Blog

Dear Bethesda,

It’s Christian. I hope you have been well. It has been a long time since we played together. I know those few hours in Morrowind weren’t too exciting, but I still appreciated how hard you tried. I also saw you play with some friends in Oblivion, and they all had a lot of fun.

That is why I am looking forward to our next play date. I hear you are bringing Fallout 3. I can’t wait. In case you didn’t know, Fallout is my favorite RPG series ever. I like it so much, I’d rather play them again and again than play some other RPGs for the first time. Still, I hope that we can have as much fun with Fallout 3. It shouldn’t be too hard, right Bethesda? All it needs is a twisted sense of humor and a staggering amount of freedom. Okay, so there’s a bit more than that, but those would be a great start. →  Lose belly fat now!

It recently occurred to me that I have a great deal of pithy wisdom to pass out, but often cannot express such wisdom in a detailed format as would traditionally befit this site. As a result, this knowledge is lost, much like many of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the QA department of Firaxis. To staunch the hemorrhaging of this critical knowledge, I bring you my irregular Nuggets of Wisdom, where I will give quick shout-outs to games, concepts, society–whatever I feel like. You are to take these nuggets and to cling to them like the final acorn a squirrel devours in a harsh winter, not knowing when the next meal will come. You will get extra points for contradicting me, and even more points for worshiping my mighty e-peen.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

A good friend of mine (actually several) have gotten back into WoW in preparation for the release of the next expansion. Blizzard has apparently created a variety of incentives for people to level up to the pre-expansion max and get ready for the joy ride that will be their newest expansion, merrily shitting upon their existing customer base by devaluing their hard work. →  Rayman Reading Rabbids

There is no question that music/rhythm games have become huge sellers across all demographics. In fact, they may just be as popular as Madden and company. With that success comes a small problem: retailers are stuffed to the gills with music games. Their boxes are often big and clunky, and there simply isn’t enough shelf and floor space for all of them.

As MTV blogger Patrick Klepek sharply points out, this issue may affect the games themselves. Walmart and other big retailers are very powerful in this industry. If they choose not to sell a niche game, no one is crying, but if you are trying to make something that could appeal to the entire market, you need to be everywhere. If Wallyworld and others decide to put a strict limit on their music games, then up and coming developers may find their chances squandered as they are denied shelf space. The MTV blog indicates that in a meeting with Walmart execs, XS games personnel were given the thumbs up for making the controller to their new Popstar Guitar game a Wiimote shell. →  Reading. Reading never changes.

Do we have to?
I hope that the delay in the World of Warcraft movie (which apparently is still being planned) is a result of them deciding to not make it about Orcs and Wizards and all that crap but instead, about the broken marriages, child neglect, olestra o.d.’ing and all that stuff that goes on when people spend all their days trying to get more powerful in a game that has no point and no “end.”

Oh wait that’s already a South Park episode. I guess I’m not that funny. :(

Ok well maybe the hero could be some mama’s-basement-dwelling gamer who gets sucked into the magical WoW world like in TRON and The Last Starfighter and all those other wonderful family classics. And then the movie goes on for two years and nothing really ever happens.

LittleBigPlanet is about a Planet that was raised by Indians, starring that guy from the Simon & Garfunkel album
I guess we all like pretty sorta-2d platformers because they’re all artsy now, and the people who make them are geniuses. →  Devil May Read 2

The October Nintendo conference, held close to the Tokyo Games Show because Nintendo are jerks and won’t go to the TGS, was received better by gamers than their last E3 show. Among the new titles shown off were Wii Punch Out, Mario & Luigi 3 for the DS, a Klonoa remake for the Wii, a Trace Memory sequel for Wii, and most importantly, Sin and Punishment 2. Beyond the slew of new games, mostly focused at the core market (us), they also announced that they would be refitting Cube games with Wii controls. Donkey Konga and Pikmin are among the confirmed reworks.

The problem with all of these nice announcements is those of us in the West have no assurance these titles will make the trip. Sin and Punishment 2 was confirmed, and Punch Out will obviously make it, but what about the smaller Wii titles like Dynamic Slash, Cosmic Walker, Endless Ocean 2, and Spawn Smasher, also all announced at this year’s show? →  What can change the nature of a post?

For reasons and in ways I need not delve into here, I made the sky open up and rain money down upon me. Lots and lots of money. Enough money to get me out of debt and leave me with almost a grand to disperse however I saw fit. I could have done many things with this leftover cash: I could have bought new tires for my car that desperately needs new tires, I could have paid off all of this upcoming semester of school, but instead, I bought a Playstation 3. I am Yoda wise.

I didn’t just go out and get any old PS3 either, I had to get one that was backwards compatible with PS2 games and so my only option was the $500, 80gig Metal Gear Solid bundle. The funny part is that I have absolute no concrete reason as to why I bought a PS3. I wanted a Blu Ray player that was firmware upgradeable and the Playstation 3 is one of the few on the market. →  Illiterates hate her! Click to read this one weird trick.

Sony’s PSP has proven that if there’s one thing that the Japanese love, its Monster Hunter Portable. Seeking to capitalize on the success of this absolute sensation, Sega’s finally ported a version of Phantasy Star over to the device. It’s funny, back when the PSP was announced; I felt that Phantasy Star Online, a game that at the time was dominating my free time without a shred of mercy, would have been a perfect fit for the newly conceived handheld.

Years later I get a mildly skewed version of my wish in the form of what amounts to Phantasy Star Universe on a handheld. For those keeping score, Phantasy Star Universe was a largely uninspired sequel to PSO featuring a forgettable story mode, needlessly complicated coop play, cumbersome equipment creation system, and a criminally bad theme song.

Phantasy Star Portable actually promised to remedy many of the issues that plagued its predecessor, that combined with the idea of Phantasy Star on the go were all I needed to take the plunge, no matter how limited my understanding of Japanese! →  Drakenread 2

This weekend, Steam is having a half off sale on all id Software games. That means you can get classics like the Commander Keen series for less than the price of a Starbucks latte. If you really want to be thorough, the id Super Pack is also part of the sale, meaning for 35 bucks you can get every Doom, Quake 1-3, Wolfenstein, Heretic and Hexen. Its a ton of games for a sweet price, and no matter how little or lot I have played some of these games, I realized I haven’t paid much for the id games I have played. It was time to salute this fine company, as well as get a huge chunk of FPS history in one convenient location.

In this day and age, where piracy is almost the norm for PC games and hardly an afterthought for old games, paying for anything pre-Quake might seem like an outrage. After all, all the old id graphics engines up to Quake 3 have been released under open source licenses. →  Michigan: Article from Hell

So there I was, in Japan, wandering about in the gamer’s wonderland that is Akihabara. I had purchased a PS3 shortly before my trip, planning to make use of the device’s lack of region coding to return triumphantly with all manner of bizarre import games and blu-ray anime.

Things did not go as planned.

It seems that anime on blu-ray will set you back well over $80 per disk and the PS3 has yet to receive the influx of “oh, that shit is so crazy that it’s NEVER coming out in the US” titles.

But they did have Kenzan.

Kenzan is a pseudo-sequel (maybe prequel?) to Sega’s critically acclaimed, albeit not tremendously successful Yakuza series. This time taking place in the 1600s and putting you in the shoes of an identical-looking ancestor (Sega laughs in the face of basic genetics!) of the series’ protagonist.

The first thing I need to get out of the way is that I do not, in any way, speak what could be called “Conversational” Japanese, I speak “just enough to order food in Tokyo and ask someone if they speak English” Japanese. →  Disaster Readport