Has Nintendo ruined video games?

Nintendo confirms secret 'Help' feature

On the extraordinary success of its Nintendo Wii video game console, Nintendo says it's due, in part, to making games accessible to wide audiences. And with an unannounced – but now confirmed – feature built into future Nintendo Wii titles, the Japanese gaming giant is taking this accessibility to the next level.



Beginning with the upcoming New Super Mario Bros. Wii, players will be able to pause a game during a particularly difficult level and let the game take over to complete the level. Press a button at any time to resume playing.

This will help reduce barriers of entry for new or younger players – without purchasing a strategy guide or resorting to websites that list cheat codes.

In an exclusive interview with Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary game designer confirmed this optional feature called "demo play" (tentative name) is something the development team has been working on.

"In New Super Mario Bros. Wii, if a player is experiencing an area of difficulty, this will allow them to clear troubled areas and take over when they're ready" confirmed Miyamoto, through his translator.

"And yes, we're looking into this for future games, too" adds Miyamoto.

Not sure about you but I think this could be huge. I recall reading a stat once about how only 5 percent of gamers (or less) actually finish a game, because it gets too tough. Now if you spent $50 or $60 on a title, you should get to see the end of it. It's like buying a DVD or Blu-ray and turning it off after the movie's intro.

When a lot of people get stuck in a game they often turn to the internet and read a walkthrough for that particular level. Some, prefers to go to YouTube and watch a player finish a level so they can run back to the TV and try it out. But what Miyamoto is proposing means you don't need to leave your television to get through tough areas.

If it takes off -- and perhaps even copied by the likes of Microsoft and Sony -- this could mean the end of strategy guides and other game help books, too.

Do you think this feature is a good idea to help those stuck get through troubled spots in a game? Or are you in favour of a harder game, whereby players should keep trying (and failing) until they get it right (on their own)?

Thoughts?

Nintendo "brain games" no more effective than low-budget puzzles: researchers

"Edu-tainment" games like the popular Brain Training series (available on the Nintendo DS console) have been credited with bringing a new group of older users to gaming. The game features a number of activities, such as solving math problems, counting currency and unscrambling letters, that Nintendo says is based on the work of Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima.

"The Nintendo DS is a technological jewel. As a game it's fine,” Alain Lieury of the University of Rennes in Brittany, told the Times of London “But it is charlatanism to claim that it is a scientific test.”

Lieury conducted a study with 67 10-year-old children, who are at an age where he says they have the best chance of improvement in brain performance.

He split the children into four groups — two did a seven-week memory improvement course, while the other did puzzles with pencil and paper, and the last went to school as normal.

At the end of the seven-week period, all the children were given tests to measure memory, logic, arithmetic skills and symbol interpretation.

Lieury found no significant improvement in memory among the first two groups — in fact, they registered a decline. The group with paper and pencil did 33 per cent better in memory tests. The Nintendo group did 17 per cent worse.

The Nintendo group did fare better in math tests — a 19 per cent improvement — and that number was replicated in the paper-and pencil-group, while the fourth group improved 18 per cent.

Nintendo, in response, told the Daily Telegraph that it never claimed to have scientifically improved cognitive ability.

Nintendo's website, which doesn't explicitly say Brain Age improves a user's intelligence or memory, nevertheless says it features games "designed to help stimulate your brain and give it the workout it needs .…"

"The design of Brain Age is based on the premise that cognitive exercise can improve blood flow to the brain."

Lieury says doing puzzles like Sudoku or playing Scrabble would be just as effective as playing games like Brain Training. Lieury's findings will be published in Stimulate Your Neurones, a book due out later this month.

Scientists use Playstation 3's to create a super computer

Computer hobbyists, geeks and researchers take note:
Two U.S. scientists have created a step-by-step guide on how to build a supercomputer using multiple PlayStation 3 video-game consoles.

The instructional guide, Which was posted online this week at ps3cluster.org, allows users with some programming knowledge to install a version of the open-source Linux operating system on the video consoles and connect a number of consoles into a computing cluster or grid.

The two researchers say the guide could provide scientists with another, cheaper alternative to renting time on supercomputers to run their simulations.

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth physics professor Gaurav Khanna first built the cluster a year ago to run his simulations estimating the gravitational waves produced when two black holes merged.

Frustrated with the cost of renting time on supercomputers, which he said can cost as much as $5,000 to run a 5,000-hour simulation, Khanna decided to set up his own computer cluster using PS3s, which had both a powerful processor developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba, but also an open platform that allows different system software to run on it. Currently, PlayStation 3 gaming systems retail for about $400 (Canadian funds).

On the how-to-guide, Khanna says the eight-console cluster is roughly comparable in speed to a 200 node IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. Khanna says his research now runs using a cluster of 16 PS3s.

The fastest supercomputer in the world, IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, has 3,250 nodes and is capable of 1.105 petaflops, or 1.105 quadrillion floating point operations per second, about 100,000 times faster than a home computer.

Massachusetts Dartmouth computer scientist Chris Poulin, who co-wrote the instructional manual with Khanna, wouldn't reveal the number of flops the system can achieve, but says that anecdotally, the cluster has allowed him to run simulations in hours, simulations that used to take days to perform on a powerful server computer.

Khanna is not the first researcher to use PS3s to simulate the effects of a supercomputer. The University of Stanford's Folding at Home project allows people to help with research into how proteins self-assemble — or fold — by downloading software onto their home PS3s, creating a virtual supercomputer. Their research is currently targeting proteins relevant to diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease.

But the guide posted by Khanna and Poulin is the first that might allow someone to set up a supercomputer in their own home.

Poulin said there are two major practical issues, however, that might limit the practicality of a PS3 cluster supercomputer.

The first issue is power. He said the video-game consoles use about 200 to 300 watts per unit, so finding a room that could hook up eight of the consoles might be an issue for hobbyists, he says.

"I think if you put four or more than four of the systems on one plug you'd probably blow a fuse," says Poulin.

The second issue is memory. The console has only 256 MB of RAM, far less than most personal computers available right now. Poulin said that while the low memory wouldn't be a problem for straightforward computations, running multiple simulations or programs could tax the system. As a result, simulations running on the cluster would have to be tailored to consider the cluster's memory limitations.

Poulin said he hopes the project will help open doors to more partnerships between industry and universities that will lead to better access to supercomputing power.

"That's ultimately the goal here," he said. "We want to make things easier, no matter what kind of supercomputer you are using."