[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends]
Below are the 2 most recent journal entries recorded in
Stephen Fry's InsaneJournal:
| Saturday, August 23rd, 2008 | |
| 4:09 am | Handheld gaming Stephen Fry has a lot of affection for Nintendo’s DS, which he finds much more engaging than Sony’s PSP Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 23rd August 2008 in The Guardian “Dork Talk” - The Guardian headline Poor Nintendo. Those clever little handheld games in the 80s: small, orange, plastic “Game & Watch” devices that opened up like a book. A gorilla threw barrels down at you while you leapt about a beeping LCD world. Then came the NES Game Console, followed by the highly successful Game Boy. After that, things began to go wrong: the Nintendo 64 and its successor, the GameCube, failed to penetrate what was now an enormous market. The oldest video games company of them all was in trouble: Donkey Kong and the Mario Brothers seemed destined to go the way of Atari and Sega, Pong and Sonic the Hedgehog, while the big boys would be left to slug it out with their PlayStations and Xboxes. That was Sony and Microsoft’s plan, and no one doubted it would be so. Nintendo, as a games brand, was about as hot as Waddingtons.
And then came its “seventh generation” offerings, the DS and the Wii (pronounced “wee”). The assumption made by Sony and Microsoft was that awesome processing power, state-of-the-art graphics, smooth animation and voluminous storage would make their big beasts market leaders. Nintendo staked all on cheaper devices that stressed a personal relationship between player and machine. The DS was all about a highly portable, stylus-driven environment, while the Wii – well, the Wii changed the rules completely. The DS and its more streamlined successor, the DS Lite, reached out to women and the middle-aged, and managed to do this without alienating the core gaming audience. Games for teenage girls, games for sudoku-playing commuters, “brain trainer” games for fortysomethings – whole new audiences were being reached, and the units sold in their millions. My DS Lite is pink. There was so much demand earlier this year that they couldn’t be had for bribes, sexual favours or worse. Unless you accepted girly pink. The moment you open it, you are taken back to the old Game & Watch days but can see why the DS has succeeded so well with the middle class, the middle-aged and the Hello Kitty/My Little Strawberry Shortcake Pony set. You set up in a twinkle and then play on two screens, one of which accepts stylus input and touches. As well as being backwardly compatible with the Game Boy Advance, there are hundreds of DS-specific games to choose from, some available on all platforms, such as Lego Star Wars; others proprietary and particular, such as Mario Kart. Fashion Dogz, Hannah Montana: Music Jam and Imagine Girl Band look after the all-important little girl sector, while Call of Duty, Race Driver: Grid and endless sports implementations show that your classic boy gamer isn’t left out either. He will prefer the versions on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, of course, but Nintendo’s whole strategy is to encourage crossover. Adults are turned on to the joys of shoot ‘em ups and RPGs, the young discover Space Invaders and Scrabble. That’s the theory, and more than 100m units sold make it hard to disprove. The DS is nothing like as feature rich as the PlayStation Portable, but it isn’t trying to be. The philosophy seems so counterintuitive at first blush: surely today’s digital devices demand the Swiss Army knife approach? If the DS has a touch screen, speakers and controls, then it should offer USB connections, AV and HDMI in and out sockets, memory cards, MP3 and movie playback, Wi-Fi and texting. Convergence is all, no? Well, we humans can be so ornery. A simple pocket knife can be more appealing and usable than a bristling Victorinox, and a dedicated little games machine like the DS can engage us far more than the sleek power of the PSP. You can feel admiration and even awe for the big power boxes, but for the DS you feel affection - and that, in marketing terms, is worth a whole heap more. Next wiik, wii’ll take a wii look at Nintendo’s other phenomenally successful platform… Acronym of the week HDMI High Definition Multimedia Interface. Says it all, really. Neat single cable attachment for HD TVs, Blu-ray players and modern gaming consoles. |
| Saturday, August 16th, 2008 | |
| 4:14 am | The sheer brilliance of Spinvox Stephen Fry is stunned by the sheer brilliance of the Spinvox, which translates voicemail into text Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 16th August 2008 in The Guardian “Dork Talk” - The Guardian headline However uninterested you may be in technology, it is likely that you use a voicemail system. If you have a mobile, then it will probably be the one provided as standard by your network. You dial 121, or 123, and dance the ghastly Menu Minuet until you’re done. The Apple iPhone has introduced a patented “visual voicemail” system, which presents a list of onscreen messages enabling you to play them in whichever order you like, but for 15 years that has been it so far as innovation goes. But now we have SpinVox, a most extraordinary service that takes your voice messages, translates them into text and then sends them to you as either email or SMS text message. Or both.
Here’s how it goes. I call you up, but you are out, or busy, and I am played your outgoing message: “Yodi, this is Dork Talk Reader, sorry I’se not in, but like leave a message after the tone, innit, and I’ll be in your face laters.” I leave my message: “Sorry to miss you, darling Dork Talk Reader. Do call back when you have a moment. I have momentous news. I guarantee it will rock the foundations of your world. Toodle-pip.” Now, if you, Dork Talk Reader, are a SpinVox subscriber, within minutes or less you will get a text as from my number that looks like this, inverted commas included: “Sorry to miss you darling dork talk reader. Do call back when you have a moment. I have momentous news. I guarantee it will rock the foundations of your world. Toodle (?) pip” - spoken through SpinVox <*n> where <*n> refers to the number assigned to the message. You can call a SpinVox number (which will replace your old network voicemail number) and press *n to hear my message the old-fashioned way. What is so magical and satisfying about the whole process is how astonishingly good the SpinVox engine is at rendering into accurate, grammatical, punctuated text even the most slurred, heavily accented or rapid-fire speech. In the example above it questioned the “toodle” but the word is spelt correctly. Subscription is quick and easy. You are given a new voicemail number, which can replace the old one on your speed dial. One’s first use of the system is naturally to try to trap it into mistakes. I caught it rendering Miranda as Meranda - it did at least know it was a proper name, however, for it gave it a capital letter. Happily for the Lynne Trusses among you, the “it’s” was correctly rendered, and I have found it spot-on when transliterating phrases like “I’ve sent a message to their centre where they’re collected. Its accuracy is great, it’s amazing.” It works out the difference between “they’re” and “their”, and “it’s” and “its”, and can distinguish by context such homophones as “sent a” and “centre”. It even got “He went out into the mist and missed” spot-on. Now that’s clever. It might not immediately strike you as useful, but once you have experienced a day where you don’t have to dial in to listen to messages, but can just glance at them, you will never want to go back. After all, the option is still there for listening to the voice. You can trial it for free, and then texts cost between 20p and 30p, according to the package (spinvox.com). Brilliant and British. Not everything brilliant is British, however. Ever been annoyed about desirable products that are available only in the US? I recommend international-orders.com which ships American goods around the globe. For us there’s VAT and import duty, plus the website’s handling surcharge, but the dollar still being relatively weak, transactions can work out cheaper as well as making available droolworthy gizmos and doodads that can’t be found here. I had a Chumby delivered to my door (chumby.com won’t deliver outside the US): it’s a soft, squashy Wi-Fi internet device that loads customisable widget or gadget style programs. Through international-orders.com it will cost about £120, plus whatever Revenue & Customs adds on. An American would pay the equivalent of £90 - but then, they haven’t got the wonder of SpinVox, so nah. © Stephen Fry 2008 Acronym of the week VAT Very Annoying Tax |
