Friday, April 28, 2006

Wii! I Want a New Gaming System!

Nintendo has announced that they are hopeless at naming things, since the upcoming console that we all thought was going to be called the Revolution is now revealed as merely a Wii.

Let's run down the Bad Names checklist, shall we?

Hard to pronounce, check.
Looks silly printed, check.
Sounds even sillier, check.
Will tend to make the object sound more expensive. ("Four hundred dollars for a Wee?") Check.
Induces snickering in small boys, check. (Bonus points for creating two separate funny mental images in different parts of the English-speaking world: smallness and urination.)
Does not appeal even slightly to the people who actually buy gaming systems, check and mate.

If I were a betting man, which I am not, I'd be laying down some serious bucks that the Wii will join the Famicom as a name that existed only in Japan...and the console will get some other name (probably not Revolution, since they've burned that bridge now) in the rest of the world.

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