Yesterday I went to the tiny danish equivalent of E3 and TGS, the D3 Expo here in Copenhagen to get a first impression of the new wonderful consoles that may await my consumption. The Wii was all I had expected. Fun and revolutionizing, and I am sure that there is potential in that little wonder for all ages. Nintendo had put around 22 of their Wii up for people to play, and that turned to be a quite satisfying number, hence the relative short lines, and the ability to show a broad aspect of their new games. Maybe they had overspend on this display, but what they spend they certainly saved on their lousy quality polo shirts, and cheap sneakers which their personnel were wearing. But hell.., the last thing I am is a fashion critic, and I think Nintendo did a marvelous job on promoting their upcoming console. Same could not be said about Sony and their Playstation 3. They had some top secret, closed doors promotion tactics that in my opinion was totally out of place. People had to stand in line for around 50 minutes, to get into some closed cubicle where they could see and play the PS3. It was not possible to view anything without standing in that line, and I think many including myself, where not up for that at all. I was very disappointed in Sony for their strange way of introducing their new product. I really looked forward to see it, but I became a bit stubborn, and decided not to when I experienced that the only possible way, where to wait and wait… In the end it is the little things that make the consumer settle on one product, over the other. In this situation I would say that Wii was the clear winner.
The D3 Expo where not really big, but still they managed to present the most interesting things in the main stream gaming world. But you could argue that it is quite easy to catch people’s interest at the moment, when the release of two new consoles is awaiting in the near future. A big disappointment though, where the lack of booth babes… Next year, you have to do better on this!
On the side note Yahoo just provided me some pleasant surprises. When I was geotagging my pictures for the expo, I discovered that yahoo maps now has much better support for Europe. They now include street maps to even small cities in Denmark and much better satelite detail than before. Now they really provide serious competition to Google in the world of geotagging and other geocoded applications.
Another funny discovery is that the Chinese yahoo offers free download of music. Besides the newest popular chinese music, you can find a lot of foreign music. It was quite a surprise, both because this most likely is illegal, and because I haven’t yet heard about any controversy concerning this. Even if it is not directly illegal, it must be against some kind of mission or value statements, and it could harm the image of the corporation. But I guess nobody in the headquarters can read Chinese, or nobody just cares about how they run the foreign platforms. And after all the Chinese interpret the phrase “copyright” to “the right to copy”.