What am I, Peter Parker?

Okay, so I pretty much had *such* a bad day today that it warrants an entire blog post. Here we go.

Last night, I realized that I actually had no idea when I worked this morning. No big deal I said, I'll just get up right at ten tomorrow and call them, because I know that I don't open. So I call, and the dude I work with who picks up the phone tells me I come in at 2:00pm. Fantastic, I think. I get to sleep a couple more hours, get up, and have plenty of time to get there ready and refreshed. So I plop my head back on the pillow, safe in the knowledge that the next few hours are all mine.

Here comes 11:30, and the phone rings. Before I even look at it, before I even reach for it, I know what's happened. The same dude who told me I come in at 2:00 goes "Uh, you were supposed to be here at 11:00". Mother*fucker*. So instead of having plenty of time to get everything I need done this morning at my own pace, I'm scrambling to get to work as soon as I can. I tell myself "okay, I'm not skipping breakfast AND waiting for the two people I work with to take their lunch before I can have my first food of the day, I won't be eating until Four Goddamned O' Clock if I do that. I'm already late, fuck it. I'll stop and get some food so I don't have to take a lunch break".

As if someone somewhere was trying his best to drive home the point to me that it is futile for me to ever plan ahead and get my shit together, not even that went right. I order my food, and pull up to the window to see some very confused mexicans. I thought to myself "Wuh oh, I better check to see if I get what I actually ordered when they hand me my food". To give you some idea of how my mind works, between getting my food, buckling back up, and thinking about what I'm going to say to my boss when I actually show up, I drive off with my unchecked food, fries in my mouth regardless of the mental note I made not thirty seconds earlier.

Sure enough, when I get to the parking lot to wolf down my sandwich, it's not only wrong, it's the exact opposite thing of what I ordered. I ordered a large angus bacon fuck you burger, and what I got was a grilled chicken pussy sandwich on a wheat bun. Fantastic.

Had that been the worst part of my day, I would have gotten off light.

Work was largely uneventful, other than getting my much, much needed check early and shoving it into the back pocket of my pants, and a period near the end of my shift where a dad and his brood of like five kids, all under the age of 8, just came in to play or something. To learn about luggage? The dad didn't want anything or wasn't there to look, he was just there to supervise while his kids explored the store or whatever the lesson for the day was.

Now, there are a couple of you guys who read this who actually have kids. A couple more of you are married and will have kids very soon. If you only listen to one thing I have to say in my entire life, listen to this: In public, your kids are not cute and stores are not learning centers and playgrounds. Don't wait and see if they behave themselves, and our places of business do not exist to facilitate your precious moments. Even your most well behaved darling little angels leave a wake of destruction behind them while making noise the entire time. If you simply don't care that you're forcibly exposing everyone around you to what is basically a retarded mutant with poor impulse control, you are a complete tool.

People who have kids say "You don't understand!". You know what? Fuck you. My dog is a little bastard monster. I love him to pieces, but I completely understand why no one else does. He is the most poorly behaved dog in the entire world, a joyful whirlwind of slobber and tongue and jumping and pawing. I would no more take that dog out in public than I could shoot lasers out of my toes. What you self absorbed parents don't understand is that until your kid is about 9 or 10 and can actually start speaking sentences that people can understand and are about actual things, they are no different from my dog. They're not people, they're just incredibly important pets. Actually, they're worse because they have opposable thumbs.

In case being a parent somehow annihilates the part of the brain that thinks about the world around you, I'm going to tell you the correct way to handle your kids when you're out in public, and no, this is not up for debate. You get IN, you get your SHIT, and you get OUT. Do you understand? You treat it like a Black Ops commando mission, all screaming "GO GO GO HUSTLE HUSTLE". When you have a kid, your days of going to a mall and shopping for nine goddamned hours are over for the next *eighteen years*. When kids start whining and complaining and getting fussy, that is your signal to GET THE FUCK OUT. Drop your SHIT, get to the CAR, and get HOME. That means that you have kept the kid at the mall or the store or out or whatever far too long. You have completely forgotten and ignored what it was like to have the attention span and energy fluxes of an 8 year old and that is YOUR fault, not the kid's, and trying to solve the problem with some scolding and stern looks is just going to lead to a scenario where you and everyone around you loses. Did you not get to decide which pair of pumps you wanted? Did you not get to peruse the clearance racks at all your stores? Did you not get to have a leisurely stroll down to the food court and enjoy some ice cream? Tough shit. Get your brood and your shit and get to your car, your mall trip is done.

AAAAAAAAAnyway, so I go home. My roommate has his brother and another chick over, and said chick has made some dessert stuff. Pastries and cake and such. So we put the plate down on this little footstool thing we have and dig in. Halfway through, Zack (the big oaf) is trying to be funny, but manages to actually knock the entire plate of dessert... Directly onto my dick. Smack center on the crotch of my pants. *Absolutely Radical*.

Not really that big a deal, as the pants were already dirty and going into the wash. So I throw the pants and a load of laundry into the washer, and hang out with my guests for a while. After the wash is done, I reach into the back pocket of my pants, and Son Of A Bitch.

I washed my check. It was utterly obliterated. Saying that I needed that check desperately is an understatement. Having it taken away literally destroys my entire life for the next 2 weeks, maybe longer than that. If I have any hope of saving myself, I have to temporarily grab six hundo from the First National Bank of Mom just to make rent.

Now, I want to leave you with this little bit of helpfulness: This post is a formal test of the Fucking Douchebag Early Alert System. If you read this post and at any point said "Well, if you had just done this or that, that wouldn't have happened", congratulations. Call your parents, because you have just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of DickSuckery. On your way to the award ceremony, please see the Queen of England to get Knighted into the Royal Order of Missing The Goddamned Point On Account Of Being An Asshole.

Every single one of my problems today arose from someone fucking up directly at me, as if fucking up was a weapon you could aim. If you said "well if you just planned ahead", you're fucking retarded because you missed how I DID plan ahead and it didn't goddamned matter. Really, what people mean when they say shit like that is "Don't make mistakes", in which case eat ten cases of dicks. I hope the mistake YOU make gets your mom killed. I can plan ahead in order to lessen my own screwups, but I can't plan ahead to fix other people's screwups. If you said "Haha, sucks for you asshole", then non-sarcastic congratulations, you're still an actual human being who realizes that when life and people decides to fuck you in the browneye, there's very little you can do about it.

Oh Man I Needed This

Man, gaming news and personal news I want to blog about has been bone goddamned dry these past few months. No one's being a jackass that needs to be put in their place, no games have come out to rant OR rave about, and nothing's happened to me that I really want to talk about.

Then comes this little gem. For those of you who no likie clickie, that there is an article about how former members of the game company Free Radical blamed the utter failure of their big PS3 exclusive Haze on not fully understanding the PS3 hardware at the time. This is hard for me to do, because Free Radical did the Timesplitters games which are genius, incredibly well done, and some of the only FPS's I would consider owning on a console. They're one of the good guys, or were until Haze was released. Haze gave them a dick-punching from whence they never truly recovered, and you know what? Serves 'em right. I'll explain why.

Haze wasn't fraught with technical glitches. It wasn't graphically uninpressive, although the flamethrower looked like shit. It didn't have a terrible framerate or shitty particle effects or lack of physics or clipping issues or missing textures or any of that. Haze wasn't absolutely savaged in the gaming press because of any technical issues at all. It was torn limb from limb because it was an absolutely boring, derivative pile of shit. It was clearly Free Radical trying to give the PS3 their Halo, and it showed. To be fair, Haze featured a very clever, if obvious, twist midway through the game. Your main character, a be-armored space marine charged with rooting out jungle guerilla bad guys and mainlining superdrugs starts to see that the bad guys might not really be so bad after all and he may be on the wrong side. Thereafter you start shooting the Busy Bee Men instead of staring out the other side of the helmet.

It would have been a novel idea had they followed through or thought about it at all, but they didn't. Your armored, drugged up Bee Marines should be nigh unstoppable armored terminators, and switching over to the guerilla side should have changed the gameplay completely, forcing you to be more sneaky and smart since you're (supposedly) weaker. They didn't care about doing any of that though. They were much too busy trying to ape Halo and Gears of War in any way they could, and THAT'S what lead to Haze being a pile of shit. It wasn't a dense programming interface that said to a room full of seasoned professionals "We are actively going to make a game where we eschew all creativity in favor of making an FPS featuring armored people with the same tired pistol, machine gun, shotgun, flamethrower weapon selection. We are going to do our very best to introduce no new gameplay concepts whatsoever in a genre that is already saturated to its limit. We aren't going to even make it a third person shooter with a cover system, even though even that at this point would be boring and derivative. We are however, going to go out of our way to include a mandatory vehicle section even though everyone on earth hates those. Our goal is to knock off and sell out just as hard as we possibly can, all the time, every hour on the hour. Why? Because Sony dropped a truckload of money at our door and said 'we would like a Halo too please', so we are going to 'me too' all the way to the bank". No, you Fallen Angel Fuckwits, had you the balls and the good common sense to actually include something different and interesting in your game, the struggle with the PS3 dev kit would have mattered little.

Shortly thereafter, Free Radical was bought for a song and absorbed by Crytek, makers of the impossibly beautiful Crysis games. Consindering the turn they took with Haze, that's really the perfect place for them. This way, they can make gorgeous yet creatively bankrupt games for all three platforms that sell marginally well until the end of time. Never again will they have to strain that pesky little imagination muscle.

Okay, really now?

Okay, so there's this. In case you're a non-clicker-reader, that link talks about yet another irritating outsider writing up a looney article about racism in games. "Why is it looney?" you might ask, heart all a-flutter. Not because there's not racism in games, oh no. It's because the examples they pick out are absolutely, one hundred percent off the mark and racist free. Let's take a quick look, shall we?

The first Racism In Games outbreak I heard of was when early footage of Resident Evil 5 was shown. It basically showed our hero Chris Redfield shooting a bunch of angry black people. If you were just given the clip out of context and were the kind of black person constantly on the lookout for any sort of an affront to your skin color so you could feel like you're a part of the Special Victims Give Me Attention Group, then the video probably looked pretty bad to you. However, let's look at it in context:

It stars Slab of Man Chris Redfield as the controllable main character, who is white as the driven snow. He is white because he is from Colorado. In case there are people here who are not aware, Colorado is home to a total of four black people. Chris has lots of experience with viral outbreaks that turn people crazy and deadified, so he's called in to Africa to deal with with the situation when one rears its shambling head. Now, i'm not on the Capcom team, but i'm pretty sure they chose Africa because that place is home to every single massively horrifying and deadly disease this world has ever seen. See: Ebola, AIDS, Nigerian Email Spam. Turns out, as is usually the case in the Resident Evil universe, in order to sort this mess out and stay alive, Chris has to shoot a lot of infected people in the face. Now, I have it on very good authority from an African-native friend of mine (Hi Rachel!) that there happen to be quite a few black people in Africa. Ergo (and now try to follow me here, easily offended attention seekers), Chris is going to be shooting a lot of black motherfuckers in the face. I would also like to point out that not every person that is infected that Chris shoots in the face is a black person, as it takes place in South Africa and that is home to a fairly sizeable international contingent.

Now, let me point out a couple things here: First off, Capcom is a Japanese company, and Resdient Evil is made by Japanese people. Trust me: if Capcom was actually going to do something racist, you would fucking know it, as Japanese people to this day have no fucking clue about anything resembling racial sensitivity. It stems from the fact that there's only one race on their little island. They don't have any black people at all (well, that's not true, they have Bob Sapp). This leads me gracefully into my next point: By being whiny little attention faggots, they made Capcom make the game WAY more racist than it was before.

What Capcom ended up doing was including a black sidekick named Sheva to tag along with Chris. This seemed to quell the uprising, which is maximumly silly. "Now a black person is shooting black people as well, so there goes all the racism" is a retarded sentence. What these twats inadvertantly ended up doing was basically forcing Capcom to create and flesh out an African native black person, which is a recipe for culturally insensitive hilarity. Amazingly, Sheva on her own is a fine character. However, when one looks at the alternate costumes and weapons one can unlock for Sheva, one of them is, I shit you not, a leopard skin tribal bikini and bow and arrow weapon, complete with face paint and bone necklace. Capcom was one baby step away from putting a fucking bone in her nose and naming the getup her "oogah boogah" outfit, i'm sure.

What's funny about that is that no one said a fucking word. Not a soul. She was a black person shooting black people, so everything is a-okay. This proves that these people don't fucking give a shit. They saw something and went "HEY I CAN RUN MY MOUTH TO GET ATTENTION" and then as soon as they filled themselves with all the attention they could get, they wandered off to pass out and digest it all. If they actually did care about rooting out racism in videogames, they would have leaped on Street Fighter IV the very second it came out.

There's a grand total of one black person in the game, and he's a retarded thug boxer. Moreover, Dhalsim is like what a Japanese person would come up with if he had never seen an Indian person or their culture before but had them described to him through a game of telephone. Zangief is just as much a caricature. El Fuerte is the third most racist videogame character i've ever seen (right behind SNK's Lucky Glauber and Square's rendition of Jim in their NES Tom Sawyer game). He's a luchador who loves cooking and all of his moves are named after Mexican food. Oh, also he's also an idiot and bad at both things he does. Hell, even Americans get it bad: There's a rich blonde pretty boy, a blonde guy in the military, a fat stupid blonde biker, and a redheaded cold-hearted businesswoman.

That's just THAT game. Street Fighter has a long tradition of culturally insensitive characters and not a WORD has been uttered in its 25 year existence. Birdie was black in the Street Fighter Alpha games, but was white in the original Street Fighter. Capcom's reason? "He was sick that day" (no, i'm not joking). That's not how black people work, Capcom. Dudley is a snooty British guy from old money fighting to win back his family's Jaguar. Sean is technically Brazilian, but he's really dark skinned, has dreadlocks, and fights with a basketball so I'm counting it. Dee Jay is a Jamaican with such a toothy grin he might as well have been named "Sambo" and is such a stereotype that he pulls out his maracas the instant he wins a fight, like he has them on him at all times. T. Hawk is a huge American Indian who's name is basically "Tomahawk", and who wears face paint and hair feathers all the time like any Indian actually does that anymore. Cody is dumb blonde American white trash who got thrown in jail because he was too violent.

It doesn't stop there. In Megaman 6 for the NES, one of the Robot Masters was Flame Man, who was decked out in a turban, pointy shoes, curly moustache, and who shot oil. His stage consisted of oil pits and oil barrels, against a muslim mosque arabian backdrop. And don't get me started on Oil Man.

There's all that out there plain as day, and the first time anyone ever uttered "racism" and pointed it at videogames was because black zombies were getting shot? Their credibility is zilch.

You Aren't Going to Like This One

Due to events of late, I've been dwelling on my own age and mortality. Life really is short, and the age limit for people being old and worthless is lowering every day. The thought that keeps tickling the back of my mind is that if I don't meet the woman who's going to be my wife soon, I'll have very little to offer. Additionally, I'll be getting very little in return.

Still, I hold onto the hope that there's someone out there for everyone; that somewhere out there, there's a girl who finds my particular quirks and personality adorable, and my frame handsome. A girl who, for whatever reason, has lived the specific set of life experiences that has bred the specific set of mental problems that leads her to find me irresistible. I hope I get to meet this girl someday, really get to know her inside and out, and have us both realize beyond a shadow of a doubt that there's no one else in the entire world that we'd rather be with.

Then, I hope to God I have the strength to deny her all of that, and leave her forever.

(I told you that you weren't going to like this).

I've been in love before, several kinds. I've had the short but explosive affair fraught with drama, the relationship borne out of desperation, the long-term love that comes from deep within and looks past flaws. I've seen it all and one thing that remains constant (save for one instance) is that no good deed goes unpunished and loyalty is rarely if ever rewarded. The world's rules, not just the rules of girls, are specifically designed to make sure that good people with intelligence never win. They never get what they want. The shallow, the stupid, and the evil get what they want readily, and the smart and virtuous have to fight for every scrap of happiness.

I'm pushing thirty. The girls in my relative age range are as well. Aside from a couple of patches of companionship, I've been alone. I'm not complaining, merely illustrating that me and loneliness and solitude are best pals. We go way back. I've learned to deal, our fucked up society has forced me to adapt to it. So what the fuck would a girl, even the perfect girl, have to offer me at this point? Companionship? Companionship at this point would be more alien to me and require more work that simply doing what I've been doing for the better part of twenty years. Sex? Yes dream girl, please come and try and tempt me at the point in our lives when half our looks are gone and most of our prowess. Chances are, by the time she's my age, she's already fucked all the guys she's wanted and her fun time is over. Meanwhile, I've had to sit over here with nothing during my prime years, all because it probably took her the better part of fifteen years to figure out what was important. Love? Anyone who's not a retarded teenager knows that love is equal parts happiness and sorrow. It's not great fun times. It's not something to look forward to, it's something to dread. Children? Yeah fucking right. The less said about that the better.

So let's see here: All my best prospects at this point could offer is a rapidly deteriorating body, a lifetime of sacrifice, hard work and appeasement, really good friendship stapled onto furious torrents of sorrow, an added truckload of responsibilities, rugrats I wouldn't know what to do with, and a space-shuttle-sized pallet of letting down someone important to you and being let down yourself.

On the other hand, causing whoever she is to realize that she'll never truly be happy or get what she wants will get me something I've craved all my life: justice. Let me get this straight: Perfect girl gets to basically date whoever she wants whenever she wants, as do all girls who even look remotely good do; spends the better part of her life probably rewarding despicable and underhanded behavior of unworthy idiots with loyalty of both body and mind during the prime years of her life; chances are, along the way she'll even have rejected or ignored someone very like me; eventually, it comes back to bite her in the ass hard, and she learns a valuable lesson about what to actually look for in a guy; now that she's older and her looks don't quite work as hard for her as they once did, she decides to settle down and look for a guy who'll give her what she truly needs: stability, loyalty, sacrifice, and true companionship; not once during this whole life journey will she ever truly want for whatever it is she was craving at the time, at least not to any meaningful degree. She will never truly know long periods of loneliness, despair, uncertainty, unrequited desire, or hopelessness.

So basically, she gets everything she wants, and I get nothing I want, namely a normal young life filled with all the ups and downs everyone's supposed to experience, and I'm supposed to roll over and take that and be happy about it because that's how life works for guys like me. Oh how lucky I am to help her deal with the decades of mental problems other guys have caused her because of her initial terrible taste in guys. Fuck that shit. No, the scales will be balanced. Whoever she is right now, on her deathbed I want her to know the sting of the years that could have been experienced but were instead gobbled up by that ravenous monster we call time; I want her to know the deep, all encompassing despair of primal, basic desires never to be fulfilled. I want her daydreams of children and motherhood to be to wither and die. Most of all, I want her to close her eyes for the final time knowing deep down to her soul she was not nearly as happy as she could have been.

Once that happens I'll be able to die happily myself, knowing I've finally gotten something I've always wanted: equality. She will finally know what it's like to live as a nice, shy guy who has no chance to learn how to navigate the insane mental jungle gym and unwritten rule pop quiz girls have always required of guys just to get a little love and companionship.

Pretty irrational, emotional, hateful, and crazy right? I totally agree. Just following your lead girls. Welcome to your own medicine, enjoy your stay.

OH MY GOD

Are you kidding me? I come home from work to read tons of E3 news just from the first day and all of it is radical. Even MS motion sensing stuff was presented in a "hey this could theoretically be cool" sort of way, and it helped that their "Milo" tech demo thing was presented by Peter Molyneux, King of the Theoretically Cool In The Future Things. Even the retarded shit like the Avatar stuff was pretty much what I wanted to see. Almost none of it made me go "Who gives a shit?"

More when E3 is over. Tommorow is Sony and Nintendo!

Pre E3 cleanup

Pre E3 Housecleaning

Haven't updated in a while, mostly because there hasn't been anything of merit going on at all, life-wise or game-wise. I've had some rad times with friends, but that's where Facebook comes into play. This really isn't the place where I go "CHECK OUT HOW I ROCKED KARAOKE" (even though I totally did). This is a place to get out whatever lodges in my head and I think would be interesting to read.

So now that we've gotten that out of the way, a couple big news things. First off, Capcom recently announced that they're definitely not having new characters be available for download via downloadable content for Street Fighter 4. The reason they cited was that they don't want players to have an unfair advantage over others, they want SFIV to be a complete package.

Capcom, don't shit in my mouth and tell me it's chocolate, okay? I know what you're trying to do. Everyone who's ever played a fighting game knows. This game got made (and made you fucking hundreds of millions) because you wanted to please a long-neglected-yet-loyal fanbase and it paid off. Don't turn around and pretend we're fucking idiots who don't pay attention.

For those of you not understanding where I'm going with this, Capcom is clearly planning to release Street Fighter 4: EX plus Alpha Cross Counter Cream Cheese and Eggplant Tournament Edition. Every Street Fighter game has had three, sometimes more re-mixes and re-releases, even the bad ones. Capcom is the undisputed king of re-releasing and re-making old shit. So instead of getting with the fucking times, Capcom's going to let their Japanese shine through and do what they've always done: they'll throw four new characters on the disc, maybe some new concept art or some shit, some new achievements maybe, and sell it for fifty bucks.

What burns me up is how everybody loses with this plan of action. Capcom loses because no one is going to buy SFIV again just to play with fucking T-Hawk, Dee Jay and Birdie or some shit. They are going to waste a shitload of money trying to pull this little stunt, whereas if they just set up a downloadable character mill and threw one out every couple months, it would be almost pure profit. No production costs, very little advertising budget, very little overhead. Activision has made incredible, stomach churning amounts of money from selling fucking Rock Band songs, and Capcom just doesn't get it. The examples of the monetary possibilities are right fucking there and Capcom is simply too Japanese to do anything other than what they've traditionally done for two goddamned decades. Plus, it's not like they couldn't do their SF4: Fourth Strike Gamma The Quest For Peace anyway! There are plenty of examples of downloadable content being sold on a seperate retail disc. It happens all the time.

The FANS lose because they don't get any more value for the product they already bought, and if they want more out of it, they're going to be stuck shelling out fifty bucks for very little. They lose out on a sustainable, professional fighting game experience, and instead get the same old shit that they've put up with for two decades.

Also, their excuse has to be the lamest cover story i've ever heard. Capcom went from a few months ago going "if fans want it, we can totally offer new characters via download" to "THAT WOULD BE UNBALANCED NO WAY". Oh yeah? Well what if I fight someone online who's unlocked fucking Akuma and I haven't been able to yet? I suppose that's totally fair, right? You know, I bet those guys are in some office somewhere chuckling to themselves, thinking they're so clever and they just really don't have a goddamned clue.

Second off, 3D Realms closed, and took with it the last hope that Duke Nukem Forever would ever get released. For those of you not in the know, DNF was the industry's running gag. The game was announced as a follow up to the legendary Duke Nukem 3D TWELVE YEARS AGO and has "been in production" ever since. This game has been promised for most of the time most of you reading this have been alive on this planet. Still, every year 3D Realms would say "we're still working on it, it'll come out when it's done". For most people, they went "Uh, all right, whatever" and promptly forgot about it again, especially over a decade after the fact. For me, I always wanted to see the thing come out and be awesome, because the original Duke was pretty much the perfect game to me. Not really my favorite or the best game, but my idea of what the ideal game should strive for: Technologically pushing boundries, fun and creative on the gameplay side, and injected with a huge dose of humor and tounge-in-cheek satire. To me, a new Duke Nukem is what this current generation of gaming needed to remind it that incredibly serious FPS's are kind of stupid and lame.

However, twelve years? Twelve years. At first, it was understandable. Back in the day when DNF was first announced, computer graphics technology was literally evolving every week. It was moving so fast that the engine one game was built on was outdated in a month, never to be seen again. The people at 3D Realms wanted DNF to be the best thing ever, so they kept scrapping what they'd done to keep up with the Joneses, so to speak.

That only explains the first SIX YEARS however. Valve has used the Source engine for what, like 5 years now? Any halfway hardworking company could have used that engine to produce something at least passable in half that time. This is my roundabout way of saying "there's really no excuse", and there isn't. Twelve years and literally all we have is a handful of screenshots (and I do mean a handful) spanning over a decade, a teaser trailer that featured nothing exceptional, and a few pictures of concept art that were leaked after the studio shut down.

Let me put something into perspective for you: less than a week after Free Radical was shut down, a very lengthy video consisting entirely of gameplay from their project Star Wars Battlefront III leaked on the net. This game hadn't even been announced, no one knew they were working on it. Recently, gameplay footage from an almost completed but cancelled anyway Aliens DS game leaked, and no one knew about that game before the footage leaked. There is a ROM out there of an unreleased, 75% completed Sega Saturn game called Sonic Xtreme, for God's sake. Duke Nukem Forever? Nothing. Not a second of gameplay footage, not a screenshot. Nothing but a handful of pages of concept art that my roommate could have done in a week, and that's including 6 hours a day of GTAIV.

Footage leaks all the time, even for games no one gives a shit about. You're telling me that in light of the biggest videogame cancellation in history, no one uploaded footage to youtube in the dead of night? No former fucked employee said "fuck it" and took a shaky cell-phone cam video? No one took unreleased promo materials and sent them directly to Gametrailers? There's an NDA so powerful out there that it keeps former employees in fear of its wrath, except when they upload concept art and then it's totally cool? Let me tell you something, there would have been footage galore had any existed, were there anything to show. If they had ANYTHING to show for twelve years of "work", i'd be able to link you to it right the fuck now. So let that sink in: An entire team of game developers got paid for twelve years with millions of dollars to go into work every day and ended up producing literally nothing. Not a fucking thing. I want so bad to read some anonymous tell-all of what it was like to work there, because I just can't imagine the scenario where something like this could happen.

E3 is just around the corner. Make sure that you watch Nintendo's press conference. The last one made history with how utterly embarrassing and terrible it was. This E3 will prove once and for all whether Nintendo still gives a shit about anything sort of resembling the actual video game market, or whether they're so arrogant and drunk on money that criticism will forevermore just bounce off them like marshmallows fired from one of those cool little marshmallow guns. Rumor has it that Miyamoto won't even be appearing, so my extremely educated and handsome guess would be that it's probably going to be a heaping helping of the latter. Whichever the case, i'm sure to rant about it here.

YAR

What with the recent clampdown on pirates, both digital and analog, I thought it was high time I slap my own thoughts on piracy down here. First, if you hadn't heard: Read This.

Once again, Jim you disgust me but goddamn if I don't agree with you. I wanna start off with this choice quote: "Piracy is the single greatest threat to the development and release of innovative and creative entertainment software that consumers demand and enjoy". I take big issue with that statement. Dinosaurs who ran out of ideas ten years ago trying to please everyone because they don't know how to make a good goddamned game anymore is the greatest threat. Companies that tend to have a huge corporate face and are largely marketing driven are piracy's biggest enemies. Why? Mostly because those companies tend to rely on fooling you rather than delivering lots of content. If you can download a game for free and see that it's like seven hours long with no original ideas whatsoever, you're not going to buy it. However, if you're an idiot and don't know about piracy, you might be dazzled by shiny things and explosions long enough to plunk down sixty dollars. After that, doesn't matter if your experience with the product is great or garbage, you've already paid.

There are companies that make games that don't give a damn about piracy, however. Valve comes to mind as recently saying "pirates are customers you just haven't met yet". And trust me, Valve's games are pirated just as much, if not more than other people's games. So why don't they get all red faced?

They make good games that make money, and through their commitment to quality and staying on top of what the fans want, they've garnered a large army of support. They're rich, and always will be thanks to doing their fucking job.

I'm going to come out and say it: Piracy isn't a significant threat. In fact, it's one of the few weapons consumers of digital media have left. It's a good thing. It's as simple as this: If you make a good game, I will buy it, regardless of whether I have pirated it or not. Hell, I'll buy it if you have some really original ideas in there. I should get a fucking Medal of Radical for buying Matt Hazard at full price. There are people out there who pirate everything, and those people weren't going to buy your shit anyway. They don't have the money. You can sob and say "well then you shouldn't play it!" and if you want to be Policeman FunRuiner, you can do that, but it's irrelevant to sales numbers.

The flip side of this argument is what most people don't get. If you don't make a good game, you don't deserve any money. Shitty games making lots of money are the biggest threat to the industry, not piracy. If you make a shitty game, I hope everyone pirates your game, spreads word about how shitty it is, and then everyone at the company you work for loses their job. Maybe next time you wont make a half-ass garbage product and try and cover up your failure with a glitzy ad campaign. People with talent and vision don't have to worry about things like that happening.

The DS has a huge rate of piracy, and it's due to a number of reasons. There are the technology reasons, (SD cards and DS adapters being cheap), but it's also what the hackfucks have turned the system into: a dumping ground for cheap cash-in detritus sold at 40 bucks a pop. Review scores are irrelevant. The system is filled with so much trash that anything with a cool premise or two minutes of good gameplay gets a disproportionately high score. The only way to be sure that you're not going to be ripped off is pirate the game and see for yourself. Of course, most DS games aren't worth more than a play or two these days, so there go the sales. Even with the huge piracy rate, DS games sell like crack in ghettos, even shitty ones (the games, not the ghettos).

Of course, there's a bright light at the end of the tunnel in all this: Piracy will never be stopped. Pirates will always be better than the companies that try in vain to seal themselves off with lawyers and courts. As long as the internet exists, there will always be a way to get your digital product you spent years and millions on for absolutely free. Now all you have to do in order to avert tragedy is give me a reason to not do so.