With all this talk of videogames, or should I say Martin's talk about videogames, I feel that I must share my recent sneak peek at the Nintendo Wii. 2 weeks ago, I visited a friend from the wall lab (the name of Jim Rehg's lab at Tech) at Electronic Arts before we headed up to the city to visit Alcatraz. She gave Roxy and I a tour -- EA is an amazing place for developers and even more so for videogamer nerds. First of all, there are clusters of bean bag chairs every 200 sq. feet (at least in the Maxxis department) or so with a nice tv and a stack of every console that has been sold in the past 5 years. They have a game library that apparently has multiple copies of every game and employees are encouraged to take them home to play. They have 1000s of finger blasters all over the floor and they have sweet game dev cubicles. Every developer has a nice workstation, a dev kit for the target console, and a TV. My friend has the pleasure of working on pixel shaders for the Nintendo Wii for a game that hasn't been announced yet (I don't want to jeopardize her rep / job so I won't say what it is). She lemme have a try at the Wii and lemme tell you, the 2 handed wireless controller blew me away. It was much much more accurate and sensitive than I was expecting out of it. There appeared to be no drift / error over time and it only took a few minutes to get the hang of it. It made 3D interaction feel extremely natural -- one hand controlled a character / POV while the other actually moved stuff around. It felt and looked like the UI in Minority Report. I can easily see players getting tired after an hour of play with the wiiremote. But it made all the difference. I paid no attention to the graphics -- the control was so sweet I didn't care.