posts by jay
jay

Off to a shaky start

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This is a little video of my Wii not working right. Any time I try to go to the Wii store to buy Zelda, it eventually locks up on me. The home button still works and the remote movement is still registered, but clicking on buttons ceases to do anything. Comcast has been dropping frequently today so it may be that the Wii doesn’t react well to momentarily losing its connection to the internet. Or it could be that my Wii is broken.

Here’s a pic of it doing this on a different screen. The field with the cursor, actually, all fields refuse to let me enter them.

 →  Read the rest

Do PS3 owners have small penises?

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“Well that’s because the wii sucks!!!! The only reason people want it is because they either never got thier dream Playstation 3 or they want it for Zelda. Apparently i think zelda aint worth 300 bucks with tax. I’ll take my chances with the ps3. Also i heard playstation 2 graphics almost outbeat wii graphics, and ain’t nothin close to the Playstation 3.”

This kind of clever repartee is easily found on any message board.

“Good for you, im glad you kids are excited about this.. maybe when youre old enough to get a job you can get a Ps3..like me.”

But something struck me about this post besides the poor punctuation. To some people, the PS3 is a status symbol. It’s expensive, shiny and new, and therefore owning it makes you cool. →  Read the rest

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 11.17.06

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Sony losing money on each PS3 sold
Selling consoles at a loss is nothing new; it nearly put Sega out of business. But selling a console for a loss of $240 or $300? Those are some big numbers, especially considering Microsoft and Nintendo are making profit on each console they sell. There are a few ways to look at Sony’s situation.

Now if the PS3 had looked like this, it would be worth the money.

The optimistic person would say, “Sony are giving us an awesome bargain and we should thank them by paying homeless people to wait in line for a PS3.” The pessimist would say, “If I want to play PS3 games, I’m forced to buy a friggin super computer with a disc drive that costs over $100 tacked on so they can get a leg up on the upcoming format war.” →  Read the rest

EGM takes a side in the console war

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Can the media change the outcome of an election? Who cares. The more important question is – Can the media impact console sales? Electronic Gaming Monthly’s newest issue has an article comparing the Wii to the PS3 (all or most of which is reprinted here). After each comparison, like hardware, control, games, etc. the author(s) pick a “winner.” The PS3 won more categories than the Wii but EGM promises the battle is not over yet; next issue they will pick the ultimate champion.
 

Numbers from December of ’03 say EGM has over 500 thousand subscribers. This is a decent number, but when considering that most people who run gaming sites read EGM, the numbers alone do not reflect the magazines influence.

So will the console they pick dominate the next generation because they picked it? →  Read the rest

The cost of gaming (or not gaming)

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This New Year’s, I’ll be in London. My vacation promises to be sweet, but something struck me earlier today. Does it count as regicide if the royal family is merely allowed to keep their castle for show? If you accidentally run down the Queen whilst driving the wrong way (which would be her fault in the first place for allowing people to drive on the left side of the street) does it count as vehicular regicide?

Also, if I didn’t go to England, I could afford a PS3. You must be saying, “What are you, a fucking idiot? The point of life is to experience new things, see new places, run over queens. It’ll do you good to get out of your bedroom and will give your forearm muscles some time to heal.” →  Read the rest

Yet another peculiar top 10 list

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Slightly (extremely) bitter about not having my stories picked up by the big sites, I scour Slashdot, Kotaku, etc for sub par stories that gets attention on a daily basis. Today’s highlight is a top 10 list (where’d they get the idea for this one?) on the “10 lamest game consoles, ever.” Ignore the fiery rage that builds within you when you see misplaced commas and other grammar atrocities. For now, focus on the gross injustice of including the Saturn amongst the Virtual Boy, CDi, 32X and N-Gage.

The guy who proclaimed Prince of Persia: Warrior Within one of the worst games of all time clearly had some input in forming this list. Please name for me the classics for the consoles on this list:

Action Max
N Gage
32X
Gizmondo

In turn, I will name amazing Saturn games: Guardian Heroes, NiGHTS, Panzer Dragoon, Panzer Dragoon Zwei, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Shining Force 3, Dragon Force, and Bomberman. →  Read the rest

Biggest losers in the world wait for the PS3

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According to Games Are Fun, a line for the PS3 has already formed in front of a Best Buy in Burbank, California. People have been waiting since at least Wednesday for a console that launches next Friday. If these people can afford to miss over a week of work for a PS3, can’t they just get one on eBay for $2000?

As someone who may end up waiting in a line for a Wii despite having no intentions of purchasing one, I may not have much right to insult these stupid people. If it makes a difference, I will be waiting for three hours against my will (stupid friends) and not for 216 hours.

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 11.10.06

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One of the worst Top Ten Worst Games of All Time lists
Top 10, 25, 50, whatever lists are one of my worst enemies. They are vacuous and a cheap excuse for content. Even an unnumbered list is significantly better because from the outset the author wasn’t just trying to fill a number of slots. This link is to one of the dumbest Top 10 lists I’ve seen in a while but since it’s posted on a major site, many big blogs picked it up. Oh, the injustice!

Significantly worse than Postal.

It seems as if the author of this list may not play games. He acknowledges that peoples’ opinions will differ and that it’s hard compiling a list of the worst games ever made, but that caveat doesn’t save him. →  Read the rest

What the dilly with the DS?

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I was psyched for a handful of recent DS releases but then the reviews came. Yes, reviews aren’t gospel, but they aren’t as worthless as fanboys would like you to believe (for an interesting case study on the power of denial, visit the Sega forums). These once promising DS games now look significantly less promising.

The first of the bunch is Children of Mana. I don’t know why I expected anything from this game after Legend of Mana sucked so hard. Perhaps it’s the small hope I still carry that one day there will be another game in the series as good as Secret of Mana. Most reviewers describe the game as a “slow,” or “boring,” dungeon crawl with barely any plot. It’s possible the action RPGs of my youth that I hold so dearly had the same shortcomings, but I am no longer 12. →  Read the rest

Metacritic loves popular sites

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This may be old news to many of you, especially since they even tell you on their About page, but Metacritic weighs reviews. Meaning they count a review more or less depending on how big the site the review came from is. This seems a little shady, but they at least don’t hide the fact. Here’s what tipped me off to some sort of mathematical incongruity.

Something struck me about the math. Mostly it was how (100 + 90 + 90 + 80) /4 = 90 and not 89. If CNET owns Gamespot and CNET owns Metacritic and Metacritic favors some sites over others, and CNET has competitors…well, isn’t this a possible conflict of interests?

Lame Discussion: To Pull a Review

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It’s been a while since the last discussion. The format will be the same as always; I just drop you into our chat room. Today we are talking about the pull of 1up’s Neverwinter Nights 2 review. If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, don’t worry, Horatio wasn’t, either. For those of you who would prefer to read opinions in a more traditional format, check out Craig’s editorial on this issue.

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Horatio: Before we start, I quickly read the article, but can someone do like a three sentence explanation of what happened?

Christian: Basically, Matt Peckham wrote a scathing review of NWN, 5/10. People thought it wasn’t a fair review, and 1up’s editorial staff pulled it. Later it was explained that their editorial process was a bit different for this one. →  Read the rest

As long as we’ve got each other

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Kirk Cameron was once a normal B actor. Then he found Jesus. Not in the standard “knowing you’re not alone in the universe, finding comfort through God when faced with tragedy, realizing men should help each other and love thy neighbor” way, though.

No. He is now a complete nutjob who roams LA in a sports car (What Would Jesus Drive?) looking for people to call liars and thieves. When he isn’t busy accosting strangers with the good news (which is that the stranger never has to see him again), he is flexing his intellectual muscle for the camera. So far on his TV show he has proven, with the help of Ray Comfort (based only on his name, he must be an ex-pornstar), that atheists have nightmares about bananas, that the Church of Satan PR guy is much more polite than he, and that orangutans are much, much stupider than people. →  Read the rest

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 11.3.06

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Halo movie indefinitely stalled
That a Peter Jackson backed Halo movie probably won’t get made despite the fact that Uwe Boll continually releases game based movies is beyond hilarious. Clearly, if there is a god he is evil, or maybe he just has a great sense of humor.

A scene from the upcoming Castlevania movie.

Castlevania movie coming
Odds are, this movie will be slightly better than Van Helsing. The problem is that Van Helsing is solidly on “so bad it’s good” ground, and so Castlevania, by being better, will be worse. Castlevania’s only hope is to be crappier than Van Helsing (or actually good, but let’s not get crazy) and therefore better. This all makes sense, right?

PS3 launching in Hong Kong and Taiwan on November 17
As an American, it is my god given right to believe I am more important than any damn foreigner. →  Read the rest

Review – Disgaea

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As I’ve grown older I have become more acutely aware that compromises are ubiquitous in game design. I once raised common questions like, “Why don’t they make this game longer,” “Why isn’t this game more open ended,” and “Why isn’t there more dialog in this game?”

A longer game time may dilute the story and make gameplay tedious. An open ended game is less focused and loses narrative potency, and more dialog can slow down fast paced gameplay. I now realize that for every obvious improvement, there is at least a small case to be made for keeping a design choice unchanged.

If you look closely, you’ll notice some soldiers measuring their height relative to their enemies and others looking through their item packs for healing herbs.

When I was younger I longed for complexity in games. →  Read the rest

Best Game Ever – The history of puzzle games leading up to Baku Baku

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Some day in the far off future, Tetris will be played with six screens. One screen will feature the gameplay while the other five will show images of unrelated games being automatically played. All five other games will be superior to Tetris.

Once upon a time there was an evil Communist engineer named Alexey Pajitnov. Don’t bother asking Alexey if he is an evil Communist because, like all evil Communists, he signed a blood oath with Stalin (and possibly Hitler) to hide his menacing ways should Soviet Russia ever fall. Anyway, Alexey was a genius and in 1985 he bestowed upon the world a video game he liked to call Destroy American Freedoms. This was later renamed Tetris.

The premise of Tetris was to line up American freedoms in order to destroy them. →  Read the rest

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 10.27.06

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The proud owner of four Xbox 360s.

360 breaks all sorts of records in Australia
Watch out Master System, there’s a new kid in Australia. By selling over 100,000 units, the 360 has become the fastest selling console down under. The first European settlers in Australia were criminals and we have Australians to blame for those rambunctious reptile lovers, Crocodile Dundee and the Crocodile Hunter (“that’s not a terrible accent, THIS IS A TERRIBLE ACCENT”). Clearly Microsoft must take these facts into account before celebrating the good news.

Gamasutra interview Clover’s Inaba
Prepare yourself for an only marginally related rant. Oh, and read the interview, it’s interesting.

The way the games media goes from one golden boy of creativity to the next is pretty odd. Why do gamers get three or four different interviews from Inaba but not one from Takahashi, Ueda, or Mizuguchi? →  Read the rest

How we remember games

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Our long-term opinion of a game may have little to do with how good a game actually is. How we remember games is almost as important as the games themselves. The way we remember any medium greatly shades our opinions, whether it be a game, a book or a movie. Games, unfortunately, share certain properties of the other two media that make each prone to being colored by memory.

First, I will explain what about books and movies are different from video games in regards to how we remember them. Books are highly personal experiences; no one can walk by and share some of a book with you. All of the action, drama, character’s introspection and so on happens in your mind and in your imagination. In this regard, they are different from both movies and games. →  Read the rest

A tale of E3, education and a fairy

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Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time I worked with a magical 60 year old fairy. She saved me from the mundane tasks I was hired to perform and charged me with studying the field of video game education.

Suddenly, work became almost pleasant and thoughts of suicide (through suffocation by books) were pushed to the back of my subconscious. Little did I know, the Middle East was secretly and silently watching, waiting for a moment to pounce and destroy my happiness.

With the fairy behind me, I organized a presentation on video games and education for librarians across the country (or at least East Coast). Despite my inability to articulate my thoughts coherently during the question and answer sessions (though it may have been academics inability to ask questions that weren’t abstruse and pompous), the overall presentation was successful enough to secure me tickets to E3 in Los Angeles. →  Read the rest

Weekly News We Care About Wrap Up – 10.20.06

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PS1 games downloadable on PS3
Actual good news for Sony? It seems so. The company plans to have their entire PS1 catalogue available, sans the games that are too messy contract-wise. What are the odds they port some Japanese only titles for American downloading? Yeah, zero, I know.

Have stock in Sony?

Sony profit forecast not very encouraging
Among the reasons for the lowered forecast were lower than expect PSP sales, higher than expected Cell processor costs and the lowered PS3 price. If they really needed to stabilize themselves, why not just put out a 360 clone? If the PS3 cost $400 and had the PlayStation exclusives the PS2 had, Sony would’ve easily maintained their #1 position. I guess big risks sometimes pay off, but how about Sony release more big risk games instead of a big risk console? →  Read the rest

Top 50 game journalists?

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Next Gen has compiled a list of the top 50 game journalists. I am outraged and deeply insulted to have been left off of this list. Of the 10 friends I’ve shown this site to, I guarantee at least half would believe English is my native language. My Shakespearean use of the words “douche bag” calls out to be recognized and honored by not just pathetic gamers, but by the entirety of media and Western Civilization.

I take shelter in knowing the list is a mere popularity contest. My posts of “fuck sony u suk” on various message boards may be popular, but those are done under the pseudonym gangstagama69, not my proper journalist name jay. Had Next Gen’s list focused solely on mind blowing awesomeness, there is no doubt losers like Adam and Morgan from that shitty review show would not be included. →  Read the rest