The Wii is not a Kid System

Sure, the Wii has lots of games that are family friendly and kid friendly, and I'm sure it is safe to say that it has more family games than the Xbox360 and PS3. however, that does not make it a kid system. You know what I played on the Wii last night? Call of Duty: Black Ops. It's rated M, if you're keeping score, which is not the rating you drop on a kid's game. It's actually a fairly difficult game too. Know why? Has to do with how you aim the gun.

If I were playing this game on the Xbox, I would be using the dual stick controller to both look around and move and aim. I've played Xbox games. In fact, after playing Halo on the original Xbox, I reconfigured Metroid Prime (which I still believe is the best first person shooter there is) on the GameCube to mimic those controls. Perfect FPS setup. Come to think of it, Metroid Prime on the GameCube was easier than it is on the Wii. Oh, yeah, they redid the game for the Wii to incorporate that pesky Wii remote. You know, the device that set the Wii apart from it's competitors and catapulted it to the top of everyone's game? Now you have to aim with your hand and arm instead of a couple of control sticks.

The Xbox and especially the PS3 both have exceptional graphics. I'm not going to pull any punches there. The visuals on those systems are a sight to behold and without argument, they both possess superior system hardware. Thing is that while Microsoft and Sony upgraded their graphics (and that's it, by the way - their controllers were pretty much identical to their predecessors), Nintendo kept the same engine that the GameCube had (that's right, the Wii has the GameCube's guts), but revolutionized HOW you play the games instead. That little aiming deal you can do with the Wii remote makes the Wii the ultimate first person shooter game system. What better way to aim a gun than to hold the gun in your hand and aim it? They actually have Wii remote holders that resemble REAL guns, complete with the trigger in the right place and they're black with no silly orange barrel.

In fact, the Wii has a type of shooter game that the other systems don't (or don't have many of considering how silly the game would be). It's called a rail shooter. Think of it this way: pretend that haunted house ride at the fair where a cart takes you through the horrors of the phantasmagorical has lots of enemies popping up all over the place and you have a gun to blow them all away. But the cart keeps moving. That's a rail shooter. The game controls your movements and you control the gun, freeing you up to just blow stuff up. Some of the better rail shooters on the Wii are based on the Resident Evil and Dead Space series, all of which are M rated games complete with the blood and carnage you might expect. Still not kid's games.

I have a box full of Wii games that are not for the children or the faint of heart. Some of them are easy. Some are hard. Some require a great deal of problem solving. But I wouldn't let my kids play half of them, which is a far cry from the system that started it all for some of us, the 8-bit NES. You'd be hard pressed to find a NES or SNES game that kids shouldn't play, and those systems defined the home video game landscape.

My father-in-law thinks that if I got an Xbox, I would leave the Wii and never return. I disagree. If I had an Xbox, I would still get any FPS games on the Wii, if a Wii version exists (I'm looking at you, Modern Warfare 3), for the fun of playing the game as opposed to the superior graphics. Visuals are paramount in movies, but with video games, you have to enjoy the game first. Those beautiful visuals don't make any difference at all if the game isn't fun to play, and if I'm holding a gun on screen, it is far more immersive to hold it in my hand than to move an auto-locking reticule around the screen with a control stick.

Why?

The human race is obsessed with this question. We’re not satisfied with a solution for a problem. For some reason, we feel the need to explain the reason something occurred. To an extent, this makes sense for some things. Knowing the reason something occurred can help to prevent the same thing from happening in the future, so from that standpoint, of course the root cause is useful. However, this obsession can go too far by demanding a reason everything that happens, even when the “why” serves no greater purpose than the knowledge. Now, I’m all for knowledge, but knowledge at the cost of sanity is too much.

For instance, if your engine explodes, and upon inquiring as to why, the mechanic explains that oil is necessary for the continuous operation of a car engine, then you can use this information to always remember to keep oil in your car in the future.

If you end up in jail for stealing a woman’s purse, you know you’re there because you stole a purse, but then she comes around asks why you did it. In this case, your answer will determine whether she finds your reasoning acceptable to her as a valid reason for theft, and even more bizarre, she will believe or disbelieve based on your answer. However, knowing your reason will neither encourage nor deter her from participating in her own purse theft. What she needs is some kind of validation for the crime. If you say you did it on a dare, she’ll think you’re lying and don’t want to tell the real reason. If you say that you need the money, she’ll want to know why you need it. If your poor mother is dying and you need the cash for medical treatments or to prevent repossession of your house or car, she also won’t believe you because it sounds legit. If you say drugs and alcohol, she’ll nod and figure that was the reason. In no case is the information actually useful to her.

Another useless why comes when the family of a murder victim demands a reason for their loved one’s death. They obsess over this desire for a reason and demand it of the killer who takes great pleasure is not telling his reason. And really, when he does tell, it doesn’t help. Some claim this is called closure, but closure can be gained for most things by simply moving on. I know that’s easy for me to say, but I also don’t obsess over why things happen to me.

This escalates to a far larger and more illogical scale when you deal with natural disasters. Our cost of sanity is usually perpetuated by the media after the disaster or other calamity when they describe the people as “trying to make sense of the situation.” If a tornado destroys a town or a hurricane ravages a coastline, there is no “why.” It is nature. The only “why” you get is a meteorological explanation of weather patterns. Does that really help?

Anyway, it’s a facet of human nature to demand reasons, but most of the time, they don’t get you anywhere. I always love a good bit of knowledge, but if that bit is out of my hands, I move on. Sure, I ask “why” on occasion just like everyone else, but I don’t demand it if there is no answer.

That’s the worst answer you can give someone who needs that validation. “Just because” or “I wanted to” or even “it was fun” don’t settle one’s mind, and therefore, it makes a “why-obsessed” person crazy. But it is a lot of fun to make the person squirm when you can give it to them.

Personally, I accept that some things have no explanation or the explanation is unattainable, as it is for many of the things that I do. For some things, you can never find a reason. And guess what? That’s ok.

Life is Like a Rubik's Cube

Or perhaps, it's like solving a Rubik's cube. There are many videos online where people "solve" the cube in 6 seconds and that sort of thing, but if you're fortunate enough to see this person also mix up the cube, you'll find that it takes approximately the same amount of time to "mix" it as it does to solve it. This is because they're following a particular algorithm to mix it and using the same one in reverse to solve it. From a higher perspective, they're creating the very problem they're endeavoring to solve, and since they created the scenario, they know how to fix it.

Actually solving the cube is a different matter entirely. You know, the cube that you hand off to the children to scramble and when they hand it back, it's a mess. That's more real. When you walk into any given situation, you have whatever life has tossed at you, and you have to take it from there to make it all right. A lot of people approach the cube by trying to solve one color at a time, and occasionally, they'll be able to swing one or colors doing it that way, but find when they try for the next color, they end up mixing up the ones they already finished. Solving the cube for this person is nothing short of frustrating because no matter what they do, they can't stop things they already worked out from mixing up again.

To solve a cube (and life) correctly, you can't look at one side or a single step. Sure a problem might have an immediate solution, but is that immediate solution the answer to the actual problem? A Rubik's cube has six sides. Are you only trying to solve one side or going for all six? If a file is corrupt is a program, are you only going to fix the one file or should you trace the problem back to its source to figure out where the corrupt file came from? A single step will involve doing the same thing over and over in vain. However, a step back to look at the big picture to define what the larger goal is will show what you need to do.

When you solve a cube, you don't do it side by side. You do it line by line.When solving one side, you have to remember the larger goal and solve the colors around the edges of that color as well by lining them up to the middle block as you solve the first color. This goal must be kept in mind while solving the first color, or it won't work. In correcting problems in life, you have to remember that bigger picture and ask yourself if this step is essential to the next and will it solve the bigger problem or achieve the larger goal? Is there something on this step that I need to do to assist the next step?

In the cube, you continue the solving sequence, by aligning the center line, followed by the center blocks of the side opposite from the one where you started. You continue until you finally have the final four corners almost lined up. The colors all match the corners where they are sitting, but it isn't aligned yet. In order to line up the final corners, you have to us a single algorithm over and over until one corner is aligned, spin the top to the next and keep going. This last step appears to rescramble the cube into a big mess, but when this step is done, all the layers are lined up, and it takes a couple of very obvious turns to bring it home to completion. This is honestly my favorite step because it looks a little spectacular. The application her is that sometimes, the final step of anything takes a leap of faith and trust in yourself. You can see what you need to do to get there, but it looks like it will get worse before it gets better. Sometimes it does, but as long as you have the goal in mind and press forward, you will get there and when you do, everything will fall into place until a few quick and obvious spins will present themselves and it is complete.

If your life is scrambled, don't focus on the mess. Work out where you need to be and see where the layers need to fall into place. Sometimes, it just takes a global perspective on the problem, and methodical working of the layers to find your way to the goal of having all your colors line back up.