@ thekitchensink Thats exactly what i have been witnessing ever since sega created sonic. but even after all thoes insults by other two and that one rumble pack promo they used to retaliate (which i thought was funny as hell when they were torturing the mario doll) nintendo never fought back with insults.

 They just continued to make games for their loyale customers and continued to make thoes witty and creative commercials.

He must take an extremely long time responding to fan mail...

Exactly.  Sonic was 'cooler, faster, and just plain more badass.'  Hell, he even had a deviant smirk!  That makes him awesome! It did make him awesome, by the way, just not necessarily 'better' than Mario XD 

Oh, and for posterity:

LOL me and my cousin were watching that when he got it in the mail we're laughing are asses off with the torturing scene. thx for that one way trip to memory lane.

As I read it, he is criticizing the infatuation with preserving certain perceived values which a subculture seeks to hedge in the protected status of art or purity or hardcoreness or whatever else.

The error is in judging all things by their commitment to the culturally inscribed principles without any regard to the broader world or even any introspection. The deeper error is to allow the culturally inscribed principles to warp your view of the world so that you can't enjoy anything that does not conform to them.

He's right.... again.

People who don't enjoy the theater(PS3/PC/360) but enjoy the movies (Wii).

People who enjoy the theater (PS3/PC/360) and the movies (Wii).

People who refuse to go to the movies (play Wii) because it is not as cultured (harcore) as the theater (PC/PS3/360)

Why? Because some people like to think that their time wasting hobby is somehow more important than other similar time wasting hobbies.

As per usual with Malstrom, he makes a great point, but he manages to insult a lot of people while doing so, and sound very pretentious all the while. Although he was more even-handed, he insulted all hardcore gamers (including Nintendo fanboys) and not just the Wii haters

Sales certainly shouldn't be the single determinant of quality, unless you take the aggregate features of everything that sells well. Certainly you wouldn't call Game Party, a platinum seller for Wii a good game, but you can take part of what it did right (simple, self-advertising title and appropriately low cost) and apply it to enrich the gaming market, and as the market is enriched, so is the culture. Culture is the market, the market as a whole. The problem is that Gaming Culture is becoming detached from the market

The Culture isn't doomed, what we're feeling is the culture changing at a slower rate than the market is, and particularly the grumblings of those who wish it were otherwise, those who are the agents of the culture's stagnation.

I always wondered what would happen if we locked Yahtzee and Malstrom in a room together. Someone should totally do that.

Nice strawman.  You've "proven"(?) that there are some people who think Microsoft has commercial desires.  However, that is not a contradiction of what Malstrom wrote.

Bill

We'd get Malstrom's words launched at our faces faster than we could read them. Convenient!

Point being there are Nintendo fanboys who fit in the same boat.  There are tons of these people also.

I know people who do very little else but play videogames.  That's their call, which is fine.  But if they think their videogaming choices are superior, they are buffoons.