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.

HAHA OH WOW

Nintendo's resident lumbering golem of meat Reginald Fils-Aime has been a personal thorn in my side since the Gamecube days when he first got hired as their PR guy. Reggie went from that guy whose job it was to lie straight to my face going "No seriously guys, the Gamecube is going to be awesome any second now", to that guy pretty much making fun of me directly for being a fan of videogames. Now he's just as big a greaseball as Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, except funnier.

Take his latest interview, found here. For those not willing to read, MeatGolem basically says that used games are bad for the consumer, never says exactly why, and then proceeds to tell me that Nintendo games have incredible longevity.

There's a few choice quotes here that aren't to be missed, like when he says earlier in the interview "I'm a big Zelda fan from way back" and then proceeds to talk about "unlocking levels in Zelda", which is not how it has ever worked. I hate to be that guy who goes "um sir, excuse me" but you're talking to a goddamned gaming blog. Try to at least look like you sort of know what you're talking about. He says "You don't see businesses selling used DVD's and CD's" and "used books have never taken off". First off, you out of touch corporate whore, yes you do. You see them all the time. You can buy pre-owned DVD's and CD's fucking everywhere. Second off, I have personally been in used books stores. I know people who frequent used book stores. Maybe they haven't taken off, but videogame used sales have. It's already happened. The comparison is dead out of his mouth.

I love how it escapes him that if Nintendo games really were deep and really did have longevity, then used game sales would be a non-issue. The fact is, they're the cheapest throwaway garbage since the NES days and so used game sales are huge.

Lots of developers are bristling at the used game market, and they're all big fat babies. They could eliminate the used game trade tommorow in one fell swoop by doing two things: pricing games accordingly, and making games worth keeping. If you priced games that clearly aren't worth more than twenty, fifteen dollars at most that price on opening day, then people would buy them. When you try and fool me into thinking a movie tie-in game is worth sixty bucks, you lose a sale instead. If you made games that had great replay value, were immense and complex, or were just plain good, then I'd have no problem buying the game new and I would probably never sell it. When you make a game that's linear, derivative, and 8 hours long, you're simply not getting my sixty dollars.

All the used game debate is over is developers that are irritated because there's a force out there that makes them work for their money a little. I don't care if Miyamoto himself comes down off his gardening fitness cloud kingdom or wherever he lives now and says "used games are bad", you tell his worthless used up hack ass to shut the fuck up.

XNA games don't make a profit, world goes "No shit"

A while ago, a service on Xbox Live Arcade was released called "XNA Game Creator's Service". Basically, it was a small devkit people could use to make little games and release them for paid download on Xbox's Live service. It was a way for any little schmuck with a dream and some programming talent to showcase their ideas to the world.

There was an article released today that showed that the service was a miserable failure as far as profit margins go. I mention this here because just a few days ago I was thinking "man, whatever happened to that XNA service. I wonder if it shaped up and if there are any gems on there", and then here comes this article, almost in unspoken telepathic response. At the end of the article, regardless of what source you grabbed it from, the poster was like "what do you think, community? Why don't people buy XNA games? Is it because MS didn't advertise the service or is there just too much stuff there? Is it pointless?"

I like how there's no third option: "I don't pay attention to the service or the games because literally every single one of them is absolute trash". Seriously, the other day I looked through the selection of games they had available, and the second one in the list was "Fart Explosion" or something. There's roughly four billion games on the service, and even if it was possible to rate or to categorize the sheer amount of them, it doesn't matter becuase i'm not paying MS Fun Money Points for something that's basically a poorly made cell phone game from four years ago.

This is the indie scene, you guys. You give people cheap devkits and a forum, and they'll pump out nothing but garbage and one or two gems, years apart. In my life i've only seen two games from indie developers that were either good, or not some elaborate twenty minute long joke.

Here's a funny contrast: During the same time period, there was an article talking about how much every developer is excited for making projects for the iPhone. It's the big thing they can't wait for. As an addition to that, there was *another* article talking about how two developers who had made it big on the iPhone basically said quality means nothing when making an iPhone title. There's no rhyme or reason to any given product's success. Which, if you're paying attention in the studio audience, is why every developer is so excited. They don't have to give a fucking damn about these products and they'll make so much money. Someone like Pandemic could code in a weekend a little flashy bloopy thing for the iPhone and it would probably make back half the earnings of one of their big boy titles.

So, we have the iPhone, a licence to print money. Then you have the XNA crowd, who are largely ignored. They're pretty much the same thing: Shit. So why is one successful and one not?

Quality, thankfully. When consumers are sitting on a machine that has the best the industry has to offer, both in retail and downloadable games, no one gives a shit about Fart Explosion 9000 from some idiot with twenty dollars and a C++ book. When you're on the iPhone, you're already a fucking moron that spent way too much money on an Apple product. Apple costumers are notorious for buying whatever Apple tells them to, because all of their products work together plus holy shit look how white and slick they are. You're not going to hop onto the Apple download store and all of a sudden be picky with what you put on your ExpensaPhone. If they had the ability to discern quality and pick out the best products, they wouldn't have an iPhone in the first place.

You know, at least MS tried. At least they gave you guys a forum to post your works. It's not their fault that all you were able to come up with was worthless idiocy.

Yeah, pretty much that

Here's an article that pretty much sums up how I feel about games today and the future of games. It's a great read, I suggest you give it a go.

One of the things they talk about in there is the sex scene in Mass Effect. Its been talked about a lot on both sides of the fence, and the big controversy came when detractors took the scene out of context. What no one talked about is how the scene looked IN context, at least if you wooed Liara, the blue alien chick: absolutely silly.

It looked silly with her because Liara was a terribly acted member of a joke of a race that suffered from Wikipedia syndrome. Bioware tried their goddamnedest to make us take their race of hot bisexuals seriously, but no matter how much you have characters blather on about their race and culture and history and blibbidy bloo, you still end up with a blue bisexual Data straight out of a juvenile Trekkie's puberty explosion dream.

In the end, when that scene comes up, it looks like (as so many games do) that someone took a team of professionals and millions of dollars to realize in expertly rendered videogame form a 13 year old fanfiction writer's story. The other versions of the scene aren't bad: Female Sheperd with Captain Carth Round Two is normal, as it's the culmination of a bunch of flirting and pretty interesting backstory between two normally written humans. Male Shepard and Christian Fundie Space Racist also makes sense, as it's two meatheads getting together. Liara's terrible though: It's all about the writing.

Jim Sterling Is A Fatty Fat

I wanted to write a short little note on my Facebook account after Jonathan Holmes over at Destructoid wrote yet another article that made me want to murder him in front of his loved ones about how much half the Destructoid staff are unfunny, idiotic twats, but stopped writing halfway through because I realized that I was basically just making a list of people I hated and calling them stupid dumb faces. I didn't have much concrete stuff to throw out there.

Leave it to Jim Sterling to toss out something a few hours later that provides a large, ample target to riddle with bullets. First off, here's the link: Read it, and go nuts. Ready? Good, here we go.

He starts off the article saying that while gamers crave different experiences, they keep buying the same old big game sequels every time they come out, leading to a pervading sense of generic-ness. It's a good start if a somewhat flawed premise (which I'll get to in a second) but then he jerks the wheel of his article hard to the left and careens into a tree at ninety miles an hour, totaling the article and ejecting him from the driver's seat.

He then goes on to talk about a couple of subjects that have absolutely nothing to do with the premise of the article: Gamers complaining about Killzone 2's and RE5's controls, and gamers complaining about lack of Co-Op in Killzone 2. Let's address his first point.

First off Jim, you're fat. Second off, not a goddamned bit of the generic homogenization of the games industry is gamers fault. Not a fucking bit. You know why? Because when a good game comes out it sells well, provided it's been advertised well, is on the proper system for its audience, and is priced accordingly. Valve is one of my favorite companies because they're pretty much an unmovable, immutable wall against all the bullshit game pundits tend to toss around. Piracy killing PC games? Valve embraces pirates, calling them "customers we haven't met yet". Gamers won't buy anything different? Gamers bought a 4 hour long first person puzzle game with a sense of humor in droves. Why? Because it was good.

Now, there are tons of projects that are different, good, and don't sell, but there's usually a reason. Beyond Good and Evil didn't sell because it was released the same day as Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Psychonauts didn't sell because apparently no one told Tim Schaefer that platformers died ten years ago, and those that didn't sure as fuck weren't on the Xbox. No More Heroes didn't sell because it wasn't any fucking good. There's the big thing: You can't just be different and wacky and get straight tens, doesn't work like that. You have to also make a game that plays great and is fun too, otherwise I don't give two fucks about your goofy premise.

No Jim, if you could somehow manage to get game designers to crawl out of their shells and make some different shit for once, and make it well, it would sell. They just don't. They're getting BETTER (just look at EA this year) but they're still not I think the firing and blackballing of anyone who's been in the industry more than fifteen years would be a great start to that, Miya-fucking-moto included.

Now, let's mosey onto his next couple of points: The RE5 controls and the lack of Killzone 2 Co-Op.

First off Jim, you're fat. Second off, RE5 has shitty controls. Your character is a stiff wooden board of a person who moves slower and worse than the "zombies" than they're trying to kill. Those are bad controls. Now, I know the de-facto argument for those controls is "it's to add tension", which is a good point, and why Valve made the controls in Left 4 Dead shitty on purpose as well.

Oh wait they didn't, did they? Again, they just made a good goddamned videogame, and they added tension how people normally add tension: by including tense scenarios. Which would you rather have: a situation that's tense because it's genuinely difficult for your badass character, or a situation that's tense because your character's a fucking retard and your AI partner's even worse. Jim, the reason that RE5 has the controls it does is that it was made by Japanese developers from Capcom who A) hate change and B) painted themselves into a corner. They basically evolved the RE series into Gears of War, which is a fucking retarded thing to do to a franchise that's about zombies. In order to keep it from being just a straight up Gears of War clone, they had to keep something different. The one consistant thing in all RE's has been shitty controls, so there you go. Controls don't have to be unresponsive to be shitty. If there's a clear, industry recognized stadard for what you're trying to accomplish and you deviate from it just to be different, and it's less intuitive that what other people have been doing, your controls are shitty. The end.

Third off, what the hell does that have to do with your point of gamers helping along the homogenization of games? RE5's controls aren't exactly a different, bold new step forward, unless you finish that sentence with "...into becoming Gears of War". If they do support something like RE5, well, that makes Capcom disinclined to try anything but sequels. If they DON'T support RE5, then Capcom's disinclined to try new things with established franchises. It's a terrible example.

Then he talks about how people complained about no co-op in Killzone 2, and how it's retarded to expect it in every game because look at Bioshock, that game didn't need co-op or multiplayer! To be fair, he's got a point here. Multiplayer is pretty much the worst thing to happen to videogames ever other than the Wii. Not every fucking game needs a tacked on multiplayer fragfest mode that people will play once and forget about. Mostly because you cannot, repeat cannot have a good story in a multiplayer game. Doesn't happen. No, WoW doesn't have a good story, sorry. Maybe the KOTOR MMO will change that, but the way Bioware's been going lately I'll be surprised if the thing has dialog trees at this point.

However, once again Jim Sterling makes the mistake of making the right point with the wrong example. First off Jim, you're fat. Second off, Bioshock and Killzone 2 are two very different games with very different goals. Bioshock is meant to be an atmospheric trip through a wholly unique dilapidated setting. Killzone 2 is an excuse to shoot your buddies in armor ripped wholesale from anime over PSN, with little thought to story, or innovation, or anything other than being the poster child for just exactly everything wrong with gaming today just as hard as it possibly can. In a multiplayer fragfest game like Killzone, especially one exclusive to the free PSNetwork, co-op should be a given. It should be an out of the box standard issue feature at this point, unless of course you're talking about a game that gives a fuck about story, and then it shouldn't feature multiplayer of any kind.

In short, Jim Sterling's fat and shouldn't have a job blogging. Maybe i'll tear apart one of Jonathan Holmes' articles one day, if I can prevent it being just one big page filled with nothing but RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

The Top Ten Games You Missed Because You're Not As Cool As Me

So I grabbed Eat Lead today, and am currently going through it. I'll probably add it to this list when I'm done with it, but for now, here's a list. These games are ones that either fell through the cracks, or ones that did okay but bear emphasizing based on their sheer importance. Without further ado, The Top Ten Games You Missed Because You're Not As Cool As Me.

10. Burnout Paradise
A few years ago, downloadable content was a non-existent phrase. To console gamers, it was a theoretical "maybe" of the far flung future, and to PC gamers it was an every day reality called "mods" that had existed for a decade or more. Over the last few years, downloadable content has burst onto the scene, and with it comes many the sticky, grubby hands of capitalism. The industry's already produced many sordid, almost comedic examples of how to do DLC wrong; thankfully, there's one company out there who knows how to do it right.

Criterion Game's Burnout Paradise is not only the finest racing game this console generation, but a shining example for all other publishers that actually give a fuck about their customers on how to do DLC right. Since the game came out, there's been many updates, both free and paid, that have evolved the game to a higher level and won them many fans, and they show no signs of slowing down. Burnout Paradise is only $19.99 at a retailer near you, so you have no excuse not to own this game. Did I mention one of the updates lets you drive the General Lee, K.I.T.T., the DeLorean and Ecto-1? Yeah, there you go.

9. Braid
Braid is a unique gem. A game that does what few indie, downloadable games are able to do: transcend its roots to stand on its own amongst the big boy titles. The game, more than any other I've seen, is a work of art in every sense of the word. The story is painfully pretentious, but gives the game a feeling unique to the medium. The art is unparalleled. The puzzles in the game are second to none in terms of sheer mind-fuckage and creativity. It's superior on every level. There are some of my friends who don't like the game because the main character looks stupid or the story's too pretentious, but they have dumb faces that are dumb.

8. Gotcha Force
Back in the mid days of the Gamecube when Nintendo still sort of cared about trying to pretend they weren't a massive failure, Capcom was their biggest supporter. One year, they touted the Five, a list of games that were exclusive to the system and blockbusters. This list included the sublime Viewtiful Joe, the forgettable P.N. 03, and the canceled Red Revolver. What it DIDN'T include was Gotcha Force, a game that was also exclusive to the Cube and better than all the other games combined. Capcom didn't advertise it whatsoever, didn't put out very many copies, and it got poor reviews from people who routinely suck the dick of the far inferior Pokemon franchise. The result? To this day it remains the best game no one's played on the system.

So what's it about? You control Gotcha Borgs, little toy-sized robots that fight each other. The battles take place in various arenas (backyard, gutter, playground, etc.) and whoever you fight and defeat during that particular skirmish, you have a chance to either win outright or win a piece of them. You assemble your fighting force from the robots you've won. Each robot has a cost, and each fight you win adds ten points to your spending limit, so you can either have a team of a bunch of small robots, or a team composed of one badass robot. Those robots are then sent out, one at a time, to deal with the waves of enemies in any given battle.

Here's the fun part: There are over 300 playable characters, each one with a unique playstyle. All of them are easy to pick up and use, hard to master. They run the gamut of everything possible: There are dragons, knights, cowboys, witches, nurses, transformers, sentai-style robots that combine, insects, battleships, UFO's, superheroes, jeeps, tanks, you name it. The thing that sets it apart from the pokemon franchise is that while your units can level up and get more HP based on how many battles they win, it's by no means stat based. You're controlling all the fast paced action. If you're good enough with your scrawny little basic Ninja, you can make him worth much more than his measly 150 points would suggest.

I've already typed too much on it, so let me say this: If you can manage to find a copy, it's the best fun you can have with your Cube.

7. Crackdown
A few years ago before Halo 3 came out, word got out that there was going to be a multiplayer beta. The only way to get into the multiplayer beta was via the menu of an otherwise little touted game called Crackdown, to this day one of the only truly exclusive titles to the Xbox360. Crackdown itself ended up being tons more fun than anything Halo could ever do.

Crackdown is an open-world game much like GTA. That's where the similarities stop. You play an Agent, a genetically engineered supercop who has superpowers, namely the ability to leap high in the air, the ability to take four billion bullets to the face and not die, the ability to throw cars like they were made of marzipan, and a super secret agency that provides you with morphing supercars. Your job? Take a rifle, take a rocket launcher, take your sweet-ass morphing car and shoot the fuck out of any dude who sort of looks like a gang member. Not only is the game a blast and action packed, but it's revolutionary in several key aspects.

While you level up most of your abilities by killing people with them, you level up your agility by hopping over the city rooftops and collecting orbs. The more orbs you collect, the higher you jump, and the higher you jump, the more orbs you can reach. It's more addicting and useful than any other "collect this shit spread all over the city" mechanic I've ever seen.

Each gang lieutenant you take out affects the final boss of that area. For example, take out his personal trainer, and all his guards have their health reduced. Take out his recruiter, and there are less guards. Assassin's Creed was basically a dumbed down version of Crackdown: Instead of killing subordinates you did stupid little minigame missions, and instead of affecting the final showdown of an area, all you got was info. While there were flags and other things to collect cleverly spread out throughout the cities and countryside, they didn't do jack shit.

Last but not least, Crackdown has the most unique open world city I've ever seen. It's not New York or Faux New York. It's its own city with its own neighborhoods, architecture, and culture. The game is dirt cheap right now, so buy it if you don't own it.

6. Freedom Force
Long before Bioshock was even a twinkle in Ken Levine's eye, he happened to make the best superhero game ever made using characters he made up himself. That game was Freedom Force, a game belonging to a genre that has yet to be duplicated as far as I know, although the X-men Legends series and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance come close in an arcadey sort of way. Freedom Force is Levine's love letter to the silver age of comics, what most of you would refer to as early 60's comics. The art style, storyline, characters and dialog are all absolutely spot on perfect, in addition to being totally revolutionary. Freedom Force has the best character creation system I've ever seen, albeit one that requires you either download or make a 3d model and skin yourself. After you do that, you can edit a character's stats, attributes, body material, voice, and every aspect of his powers, from damage type (of which there are hundreds), to effects, to type of power (ranged, melee, etc), and more. It, and its sequel Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich are truly groundbreaking games that have no equal.

5. Blood
Everyone's played Duke Nukem 3D. If you HAVEN'T, you're not really a gamer (looking at YOU, Chambers). Duke Nukem was revolutionary in its day, because not only was it a groundbreaking FPS with an unprecedented level of interactivity, but because it was truly funny. Most of it was juvenile retard-humor, but an FPS with a sense of humor was unheard of back in those days. Well, Blood was that game but transposed into a horror setting and better in every way.

Blood ran on the same engine as DN3D, and featured a story about a jilted cult member rising from the dead to take vengeance on a dark god that spurned him. The thing that sets Blood apart is that there are secrets roughly every two steps you take. Some of them are just little walls that come down to reveal health or weapons, but most of them feature great jokes. One that sticks out in my mind is wandering through a hedge maze in the snow, an astute player will find a frozen body holding an axe, and the player character will say "Heeeeere's Johnny!" (in reference to the Shining). Zombie heads can be kicked if they fall off the zombie's body. Disembodied hands come after you, squealing "I'll swallow your soul". Weapons include the standard shotgun and machine gun, but also feature crowd pleasers like "lighter and hairspray", "flare gun" and "voodoo doll". If I remember correctly, it was also one of the first games that made use of the secondary mouse button for alternate fire purposes as well. To this day, it's the finest FPS experience ever crafted, and has yet to be touched, although Serious Sam came close.

4. Shadow Warrior
Everything I said about Blood? Ditto on Shadow Warrior. A sister game to Blood, Shadow Warrior also ran on the DN3D engine, and transposed that type of game to an asian kung-fu motif. Shadow Warrior also had tons of secrets and in jokes, as well as a couple of innovations of its own: Shadow Warrior is the first FPS to feature Dual Wielding, and is one of the earliest appearances of anime influence in a western game (during many of the secrets, the player will stumble upon a naked anime chick covering herself, either bathing or going to the bathroom, and she'll open fire on the player after he utters some ridiculous sexist pickup line).

3. Elite Beat Agents
The DS has largely squandered the good name it worked so hard to get in its early days. The platform, who used to be a hotbed of true creativity and innovation, is now largely a dumping ground for truly terrible embarrassing shit. One of the last great games to come out of Nintendo, Elite Beat Agents is the best music game you'll ever play. The premise goes that when you're in trouble, when you're at the end of your rope and feel like you can't go on, the EBA will show up in some radical vehicle to help pump you up and inspire you to achieve your goal through the power of rockin' songs and awesome dance moves. Weird? You bet. Fucking awesome? You also bet. Gameplay consists of you tapping dots, dragging your stylus on a track, and spinning discs in time to the beat of a song. Each song is broken up into three sections and before, after, and during each song there's cutscenes that set up your current mission. Your progress is shown on the upper screen: Do well, and the person you're cheering on does well in whatever they're doing. Do poorly, and they fail.

Missions include shrinking down to cheer on a white blood cell (shown here as a sexy nurse) to fight off viruses, traveling back in time to make Leonardo DaVinci fall in love with Mona Lisa, cheering on a treasure hunter trying to strike it big, and empowering a mother to do whatever it takes to make tomorrow a sunny day so she can take her son on a picnic. It also has the saddest and raddest moments in any videogame ever: A little girl's father has died, but he promised to be there for her for Christmas, so the EBA bring the father's ghost back to her through the sheer power of being fucking awesome, and then the EBA unite the world in rocking out to repel an alien armada. The ending consists of everyone on earth rocking so hard under the guidance of the EBA that the earth shoots out a beam of pure rock energy that destroys the alien mothership.

No, I'm not joking.

Everyone in the videogame industry can go home, that is officially the most awesome thing that will ever happen in a videogame. The fact that Nintendo never greenlit an EBA 2 despite its Japanese counterpart Ouendan 2 burning up the sales charts is the most damning piece of evidence for Nintendo being a lame company that cares little for innovation.

2. Knights of the Old Republic II
I debated whether to put this on the list: A ton of people have played KOTOR I, but I think a lot of people avoided the sequel because it got lackluster reviews and wasn't done by the same team. A mistake, as while the game is ridiculously buggy, clearly unfinished and lacking any sort of real ending, what IS there is probably the best written game on the planet. Each character in KOTOR II has hidden facets to their personality that don't come out unless you talk to them and really dig. Truly fascinating philosophical questions like "what exactly is good and evil?" permeate every moment in the game. Every action you make effects your teammates, and they react accordingly. HK-47 and G0-T0 are some of the most entertaining characters I've ever seen in a game, and Kreia is the best written female character I've ever seen in a game. The game's not for everyone: It was rushed, so there are bugs galore, the combat is piss easy even on the hardest difficulty, and as was stated before, there is no real ending to the game, but everyone at least needs to play through it at least once, but probably more than that, as it's impossible to see everything in even two playthroughs. There is a fan made patch in the works that will restore large, important chunks of content, but it's been in development for four years, so odds are it will never come out. Assuming it does however, it will (almost) complete one of the best games of all time.

1. Chrono Trigger
I almost put Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard here because I think it's literally going to sell five copies, but I've already talked about it. It's good stuff, go buy it. No, instead I'm going to talk about a game that most people reading this haven't played but should.

Let's face it: The Japanese can't write for shit. Any time they try and tackle anything more complicated than basic high school drama, you get pretty sounding, metaphor-laden writing that doesn't mean anything and talks about how the stars are our friends and friendship is like an ocean of happiness in the sky and bullshit like that. This is why most JRPG's fail and Chrono Trigger stands tall among the rest: It keeps it simple. No one talks about how birds are like dreams of the heart that soar: they talk very straightforward and normally, like actual people.

The cast is also one of the greatest in game history: Where else in one game can you have a robot from the future, a knight who's also a frog, a cavewoman, and a scientific genius on the same team? The game also revolutionized turn based combat by eliminating random battles and having them take place instantly with no battle transitions. It's also immune to the tragic effects of homo-fication that so many other JRPG's suffer from, as it features character designs by Akira Toriyama, he of Dragonball fame. To top it all off, the story is epic like none other, chronicling the entire history of a world, from its infancy to tragic death through the power of time travel.

All these factors combine to form a game that blows every other Final Fantasy game out of the water, and it still stands as the best thing Square has ever made. Everyone who loves JRPG's should play this game to see what they could be if people would stop buying games that feature gay ladyboys.

MORE LIKE CRAPCOM AMIRITE

I have a love/hate thing going on with Capcom. Capcom is much like Nintendo That Was. When they give a shit about what they do, they turn out solid gold. They churn out diamond encrusted platinum games. Games that define and/or create genres and go down in history.

Problem is, Capcom only does this sometimes. They go in bursts. They'll create something huge, like Megaman, or Street Fighter, or Beat-'Em-Ups, or Resident Evil, or Devil May Cry, They'll milk it for years until the public's aboslutely sick of it, and then they'll drop it like it's made of superheated plutonium covered in butter. Here's the sad part: The stuff they put out in their "milking" phase isn't that bad. It's just not nearly as good as what could be. See: numerous fighting game iterations using the exact same sprite sets, fourteen billion Megaman Battle Network games, Onimusha and Dino Crisis trying and failing to be a hit, Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop, etc.

The other thing that's clearly evident to me now is that Capcom has literally no idea what they're doing. The only way any money is ever made by that company is when some high up exec begrudgingly lets one of their people make their idea into a game. Their only strategy is to throw money after projects that have either made money in the past (Resident Evil) or throw money at projects that look like projects that have made other people money (Lost Planet). Beyond that, they greenlight only what they're begged to greenlight on hands and knees, and even a greenlight doesn't mean that the project is going to be advertised once it's completed.

I'm not going to list Capcom's numerous crimes right now, mostly because half of them are perpetrated by Keiji Inafune, who's not really the target of my wrath here. However, it's clear that the people in charge of Capcom have so little idea what they're doing, there's no reason they shouldn't be fired at this point. Need proof? Look no further than SFIV. 2 years ago, Capcom flatly stated that Street Fighter was a dead franchise, no one cared about it anymore, and they were absolutely convinced the most profitable route was to move on to other things. Capcom of America BEGGED Capcom to make another Street Fighter, saying that "hey, it still has a pretty big fan following, you know". Cut to today, SFIV has made millions. I'll be surprised if RE5 makes as much money for them. Same deal with Bionic Commando. Factions within Capcom said it was like pulling teeth to get the project greenlit, and it went on to become one of the highest selling XBLA games of all time.

Now, i'm aware that part of the reason that SFIV sold so much is that there hadn't been a proper Street Fighter game in over a decade. Had there been a yearly SF game, something like SFIV would have sold like balls. I highly doubt that was part of their master plan, however.

On the flipside, you have Capcom's mind-boggling dogged support of the Lost Planet franchise. Before the game was even released, they shopped out the movie rights, planned a collector's edition, ports to other systems, the works, all before seeing public reaction. The game sold well so I hear, but got piss poor reviews for a Capcom game. Trying to make a movie out of the story of that fucking thing is going to be like trying to write a book about some kid's MSpaint drawings. Good luck with that, guys. They just announced Lost Planet 2 to an overwhelming "Uh, so?". And still they press on with the attitude of "WE'LL MAKE YOU LIKE IT DAMMIT".

The depressing thing is that they probably don't care if it's a hit or not. As long as it's not a loss money-wise, they don't care. They don't even do the greedy corporation thing of trying to maximize profit, if it makes any profit at all, they're good. Meanwhile, they're sitting on about ten franchises right now they could dust off, inject with a little marketing and effortlessly make billions with instead of this Halo rip-off garbage. Morrigan and Felicia are still instantly recognizable video game icons, despite being from a fighting game that only had three installments in the US, none of which sold incredibly well and the last of which was fifteen years ago. Is Capcom currently planning a game about the big-chested succubus sex queen? Fuck no guys, it's time to shoot angry fireflies in the snow, here we go. Are you fucking kidding me? The thing that really overloads my plasma cannon about all this is that it's not fucking hard to see what would be a hit. You toss a PM to any random fucktard in a gaming forum and they'll give you a five year plan for projects that would enable Capcom to climb to the goddamned moon on a pile of money.

You know what? Keiji Inafune, much as I hate his fucking guts, has wanted to make Megaman Legends 3 for what, ten years now? The answer from Capcom HQ has always been the same: "We can't see that making a profit". Well, guess what faggots, you didn't see Street Fighter making a profit either, and it just paid for your gold plated hookers to tell you your tiny Japanese dicks aren't really that tiny for another month, so maybe you should shut the fuck up, listen to your goddamned talent, throw your advertising department behind him and let him make his fucking game.

Of course, knowing good ol' Inafune, he'd make a Megaman Legends where the entire game has a time limit, and if you fire your Mega Buster more than five times without saving your console explodes, but at least give the man enough rope to hang himself with.

Eat Lead!

There's a game coming out March 9th that you may or may not have heard of; it's called Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard. Every single person reading this should buy this game, and I'll tell you why: It's the first game I've seen in literally about a decade that is a parody of the games industry itself, barring independent games like Barkley Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden (which is another must play. Google it, seriously. It's free and one of the best free games ever made).

Here's the deal: Matt Hazard (played by Will Arnett) is a washed up 80's video-game star, think the dude from Contra crossed with Duke Nukem. He had a big career, but faded from popularity and retired. Now, a game CEO (played by Neil Patrick Harris) wants him to star in a new game... except it's a trap designed to kill him. The plot is pretty much an excuse to go nuts and have fun at the expense of the game industry. There's a fight against a JRPG character, a level that's basically Wolfenstien complete with pixely blue walls and sprite based soldiers, plus other wackiness galore. It looks like an absolute blast, and already has the best jokes in a retail videogame that I've ever seen.

If anyone ever asks about my severe lack of motivation, I'll point them to this game. Why? Well, It's pretty much the game I would make had I the money, talent, and time. What's the point of following your dreams when everyone's doing what you would do but better all the time? I'm not bitter though, far from it. It's uplifting to see that a publisher greenlit and funded this, gives my ideas validation. I'll be happy to just play it. Here's hoping it doesn't suck ass to actually play.

Going back to the "story in games" theme, this game is probably the most important game of 2009 in that respect. If you look at gaming's short history from the perspective of a kid growing up, you can clearly see the industry's current maturity level. This is why I'm fascinated with videogames as a medium: It's the only medium whose birth I was present for. Gaming so far has literally grown up with me, although entire mediums tend to grow up slower than a single human. In the beginning, and for close to fifteen years afterwards, story in games rarely went beyond "save the princess". That's fine. The industry was in its infancy, and thus created stories a child might when playing in the backyard. There were rare flashes of early maturity ("Custer's Revenge" comes to mind) but unfortunately videogames had their progress stunted for a few years by the great Atari crash.

In the early 90's, you had the PC gamer boom, and with it a clear leap into early adolescence. Stories shifted from "save the princess" to "please kill everything you see isn't blood so awesome by the way" very quickly, and that in turn quickly gave way to sophmoric, crude humor. That's important, because it showed growth and advancement, but more importantly the first sparks of parody were showing, which is a literary and developmetary milestone. I'm of course talking about Duke Nukem and his bretheren Blood and Shadow Warrior, three of the best, most original FPS's ever made. (There also was of course the point and click boom of the late 80's/early 90's. This era was important but less so, as that genre is largely forgotten and dead. Still, it is to this day a repository of game's best writing and humor).

Seriously guys, I hate to sound like a retrofaggot, but those FPS's have yet to be surpassed by anything released today, graphics be damned, mostly because they combine great graphics, awesome action, and (this is the important part) loads of humor. They're truly funny games, albeit crude. Then Quake 1 hit, and it was forever more uncool to be funny in videogames. This was a great step backwards in terms of games coming into their own as an art form, because you can't grow if you can't make fun of yourself. Some of literature's greatest writers have been masters of satire. Without parody, all your serious stories are really just navel gazing.

So all through the mid to late 90's and up until today, games have largely been stuck in their late teen years: so wanting to be taken seriously that they eschew humor and instead try (and fail) to be deep. Occasional bright spots show through, but games are stuck firmly in action and drama obsessed early adolescence.

A few years ago I took a chance on a wacky looking, cheap FPS called Serious Sam. The first chapter (of two) was twenty bucks new, from an up and coming dev team from Croatia. It was the best twenty bucks I ever spent, because it was basically Duke Nukem reborn. Tons of secrets, tons of humor, truly unique gameplay. At the time, I thought a savior had arrived: Funny games were back. (Not only that, it was the best argument i'd ever seen against bloated game budgets. These upstarts from a poor European nation made a radical, powerful game engine from scratch, made a truly unique game experience filled with tons of creativity, sold it for twenty dollars new and made a profit. You need a million dollar budget and hundreds of people to make a game and that's why it costs sixty dollars even though it lasts 6 hours? Fuck you).

Unfortunately, CroTeam (Sam's devs) really didn't have much staying power. When the time came to make a true sequel, Serious Sam 2, they just didn't have any steam left. It wasn't funny, it looked like crap, and it wasn't fun. They (along with Sam) have yet to resurface, which is a shame, but here's round two in the wings, and here's hoping the industry sits up and takes notice. Regardless of how it plays, it's already the most clever game of 2009.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Matt Hazard is going to sell like crap because it's only getting the most meager of coverage, but at least it's getting released. One step at a time games, and one day you'll be able to sit at the big boy's table.

HI AGAIN

So, I'm back after a month-long hiatus. Since no one reads this thing right now anyway, it doesn't matter. It's like I never left! Now I have a bunch to talk about.

The first thing that pops into my head is an article I read a while back regarding the new Prince of Persia game. The lead game developer was quoted as saying that he thinks it's a shame that PoP didn't get more acclaim for all its innovation.

Okay man, first off: The game already got like eights and nines. Basically the only person who didn't like it was some dude over at Destructoid, and knowing them he was probably a twat anyway. What the fuck do you want them to do, create a new system just for you? Hooray for you Ubisoft dev, you get an eleventy-billion out of wham-a-doodle.

Second off, what innovation? I've played a few hours of the game, and all they did was replace the sublime time-rewind mechanic with a judicious checkpoint system, and a clever female sidekick with your typical strong, tough, walled off tragic princess character. Oh, they also just about fucking ruined the combat. Everything else was inspired if not outright cribbed from earlier games.

When the games are as fantastic as the Sands of Time games, borrowing heavily from previous outings isn't a bad thing, but it's not innovation. When you turn the previous combat into barely animated glorified quicktime events, you shouldn't even get your eights and nines, much less praise for innovation. As it stands, congratulations guys: You've crafted what should be the gold standard for jumping puzzles this generation. Of course, after Sands of Time last generation totally redefined what a jumping puzzle was supposed to be, that was literally the least you could do.

Speaking of "least you could do", I've been playing Chrono Trigger on the DS on my lunch breaks. There are only two things i've ever given square my money for: Chrono Trigger DS, and Rocket Slime Adventures. Both of those are some of the best things they've ever done, certainly leagues ahead of their recent lunatic crystal belt zipper j-pop offerings. Final Fantasy III gets a gorgeous remake on the DS, Yet Chrono Trigger gets a couple of extra poorly laid out dungeons shoehorned into the main story poorly, and a totally nonsensical unbalanced monster dueling arena. After they used CT's release to make themselves a fat sack of cash while spending as little as possible, they turn right around and announce another 3D remake of some Final Fantasy piece of shit no one cares about or ever played.

Why did Blue Dragon have to be so terrible? I really wanted a JRPG alternative to Atlus and their generic prettiness and Square's J-pop madness. Oh well, the search continues.