This is a Public Service Announcement to all parents. Parents, don’t buy the “game system” you see at at left for your children when they ask for a Wii. I don’t care how young your kids are — they’ll know the difference.  Neglecting to buy your child the system they want for Christmas may cause long-term emotional scarring. As adults, they may feel a permanent emotional void when it comes to video games, causing them to become obsessive, insatiable video game collectors. You’ve been warned.

I spotted this rather craptacular Wii clone, the Zone Wireless Gaming, at a local discount store. The remotes are the big knockoff giveaway — it could have slipped my eye otherwise. I love the nonsense upselling text.

• “THIRD GENERATION GAMING!” — I think this is a sly way of saying “This is no better than a Genesis.” I think.
• “RCA INPUT JACKS” — What exactly are we inputting here? I’m pretty sure the Zone does not double as a Slingbox.
• And of course, seven, count ‘em, seven “GAME SPORTS PACKAGE,” including “BOXING,” “TENNIS,” “GOLF,” “BASEBALL,” “TABLE TENNIS,” “TEN PIN BOWLING,” and “SOCCER.” Eat it, Wii Sports!
• Bonus points for the ESRB-like 5+ rating from Kazakhstan.

Overall the box doesn’t try very hard at making it look fun. At least overcaffeinated Chinese children can make the Vii look downright spasmodic.

My favorite part is that the whole package rattled around like a box of puzzle pieces. Oh, and the price? $39.99. I guess at a price that low, asking for styrofoam would have been downright selfish.

7-Eleven isn’t the only retailer expanding their video games selection in recent weeks. KB Toys — this one, spotted in Altoona, Pa. — has just started stocking used video game titles.

If you’ll recall, KB Toys was a major video game retailer in the 1990s, but they abruptly stopped carrying games in the early 2000s. Within the past two or so years, they’ve slowly been amassing a stock of $19.98 and under budget game titles, which are cheap to buy in bulk and big profit makers. Not all of those are necessarily junk — titles like NeoGeo Coliseum and Art of Fighting Anthology have a good chance of becoming collectible titles in the future.

KB is no doubt ogling sales like these on the used game market and want a piece of the action.

I checked out the prices and they more or less appeared to be in line with Gamestop. Grand Theft Auto IV, for example, was $39.98 for both the Xbox 360 and the PS3.

On the plus side, all the games appeared to be in great shape and complete with boxes and manuals — including the Game Boy Advance games. (Gamestop, take notes.)

On the minus side, there was a glut of older sports games that no one will buy. Ever.

Last week, I took my first trip to the Nintendo World Store in New York City. Curiously enough, I didn’t buy anything, but there was one item that I specifically wanted to see — the Advanced Video System, a computer prototype that eventually became the Nintendo Entertainment System that many of us have undying nostalgia for.

Without repeating what you can find better documented elsewhere, I’ll summarize: The Advanced Video System was a computer system that Nintendo debuted at CES in 1985, but scarcely seen thereafter. It was intended to be the American incarnation of the Famicom, to be co-distributed by Atari, but the deal with Atari fell through, and Nintendo re-imagined the system as the Nintendo Entertainment System.

One of the very few (the only?) prototypes of the AVS is on display at the Nintendo World Store in New York, and I really can’t begin to fathom how much sublte importance this piece may have for Nintendo’s initial history in America.

The thing that strikes me first and foremost is the look. It looks like an NES — it has that unmistakable gray/red/black color scheme that defined the gaming system for a generation, and even today, it just screams 8-bit Nintendo. But once you look past the initial color scheme, it’s all wrong. A keyboard? A joystick? A tape deck??

As you’ll notice (and read in the plaque), all of the AVS components were wireless via infrared. Although I read some comments that this was ahead of its time, I’m going to take the skeptical approach and say that I can’t imagine that it worked well — perhaps a reason that the AVS design was scrapped in the first place. Infrared is wildly unreliable for gaming. It requires a straight, uninterrupted line of sight between devises. I recall a numbmer of infrared controllers from the the 90s and all of them worked awfully. Thankfully RF wireless, in place in most modern gaming controllers, has made all of our lives better.

Nevertheless, the main purpose of this post was to share some of the photos I took. I was disappointed by the practically thumbnail sized photos on Flickr and knew I had to take some large photos for posterity while at Nintendo World.

My one regret is that I didn’t take a back-side photo of the display, as it would certainly be interesting to see what kind of ports this prototype had going in and out…

I should add, kudos to Nintendo for putting a fascinating museum-quality piece like this out for public display.