure should do—whether in real life, or just in a video game.  The mind really doesn’t know the different.  Some of the puzzles are monstrously hard but once you figure them out you feel great and want to tackle more of them.  Just guessing but I’d say there are at least 500 puzzles if you count all the shrines, the Korok seeds hunts, hidden treasures, and the normal plot parts of the game for which some are extremely complex.  Every new place on the map is a new discovery and every time we turn the game on we are doing something else.

I’ve talked about before how my wife and I played Star Wars: The Old Republic for at least two years every day back in 2013.  It was something we could do together and we had a blast.  She’s played World of Warcraft with my adult children before so we have some reference on MMO games so it says a lot when I say I think Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the best video game made to date.  What makes a game like this good is the open world game play where you feel you can do anything and go everywhere.  Usually there are parts of a video game experience where you run up against a programming blocks—even on the massive MMO games where you can’t go certain places because the video game designers were too lazy or not motivated to fill every possible place on a map with an opportunity for adventure, but not in Breath of the Wild.  You can literally go everywhere and do anything making it a nearly infinite experience.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  I mean there are a lot of great games out there, and I tend to talk about them when I run into them, but this Zelda game is in its own category.  It’s a true technical achievement that never sacrifices itself.  It clicks on all cylinders in what will surely become an industry setting standard that will change the video game industry.

While Breath of the Wild isn’t the biggest game ever created it makes the most of what it has.  The map of the new Zelda game is 23.5 square miles—about the same as Manhattan Island New York, but in literally every section of that map has something to do.  You could spend countless hours looking for things hidden in Breath of the Wild making this such a wonderful little treasure hunt that can frustrate you at times only to leave you elated with each accomplishment and coming back for more to recover the sensation. Never was that more real for me than in the section of the map called The Korok Forest.  Not only was that area playfully optimistic, it was extremely spooky at the same time and the puzzles were at times really difficult.  I can just imagine a team of people coming up with the various stories and puzzles just in that forest as the design lay out was just magnificent.  But that is such a small part of the whole game that it almost gets lost in the reviews—because there’s just too much to cover.  There is nothing small about Zelda: Breath of the Wild but as I said this isn’t the biggest video game world ever created—it clearly has the best level design that I’ve ever seen.  I have no idea how the Zelda creation team managed to get all the ideas for this game down on paper to a bunch of programmers to implement into a working reality.  There are so many options, so many outfits, good combinations, objectives that there is no way one player’s experience will be exactly the same as another yet the game works.  You don’t come along and find many glitches which allow you to buy into that world and the characters.

Then there is that other issue for which I am more than just a little obsessed, the idea of ancient technology being superior and the cycle of life coming around and around again,–the Vico cycle. There is a huge amount of that topic in this game, so it has been a wonderful experience—and I’m far from done with it.  But when I finally do finish it, I have no doubt that this will be one of the greatest games ever made—yet another benchmark for the industry but even more than that, an exceptional entry in perfection.  It’s easy to consider video games as silly things for a new generation to keep themselves busy with—but Zelda: Breath of the Wild is certainly something bigger than that.  It is the first massive game of its kind that can go with you while traveling due to the nature of the Switch game console.  It essentially is the first game of its kind to actually weave itself into all aspects of our reality with an optimistic story of honor and fearless pursuit of vanquishing evil all while enjoying the little things in life.  The only thing that I wish was that every video game was as good as this one—because this is one of those things you only see a few times in a century—creatively as an art form.  It’s that good.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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The Unexpected Fun of Mario Kart 8: What a capitalist culture produces that’s good

If I sat and thought about it, there are a lot of things I deal with on a daily basis that I could claim drove me to depression or misery—where your expectations for things don’t match up with the real-world output. After all, that is the #1 cause of unhappiness.  Such things might be some distant family member that you care about. who got a new tattoo against your wishes, or some catastrophic expensive business disappointment—which happens all the time.  But I stay pretty happy all the time because of my personal means of management no matter what is going on—because I have a lot of hobbies that make me very happy.  One of those things I do is video gaming where I continue to be surprised at the technical achievements that are now coming almost quarterly from the industry—the latest great surprise being the Nintendo Switch counsel.  There have been 900,000 sold in the United States as of this writing and I consider myself lucky to have one of them.  It wasn’t easy to get—but once we did get one it has become a good friend to me.  I use it all the time and it has brought a lot of joy to my family after only a month.  The new Zelda game exclusively on Nintendo is for 2017 what Uncharted 4 was to last year’s game market for the PS4.  It is just a marvelous game on every front.  It’s like playing in a virtual Akira Kurasawa film—just something really special.

On Friday April 28th Mario Kart 8 was released and I didn’t realize how big of an event that was going to be.  My youngest grandson was about to have his 1st birthday party and a lot of family members were going to be there so I planned to bring along the Switch for everyone to play and of course Mario Kart is one of those great games for a crowd to play with. So I found myself at Target hoping to get a copy of the new Mario Kart 8 Deluxe that is simply a revamp of the 2014 game released on the Nintendo Wii.  I thought it would be a fun game and it was a priority for me because we did have a Switch, but I wasn’t prepared for the all-out display that Target had done for the new game on the new system.   Mario Kart 8 had its own display right at the cash register the way a hot new movie release might—which I thought was odd because likely very few people in the marketplace had a Nintendo Switch yet to justify such a roll-out.  But Target was absolutely committed to the new Nintendo game system and they were not shy about it.  I was impressed by that.

We had fun with the Mario Kart 8 game all weekend.  Another of my grandchildren stayed at our house and we played it until he went to bed and then again starting at 8 AM Sunday morning until about noon when his mother picked him up.  As we were saying good-bye to them I noticed she had McDonald’s Happy Meals in the front seat and on the boxes were advertisements for Mario Kart 8 on the Nintendo Switch.  Like Target, McDonald’s had jumped on the whole Mario Kart 8 release with great capitalist enthusiasm and it was fun.  I enjoyed with all the things going on in my life to have a delightful weekend playing with this fun new game system with my kids and grandkids sharing the enthusiasm that often comes from Nintendo products while being exposed to it everywhere I went.

Last week I went to great effort to convey why I liked the movie, The Founder so much.  McDonald’s is about more than food—on many occasions in the past they have infused themselves directly into our culture—as they did recently with the Mario Kart 8 game release for the Nintendo Switch.  As I say a lot, these video games are now part of our cultural heritage—they are updated story telling avenues that are in many cases replacing the effectiveness of movies and books—so I consider them significant.  And specifically, these efforts by Target, McDonald’s and all retail companies associated with Nintendo and the release of Mario Kart 8—a simple kids game that is just fun for anybody to play—are all creations of capitalism and convey the optimism that pours forth from creative enterprise that exists for the pleasure of past time indulgence.  That indulgence only happens in free societies led by capitalist monetary commitments.

I had to see a young lady at her office on the day that Mario Kart had been released and I was early for our meeting. So when I walked in on her she was looking sheepishly at her computer screen trying to hold back a laugh.  I knew she was hiding something so I walked behind her desk and saw that she was playing Mario Kart 8 on her Nintendo Switch and she was trying to hide it from people walking by her office window. I told her I understood and she proceeded to tell me that she went out for lunch to get the new game and she couldn’t wait to play it.  This was a grown woman with a pretty important job.  So Mario is for anyone and there isn’t any harm in blowing off a little steam with some fun—which is why this Switch game system is so powerful–culturally.

After my visit to Target I stopped by Gamestop to see if I could find an AC adaptor for taking the Switch on the run, so I could charge it up away from the docking station connected to my television.  While there the guy at the counter asked me if I had Mario Kart 8 yet—which of course I said I did because I had just bought it at Target from the big display they had there.  That’s when the sales clerk said “but do you have the steering wheels?’  I was a little shocked to see him present two Mario Kart steering wheels to use while playing the fun racing game and of course I couldn’t pass them up.  So It was a Mario weekend for me and I enjoyed it greatly in spite of having plenty to worry about in all other aspects of my life.  Being surrounded by the influence of one game for a game console few people had yet was enjoyable.  I spend a lot of time talking about cultures ancient and present—and Nintendo certainly has a place of honor in our modern myth making efforts as human beings.  I couldn’t help but be impressed because there really isn’t any downside to it.  It’s all a positive aspect of capitalism—you won’t find Mario Kart 8 bringing that kind of joy to places devoid of capitalism—places like Iran, Syria, Russia—Afghanistan and so on.  Only healthy countries functioning from good philosophy and positive money flow can enjoy these types of things and Nintendo was doing a good job of putting their product in the hands of the most people possible which was wonderful.  I’d love to see a world where kids in the middle of Africa could participate in the Mario Kart fun—but for them—they are lucky to find a stable meal because of the lack of capitalism in their countries.

Nintendo specifically is a good, clean company.  All their characters are wholesome and playful.  You don’t have to worry about illicit sex and mental depletion when it comes to Nintendo products.  In every instance I can think of they are child-like in their approach to gaming but revere intelligence in the actual game play. Mario Kart 8 is a smart little party game—and Zelda is very deep—but they all have in common that Nintendo fun of living life without the burdens of modern adulthood drowning in expectations.  Everything is optimistic—just like when we were all children—which is why many people are bringing these Nintendo Switches to work with them.  I don’t get mad when I see such things because I think it makes people more productive and that this video game element to our society is taking the place of more restrictive past times that used to be utilized during lunch hour.  It is a lot more productive to play Mario Kart 8 for an hour than going to BW3s and drinking a couple of beers.  The Mario Kart player will be ready to solve problems and tackle challenges after lunch while the beer drinker will struggle to stay awake and engaged for the rest of the day.  So I see no downside to all this capitalist excess because it helps our society in every phase, mental wellness, economic development, problem solving, enthusiasm endurance—when a simple game like Mario Kart can enhance the level of excitement when shopping at Target or buying Happy Meals at McDonald’s really—everyone wins.  There is no downside.

In that regard, the Nintendo Switch has turned out to be a little bit of a miracle. In just one month it sold over 2 million units worldwide which puts it up there with the PS4 and ahead of Xbox.  A few years ago Nintendo looked like it was falling off the map.  After watching the Superbowl commercial for the Nintendo Switch I was highly skeptical—but now I am a huge fan.  I love it.  It is a perfect marriage of incredible technology and innovative product development rolled up into one beautiful package that touches many aspects of our capitalist culture which advances human thought through entertainment and philosophy.  That to me is a big deal and is something to celebrate.  I certainly did.  After a weekend like I had with the Nintendo Switch, I felt privileged to be able to play a part in it.  Not only was it fun, but it was enhancing in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible even a few months ago.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

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