TouchArcade has some nice quotes from Nintendo’s el-presidenté (of North America) regarding cheapo mobile games (reacting to Nintendo 3DS games likely costing 30-to-45 dollars):

I actually think that one of the biggest risks today in our industry are these inexpensive games that are candidly disposable from a consumer standpoint.

Mm. Far better to continue ripping off consumers*. Because that isn’t a risk at all. Also, it really is terrible that plenty of iOS gamers are out there buying games every single day, due to their low cost, rather than one game a month.

Angry Birds is a great piece of experience but that is one compared to thousands of other pieces of content that, for one or two dollars, I think actually create a mentality for the consumer that a piece of gaming content should only be two dollars.

And why exactly shouldn’t a great piece of gaming content only be two dollars? Or, more precisely, why should a great piece of gaming content cost 30 dollars, or 45, or more? (Infinity Blade is six bucks, so is that OK, or is that still too cheap?)

I actually think some of those games are overpriced at one or two dollars but that’s a whole different story.

Oh gawsh! Chuckle! AHO! And so on. You go, el pres, dismissing iOS and its kin with a quip. But here’s the thing: your problem today isn’t myriad games that aren’t worth two bucks—it’s the thousands available that are.

* Incidentally, my all-time favourite Nintendo WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING? moment came with Pac-Man (NES Classics) for the GBA. Currently ambitiously priced at 30 quid on Amazon, the game was originally priced at ‘only’ 15 when first released in the UK—for a dodgy port of the NES version of Pac-Man. BARGAIN! Kind of puts iOS gaming into perspective. Hell, it even makes Namco’s crazy iOS Pac-Man pricing almost look sane. (Almost.)

The BBC’s having to apologise to Mexico (BBC News) after Top Gear did an episode in a very Top Gear manner, taking the piss out of Mexicans in a low-brow, vaguely xenophobic way. This, apparently, has caused “outrage”, for some reason, because, clearly, Top Gear is a serious news programme and not just three blokes arsing about and wanking over car porn.

One of the few sane voices on the spat, Robert Llewellyn, says:

One of the most intelligent men I’ve ever met was a Mexican architect. He wasn’t lazy, he didn’t wear a poncho, he cooked some of the best food I’ve ever eaten and he was a gentle, non judgmental kind man. I also know if he’d watched Top Gear the other night he would have laughed because he wouldn’t be threatened by such inanity. He would have known that the three middle aged men in jeans had not a clue about Mexican history and culture, he would know what they were really doing was revealing their own ignorance and frail self worth.

Llewellyn’s post seems to swerve between whether Top Gear was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but ultimately comes to the conclusion that the episode was merely embarrassing. The bigger argument, though, is should the BBC be self-censoring? It’s one thing for the news to carry on in this manner (almost unheard of in the UK, although some US channels, like Fox News, do this kind of thing all the time), but should television be sanitising an entertainment show? And if so, what about comedies?

Last year, Stephen Fry said there was such a culture of fear at the BBC that it was shying away from taking creative risks. And, indeed, even the man himself has been hit, with the Japanese embassy complaining over a section of a recent QI that featured a discussion on the nuclear bombings of 1945. While some of the comments were undoubtedly in poor taste (such as Davis quipping that bombs had bounced off survivor of both blasts, Mr Yamaguchi), it’s insane to think this sparked a minor international incident. Even more crazy is the tone of the BBC’s own report, which adds:

And Stephen Fry expressed amazement that the Japanese trains were still running after the blast.

Indeed he did express amazement, but that wasn’t him being derogatory—he was amazed at how the country managed to deal so well with being bombed twice by brand new, deadly weaponry. That’s not something to be apologetic about in the slightest.

Still, lucky no other countries ever portray the British in a stereotypical fashion or make jokes at our expense, eh? Man up, BBC. The Top Gear thing wasn’t anything to be proud of, but it wasn’t, in the context of the show, anything to apologise over; and that QI—the best-mannered, most intelligent, most interesting panel show around—also finds itself in a similar situation is nothing short of maddening. Sometimes it’s like the BBC wants to find itself being the British PBS in a decade’s time.

Absolutely fucking nothing.

And any publication that says anything different is lying out of its arse.

Google’s bitching that Microsoft Bing’s ripping off its search results.

Google:

At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we’d like for this practice to stop.

Perhaps Google should look at its own actions before criticising others. Android is one of Google’s most important products now, but it’s interesting to note how rapidly it went from being something akin to a BlackBerry to a knock-off iPhone once Apple’s device appeared. (And while Larry Page claims Google was working on Android before the iPhone arrived, Apple was working on iOS for years before, as part of the SafariPad skunk works project. Plus BlackBerry-like Android devices were what Google showed off after the iPhone was in the wild.)

Maybe Apple should say:

At Apple we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our iOS devices’ quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our iOS devices and iOS itself because we want our users to get the best experience every time they use them, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new companies in this space that are out there—with products built on core innovation, and not on recycled ideas and concepts from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant smartphone and touchscreen devices, we encourage you to come directly to Apple. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we’d like for this practice to stop.

Or maybe Google should just stop whining about others ripping it off when it does precisely the same thing itself.

The New York Post quotes analyst Ezra Gottheil:

If you want to get a device out—if you’re [a manufacturer]—do you have to go with what’s available right now or do you wait for the next generation to come out?

If you’re Apple and what’s available’s not good enough, you wait. If you’re pretty much everyone else, you don’t, and you risk releasing sub-optimal hardware, like the Galaxy Tab. Oddly, most of the market still doesn’t get this.