Moved...!

Sorry for the delay in adding new content, but after a month of blogging, I decided I enjoyed it enough to invest in moving my blogs to their own server.

We now have a new home for Subtle Fun!

I won't be posting much here at all in the next few weeks, but will leave this site up to help herd in the lost.

Happy New Year!

I wish everyone a Happy New Year! May the upcoming year be filled with fun!

Famous Mii Website

One of the cute things about the Nintendo Wii is that you can design a "Mii", a simple character that can then be used in other Mii-capable games such as Wii Sports. This of course leads to attempts to build Mii celebrities. Within a couple of days of registering your Wii with friends, you're likely to get a Mii Shaq O'Neill and a Mii Jesus plop into your Mii household, and after that you'll see a few celebrities show up in your Mii parades.

Enter Famous Mii.com. This site has some step-by-step instructions on how to make famous Mii's! The nice thing about this site is that most of the Mii's actually do look like the celebrities they claim to be.

If you've got a Wii, enjoy!

Christmas Winners Honorable Mention

With the horrid Strawberry Shortcrap Karaoke Set now safely back at Toys 'R' Us, our attention the last couple of days has turned to some of the better presents. My son and I have spent quite a bit of time building the the Mega Bloks Battlestorm Castle the past few days, and each time I sit down with it, I am more and more impressed. This is an excellent product.

First, you get a ton of quality building time for your money. There are more than 400 pieces in this set, and about 60 detailed steps to putting them all together. I'm working slowly with my son and trying to let him do as much as possible. He is a full year younger than the minimum recommended age of 6+, so things are slow going. We'll do a half hour a couple of times a day. I'd say we are now about two-thirds of the way complete, with about 2-3 hours total time spent so far. But this is a wonderful parent-child project, and we're having a great time.

Second, everything fits together well. With this many parts, all it would take is for some shoddy manufacturing to make the assembly a nightmare. But it's not. Everything is there, and everything snaps together cleanly and well. Some of the elements come apart again a bit easier than I would like, so we've had some minor rebuilding to do after a random five-year-old arm sweep bashed off the top of the adjoining tower, but for the most part, they seem to have gotten the "difficulty-to-assemble/easy-of-disassembly" balance pretty much on the spot.

Third, if you like manuals, this set has the second best manual I have ever seen. Heck, if you like manuals, this might be a good purchase for the manual alone. It's a full-color, high-quality book on large paper, and it goes on for page after page. And get this: there are no words! Everything is done with pictures, arrows, and a few numbers, and it's crystal clear what you have to do. The attention to detail is outstanding. At the end, there are even full-page, full color pictures of alternate builds you can make with the castle. The person who created this manual should get a Noble Prize.

Lastly, and most important, there is a ton of fun stuff in this box. In addition to the castle, you get one larger dragon, two smaller ones, six knights (albiet small ones), a catapult, a javelin thrower, a working drawbridge, a spiked log trap, and functional moat with a real waterfall! Ok, ok, I'm just kidding about the moat and waterfall. But usually when you buy a set like this, they show you a picture on the front of the box with a ton of awesome stuff on it, and then hidden somewhere on the back, in teeeny weeny letters, is that 75% of the stuff is sold separately. So to get everything you see, your approximate cost would be about the same as a year of college tuition at a prestigious Ivy League college. But with this castle, all the cool stuff is there! Amazing!

Highly recommended at this point!

Strawberry Shortcrap Karaoke Set, Part II!

Yesterday, I talked about our household's 2006 Christmas Crap Award Winner, the Strawberry Shortcake Karaoke Set.

But little did I know that the story would get better. Astute readers will remember that I complained about the lack of a power switch for the product, which has a power light that stays on all the time, thereby draining batteries at a remarkable rate.

Well, I was wrong. There is a power switch. But you'll never guess where! I had some time this morning to return some Christmas presents, one of which was the Strawberry Shortcrap Karaoke Set. Before taking the thing back to Toys 'R' Us, I got out a screwdriver and opened up the battery case to take out our batteries. And there it was: the power switch! Whoever made this product brilliantly decided to put the switch underneath the battery cover! This might be fine if the battery cover was easily accessible, but it's not: you have to take out a long screw, which is set in a hole in the case so narrow that none of our normal screwdrivers could fit. What a great idea!

So let's sum up the defects with this wonderful children's product:

• The microphone wires have a carcinogenic coating.
• In some versions, the tapes contain sexual lyrics clearly unsuitable for young children. Keep in mind that the suggested age for this product is three-years-old and up. We actually never got to the lyrics issue, because of the next defect...
• In our special version, we couldn't play tapes because the machine kept eating them.
• The screw to the battery cover is set in a hole too narrow to reach with a normal screwdriver.
• The power switch is under the above difficult-to-remove battery cover.
• I forgot to mention this one yesterday, but there is no manual.

This is simply an amazing design accomplishment. I can see the marketing discussions now:
Lead Designer: Let's make a Karaoke set for little children!
Assistant Designer: Great idea! How about we put a cheap carcinogenic coating on the microphone wires?
Lead Designer: Humm, I'm not sure. Parents might not go for us killing their kids.
Assistant Designer: Oh, ok, perhaps we could distract them, then! We'll add a mini-game called "Find the Power Switch!" We can put the switch in a difficult to access place, then not include any manual in the box! Parents will be so busy trying to figure out how to turn the thing off that they'll never notice their kids' brain tumors!
Lead Designer: Brilliant! And we'll save money on the manual that way as well! I like it. Now, what about music?
Assistant Designer: Humm, sex sells, so how about provocative, suggestive music about fornication?
Lead Designer: Great point! That way parents can play with it after their kids go to sleep! It'll be an overnight sensation, this year's hot Christmas item! Oh, but wait, the religous right might get a bit ticked off.
Assistant Designer: Humm. Well, we could make the cassette player eat any tape you put into it! That way no one would ever hear the lyrics!
Lead Designer: Brilliant! Let's run with it. Get started right away.

Christmas Crap Award Winner!

There was some tough competition this year, with contenders including a Mega Blocks monster thingie whose head falls off and a doll house with flimsy cardboard walls that knock down all the furniture inside when you touch any part of the house. The hands down winner, though, has to be the incredibly cute piece of carcinogenic crap called the Strawberry Shortcake Karaoke Set.

This was an impulse buy at Toys 'R Us, and it's likely the only present that we'll be returning. I should have read the Amazon reviews, which mention things like carcinogenic coatings on the parts and lyrics inappropriate for young kids. In our case, however, the lyrics complaint wouldn't have matteredd: we never heard the songs on the tape.

Every time we put a tape in the thing, it ate it. Three for three. Each of these incidents necessitated a ten-minute surgery to extricate the gnarled tape, during which time our daughter would suck on the carcinogenic microphone.

Even better, this battery powered product has no power switch, which means that the power light is always on, always draining the batteries. What a great design concept this is! The only way to turn it completely off is to remove the four C batteries with a screwdriver? Brilliant!

I'll let my daughter sum it up best:
"Let's do something else, Daddy."

Christmas Winners!

Here are this year’s early winners for best Christmas toys in our household, as chosen by our three-year-old daughter and our five-year-old son. Keep in mind that things change; kids are whimsical and things break.

Our three-year-old daughter has adamantly professed her love for her Princess Dining Set, consisting of a cup, plate, and bowl. This $10 gift has beaten out the $40 doll house, a $25 Finding Nemo Leapster game, and a $35 Hello Kitty Karaoke set. More on the Hello Kitty Karaoke set tomorrow, which will most likely win the Christmas Crappy Toy Award this year.

Our five-year-old son has voted for three consecutive days for his $25 Power Ranger Action Figure set (link unavailable). The Bandai figures are pretty good in terms of flexibility and durability, and this set comes with two small motorcycles and three figures. I’m not sure this one will last the week though, as we’ve been putting together his $50 Mega Block Castle, and his interest in that is climbing as we get more of it finished.

Rising in the rankings though is the surprising $10 Spider-Man Memory Match Up. We opened this one today and two hours later my five-year-old son was still playing with it. The game is a neat twist on the typical memory game: You’ve got 10 Marvel Super Heros that pull apart at the waist, leaving you with two halves for each of them. You then cover these 20 half bodies with 20 cups on a red playing case. From there, the game plays like any standard memory game. The pieces are cute, and super heros are always a huge hit in this age range.

The thing that I like about this game is that the box, which doubles as the playing board, is a sturdy plastic carrying case for the game pieces. Games that include good storage options score bonus points in my world.

There may be potential for creative play with this game as well. After we played the memory game, my son then played with them for another hour, creating such memorable games as “Bumper Car Cups”, in which the superheros rode around in the little cups and tried to knock the other ones out.

The game’s not perfect, though. A couple of the bottom halves are so similar (Spiderman and Spider Girl, for example) as to make it hard for a three-year-old to figure out which goes with which, and it’s a bit tricky to set the game up without catching glimpses of the pieces in the cups, but still, for $10, it’s been a serendipitous winner.

Up next: This Year’s Losers.

Nintendo Stock (NTDOY) Doubles in 2006; Up Over 10% Since Wii Release

Despite solid sales and review accolades, the Wii in its first month of release has had setbacks. News of TV screens shattering from flying Wiimotes has permeated the national media. At the core of the controversy is the small strand of string that joins the wrist strap to the Wiimote. When heavy friction and sweaty hands wear down the thin joining string, it can break. If you happen to have a loose grip on the Wiimote when this happens, you end up launching the controller in various and sometimes costly directions.

On December 6, 2006, Green Welling LLP of Seattle Washington filed a national class action law suit against Nintendo for a breach of warranty with regards to the wrist straps. Nintendo has subsequently recalled 4 million of the launch wrist straps, at what will be a cost of millions to the company. It will replace them with a strap that secures to the Wiimote with a strand of string that is nearly twice as thick as the original.

What has not made the national news with the same frequency, however, is the price of Nintendo's stock (NTDOY). As of this morning, nearly a month after release of the Wii, NTDOY was up more than 10% over its November 16 pre-release price. Fueled by the popularity of both the DS and Wii, the stock has essentially ignored the strap recall and lawsuit. The 10% rise is in addition to a run up of the stock's price in the months before the release. If the current price of nearly $31 per share holds over the last few days of December, Nintendo's stock will have doubled in 2006. Nice returns for a company who future looked bleak a few years ago.