News I Care About: Beta

Don’t worry folks, this is not a replacement of the actual VL weekly news. Its just a blog entry with a clever twist. There have been a few stories I’ve been meaning to discuss, without actually discussing them. So why not just lump them together into one MEGATON (copyright IGN) batch?

– Tekken 6 has finally been announced with some actual screenshots and videos of the game in action. Not long ago I wrote an article about the Tekken series and my attempt to come to grips with it. Part of that article involved reconciling the fact that Namco can’t seem to make an original character design, not with so many other franchises to steal from. I thought I had made my peace, but Namco couldn’t leave well enough alone, and now I’m having my doubts after seeing new character Leo in action. C’mon guys, its one thing to use a generic character archetype, but this is getting pathetic.

– The beginning of this week saw a huge clearence sale at Best Buy, with some Gamecube games going for as low as two dollars. Game clearances have gone on for a long time now in big box electronics stores, but only in the last few years have they become something of an event. I know it may be tempting for some of you to go out to all the stores in an hour radius whenever these sales come around, but I’ve realized that its best to leave them alone. Two reasons why:

1) The sales are meant to get rid of old stock; none of them are getting fresh shipments of any of these titles. There’s no guarantee they’ll even have any of the games on the list.

2) Thanks to the communities surrounding sites like cheapassgamer.com, it has become almost impossible for any adult with a regular job/college schedule to take advantage of a clearance. Aside from collectors, who may buy two copies of a game but no more, a truly pathetic group has arisen that will go to a store when it opens, buy as many games as they can afford, and either sell them on ebay (to the suckers who miss out) or trade them in at local EB’s and Gamestop’s, where the measly trade-in prices are actually a profit compared to what was paid on clearance. Unless you can get to a store by 10:00, you have almost no chance of getting anything but scraps, all thanks to a bunch of grey market merchants with no job or nothing better to do than rip people off.

Bottom line, unless you’re passing a store on your way to somewhere, don’t bother with clearance-mania. I’ve tried many times, and only once did I ever score something decent. 9 times out of 10 you are only going to waste time and fuel.

– Command and Conquer 3 demo is out. After all these years, its great to see that the biggest names in Real Time Strategy are CnC, Blizzard, and Chris Taylor. And people wonder why I don’t give a shit about the genre.

– Pixel, the man behind Cave Story, has released an almost complete version of his new game, a shoot ’em up called Guxt (thanks to the fantastic selectbutton for the heads up). I’ll let you all decide what to make of it. Some call it simple and elegant (you have one gun and that’s it), others say its too simple for its own good. Great music and sprite work as usual though.