the-inbetween.com

As I mentioned in my two reports (part one, part two), Essen Spiel had more than just boardgames and LARP gear: it had some videogame content too. These came in the form of retailers selling their games or the occasional licensed products based on boardgames. There was one exception: an entire, new videogame console! The Yuraku Yur-Gaming V-MAX32.

A couple extra photos can be found in my Flickr stream

There’s not much to say about products like this. Like the ePhone, these kinds of clones exist not to compete against the products they are mimicking, but to confuse befuddled consumers who don’t know any better.

I even took a (crappy) video of it in action. WATCH! As a clueless mom gets the sales pitch. SEE! Players haplessly swing their arms as if expecting their motions to be properly captured by the device. They aren’t. I tried to make sense of it and I think it has an accelerometer, maybe, but I couldn’t really get it do what I wanted so I don’t know. It was registering something, but it wasn’t mapping my movements spatially like the Wii does.

Click for larger

There isn’t much to say about this system except to acknowledge that when you’re being so blatantly (and poorly) copied, like the above mentioned ePhone, then you must be doing well. The Wii is doing well.