You may have seen some of the recent news pieces on how Blockbuster is attempting to get more aggressive with its game offerings, starting with putting GTAIV on their coveted front wall of new releases, the first time for a game. An interesting step to be sure, but I had to take a trip down to my waterfront store to see what else was changing.

I have written in the past about this Blockbuster and its lack of quality. Few new games and a lack of organization drove me away from it as a rental avenue. About two months ago this started changing for the better. The games section was reorganized and expanded, and for once it looked like it was supposed to. The store also started selling PS3s, and for a little while actually had two 80GB models (which I would have jumped on if my taxes were done earlier). Then Guitar Hero games and controllers trickled in. There were preorders and midnight releases for Halo 3, Smash Bros. and GTAIV. The lesson here is that Blockbuster had already been making this change slowly and quietly during the year, but after my last visit, there were even more surprises. The games section is even cleaner and bigger, wrapping around to the other side of the aisle so that they could include a monstrous amount of DS games. The front wall not only has games for rent, but games for sale; there is a small section of the newest releases for you to pursue. There are even more PS3s, and in some bizzare, Twilight Zone sight, were three Wii boxes.

Imagine that. You are in the middle of suburbia, and all of your Gamestops and big box stores have not had a Wii in months. Or maybe you are like me, in the city, with no game retailers in sight without a 30 minute walk downtown. Wii Fit is making it even harder for you to find that most coveted of all consoles. And you find a Wii for you and the kids as you grab the latest romantic comedy to torture your husband with. Or maybe you’re cruising around the store with your teenage friends, dressed in as much black and or hipster plaid, fresh off of buying a new pack of Camels and hoping to rent Juno from this stupid fucking store that you hate but visit anyway. You see Rock Band there, or maybe some other game your barely tolerable nerd acquaintance recommended to you. You buy it, and maybe now you have a reason to come back.

This is how Blockbuster can succeed. They must become the one place that you would never expect to find a gaming treasure, but lo and behold, actually has it. They must become the place where you can preorder - just in case - and know your copy will be there, because everyone else put a deposit with Gamestop, and no one will hassle you because the clerks don’t care enough about games to sell you more shit. It has to strategically place junky Wii games in the spot where the kids will see it and the soccer mom picks it up to shut their traps for the entirety of a weekend. Do this, and Blockbuster will succeed. Lord knows they need to, as their financials aren’t getting any better. In short, you don’t need to go there to get your gaming fix. But if you are in the area, or stopped in to grab a flick, you might be pleasantly surprised.

Finally, Blockbuster has one other trick up its sleeve. They brought back their Gamer’s Pass, which for $20 (per month, I assume) is “all you can eat”, one game at a time. Astute readers will note that this is slightly more than a two game rental from Gamefly. The answer for this is corporate greed of course, and yet I don’t really care. You see, snail mail is slow, even when it is first class priority. There are chances of the mail getting lost. A trip to Blockbuster meanwhile is the length of a cigarette and a half. If I get bored with a game, I get a new one. And another, as quickly as I need. Instant gratification is worth the extra few bucks. Hell, with a string of 8 hour action games I may get more than my money’s worth in a month than with two titles from Gamefly. Expect possible repercussions of this new offering in the future.

I recently played Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect for the first time. Both seemed to be very good games in the ten minutes I dedicated to each (reviews indicate that with prolonged exposure my liking of Ass Creed will diminish and my enjoyment of Ass Effect will swell). When I finally cave in and buy a 360 I will likely pick up both.

Still, I am somewhat startled by the way many people view these games. Beyond confirming graphics are largely irrelevant to my enjoyment of a game, I realized that almost every game is clearly evolutionary, even great games. Despite fighting the urge to be reactionary, the fact that these games are praised so heavily forced me to pay special attention to each game mechanic. The result left me with a mix of “ha, told you these aren’t as good as you thought!”, “my god I am so grumpy I’m denying myself the obvious pleasures of these games”, and “at least I can write something boring about all of this.”

Here is a brief rundown -

Assassin’s Creed is Thief plus Price of Persia with a hint of Zelda and lime. People noticing dead bodies and much of the feel comes from Thief, the architecture and excellent climbing stuff comes from Prince of Persia, riding everywhere on a damn horse is reminiscent of many games, specifically from the Zelda series, and diving off structures into lava while an alien bursts from your stomach comes from Alien 3. I haven’t noticed the battle system anywhere else so I am willing to accept they didn’t directly lift it from another game, though there are thousands of titles I haven’t played so who knows.

Mass Effect’s lauded dialog system reminds me of Indigo Prophecy’s dialog system and of the simple choose-a-word-to-discuss system from the Ultima games. Besides being obviously descended from KOTOR, other specific bits reminded me of classics - the huge amount of info on every character, race, location, etc. is straight out of X-Com and the large number of planets to mine on seems Starflight inspired. While discussing the betrayal of some important alien I had a major Fallout flashback and in a moment of lucidity I realized that despite the 3D models and camera (which I hate, by the way) nothing had really changed in Western RPGs.

Now the caveat is that many Western RPGs, at least the Bioware/Black Isle ones, are amazingly well written. Almost all games, even classics, are compilations of earlier ideas slightly reinvented and one or two, if any, new ideas. What often makes a game great is how it combines specific elements, and like when preparing a meal, it is not necessary to invent new ingredients to end up with something spectacular. I do not want to begrudge either Assassin’s Creed nor Mass Effect and I still look forward to playing both. I simply want to suggest people who are not well versed in games watch their hyperboles.

Our missions are the following - I will stop being reactionary and fight my desire to hate everything popular (highschool is over, afterall) and you will go play more games and by doing so realize nothing is as impressive as it seems. And then kill yourself.

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.