When you get a postcard, do you look at the photo of the Grand Canyon or the Eifel tower or whatever and go “oh my god! It’s so lifelike! It’s like I’m actually there!!!!” No, of course you don’t. Similarly, I should have realized - before I shelled out my 60+ dollars yesterday - that playing GTA IV wouldn’t make me feel like I was actually in New York City (why I wanted that, when I know exactly what it feels like all the time, is beyond me). Unfortunately for me, I came to the conclusion that GTA IV would be an exact, block-by-block replica of the city in which I currently reside. I actually thought I’d be able to go over the Williamsburg bridge and continue going in the same general direction in Brooklyn until I found a street that roughly resembled my street and a house that looked sorta like my house. I even sorta held out hope that I’d be able to walk up the steps to my door and see a mailbox that sorta looked like it had my name on it. And maybe I’d walk in, see myself sitting on the couch, and offer myself the blue pill (or is it the red?) or whatever.

Yeah call me stupid, call me a victim of hype. Unfortunately, I believe what I read, and everything I read told me that the new Liberty City was just so amazingly just like New York that’d it’d be all Uncanny Valley. Admittedly, Liberty City does remind me a little too closely of another city I’ve visited before. I think it’s called… Vice City? Or maybe Los Santos. I get them mixed up.

I’ve only played the game a few hours, but those few hours were devoted almost entirely to comparing Liberty City’s equivalent of Brooklyn (called “Broker”) to the real one, at least the one I know. First off, I’m gonna be honest and say I’m no Brooklyn expert. I’ve only lived in the area for about a year and a half, and so my knowledge is limited to certain parts of the borough. That said, being a non-native Brooklynite I think gives me a perspective on how it’s different from other cities I’ve been in - what makes it uniquely Brooklyn you might say. So let’s run down the list of how Rockstar failed to make a realistic sim of my favorite borough.

No. 1: No Jews.
Ok, I’m sure there are NPC Jews somewhere in the game, and I shouldn’t really be able to just look at a random NPC (or a real flesh-and-blood person, for that matter) and tell his religo-ethnicity. But I’m not talking about the Jew that goes to synagogue once a year; the one that had a bar mitsvah and forgot Hebrew for the rest of his life. I’m talking about the serious, shave-your-head-and-wear-a-wig, all-the-men-wear-archaic-hats, my-family-has-lived-in-this-country-for-four-generations-and-English-i s-still-my-second-language Jews. You know, the ones you can spot walking down the street. I remember shorty after moving in to my apartment I once got lost somewhere near my new neighborhood. I ended up walking for about 20-30 blocks through a neighborhood (Williamsburg) in which I didn’t see a single suspender-less man or white-shoed woman. Orthodox and Hasidic Jews for miles. There is no neighborhood like that. Which brings me to my second point.

No. 2: Too much English
Ever been to Greenpoint? Everything’s in Polish. Where I live, in Bushwick, many of the signs are in English and Spanish, and if they’re in just one it’s usually the latter. Not so in Broker. Not a big deal, but it’s also not a big deal to put in your game. It’s not like the player can go into any of those stores anyway, so why does he care if he can read the their signs? This is an oversight that should have been easy to catch and fix.

No. 3: Too many white people
41% of Brooklyn residents are white, and that’s a lot, but they are not spread equally throughout the borough like they are in Broker. I get the impression that the NPC’s spawn according to a percent that corresponds to the whole borough and not particular neighborhoods. In real-life Brooklyn you can expect to see mainly white people in Williamsburg. Go a half mile south and you see barely any. In Broker it’s 41% (actually I wouldn’t be surprised if it was closer to 60%) everywhere in the borough. In real life ethnicity is determined based on geography. But of course…

No. 4: The geography is all screwed up.
In real life, Brooklyn is about 3x the size of Manhattan. Though I haven’t reached GTA’s Manhattan, from the map I can tell that Broker is about half the size of the Golden Island to the west. I understand that many things of cultural significance happened in Manhattan 20 years+ ago, but is anything - other than shopping - going on there now that warrants this gross size disproportion? Anyway this screwiness has caused a dearth of bridges, so that the beloved Domino Sugar Factory is right next to the Queensboro bridge, which actually goes into Greenpoint and not Queens at all.

Now am I being nitpicky? Obviously - you say - GTA IV can’t be geographically exact, since games can hold only so much data and blah blah, and that’s fine. The problem is that if they were going to hype it as being a perfect rendition of the city than it should be so. Instead - as I said before - it reminds me more of other GTA games I’ve played in the past. The similarities to New York - so far - seem to mostly reside in skyscrapers, which I don’t care about at all. If it’s just like New York because of the skyline, than it’s just as realistic as a postcard. And you can buy one of those for way less than 60 bucks.

Despite the title, this blog post is another update on the (awesome) shenanigans going on with Atlus USA. About two or so weeks ago, Atlus quietly reprinted some copies of Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. It was so quiet that not even Atlus employees that often float around the Internet knew the details. The only reliable retailer that seemed to have it was Play Asia, but now we know quite differently. Turns out that a reprint was done for both Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga, and according to some Gamestop employees, almost every store was getting one copy of each game, brand new but labeled (and stickered) as used. Naturally this caused much rejoicing among the Atlus Faithful, and both games as well as Persona 3 FES are the top selling PS2 games on the ‘Spot’s website.

Initially, there seemed to be nothing bad at all about this news. I broke the bank to get my own copy of Nocturne, and since Devil Summoner and DDS2 are common enough to find, this is a chance for people to obtain every PS2 SMT with relative ease. However, on a random visit to the Atlus forums, I found some users with an interesting, though not completely validated complaint. According to them, when Gamestop initially got their reprints in, they were being sold for $60 a pop, later dropping them to $40 (in order to compete with Play Asia, at least according to these users). While $60 is still a savings over the Ebay price for Nocturne, it also seems rather greedy, especially when the games look used at first glance.

So is this story true? As odd as it seems that Gamestop would worry about Play Asia, I have no reason to believe these forumites were lying. I have seen past instances of Gamestop hiking the price of rare, highly coveted games; for instance, at certain points in time I have seen both Disgaea and La Pucelle Tactics for $60, and Katamri Damacy stopped being $20 a while ago. What made this bothersome to me was that in all these instances one could find a new copy for less on the web. This time around, the price discrepancy has been removed, but a little too late for some.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. As a business, I cannot blame a store for cashing in on people who didn’t jump on an Atlus game when it was released. On the other hand, both the original $60 price as well as the copies masquerading as used means that Gamestop’s handling of these reprints has been messy. You would think that after buying up that much stock in some niche jRPGs, the company would take some care to make sure they are all sold - the demand is certainly there, but keep in mind that the crowd who buys SMT games aren’t the friendliest towards brick and mortar retail.

Ultimately, there are more copies of Nocturne in the world, and that is the best thing of all. I also want to point out that our magnificent editor/site master bought the game for $95 on ebay not long ago, but he got the OST that came with the first print. On behalf of Jay, I give you all a giant middle finger and the smirk of a completionist.

Last night, I walked into a video game store that was swamped with trade-ins. I could barely make out my manager and another co-worker behind the counter for the stacks of NES games that were piled before them; it was like Christmas…of 1989. Classics like Ice Breakers, Ducktales, RC Pro-Am, and countless others littered the counter top as my geeky colleagues waded through processing all of the games in order to give our Santa Claus his grand total of trade-in credit that the store was bestowing upon him for his generous endowment.

In Germanic folklore, Santa was this skinny guy that dressed in green clothing and gave out gifts to good children while beating the bad ones. Kind of like a strung out father who would smack his kids around while waiting in line at the methadone clinic. For Dutch people, Santa was a guy who would come around and give out presents to deserving children while his helper, called Black Peter, would carry another bag to take away the bad kids. Finally, the American Santa is this chubby guy who wears a red suit and gives out presents to pretty much everyone because it would not be politically correct to exclude any child from Yule Tide bliss.

The Santa that walked into the video game store last night was slightly different from all of his peers in the gift giving profession. Our Santa was dressed in a gray wife-beater and had the physical appearance that can only be described as mildly creepy, think Uncle Fester combined with Chunk from The Goonies. Either way, who was I to complain about his mild weirdness, he was trading in some pretty sweet stuff.

It should be said here that in order to complete a trade-in transaction, we need to see some form of identification to keep on record just in case it comes up that the person trading in the games stole them from someone else. When we asked our Santa Claus for ID he said that he didn’t have a driver’s license (sleighs do not require a license to operate) but had his IDOC ID card. IDOC stands for the Idaho Department of Corrections so not only is our Santa Claus a bringer of gifts, he is also a guard at one of the state penitentiaries.

Wrong.

Santa whips out his ID and it was nuclear war orange with the word “INMATE” in bigger-than-God letters down the side of the card. Our bringer of gifts and good will was also a card carrying felon. In the back of my mind I knew where all of this was going but still held out hope that Santa had been either wrongly imprisoned or had only done time for a minor offense like robbing a liquor store. It was about this time that Santa’s brother walked up to remind Santa that he had an 8pm curfew and they needed to be going home. Now in a hurry to stay on the Nice List of his parole officer, Santa quickly made a couple of PS2 selections, paid for them, and exited the building.

Armed with the internet and my memory, I quickly made my way to the Idaho Department of Corrections homepage and found their searchable database of inmates. Being the observant guy that I am, I punched in the name and then inmate number that I gleaned from our Santa’s unique and very orange ID card. In the blink of an eye, my cheery sugar plum visions of Santa were turned into moldy and tattered visages of the past. Santa’s sled turned into a dented blue, 1980s GMC conversion van with red curtains, and Santa’s presents twisted into bags of Walmart bargain bin candy used to entice small children into his vehicle cum love nest (pardon the pun). Our Santa had just been released from prison for Lewd and Lascivious Conduct with a minor under the age of 16 and was on probation until 2018. Christmas will never be the same and the games he traded in are now labeled as “the rapist games” and must be handled gingerly, followed up by a thorough hand scrubbing when finished; don’t even think about turning a black light on around them.

To abate our frustration and disappointment, we video game store employees found a broken Guitar Hero guitar and used it to vent our angst against the brick wall of the exterior of the building. After destroying something beautiful we came back into the store to double-check our inventory of rapist Santa repellent and mace behind the counter.

Last week marked an interesting release on American shores, as Atlus shipped out Persona 3:FES. FES is both an expansion pack and a revision to the original P3 - it mainly serves as an epilogue chapter to the story, but was also served with the original game as a “director’s cut” that added new goodies to the entire quest.

This kind of release is very rare on consoles. For example, whenever Square releases an International Edition of a hit RPG, you can be sure this nation won’t see it. Yet for whatever reason (likely due to success of P3 last fall), Atlus decided to grace us with more of this excellent game, rather than leave Western fans out in the cold as happens so many times. Not only that, but the price is only $30! Of course, this decimates whatever high prices the original P3 might have held on eBay, but that isn’t any sort of price compared to what we’re getting.

Personally, I have yet to finish the damn game, but I still intend on looking for FES this afternoon (Best Buy had it released today for some reason). True I already paid $50 for it before. True I won’t get to FES any time in the near future. But dammit, someone has to look Atlus square in the eye and say “thanks for looking out for us”. And yes, they are looking out for the fans. If they could have released the P3 + FES package initially, I am sure they would have. The fact we got this at all is still a small miracle.

What can I say, I am becoming an Atlus Faithful.

I need to fill this post up with some more content, so I will bring up a discussion I had with Jay today. I got a text message from my roommate rejoicing over the fact that he was able to pick up a copy of GTA IV, something that surprised us both. You see, in order to get the game for free with left over holiday gift cards, he had to buy it at Gamestop, and as we all know, trying to buy any new game at the ‘Stop without a preorder is a losing gamble. I’m not sure what is more amazing; that he got it, or that he, I, and you have to worry about whether one of the biggest game retailers in America will have enough copies of the biggest game of 2008.

Fuck that jazz.

One thing that sets my store apart from other video games retailers is our game testing stations. Each of the two stores I flutter between during the week is equipped with just about every major gaming console made in the last twenty years and we encourage people to try out the games before they take them home. This also means that when it is slow, I pretty much play any game I want. Life is good. The other night the battle of the sexes erupted at my Xbox 360 test station.

These two high school kids were playing one of the Soul Caliber games and the girl was absolutely rocking this poor guy’s newly pubescent world. You see, this naive young man confidently entered into a contest of furious button mashing with a girl that had no clue how to play the game. Little did he know that almost all women have a secret power that enables them to totally dominate their male counterparts at video games in which they haven’t the slightest inkling how to play.

This mutant ability manifests most prominently in fighting and racing games; woe is the man who thoughtlessly enters into a couple rounds of Smash Brothers with a woman who has never touched a Nintendo controller. Round after round went by and you could see the caged fury building in the young man’s face. Soon, he smacked the controller down on the stand and declared that it was time to play a few Halo 3 deathmatches to prove that his testicles were still firmly attached to his nether region. The girl said that she had only played Halo a couple of times but felt that she could probably hold her own. I had a different idea.

When the frustrated lad approached my counter and asked for Halo 3, my co-worker, Teddy and I decided that Halo would not be a sufficient test of gaming prowess and a more apt title would need to be found. The solution was simple, when battling another for gaming supremacy there can be only one suitable arena in which to demonstrate your skill, the killing fields of Katamari Damacy. Neither of our gladiators were overly familiar with the title so that evened the playing field a bit and with a measure of trepidation the young and slightly demoralized gamer lad popped Beautiful Katamari into the system.

“What the hell is this?”

“What the hell is this?”

“WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?!”

“It’s Beautiful Katamari,” I replied.

“No, that is not what I meant. What kind of a freaking gay-ass game is this,” said the confused kid.

“That gay-ass game is one of the best franchises to hit console gaming in a long time.”

“You have got to be kidding me, this game may be one of the best games of all time if I was a fag.”

And with that comment I lost my temper a little. In a fit of verbiage, I think I said something about shanking him and jabbing him with a meat puppet if he didn’t watch his tongue and that the next time he came into the store he better be wearing armor because I was going to stick him like a pig for the insults he was hurling at one of my favorite games…and homosexuals…mostly my game. While I was half kidding, I think I may have scared the little tyke and within a couple of minutes he left the store and his ego without flexing his Halo might. The girl lingered for a while more before victoriously vacating the premises, leaving Teddy and I polishing our pimp sticks and sharpening our shivs behind the counter.