Itemization

I realize it's been ages since I posted anything, but here's the last few months of my life in gaming form:


GTA4: I can watch Bas Rutten on TV in the game I'm watching on my TV!

Kenzan: Note to self: Don't try to play import action/adventure titles with RPG overtones and massive amounts of dialogue.

Wrath of the Lich King Alpha/Beta: What can I say? Blizzard doing more of what Blizzard does best.

Space Invaders Extreme: Space Invaders trying very hard to be Lumines. Tons of fun, but lacks longevity.

Geometry Wars 2: This game is liquid crack for people who grew up playing games in arcades as children. Through cunning use of leaderboards, Bizarre has figured out how to trigger that "itch" to play just "one more game"

Bionic Commando Rearmed: Owch, i forgot how hard old school games were.

Jean D'Arc: Still not done killing the English.

Soul Calibur 4: Wow, just, Wow. The Hori fighting stick is like a vicious animal that I let out of it's cage to tear my online enemies asunder!

Phantasy Star Portable: Wow, they actually made Phantasty Star Universe fun!

Too Human: "Tap, tap" is the new "click, click." I sank an unconscionable number of hours into this flawed gem.

Civilization 4: Nuking Mongolia has never been so much fun! How the fuck did I go my whole life without playing Civ?

Lego Indiana Jones: It's like Lego Star Wars, only without The Force or Lightsabers, but yet I still enjoy it.

Infinite Undiscovery: Umm, I thought I was in the mood for a JRPG, I was mistaken.

Castle Crashers: Classic Capcom/Konmi style beat-em-ups are back again, and as fun as they ever were!

Warhammer Online: WAR is the lovechild of WoW and DAoC, RvR with all of the niceties you expect from a modern MMO

The Force Unleashed: People like to complain because this game isn't anything at all like Jedi Knight. They should be complaining that it's not as good as God of War, since the Apprentice is trying oh, so hard to be Kratos.

Rock Band 2: It's Rock Band, only this time without completely ignoring people who like to play solo!


…and there we are, all caught up!

Testing Out the Blackberry Functionality

Let's see how this works

What The Fuck Are They Thinking?

In the race to find the worst idea in the history of gaming, we have a new contender!

Musou Warriors and Giant Robots

There are two Japanese phenomenon which i am consistently baffled by. The first is the popularity of the Dynasty Wars series. It's a massive scale hack and slash-0-rama that hasn't changed much since its second inception (they are up to 6 now, not counting pseudo-sequels such as Dynasty Warriors 3/4/5 Empires and 3/4/5 Extreme Legends). The confounding thing for me is that DW is entirely about "historical" battles during the Three Kingdoms Era of ancient China. I put historical in quotes because I'm relatively certain that these battles didn't involve Wu leaders invincibly carving a swath through thousands of Su warriors with blinding light pouring out of their weapons just so they could fight similarly powered Su Leaders who weren't even alive at the time of the actual conflict.

An excellent example would be if the latest Canadian gaming rage was a game featuring George Washington cutting down nine hundred British soldiers alongside Abe Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson with the goal of facing Henry VIII in mortal combat.

Yeah, it's a very strange phenomenon.

A few years ago, Koei started making Samurai Warriors games, which are more or less exactly the same as DW, only taking place in Japan's Sengoku Period, and featuring many more katanas.

Because reaching they are always looking for ways to reach new heights of absurdity, they recently produced Warriors Orochi. Which, well, just read this:

Orochi, the Serpent King, created a rift in time and space. By creating a twisted new world and bringing together warriors from the Three Kingdoms era of China and the Warring States period of Japan (more than 1,400 years apart in history), Orochi wished to test the might of the warriors of these two eras.

Yeah, you read that right.

Anyway, the second unusual phenomenon is Gundam. In a country where even the best shows come and go after their season is up, Gundam just keeps on coming. At last count, there were a combined twenty five series and movies. As far as i can tell, Gundam centers around emo kids (in 1979, before emo was even a term!) who pilot giant robots and then whine a lot about war. This series is popular, we're talking huge. just about every major anime store i've been to in Tokyo has an entire floor dedicated to models and figures of these mammoth mecha. But that really doesn't describe how big Gundam is over there, though this might:

Gundam is a popular cultural icon of Japan, it is a 50 billion yen business of Bandai Namco (projected 50 billion yen income of the company and reached a highest number of 54.5 billion yen in 2006).^[11] Not only were stamps published, the Agriculture Minitry was reprimanded for contribution to Japanese wikipedia Gundam related pages, the Japanese Self Defense Forces code-named its developing advance personal combat system as Gundam and the Fire department used Gundam to promote the future of fire fighting developments. A tram station stood a monument of the original Gundam and used the main theme of the first Gundam anime as its departure melody and other businesses like Mitsubishi not only created a test-type simulator for concept cars with a version of Gundam cockpit, it also held recruitment seminars using How to make a Gundam as a demo of what their development process is and based their Lancer Evolution design on Gundam. Isuzu also used a Gundam to model the VX2.

I think you see where this is going:

Dynasty Wars: Gundam

And this is what I've been playing lately. Dynasty Warriors was always a bit of a guilty pleasure for me. A game that I logically know isn't "good," but for some reason, I enjoy tremendously. Every eight months or so, I find myself playing a DW game. I play it religiously for a few days and then, as soon as I tire of the bad English voice acting and brownish color pallet, I shelf it and move on. DW:G is exactly what one would expect from the title. the gameplay from DW, coupled with giant battles from Gundam. This game has serious potential for outlasting its predecessor though, since the colors are vibrant and bright; and the game actually offers a Japanese voice track. Please note that while I'm sure the Japanese track uses the same horrible dialogue as the English, but somehow they just sell it better... I'm also sure that it doesn't hurt that I can't understand Japanese.

As I mentioned, I'm going to be playing this one for a while to come, it seems that ancient China and giant robots are like peanut butter and chocolate.

Back from Japan

Yeah, my plan for frequent updates from the Land of the Rising Sun didn't quite happen as planned, but at least pictures will be forthcoming.

I wanted to talk a little bit about my observations while on my visit.

1. Nintendo has taken over the country. During my last trip to Tokyo, the Sony flag was held high everywhere you went. The first thing you saw in every store was the PS2, the second thing you saw was the PSP... and then if you went upstairs or whatever, you saw everything else. This time, a mere two years later, Nintendo utterly dominates the ground floor of every gaming store, the DS mostly, but the Wii is lingering behind isle two as well. That's not to say that the Japanese don't get excited about other platforms. Armored Core: For Answer --a early nominee for worst title of 2008-- came out while i was there and seemed to get a decent amount of interest from the locals, and they seemed quite stoked about Monster Hunter Portable 2 G's pending release. But all of the massive ads in the world don't make up for the lack of floor space in local stores. In fact, I think there was a marked lack of advertising for Nintendo products... but I'm thinking that they simply didn't need it.

2. PC gaming in Japan is 4/6 porn, 1/6 imported American games (including a massive and beautiful Neverwinter Nights Boxed set that put to shame anything I've ever seen in the States), and 1/6th non-porn Japanese games. The American and NP Japanese games are hidden waaaaay in the back, behind piles and piles of boxes featuring animated ladies in various states of undress being assaulted by plant life. You may be wondering, "you're an adventurous, forward thinking fellow, did you purchase any of this peculiar merchandise?" The answer there is no, and it's not because I had a sudden bout of self consciousness either, it's because these little boxes of fun were running anywhere between 7000 to 10000 Yen ($70-$100) a piece. which is well outside of my "haha, look what ridiculous thing i bought" range.

3. I really, really, like Shaka Shaka Chicken. Probably the best chicken product I've ever had at McDonald's. I smell a hit!

4. The Japanese really, really, like fatty meats. from the Lamb skewers to the pork soba, the meat in japan was almost universally fatty. I started to think it was simply a matter of taste when i tried to get the chicken breast at Moss Burger (clearly on the english menu) only to find out that they had actually discontinued it in favor of a similar product (which was not on the english menu). Assuming chicken was chicken, i went ahead and ordered it, only to find out that it was actually the greasiest, fattiest, nastiest chicken thigh I've ever sunk my teeth into. On second thought, maybe Shaka Shaka Chicken is doomed to failure.

Sorry i'm late

Sorry the updates have been so damn lacking, but my alone time has been much more infrequent then I would have liked, that and I've been shaking off the residual effects of my jet leg. But it’s all good now.

I’m flying solo today down in Akihabara, I’ve been here since 11 and barely cleared two blocks of this mammoth of technological gadgetry. Within just a few short minutes of arriving, I already found what I was looking for, a copy of Phantasy Star Generation 2 for the PS2… and I found it for like $17. My only problem now is finding a way to play it when I get home.

I visited Taito Hey, a nice arcade on the strip. I’m saying “nice” because it had, by far, the best ventilation system I’ve experienced in an arcade so far, barely any smell of smoke to be experienced. This arcade is probably my favorite so far based solely on the fact that they have an entire floor dedicated to shmups, those lovely "massive numbers of little ship thingies attacking you from all angles as you fend them off though the wild use of ridiculous powerups" sort of games. I played probably the best the genre has to offer in Ikuruga, as well as some interesting new ones. One from Konami which basically amounts to Gradius: Miracle Love Umbrella Girl Edition. This game had me flying around a fine beachfront community while killing maniacal blue penguins... then moving on to ancient Egypt... where i was killing mummified maniacal blue penguins.

The next one I tried was a bit more contemporary, flying vertical while blasting random tanks and whatnot. The hook for this game was that you could use some sort of tractor beam to grab your foes and use them as shields, or alternatively, swing them around and use them as giant projectiles… it was fun.

Like all arcades, they certainly had their Fighter Floor, wherein chainsmoking lunatics beat the virtual snot out of one another all day and night. In most of the arcades i've visited so far, the FF has been almost universally located in a basement or sub-basement. this one was on the third floor.. which scored extra bonus points with yours truely.

Ive noticed a few changes since my last trip, KFC has expanded and is fucking everywhere now. I cant walk two feet without seeing the colonel’s ugly mug staring me in the face. There’s also been a massive proliferation of so called “maid bars.” They seem to just be coffee shops… where the waitresses dress as maids. I’m assuming these are popular and that there’s massive competition because I see small girls dressed as maids on every corner handing out flyers with maps to their employers locations.

I haven’t visited one of these cafés yet, but we do plan on hitting up a maid Izukaya called “LittleBSD” very soon. I’ll be sure to report.

Last night we went to the local Big Echo for karaoke, I’m going to say up front that Japan is light years ahead of the US in sing along technology. This room featured wireless mics, touch screen music selection (from wireless tablets), touch screen food and drink ordering, and even a webcam to videotape your performance. The music selection was surprisingly vast (and eccentric, featuring for some reason like 80 Slipknot songs).

It would be criminal of me to mention another word about last night without mentioning the izakaya we went to. Not only did they have my favorite sake, the always tasty Suigei, but some of the most amazing garlic bread I’ve ever had... served on wheat toast. To top it all off, we had some truely great deserts. I enjoyed some sort of ice-cream/oreo/shochu combination, and tom had a massive triamisu-like confection which featured like two full bananas and a half pound of coca crispies... it was a good night.

PS: a recent trip to the other side of Shinjuku turned up a familiar sight...

I'm a bit behind, but I'll try to bring you up to speed...

On Friday, we treked out to Ginza to rediscover our roots, grabbed lunch at the Lion, found the hotel from out last trip, and also visited Tully's, our former favorite morning coffee run. Our real objective in Ginza was to find the Japanese office of the Amnet travel agency to pick up our tickets to Dream.

Once the tickets were safely in hand, we wandered on over to Shibuya for some hardcore exploration... and then it started pouring.

Japan: The Return!

Last night was my first in delightful Shinjuku. We spent just a few short hours exploring before heading back to the room to pass out and let the rigors of our flight slip away.

Within just a few blocks of our hotel, we came across many, many izukayas, two Macdonald's (more on that later), a half a dozen 24 hour convenience stores, Wendy's, KFC(?!), and Gyu Kaku


I learned the following last night:

1. The Japanese really like Kit-Kits. I found this particular confection to be disproportionately represented just about everywhere i went. This phenomenon culminated in the consumption of a Kit-Kat McFlurry... yum.

2. Shaka Shaka Chicken is pretty damn good. it's essentially a chicken cutlet in a bag. mix in your choice of seasoning(hot chili, lemon pepper, or cheese) and boom, you've got a nice snack.



I also took the time to stop in at the local Club Sega, where I found that I can, in fact, hold my own (and lose two out of three rounds) in Virtua Fighter 5 to the local denizens of Tokyo arcades.

More later, as i've just gotten out of bed and am in dire need of coffee... luckily, we saw many, many Prontos on the way here!

DMC and stuff

I've been playing Devil May Cry 4 for about nine hours now, which is substantially more then I played Devil May Cry 3. (note: I started this post a few weeks ago, and have since completed DMC4, which should put into perspective how much more I enjoyed it then its predecessor)

I think part of the problem is that I played DMC3 in the shadow of Ninja Gaiden, which is a vastly superior game in every way that counts. Sure, they both feature highly skilled swordsmen dispatching demons at an alarming rate, but where I feel Ninja Gaiden is actually about killing the aforementioned badass demons in any way possible, DMC3 felt more like a collection of listless denizens of the nether, lining up give you as high a combo as humanly possible, while not putting up much of a fight. Oh yes, and if you should falter at any point while you're endlessly hacking away at the bad guy, you'll get hit and die, pretty much instantly. Ninja Gaiden, on the other hand, offered you a fighting chance. the combat system in that game is easily likened to an elaborate game of chess. both you and your opponent are easily capable of dispatching one another, provided either are careless. Both parties dodging, blocking, and looking for an opening. In comparison, DMC3 just felt like all style, no substance.

Skip ahead a few years and now I'm firing up DMC4 on my 360, the game is utterly gorgeous, the combat feels like a ton of fun and while it's by no means a strategic endevor a-la Ninja Gaiden, it's certainly a tremendous amount of fun as a strict beat-em-up.

I had a great time playing DMC4 despite a few factors:

1. Backtracking: the game's level structure is interesting, you spend the first half of the game going though 10 levels as Nero, the new emo-rific protagonist (honestly, I don't have enough experience with this series to care who the hero is, just so long as he hits things very hard), then you play backwards through those same levels as Dante, the egotistical prick from the first three games. Hell, you even fight the same damn bosses again. No thanks.

2. Cut Scenes: Yes, i realize that complaining about cut scenes in a Japanese game is like complaining about smoke in a Tokyo restaurant (you knew what you were getting when you walked in the door), but dear god, I felt like every thirty seconds the game was taking the wheel and going for a joyride without me. Couple that with the over the top maneuvers your characters perform during said scenes which make the regular gameplay look downright flaccid in comparison.

Better Late The Never: Stranglehold

So yeah,I've been out of the loop for a while, lots of crazy personal stuff including a shiny new job have put this blog on the back burner for a but, but that doesn't mean that I haven't been playing games rather non-stop.

I've recently worked my way through Stranglehold, the video game sequel to the John Woo 'Heroic Bloodshed' classic, Hard Boiled. 'Worked' is a literal term at times, as the game has an oddly schizophrenic difficulty level that threatened to bitchslap my sanity into oblivion, but by that point i was firmly entrenched and wasn't going to give in until Inspector Tequila got his revenge, or got out alive, or whatever it was that he was getting. As you could probably tell, I wasn't particularly enamored by the plot of this one. The thing that really got me engrossed in the life of Chow's gunslinging alcohol-fueled cop was the perfect John Woo-ness of the game. Sure, other games have come along before this one, waving the flag of Woo with reckless abandon (i'm looking at you, Max Payne, F.E.A.R., and even those shitty Matrix games) but this one, for whatever reason, just gets it so right.

In many games featuring Matrix-dubbed 'bullet time,' the slow motion advantage over your opponents is really its own reward. You're expected to use it because it looks cool and it makes the game easier, but that's really the only incentive. Stranglehold takes things a bit further, rewarding you in spades for making use of its various Wootastic moves. You gain style points for killing the bad guys using 'Tequila Time,' (really, why not call it 'woo-time?') more for doing so while diving, more for doing so while sliding down a banister, even more for doing so while rolling on a cart or swinging off a chandelier, and more for offing many baddies in a row while doing so. Style points do a few things for you. First and foremost, they charge the meter for your special moves (Which they decided to unsurprisingly dub, 'Tequila Bombs'), the more stylish the kills, the faster the meter fills. Second, they serve as the game's currency for buying unlockables, of which there are many. If that was somehow not enough incentive for you, the damage taken and dealt are subject to change based on how much style you're exhibiting at any given time.

I'm not sure I would recommend this game for a purchase though, since it's fairly brief and the multiplayer is pretty much forgettable. But for those few sweet hours, Stranglehold takes the Tony Hawk Rule (everything you do looks cool), jacks it to 11, then gives you a cookie every time you do it.

DO NOT WANT

On no fewer then three occasions this week did I very nearly purchase Spider-Man 3 for the 360. Each time I held the game in hand and each time I came up with a suitable reason to delay that purchase. First it was "Well, I just moved, I should save my money," followed by, "Ultimate Spider-Man wasn't terribly good," and finally the tried and true, "There are no reviews yet, Gamefly this thing in case it sucks."

In general, I had a really bad feeling about the game that I just couldn't place.

In his book "Blink," Malcolm Gladwell speaks extensively about the phenomenon of human intuition, how our gut feelings often steer us in the right direction even though we may not be conscious of the reasons at the time. inspired by this book, I've gotten into the habit of calling gut feelings my "Blink."

Today, the reviews for the Spider-Man 3 game started to dribble out, first Eurogamer took their swings and slapped Spidey with a 6/10:

If only Treyarch had polished the game properly, we could have been reflecting on one of the best superhero games ever - and if you were to cut together a movie of the best bits you'd almost certainly want to buy it on the strength of that. As it stands, the total lack of consistency in what the game offers in terms of entertainment gives it the whiff of a game produced under pressure, and one developed around an unrealistic deadline so it could come out day and date with the movie. Whatever the truth of the situation of Spider-Man 3, here we are, yet again, complaining ruefully about 'missed opportunities', 'a lack of consistency' and 'unfulfilled potential'. For something as thrilling yet as disappointing as this, perhaps a rental's the smartest plan.

Then it was IGN's turn, also handing the game a 6/10:

I fought the Kingpin for an hour -- an hour of joyless reversing. It was six 10-minute installments of Spider-Man standing in the middle of the room, the Kingpin attacking, Spidey dodging, and Spidey punching Fisk once in the face. If I punched him more than once, I risked getting caught in a combo or running out of Spider-Reflexes and watching Fisk land a devastating attack. I played it safe and patiently countered the mountain of a man one slow, boring punch at a time. Now, if God's with you, you'll only have to duke it out with the Kingpin twice - you'll meet and wear him down, he'll deploy some thugs, you'll finish the job. However, God didn't exist Wednesday morning at 1:30 a.m. I got Fisk down to his last legs in the second half of our boring battle, and the game froze.

Twice.

I think my Blink may have been right, I'm glad this one will be coming from Gamefly.

360 180

Well at last we have it, the official unveiling of the worst kept secret in gaming, the Xbox 360 Elite, and with the way Microsoft's handled it, it's also the greatest gift they could have given to Sony.

In the current console war, Sony's biggest blunder has been the prohibitily high price and therefore nasty barrier to entry for the PS3. Microsoft's Xbox360 has enjoyed success through the preception that it provides a comparable experience at a fraction of the cost. A perception which has now been shattered.

The Elite is basically identical to the 360 Premium, only it includes an HDMI port, which delivers absolutely no difference in quality over component, a larger hard drive, and a black paint job, all for $80 over the cost of a Premium.

Lets see, it has a completely useless port (I'm fortunate enough to have a TV that actually supports HDMI and i'm still utterly ambivalent about this), a big ass hard drive whose only useful purpose is giving you more storage space to put TV shows they expect you to buy from the marketplace... though I suppose the paint job is cool.

Luke Smith had it right in a recent episode of 1Up Yours when he decried this move, going so far as to suggest that the new hard drive should be subsidized since its only use is to create another revenue stream for Microsoft.

Think about it, they beat their competitor to market by almost a year and are selling at a lower price point. Now that Sony is finally starting ramp up production enough to keep ps3s on shelves and pump out software on known IPs that are going to sell systems. Now that their advantage in timing is gone, now that their advantage in software is waning, NOW Microsoft opts to RAISE the price of the 360 and eliminate the last advantage they had?

It looks like the vaunted "Sony Arrogance" is highly contagious, and now it's Microsoft's turn to make themselves look like asses.

GDC Smack Talk 2007

I thought this was hilarious

"Waiting for the Miyamoto keynote to start, I’m sitting three rows from the front. Close enough to see Nintendo’s resident BMOC, Reggie Fils-Aime at the front of the crowd, working it with his trademark smile and good will. He poses for pictures, he signs Wiimotes, he presses the flesh with a goodnatured ease that would make even the most seasoned politician weep with envy.

“Kick his ass and take his name!” someone shouted from a few rows behind me.

“Who?” answered Reggie in mid-autograph.

“Phil Harrison, front row!” Sure enough, there was Phil Harrison, seated dead center, front row. Looks like he could show up on time for Nintendo’s keynote, but not Sony’s.

With a grin and a chuckle, Reggie replies, “Some would say we’ve already done that.”

Touchdown. The crowd goes wild".

Nintend0wned indeed.

Ninety Nine Mistakes

I played the demo for Ninety Nine Nights (hereafter known as N3) while visiting Japan last March. In that insulated setting, the game experience was excellent. The game's rich graphics and wonderful designs drew me in and I'm always a sucker for short bursts of Dynasty Warriors-Style Combat.

The game, however did not live up to its potential. While this is unfortunate, I don't think N3 was a lost cause and so I've thrown together a few key changes could have saved it from the Bargain Bin.

1. Fix the damn save system. The game has like six playable characters, and their progress is saved in individual save files, accidentally overwrite one and poof! Everything you did with that character is gone. This is an obtuse system that should be a distant memory, not an unfortunate reality.

2. Make the boss fights more interesting and more frequent. One of the ways N3 separates itself from Dynasty Warriors is though the use of boss battles. DW simply puts you though a series of battles against similarly powered heroes, whereas N3 actually had the occasional large, challenging-looking boss. I say "challenging-looking" because generally speaking, the object is to find the boss's blind spot and go to town for what feels like forever until the fucker finally goes down.
This doesn't work.
You can't spit without hitting a game that has done decent boss fights, boss fights with some sort of hook that makes it more then just a repetitious chore. It doesn't take that much work and it really adds so much more to your game.

3. Save Points must be included. Yes, this is different from complaining about the overall save system. If your game has forty-five minute missions, particularly when you often have a big ass boss at the end of them who are capable of killing you in one or two hits, then you must allow for some sort mid-mission saving. Otherwise, instead of providing challenge, you provide frustration.

4. What's with the Cursed Items? N3 has equipment that actually drops your stats. Equipment that you have to manually equip having read in advance that they are indeed cursed. Hell, even the font color is is different as to eliminate any need for you to have to actually read the negative numbers. They serve zero purpose, lose them.

5. Give me some extras. You are allowed and encouraged to replay missions in N3 in order to get experience and drops. Thats fine, in fact, that's a great idea. But there needs to be more incentive to replay like that. The game's one hidden character has but two missions, both of which are reused missions from other characters, which this game does a lot of, and that's fine. But you could easily have used the other non player characters in the game as additional unlockables. The assets are already there and there's almost no work involved in shifting a mission's point of view to them. It's an exceptionally cheap and easy way to make more content and heavily increases replayability.

I don't think a game like this will ever be a top selling game, but if they are smart about it, a well crafted one can defiantly be profitable.

The American Famitsu

Japanese gaming journalism is... strange. The number one gaming magazine in Japan is Famitsu, a 400+ page beast of a mag that comes out weekly over there. It's huge, it's colorful, it's vibrant and well, it's also essentially all about delivering an oral massage to popular games. This was a column that an insider submitted to next-gen.biz that got rejected on the grounds that it was too slanderous:

Contrary to what hordes of western gamers believe, people don't "pay" Famitsu for a specific review score. I know this because I have dinner with Famitsu guys once a week.

It's more like, a company pays Famitsu "protection money" -- in other words, they pay them to review their games, period. Famitsu -- and most of Japanese journalism, in fact -- is basically just vanity PR. And proud of it!

The editors of Famitsu are, to a certain extent, deeply entrenched in the most fascinating role-playing games of their lives. Sure, it's a love of games that gets them to apply for the job. However, once "in", they must play the "role" of a person who is batshit nuts in love with the very idea of videogames. The guys at Famitsu, however, are usually such resiliently affable personalities that they can do this job and still provide hilarious conversation at dinners where they are not even drunk (yet).

That, and let's face it -- games like Sonic have creepily devoted fans who are even more devoted than, say, James. In other words, they are blinded by their love for Sonic. Or Final Fantasy, or Kingdom Hearts. The chief purpose of the "MOST WANTED" poll in each week's issue can be assumed, then, to be to gauge what games the readers do not want to receive a low score. The readers who vote in that poll are the people who buy the magazine, read it cover to cover, and chatter endlessly on 2ch about it.

When Famitsu rates a game high, they do it out of respect for the readers -- avid players of Kingdom Hearts as most of them are. Avid players of Kingdom Hearts don't want to be told what Famitsu really thinks of their fucking piece of shit hobby. So Famitsu awards the "courtesy score" -- which used to be all nines and a ten, and is now all tens and a nine. When Famitsu KNOWS a game is going to sell 2 million copies in a week regardless of what they say, this is what they do.

You can try to refute the above paragraph. However, you will not be successful!

Famitsu is still very careful about perfect scores. No matter what, readers will bawl when a perfect score is given. They will be either overjoyed or deeply angry. Final Fantasy XII's perfect score, to look at 2ch, was "the biggest debacle in the history of the magazine". No. FFXII was a game that made giant, drastic, sweeping attempts to change a genre. Famitsu made a conscious decision to give it a perfect score, despite the game not being perfect. They wanted to send a message -- a gentle one -- "Please make an honest attempt to like this game better than those other games." It's very noble of them.

Yet Famitsu makes more money off the back cover advertisement than off all the newsstand sales combined (they offer no subscription service). What Famitsu is -- and you wouldn't know this unless you've held a heavy issue in your hand on a tired Friday morning -- is straightforward (if not entirely honest) PR in a pretty, meaty, high-quality bundle. It's an advertisement feast. If the western concepts of "journalistic integrity" are distorted and twisted within its pages, they're done so very lovingly. Because, you see, that degree of over-thinking really doesn't exist here. You can cry "viral!!!!!!!!!!!!" and "TEH PAID!!!!!!!!!!" all you want at Famitsu's features and articles. However, you can't change that it's a hell of a thing to look at on the train on Friday morning, or at lunch on Friday afternoon; it provides stimulating topics of conversation (for geekos) over Friday dinner.

The people who read Famitsu are not brainwashed by the contents of the magazine. They take it in, shrug some of it off, and form their own opinions on the fly. Whether they're enlightened about the finer points of its making or not, they are always suspicious of the fact that they can think for themselves. It's a free country, and a free world, et cetera.

In the US, gaming journalism has been struggling for respectability, trying their hardest to be taken seriously by the rest of the country. They do everything they can do not be seen as biased, they try to be objective and sometimes even antagonistic in their reviews and interviews.

There is, however, an exception

Play Magazine

Yesterday evening I forgot my PSP at the office and had finished earlier that morning, the book that I had brought along to read (Timothy Zahn's Star Wars: Allegiance), so i swung into the magazine store and saw a copy of the latest Issue of Play. I haven't read Play in a long time (at least a year) so i figured why not? Then I started flipping though. The first thing that caught my eye was the glut of below-average games getting high marks... and for very odd reasons. Like Star Wars: Lethal Alliance (61 metascore) got a 7.5, citing "a female lead" as the first entry in the "pros" section. Even the interviews... hell, especially the interviews were heavily layered in PR-style fluff. The questions were always phrased like "This game is absolutely amazing, how did you cram this much Amazing onto a single disk?" It almost felt like i was reading an infomercial. I felt embarrassed for the interviewer. But then it clicked.

They were trying to pull a Famitsu.

It was very much like that wonderful moment when you realize that the shitty movie you are watching is actually going for pure camp; and so you begin to have fun with it. Suddenly i felt free to enjoy the bright, colorful pages filled with ridiculous hype and overblown scores unhindered by the limitations of "journalistic integrity." I must confess, once I released Play from such conventions, I had the first American gaming mag experience that brought back fond memories of Famitsu.

Crackdown notes

Realtime Worlds has constructed the greatest "Pick up and Play" game that I've ever dealt with. It's a game that you can just pop into for 5 minutes, get a satisfying experience from, quit, and still have the feeling that you accomplished something in it.

That however, is the challenge. In a manner I've only seen previously in World of Warcraft's quests, it's incredibly easy to be seduced by the "just one more" mentality in Crackdown. You always want to just kill one more group of thugs, just grab one more agility orb (which are collected to make you faster and jump higher... and there are 500 of them to find).

PS: I saw this over at GAF and needed to share:

Speaking of fun, I spent a surprisingly long time chilling out on a highway sign watching the completely batshit insane traffic blaze down the highway behind Crazy Volk Steroid Chick's Lair. I didn't have to shoot out anyone's tires or anything. They barrel through that slight curve so fast that there's an insane (and awesomely handled by the AI) wreck every few minutes. Check out it when you get a moment.

I can't wait to try that

Cleaning up the Streets!

So like so many others, my local store had copies of Crackdown yesterday, a full day ahead of the scheduled release date, and complete with a nice "Do not sell before February 20th" sticker on the top. The sticker is sort of amusing. I've never seen anything like it and it was 'inside" the packaging, which made me think that it was almost intended for the buyer to see.

It almost feels like MS was trying to do one of the following:

A: experiment with the idea of advance shipping and just didn't expect such rampant street date breaking.

B: knew it would be broken, but wanted to see what sort of hype that would generate. After all, people love to think they are getting away with something! perhaps this was an experiment in a new type of Viral Marketing.

I'm not sure, but I was certainly happy to have a copy in hand yesterday. So far i'm having a blast with it. Crackdown really is just a pure sandbox game. No real plot to speak of, no narrative, just you, a big city, and criminals who need to be taken out.

More impressions later...

To Wii or Not to Wii

I wanted to buy a Wii, but now i'm not so sure. My reasoning is pretty simple:

There are no games coming out.

I looked at the release list and all they offer currently for me are Wii Sports, which comes with the damn thing, and Zelda, which i could buy right now for Gamecube. Past that there's almost nothing going on until Christmas, unless you are interested in PSP(wtf?) ports with tacked-on Wiimote functionality.

Sometimes I don't understand Nintendo. They have a legendary amount of hype surrounding their console currently and to capitalize on this, they are releasing what? Wii Play? perhaps they were hoping that 3rd parties would come along and pick up the slack, but that has simply not happened yet. I envision playing though Zelda (or getting bored of it) in a few weeks and then occasionally taking out to show Wii Sports to guests like once a month until Metroid Prime comes out in like eight months.

Podcasts x2

Been gradually adding more podcasts to my weekly audio buffet, These past two weeks I've discovered 1Up's new WoW podcast, Legendary Thread, featuring some personalties already familiar to me from other 1Up productions, such as Luke Smith and Jeff Green.

The best thing about it is that apart from Luke, the hosts are all casual players that people would have a better chance of relating to. Having a hardcore like Luke there helps move the topics along and add some variety. On one hand you get Luke passive aggressively whining about his Shaman while taking manic pot shots at classes perceived as being overpowered, and then at the opposite end of the spectrum, you have Jeff telling us about playing the game with his daughter. The show does a good job of capturing the variety of players that WoW attracts

In addition, I've been checking out the Played Podcast, staring, among others, Chris Remo from Shacknews (Whose job I was actually one of the finalists for getting). The Played group has good chemistry and tend to keep the discussions fresh and interesting, even when they are about games i've read and heard about a million times. I reccomend them if you are looking for something a little different then the usual fanboy baiting verbal flamefests that, despite how entertaining I may find them, many other shows tend to become(1Up yours, I'm talking to you).

Bill Harris on Sony

Bill Harris, formerly of Gonegold.com is one of my favorite gaming bloggers, combining intelligent discussion with quality laughs and very very astute observations. Here's a bit of one of his more recent rants on the fall of Sony.

Do you remember when you were in college and your best friend decided to throw a party? Even better, he somehow got the best-looking girl in school to show up. When you saw her walk in, you had one thought: this is going to be the best party ever.

There was only one problem: the best-looking girl in school. Yes, she was totally hot, but all she did was talk about how hot she was, and how we were all lucky that she showed up, and how every single girl at that party looked like ass compared to her. She was so loud and so obnoxious that you went into the backyard just to get away from her.

Later that night, though, you came back inside the house and saw her again. This time, though, she was sitting against a wall. Passed out. With vomit all over the front of her smoking hot halter top. And as you took a picture of her with your cellphone, you had one thought: this is the best party ever.

That smoking hot girl, my friends, is Sony.

I've said this before, but I don't have an anti-Sony bias. I've been extremely pro-Sony at various times in the last ten years. But I do have an anti-dickhead bias.

You can find the rest of his thoughts on Sony's recent moves here.