Thursday, November 4, 2010

Lazy Filler Post #2: More Empty Promises

Okay, so it kind of looks bad, what with me not posting anything at all since last July, but there's a very good reason for that: I didn't write anything since last July.

So anyway, the long and short of it is that, a few weeks ago, I quit my job after almost 7 years of toil and towing the company line, in order to have more time to devote to school, and at the start of November, classes started up proper. Ten years out of high school, there's some things I kind of forgot about student life... like the fact that you actually take your work home with you, and are expected to keep working on it in what the sane and civilized world would rightly refer to as your hard-earned leisure time.

This, and the fact that I've been, on very rare occasions, writing some stuff for the HG101 blog, means the time and money that I can dump into this little fringe hobby of mine has dropped off somewhat.

And what terrible timing for something like that to happen, too. Here I am, pinching pennies and borrowing well out of my (nonexistant) means, and just a few weeks ago, Panasonic went ahead and dropped the motherload!
This here, this hideous looking pentagonal... thing... is the Panasonic Jungle, a handheld platform, seemingly dedicated to online gaming, and MMOs in particular. Why is it called the Jungle? Who the hell knows. Far as I can tell, they're just sort of hoping the Guns n' Roses jokes will write themselves, and maybe they can get some kind of meme publicity or something.

All I really know is this:

1 -This thing is the product of pure insanity. Were it not for the fact that other people seem aware of it's existence, I'd have assumed it was merely a product of my own insanity, and no such device actually exists. Unfortunately, this thing is apparently real, as exemplified by it's appearance on Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory.

Yes, you read that correctly, Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory. Were it not for this, we might have thought this was merely an idea for a device, a mock-up of a thing that might potentially go into R&D, and hopefully go through some rigorous refinements, or even more potentially, get chucked into the dustbin when people set eyes upon it and say "What in the gee-dee is that thing?" Thanks to Dyrdek, however, we know that this isn't the case. The thing has already gone through R&D, has been built, and works, and barring some sudden stroke of logical thought, will be launched unto the unsuspecting public.

Also, someone at Panasonic's marketing department actually though using Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory as a means of gaining a promotional groundswell was a good idea, and enough other marketing people agreed that they went ahead with it. This should tell you what you need to know about this product, and the "brains" behind it.

2 - Holy Hell! I want that thing!

Of course, I also want a 3DS, and I want an education... and food. So, somewhere down the line, a doomed to fail handheld game platform from a company who's never quite shaken the stigma of being associated with the 3DO falls pretty low on the list of priorities.

Panasonic Jungle; Camp Kusoge preemptively salutes you.

But anyway, on to the empty promise that I emptily promised in the title of this post:

Since free time is a bit scarce these days, I'll be finding ways to scale back on how I do things around here. Posts in the future will likely be a bit shorter.

For what it's worth, I do have a project on the back burner, but in the name of getting it out there sometime before the end of days, I've decided to break it up into smaller chunks, and post those as they come out.

I can give you a hint: the common theme is a certain company that had no business whatsoever making video games.

I can give you another hint: It's not LJN... good guess though.

2 comments:

  1. Good to see you're posting again.

    I thought Panasonic learned their lesson after the 3DO. Also the Jungle runs on Linux so it can't run WOW and most other major MMOs to begin with.

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  2. I don't really know all the details about the 3DO, but I do know that we actually have EA co-founder Trip Hawkins and The 3DO Company to blame for it's existence, and Panasonic merely had some sort of licensing deal to manufacture the hardware, as did Goldstar and Sanyo, though there were reports that certain Panasonic 3DO games didn't work right in a Goldstar 3DO, or so I've heard over the grapevine.

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