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Mass Effect may have close to a 400,000 words in its script.

Hoo boy.

I’m probably the only person who looks at this game and says “what fucking waste”. There is absolutely no reason for that much wordiness in a game. Did they think I came to their game to read four – five novels worth of text? This is the kind of stuff that drives me nuts, because people always seem to encourage them. I could deal with the dialogue in Planescape: Torment, because it was good and I read it at my own pace. Then Knights of the Old Republic came around, and Bioware wasted thousands of words, because I didn’t listen to a word of the excruciatingly slow spoken dialogue. →  Do the math.

I think it’s official that when SNK finally brings the Neo Geo goodness to the Wii Virtual Console, they have no excuse if some of their prime games don’t come out early. In an absolute explosion of Neo goodness, Gametap has a killer list of games coming down the pipleline, thanks to whatever massive effort they’re undertaking with the service. As of today you can play Metal Slug 1 and King of Fighters 94, but after that they’ll also be getting every Metal Slug up to 5, and every KOF up to 2003. In addition, they’ll be hosting the first two Art of Fightings, the first two Samurai Showdowns, the original Fatal Fury, and The Last Blade.

These are some of the best fighters on the system, and I’m absolutely stoked for them. →  Monster Reader 4

News today of a new action-adventure Soul Calibur game on the Wii. Very few details on it of course, but this pleases me nevertheless. I was devastated to see how messed up Soul Calibur 3 became because of the silly story segments and tactical-adventure nonsense they tried to cram down our throats. I would have loved to play with a sweet custom character, but not if it meant wading through ten hours of castle sieges, or losing twenty rounds in Tales of Souls so I could unlock twelve different capes in the shop (why the game unlocks things for losing, I do not know).

Of course, this new game doesn’t mean that an eventual Soul Calibur 4 won’t behave like 3, but I’m willing to guess that Namco realized they were trying to do two separate things in one game, and that this spinoff series will allow them to keep the adventure and story separate from the pure fighting.

Let’s talk about game sequels, specifically two sequels to two high profile games. The first is Fallout 3, which has been the subject of quite a few official announcements as of late to go along with all of the speculation. The second is the possible, but not confirmed Starcraft sequel, which may be an MMORPG. These two franchises have a lot in common: they’re both considered the pinnacle of their genres on the PC, they both get played constantly despite their increasing age, and they both have diehard fans that know exactly what they want in a sequel and will kill you if their demands aren’t met.

On one hand, Starcraft and Fallout fans can be a little more than annoying. →  Postlanser: Heritage of Read

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? →  [do not click]