by Duke

When was the last time you bought a telephone that had a cord? Have you ever had to get up off the sofa to fast-forward through the FBI warning at the beginning of a videotape? Can you open your garage door with a button? It's called wireless, baby. It's become such a part of our regular day to day lives we never even notice it anymore. It's made our lives free from physical chains, and it's everywhere... except one place.

Why, in the name of seven blasphemous ancient gods, are my video game controllers still on cords?! Do you understand how backwards that is? Why are our video game consoles trapped in the ghetto of technology?

My Dreamcast and my Playstation 2 are supposed to be cutting edge, state o' the art, girlfriend-replacing, whizz-bang pinnacles of electronic genius. But as far as I'm concerned, as long as I still have to sit on the living room floor in front of my TV untangling cords so that I can play Dead or Alive 2, this hardware is strictly Third World. Sega and Sony might be building Ferraris, but they're making us drive them on dirt roads.

This is a bigger problem than you think. Who cares how many polygons per second you get if your whole gaming experience is uncomfortable?

Let me put it this way. If you walked into a Circuit City to buy a new TV and they showed you a brand new set with a high definition picture and surround sound, you'd be excited. But what if the TV also included a remote control on a long cord that you had to string across the living room? Would you still buy it? No. You'd walk right out, laughing your ass off, and you wouldn't stop laughing until you reached the next store.

We don't even get a long cord with a video game system. The damn thing only stretches about 5 feet. If you want to actually sit on your couch, you have to pull the console out into the middle of the room, exposing and tangling even more cords for the dog to pull out of the wall. Either that, or sit on the floor staring up at the TV - a good way to develop that hunched, Early-Man curvature of the spine look that the chicks love.

 

Nintendo's GAMECUBE controller

Now I hear some of you saying, "But I bought wireless controllers for my Playstation, and they sucked. The technology isn't good enough." That's because those controllers were manufactured for 59 cents in a factory in Bolivia using Russian technology from 1964. They weren't made by a real company that knows anything about gaming. They suck because they don't come standard with the machine, and nobody is held accountable.

The technology is here, and it's plenty cheap. I'm looking at an ad right now for a brand new cordless 900 MHz telephone, with answering machine, for $29. That means it costs about $15 to make. $10 if you scrap the answering machine. Now imagine a well-made 900 MHz video game controller. You could relax on the couch with ease, enjoying crisp, accurate response from any distance. Your little brother or roommate (same thing, really) won't walk through the room, trip over the cord and rip the Playstation off the shelf, breaking it, or at the very least, ruining your perfect season record in Madden.

"But Duke, I don't want to buy all those batteries." Yeah, well you wouldn't have to. Just like the cordless phone above, your controller should be rechargeable. Those phones last for days on a charge. Just build a cradle into the front of your "next gen" console and put your controller back when your done playing. It's fully charged every time.

So the Dreamcast and the Playstation 2 are lost causes. But what does the future hold? Well, Nintendo is about to prove once again that they can hang onto ancient technologies until Mario is stuck in a nursing home looking for hidden coins in his strained peas and calling the furniture "Yoshi." Look up there at that picture of the GAMECUBE controller. If the cord is actually that short when it ships in 2001, I'm gonna go to Japan and hurt someone (or get hurt by someone. Don't try to stop me.)

A clue to the Xbox controller?

How about the fabled Microsoft Xbox? Well, they haven't officially shown the controller yet, so there's still hope. But not much hope. Here's a picture of Bill Gates (left) watching as some dweeb (right) demonstrate the Xbox. What's that in his hands? It's a controller! You can just barely see the cord draped in front of the TV. Goddammit! What the hell is the matter with you people? Why is that guy standing uncomfortably instead of relaxing on the couch? Microsoft is planning to spend five hundred million dollars (actual, real figure announced by Microsoft) on Xbox advertising, and I sit here with a broken Playstation and a bad back..

Are you listening to me, game companies? I am offering you the technology of the jealous gods. It will give you invisible power over items across distances both great and small. It will improve the gaming experience and people's live in a thousand untold ways.

Listen up: This is the 21st century, and I'm trying to give you fire.

I have a phone smaller than a bar of soap in my pocket. It works in the middle of the desert, 100 miles from the nearest big city. I can make and receive calls in 165 countries worldwide. And yet it looks like I'm going to be chained to my console for the rest of eternity.

All that's missing are eagles tearing at my liver.

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