Weekend Wreckage: Cho Ren Sha

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What are you doing this weekend? Wrapping your face over an advanced warfighter? Getting ob-trapped in Gears? Maybe a bit of the old ‘running around flipside trying to find a heart pillar for 18 hours’ business?

Maybe you’ve got It in your head that, much like Uno before it, settling Catan will be that much cooler on your plasma.

You may be right, to be sure. I, too, have settled myself some Catan. I’m a regular Catan colonization specialist. I think being me, and settling Catan, nets an achievement on xBox Live. I think I have that one, and I think it is because I’ve settled Catan.

But this weekend, as I do every third weekend of every month of every year on this island Earth, I will be playing Cho Ren Sha. →  Read or die.

Wii is Just a TG16. With a wand. And a bunch of other crap.

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Look, I get that you’ve read it all over the place, myriad times, and by sometimes reputable people. I have too. Your friends have said it, which may be why you say it and perhaps, conversely, your saying of it has influenced those friends of yours that had not yet begun to say it.

It has become a meme impeditive of the correct progress of our gaming culture. It has inspired at once plagues of ire and embarrassing fanboy uprisings. It has become a badge pinned to the lapels of those who want to sound as though they have their finger on the pulse of an industry and has become a point of derision among those who feel an inbuilt brand loyalty virgin to the realities of a very real historical penchant for near-failure. →  Please sir, can I have some more?

Game Over: Not That Funny


Game Over, Man.

Like any good ‘lamer, I troll this here series of tubes with an eagle eye on gaming news and other related goodies. Whilst doing so last week I was besieged by persistent incestuous linking and goings on about the above video. I watched the video. When it was over I watched it again to make sure I hadn’t missed some hidden genius or arcane humor delivery initiative I had not had the mettle to have noticed on the first go-round

The whole week this went on. My RSS reader was brimming with links to this video and almost all of the comments seemed to be near sickeningly positive. A writer for a popular gaming editorial website, I was faced with a challenge:

Do I hold my tongue and starve this beast the select few who might come to it by my mention of it, having somehow missed the near ridiculous barrage of geek-love it has received in the last seven days? →  Xenoblade Articles X

Wear Your SHMUP. Wear it Proud.

ThunderForce222There are those of us to whom all your base are belong. Those of us whose love for all things SHMUP is insurmountable but for the clawing beckon for sustenance and expulsion. Those of us, even, who might be sated by a hailstorm of rapid-fire alone.

We are the bullet eaters. We are like you in many ways. We are unlike you in that 1080p means little to us. We can be sustained by as little as 16 mighty bits, and even those bits can be split between two processors as long as one is dedicated to calculating hit-box geometry.

We walk among you. We slip through the crowds; our collision detection tight and our eyes peeled for a volley of hellfire. →  Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Bore me and I sleep.