In my time of need

30 April 09 | 23:31 | Posted by:

I'm trying to track down a clean, high-resolution (640 pixels wide or better) scan of the full box for Bionic Commando, Game Boy version. Not Elite Forces, thanks very much; the original. If you can help me out, that would be great. If you'd like to sell me said box, that would be even greater. But I won't hold my breath -- I've been watching for someone to post a boxed copy of the game on eBay for almost a year with no luck, so I'll settle for a scan.

I'm actually trying to track down a number of complete-in-box Game Boy games, for that matter. Email me if you have any you're looking to get rid of. Maybe we can be friends! Or at least mutual participants in an observation of capitalistic principles.

category: games | forums | 17 comments | §

A fresh case of the 'roids (part 2)

30 April 09 | 14:17 | Posted by: calorie_mate

It turns out Super Metroid isn’t a very long game, even if it’s your first time. I’m actually very pleased about this, since it felt just right and had no padding whatsoever. And, of course, this lends itself to the horrifying world of the speed run, and while I don’t have much interest in that kind of thing, it highlights one of my favorite things about the game: how streamlined it is. This not only apparent in moves like the wall jump that are specifically included – but never required! – to let skilled players tackle the game more quickly (and sequence break the hell out of it), but in the way every item in the game makes Samus more mobile. A great example is the area right before the Space Jump, which takes awhile to traverse until you acquire it and about 10 seconds to travel back afterwards. Once you’ve overcome a challenge, you’ve completely overcome it.

Of course, everyone else in the universe already knows this. I’m probably the last guy on the planet to play the game, after all, so there’s no real point to discussing things everyone got out of their system years ago. I could go on and on about how much fun the boss fights are or how much the music adds to the atmosphere, but that would just be an extreme case of preaching to the choir. The ending, however, was so incredibly impressive to me that you’ll have to excuse my gushing for just a minute.

The best thing about the ending, to me, is that it follows the age-old adage of showing rather than telling. Not a single line of dialogue or explanation appears the entire time. Furthermore, the entire sequence never forgets that this is a game - on the contrary, it uses this fact to its advantage. Finding the enemies turned to dust and then having the giant metroid latch onto you wouldn’t be as intense if it was simply a cutscene; instead, you’re always in control, and Samus' struggle to survive is your own (as it has been the entire game) while you fire and jump like mad trying to get it off you. When it lets you go just as you've resigned yourself to death, it's instantly clear to both Samus and the player that this was the hatchling, all without the use of a single line of text. Likewise, having Mother Brain activate her powerful beam without ending the boss fight lets the player get caught up in the impact of it, and the spanking you give her – not Samus during a cutscene – as a result of your metroid’s sacrifice is effective because it isn’t divorced from the rest of the game. There are few moments in gaming as satisfying as that, and that the developers used discretion and realized they could heighten the player's complete immersion without words is still a marvel.

And like any good story, the plot of Super Metroid is comes around full circle. It’s a bittersweet ending, since the hatchling has been lost once again, and for the second time in a row Samus has little time to dwell on it, what with there being another time bomb to escape and all. Few games before or since have had such a good ending, let alone one that really used the strength of the medium to make it something special. I really didn’t want to end this post on a negative note like the last one, but an unfortunate side effect of playing one of the industry’s best games is that you start to wonder why people are still struggling to match it 15 years later.

category: games | forums | eight comments | §

The final alopecia

29 April 09 | 21:23 | Posted by:

As part of my mandatory Star Trek refresher course, I've decided to thumb through a few of the more interesting Trek novels I read as a kid. And by "interesting" I mean "the ones that seemed kind of boring back then because I was too young to properly appreciate them." Mostly these are the ones that involve the series' main cast in only the most peripheral sense and instead focus on developing alien races or secondary characters as a means by which to flesh out the franchise's universe. Not coincidentally, these are the ones that are less like dumb fanfic and more like actual sci-fi novels that just happen to take place in someone else's toy box.

High on the list are the late John M. Ford's works. He wrote two Trek novels back in the day, one of which -- How Much for Just the Planet -- I recall as being a hilarious farce nearly to the point of satire, a recollection the Internet seems happy to corroborate. His other contribution, though, was the sort of work that made my young eyes glaze right over. Entitled The Final Reflection, it was an intricate exploration of Klingon culture, which to that point had never really been tackled in the actual TV series beyond, "Boy, those Klingon guys sure are angry!" Of course, at this point the entire novel has been made completely moot by later television shows, but in a way that makes the book even more interesting. Because, really, the "official" Klingons ended up becoming pretty obnoxiously boring, to be honest.

I'm not terribly far into the book, but I really am enjoying it. The TV series' core cast exists strictly as a framing device, and the central work is presented in-universe as something controversial, almost forbidden, which is a pleasant contrast to the Happy Hippie Space Utopia of the Roddenberry years... and handled a lot more gracefully than the fumbling undercurrents of cynicism more recent takes on Trek have tried to incorporate. Ford's two contributions to the Trek non-canon are highly regarded, and I can see why: each was a very different work, but both were united by taking a rather skewed view of the franchise and creating something interesting out of it.

Yeah, good stuff. Unfortunately, I've had to put the book down, at least for a little while, because I've just reached the point where the narrative has introduced an intensely gorgeous Orion slave girl named... Rogaine.

Poor Mr. Ford. I'd really like to take your story seriously, but at the moment I just can't. What a hairy predicament.

category: media | forums | eleven comments | §

Clearing up a possible misunderstanding

29 April 09 | 16:10 | Posted by:

A little bit of Twitterpation has sparked a sudden surge of interest in GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1, which is nice and all. But I think people are misunderstanding: the book that's currently on sale is the one that was first published in December, and it compiles content posted on this site over the course of June 2007 through July of last year. The one full of yet-unpublished critiques about Game Boy isn't available for sale yet! I hope to finish editing it this weekend, and then I will submit a proof for revisions, and then it will be available for purchase. Please do not buy the wrong one, because then I would feel bad as I don't believe this on-demand service offers refunds.

So, to restate:



Yeah. Hope that helps.

category: blog | forums | twelve comments | §

Sole survivor

28 April 09 | 22:10 | Posted by:

You know, even though every other front-page post on this site (and every other Talking Time thread) is about Persona, the dude who runs the site -- that's me! -- has yet to play a single game in the Shin Megami Tensei series for more than an hour. Until now! Although technically the game in question -- Devil Survivor -- belongs to the Megami Ibunroku series, but I don't even know what that means, so, like, whatevs and stuff.

So far it seems to be a really good take on (what I understand to be) the whole point of MegaTen, despite the jarringly terrible character designs. It's also strongly reminiscent of The World Ends With You, but I rather think MegaTen had a claim to things like teenagers struggling against mystical forces in a battle for life or death in Shibuya about a decade or two before Square Enix and Jupiter got there. I think what impresses me most is that it manages to combine the super old-school MegaTen combat system (first-person battles) with a tactical RPG. And, also, it's gonna be pretty baffling for anyone who isn't familiar with major Tokyo geography -- landmark and location names are tossed about casually without regard for tin-eared American sensibilities.

Needless to say, I approve on all counts.

category: games | forums | sixteen comments | §

Add to Queue 86: The not-so-final frontier

27 April 09 | 22:54 | Posted by: vsrobot

Media | A2Q Archives | The Author on Twitter | A2Q #86 | April 28, 2009

---

Being a cinephile, particularly when it comes to genre films, I usually catch people by surprise when I admit that I've never seen even a single episode of Star Trek: The Original Series (whose first season arrives on Blu-ray this week), let alone any of the Trek films. I've seen bits and pieces of the films: I remember seeing Leonard Nimoy attacking a punk rocker with a boom box on a bus, but I don't really have a sense of what Captain Kirk's Enterprise is about. Perhaps I absorbed some of the old "Star Wars vs. Star Trek" fanboy prejudices by osmosis, but honestly -- I think the reason I never became a fan of Trek is because I was born in 1979, after the show's heyday, and never came across the syndicated reruns. The only William Shatner I know is Shatner-as-parody. His acting and his singing are both common targets of jest. The commercials and contemporary shows I've seen him act in feature completely overblown performances. Shatner has seemingly accepted that self-parody is what people want from him these days and strives to fill that expectation.

Is it any wonder that I never sought out original Trek? This was the show where people yelled "He's dead, Jim!" and "The engines can't take it, Cap'n! She'll break apart!" Where Captain Kirk laid every femme alien he came across, and where the aliens are mostly humanoids with slightly different facial and cranial features. When I was old enough to choose what I watched, rather than whatever happened to be on after He-Man, I didn't the need to go back and watch Trek when I was already completely enamored by Star Wars. After all, I'm a bigger fan of fantasy than I ever was of science fiction. Asimov and Clarke never made my heart race the way J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Ray Bradbury (among others) can, and Trek is much more a sci-fi franchise than Star Wars ever was.

Eventually I came to realize that there was a Star Trek-sized void in my knowledge of genre entertainment. I've been meaning to rectify that for a while, but I'm always so behind on games, television, film and books that I never made the time to catch up. Now, with the upcoming Trek film by J.J. Abrams due out in just over a week, I feel like failing to catch up on Trek was actually a lucky break. Unlike the vast majority of the people excited for Star Trek, I'll be going in as a clean slate. I won't be comparing the new actors to the previous actors who held those roles. I won't be distracted by Trek canon or beholden to what has come before. I've often wondered how the Star Wars prequels would have affected me if they were my first exposure to that Galaxy Far Far Away. Now I can watch the prequel of Star Trek before I watch the events that occur chronologically later but were written and filmed decades earlier. After I watch the new Trek movie, I'll add the newly released Blu-ray edition of the original Trek series to my Netflix queue and watch it with the new perspective (if any) the prequel film gives me.

Maybe I'll even write something about it.

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category: film | forums | 28 comments | §

How I spent my weekend

27 April 09 | 08:11 | Posted by:

Well, that'll teach me to be frank and up-front about the behind-the-scenes decision-making processes of putting together a project like the quarterly books. Somehow a well-intended recommendation which I politely declined turned kind of ugly. Neat.

Anyway, pretty much all I did this weekend was put together the magazine, wrapping up my last few text contributions and developing layout ideas. While the Blurb.com book format is somewhat limited, I do want to art it up a bit, so I eventually lit upon the idea of combining the wasteful intro pages I used in the first book with the boring screenshot galleries at the end of each piece into something more compact and attractive -- which is what you see here. It also lets me incorporate the site's standard font (which will be much more legible on the page than on this image, as the sample is displayed at about 1/5 actual resolution) for a touch of cross-media unity. Smashing.

Perhaps best of all is that these streamlined designs have enabled me to keep the page count at 160 or less, meaning we won't bump into the next folio size, which means a savin' o' the green. The final count for this issue will be 160 pages for $12.50 -- about 60 pages more than I ever expected the magazine to run (the contributors have contributed a lot, and we have the Game Boy's highlights pretty well covered) but right in line with my price goal. So that's perfect.

I'm about halfway through the layouts, so I should be able to submit for editor proofs next weekend. The technical word for this is groovy.

category: gamespite | forums | 23 comments | §

An iTunes feature request

26 April 09 | 08:46 | Posted by: vsrobot

You know, if Apple really wants to replace the old record store paradigm with their fancy-shmancy iTunes digital distribution model, they still have a long way to go. With the recent addition of "iTunes DJ" to the software package, it seems to me that it wouldn't be that difficult for Apple to add "iTunes Record Store Clerk", or iClerk. Here's how it would work:

You select something to listen to. iClerk would then pop up and tell you how it was into that band way before you ever heard of them. Plus they suck now anyway.

You try and buy something from the iTunes store. iClerk pops up and says, "Yeah, that's alright -- but there's this other band you've never heard of that is way better." If you try and buy the band iClerk recommends, iClerk sniffs and tells you it is very rare and out-of-print, no way you'd ever find it for sale anyway.

Basically iClerk would try and replicate the real record store experience: that of having an insufferable hipster look down his nose at you. Until Apple adds this much needed feature to iTunes, the only way to digitally replicate the real record store experience is to read Pitchfork.

category: media | forums | ten comments | §

GameSpite Quarterly status report

25 April 09 | 14:04 | Posted by:

The first issue of GameSpite Quarterly is still missing a handful of articles (including a few I need to write myself), but I've completed most of the initial layout -- such as it is. The drawback to using Blurb.com is that you have to put your book together through their proprietary software, which is pretty limited. If you've seen the first book we published, you have a pretty good idea of what the interiors will look like: clusters of plan text broken up by the occasional intro page or page of screenshots. It would be nice to have more options...but we don't. Given the choice between "limited options" and "impossible to create," though, I'll take the former any day.

Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time keeping the page count under 160, even after using a more compact font in a smaller size than we did for the book. Yay, you say, 160 pages. Yeah, I say, but remember this project isn't ad-supported: the larger the book is, the higher the final cost per book. I was hoping to keep it at $12, but if we go over 160 pages that's $14. Realistically speaking, that's a pretty reasonable price for a small-press, ad-free book printed on high-quality paper; but in strictly subjective terms, it seems an awful lot for a magazine. So I am considering our options.

On the plus side, we'll probably be ready to open orders before May 10.

category: blog | forums | 33 comments | §

FFVII Advent Children: completely unremarkable director's cut edition

24 April 09 | 18:27 | Posted by: Azar

Poor Final Fantasy VII. If you hadn't been so wildly popular, such a spectacularly successful smash hit for Sony's fledgling disc-based console, perhaps you would have remained a happy memory. But that's not how things worked out. When you sell more than 10 million copies and introduce a new generation of gamers to the role-playing genre, it's hard to be bound by the realm of nostalgia. It makes me wonder who's more to blame for the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII nonsense -- Square Enix, eager to whore out their most popular characters for all the money they can grab, or the fans, who eagerly lap it up and still clamor for that PS3 remake.

The whole thing really began with Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Now, just three years after the release of the original movie, Advent Children Complete is out, resplendent in 1080p and jammed with 25 minutes of extra footage. Supposedly it's not the end of the line for the Compilation, but it's all we've got for the foreseeable future.

And that's a shame, because Advent Children Complete does little to improve upon its predecessor. Even though a few of the new scenes smooth out the movie’s rough narrative flow, it's almost like pumping water out of a sinking ship -- the story was already hopelessly dumb, and the added exposition can only improve the presentation, not deliver a cure to the heart of the problem. Plenty of action movies have lamebrain plots and make up for it with explosive eye candy, so it's a little perplexing why ACC spent only a few of those extra two dozen minutes bolstering its flashy, gravity-defying fight scenes. Even at two hours and six minutes, the film feels too long, and the very fans it caters to will likely be the ones most disappointed by the additional footage.

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category: film | forums | seven comments | §

A fresh case of the 'roids (part 1)

23 April 09 | 18:00 | Posted by: calorie_mate

So I began playing Super Metroid this week. As in, for the first time ever. I know, I know, I’ve been missing out, best game ever, blahblahblah. It’s my secret shame and I’m finally doing something about it, so that’s good enough, right?

Luckily (and unsurprisingly), I’m enjoying it a good deal so far. In some ways, I feel really lucky to have missed out on it up until this point, since the Super Nintendo is still my favorite system of all time and it’s like I’ve unearthed a completely awesome AAA title for it. I’m basically living out the premise of Retro Game Challenge, but without my disembodied head from the future constantly watching me (that I know of). Equally fun is seeing conventions of other Metroid games I’ve played pop up here (I missed out on Metroid II and never really "got" the original as a young lad). Perhaps the best thing about Super Metroid so far, though, is that even after setting all that aside, it’s still impressing me on its own merits.

The level design in the game deserves a special nod. It’s hard to follow videogames – or, at least, the slightly retro niche this site tends to attract – and not be familiar with the Metroidvania setup, or the general belief that Super Metroid perfected the formula. While I really enjoyed Symphony of the Night, for example, there’s something about the structure of this game that really hammers home the feeling of exploration. Samus’ wider arsenal of moves -- blasting, jumping (in several ways), bombs, morphing into a ball, etc. -- seem to encourage seeing where you can go far more than Alucard’s running and jumping ever did. At least twice now, I’ve been stuck in a room and assumed I had to go elsewhere...only to find I couldn’t make my way back, forcing me to think a little more and find a way through the current obstacle. No tutorials popped up -- heck, most of the weapons and moves you get don’t even have a description of how to activate them! -- and there were only the most subtle of hints (in one specific case, enemies nearby that dropped an awful lot of missiles when I shot them) to guide me. Finding the solution to move forward was completely organic.

And, perhaps, that’s my favorite thing about the game so far: the fact that it trusts me enough to never hold my hand or do it for me, and in return, the fact that I can trust it to never stick me in an impossible situation or require some obtuse solution from out of left field. It’s no secret that my absolute favorite feeling in the world is cracking a difficult puzzle in Zelda games, and it’s largely for the same reason that I’m enjoying just plain exploring here. There’s an argument to be made for increasing a player’s desire to explore by telling them as little as possible and just cutting them loose, I guess.

Unfortunately, finally playing this is also a tad depressing, since playing it now I know that the same company responsible for such a considerate game has become so paranoid about leaving a single player behind that they put out games like Twilight Princess, which -- while still very good -- suck out all sense of discovery with an increasingly large pile of tutorials and "helpful" text windows in their games. Even the Prime games -- again, still totally fantastic! -- encourage scanning enemies first, rather than finding out on your own organically. I think everyone at Nintendo -- heck, in the games industry at large -- needs to go back and play Super Metroid. Couldn't hurt, could it?

category: games | forums | 20 comments | §

Movie-tie-in mass-market paperbacks

22 April 09 | 21:36 | Posted by: vsrobot

As a boy growing up with four younger sisters, family trips to the movie theater were exceedingly rare. My family was of modest means, and taking the whole herd out for that kind of outing was a very pricey proposition. Unfortunately for my mom, I was cinema-obsessed from a young age. Whenever a movie I was excited about was on the verge of release, I would keep a blank tape in the VCR so that on the off chance a commercial was shown I could record it for later viewing. (I even got the idea once that if I taped enough different trailers, I would have the whole movie recorded).

There were a few occasions when my frothing demand for a movie was so overwhelming for my poor mother that she would drop me off at the movies by myself and take my sisters somewhere else for a few hours before coming back to pick me up. This is how I saw Ghostbusters II, and I never had the heart to tell my mother how much it failed to live up to the expectations of my 10-year-old self.

On other occasions, our whole family would go out to see a movie, but usually not until it hit the third-run, dollar theater. By the time I saw Back to the Future Part III, I had seen so many commercials for it that I already knew that the way our heroes would make their way out of the past was by way of a modified steam locomotive. This is the first time I remember my voracious appetite for clips and trailers that I spoiled a movie for myself. I wonder now if that wasn't the reason I didn't care for the film, despite being a huge fan of the first two entries in the series. I haven't seen the movie all the way through since that theater outing as an 11-year old, and I'm considering moving that trilogy to the top of my Netflix queue so I can re-evaluate the film after so many of the GameSpite commenters disagreed with my disregard for that film.

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category: film, media | forums | 19 comments | §

GameSpite Issue 14 has been cancelled

21 April 09 | 21:07 | Posted by:

But don't worry, it's not really gone. It's just been renamed. Same delicious "gently-used games journalism" taste, but now with the piquant nostalgia of print media.

It's like this: when I was first hired at 1UP, I was excited to have steady work, sure... but I was even more enthusiastic about the fact that I'd be working at the company responsible for the last few American game magazines worth reading. I'd always wanted to be a published author, and working with GMR, EGM, OPM et al. gave me that opportunity. Needless to say, I watched the magazines die one by one with grim disappointment, and when they finally pulled the plug on EGM I was crushed. The death wasn't a surprise, of course. I don't know if the gaming press can realistically sustain a healthy print arm anymore, at least not in the U.S. Distribution costs here are too high, the audiences spread too far apart, tastes too diverse. Even in the U.K., Edge only exists because it's a bragging point, and the Japanese gaming press (minus niche publications like Continue) is basically 300 weekly pages of mild pablum carefully vetted by game publishers' PR agents.

No one's going to make a profit printing game magazines in America these days. But at the same time, I really miss print: I miss the substance of physical media, and I miss single looming deadlines, and I miss pages of content without animated roadblock-style Flash ads bordering them. No one's going to make a profit publishing a game magazine, but I realized we can do it here without a loss, and that's good enough. I mean, I already make a living doing online game writing for a company that has no interest in taking us into print, and this site already has lots of great content that will eventually be bundled into collected print volumes. So we've decided to reverse the process a little and do print first: thus, GameSpite Quarterly, Issue 1.

We'll still be posting content online, though. In fact, there'll be some articles that only appear online. But instead of publishing web content first and then compiling it into print, we're going to do it backward and write for print, then post that material gradually online. We get to write themed content for a set deadline with a really nice end product in-hand, and you get the same writing as usual with the option to grab it all in one go.

I'm using Japan's Continue magazine as our model, here: every quarter they publish about 150 pages of niche content in a small squarebound format and charge $10 for it. We'll be doing roughly the same -- maybe each issue won't be quite 150 pages, and maybe it'll cost a dollar or two more, but the content will definitely be niche, and we're ultimately sticking fairly close to Continue's overall style. I've learned a lot from GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1, including "don't distribute the magazine myself" and "work in smaller increments as opposed to a single 350-page volume." I'm mailing out the last handful of hardbacks this weekend, finally, and there's no way I'm subjecting myself (and you) to that mess again. All orders will be purchased through and shipped by blurb.com, thanks very much. I'll post all necessary info for interested parties once the issue is ready to go up for sale. And again, just about everything in the magazine will make its way onto the site; the book format is just for people who, like me, still have a fondness for paper.

As you can see, the first issue will be covering Game Boy's birthday, which admittedly you may be sick of after our 20th anniversary blitzkrieg on Retronauts. I think this will be different, and worth reading, though! But then, I'm biased.

We're still wrapping up the magazine. Text will be finalized this weekend, and layouts will be completed the week after, and then it'll take a while to get a proof copy and make sure the issue is distribution-worthy. Orders will be opened only once the magazine is edited and ready to ship -- no preorders, no delays. I figure you should have your copy in hand by the time E3 rolls around, and then we'll get to working on the second issue.

I should probably be spending my free time on weekends doing something besides more of what I do at work, but I can't help it. I miss print. This little endeavor won't change anything; it certainly won't turn the tide of game writing away from traditional media. But the project has been fun to plan and create, and while we'll probably just sell a few dozen copies, we're really not in it for the money... just the egoistic satisfaction of seeing our names in print.

Anyway, that's what we've been doing with our free time lately.

Edit: Some clarifications!

This is not a news magazine; it not intended to fill any void left by EGM except the one in my arrogant need to see my name in print. It's a quarterly journal printing the same kinds of articles that already appear on this site every week. Think... McSweeny's, but without as much ironic post-hipsterism. Also, I don't want it to conflict with my day job. To that end, it won't include any advertising, and I'm not going to be promoting it -- it sells what it sells, and if it doesn't sell much, that's fine. That's not why we're doing this.

We'll still publish collected volumes of the existing content; I hope to have the next out over the summer, time permitting. And the first book is permanently available if you click the little picture of it in the upper-right corner of the site. See? Right up there.

Edit Again: People seem to be making a bigger deal of this than it actually is (i.e. Kotaku). Nothing's really changing; this book is nothing more than the collective, weekly-ish game musings that have been posted here over the past two years, but now they're simply being bundled into print before going online. I'm a little nervous that what is supposed to be a small side project seems to be gathering so much attention.

category: gamespite | forums | 54 comments | §

Add to Queue 85: Breaking kayfabe

20 April 09 | 23:17 | Posted by: vsrobot

Media | A2Q Archives | A2Q on Twitter | A2Q #85 | April 21, 2009

---

It's okay to like The Wrestler even if you don't like pro wrestling. In fact, I think if you aren't invested in that sometimes barbaric and brutal "sport" you might get more out of it. As a kid growing up in the '80s, I was a fan of the soap opera that was the WWF, cheering for the babyfaces and booing the heels. One of my pre-adolescent birthdays was spent cheering on Jake "The Snake" Roberts at a non-televised event. I grew up and stopped watching wrestling, and if I thought of it at all I did so with an adult's eyes, wondering what I ever saw in something so obviously fake.

These days, I know it's only fake in the sense that the outcomes are predetermined. The enormous physical toll it takes on the performers is real, and the mid-level guys are performing not only on the televised events, but the non-televised house shows as well. The more interesting a wrestler is to watch, the more athletic and acrobatic the performer's moves are, the more likely that person is to end up crippled and/or in constant pain when they get older -- if they even live that long. It is a sad state of affairs that many wrestlers die young. Wrestlers aren't protected by a union and, last time I checked, don't have post-career health coverage.

This is the world that Darren Aronofsky's The Wreslter portrays. The life of a faded star, once world famous in the world of wrestling, now living in a trailer park working a job he hates, living only for the weekend when he can perform for audiences that are only a fraction of the size of the crowds he once drew, dreaming of a comeback. The movie is as good as you've heard, and don't let any preconceived notions about the nature of wrestling keep you from seeing this important work featuring a powerful performance from Mickey Rourke, who, like his character, is similarly on the comeback trail.

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category: film | forums | twelve comments | §

GameSpite Issue 14.0: DMG-01 Prelude

20 April 09 | 06:23 | Posted by:

Issue 14 won't start up for a little while yet (more on that tomorrow), but since tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the Game Boy's Japanese launch and this issue's topic is the Game Boy's 20th anniversary, I figured we should get an early start with the prologue.

Game Boy Moments
Like last time, we kick off this issue with a round-up of personal anecdotes on the topic du jour, many of which will be expanded on in the course of the issue itself. So enjoy this fine appetizer as you wait for this big ol' feast of words to begin.

category: games, gamespite | forums | 17 comments | §

In defense of sequels and remakes

19 April 09 | 09:58 | Posted by: vsrobot

You can hear an audible groan from the film fans of the world with the announcement of each new terrible sequel or remake. Mainstream Hollywood seems bereft of original ideas, and so we end up with a lot of terrible ideas instead. Nothing could illustrate this more than the oft-rumored (but thankfully never produced) remake of Casablanca starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.

The evidence that sequels and remakes are a bad idea is overwhelming. The world didn't need another The Day the Earth Stood Still starring Keanu Reeves. Disney seems to have made the argument that all sequels should be banned all on their own: just walk through the animation section of any video store and see crimes against your childhood neatly alphabetized: Cinderella 2 and 3, Fox and the Hound 2, Return to Neverland-- none of them compare favorably to their predecessors.

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category: film | forums | 30 comments | §

Circle of distrust

18 April 09 | 11:46 | Posted by:

I pass this chalk, uh, diagram all the time in the course of my morning walk.



I keep wondering what happens if you step into the circle...but not enough to find out for myself. It's a little too close to the ocean, and thus lots of seagulls, for my liking.

On a less stupid note, congrats to GameSpite contributor reibeatall for getting hitched today...and liveblogging it. A brave new frontier for nerdkind!

category: blog | forums | eight comments | §

Clichés... in... spaaaaace!

17 April 09 | 20:26 | Posted by:

You know, it's weird, but even though I was a big ol' Star Trek dork in junior high school (it was almost kind of cool for a while, since Next Generation was first launching at the time), I've really never seen that much of the original '60s TV series. A handful of episodes decades ago, but mostly just bits and pieces of fuzzy, worn, chopped-up prints on syndicated TV. For the most part, my Trek indoctrination happened through the movies, the early seasons of Next Generation, an embarrassing number of novels, and even (gulp) the Saturday morning cartoon. So I am relishing the prospect of watching the restored episodes on Blu-ray -- it's a sort of back-to-basics project under the best possible circumstances.



That said, the very first episode, "The Man Trap," has been unintentionally amusing -- in exactly eight minutes, 29 seconds, Dr. McCoy had already uttered his trademark line, "He's dead, Jim." Well, technically it was simply, "Dead, Jim," this time, but whatever! It's the spirit of the thing.

Some of the episode has surprised me, like the bit where Uhura comes on to Spock -- a slightly uncomfortable (and really awfully out-of-character) way to establish what's the deal with Vulcans. However: Nichelle Nichols was crazy gorgeous. Bummer that she didn't do her sexy fan dance until she was eligible for retirement.

Edit: Uh... I just got a part in the second episode where Uhura starts singing a really weird song about Spock, and now I don't even know what to think. Everything I believed about Star Trek is a lie.

category: film | forums | sixteen comments | §

Gaming reinventED

16 April 09 | 23:01 | Posted by: Azar

Picture yourself in the bustling streets of ancient Rome, weaving your way through the narrow avenues of open space between the tightly-packed crowds of shouting vendors, haggling housewives, and stern centurions. Imagine sitting in the majestic colosseum, eyeing 40,000 Romans just like you who are watching a particularly vicious gladiatorial bout. Now dial it all back a notch -- those aren’t real throngs of Romans haggling over produce prices in Latin. They’re avatars, similar in detail to those in Second Life, and nearly every one is being controlled by a 12-year old. And you’re not really sitting in the Roman colosseum -- you’re sitting in a classroom, learning the history and culture of an ancient civilization from a video game.

It makes sense, if you think about it. We're living in the information age -- Twitter spreads messages across a vast network in minutes, millions of people sink time into alternate identities in World of Warcraft and other MMOs, and video games are right in the middle of the burgeoning new media sector, pushing the wave of HD displays and challenging how we interact with technology. So why isn’t that same technological advancement carrying over into the classroom, where textbooks still reign supreme? After listening to one of the co-founders of GameTap, Al Meyers, talk for two hours on Tuesday about his new project ReinventED, I was convinced -- video games are an untapped resource for expanding the scope of what our kids learn in the classroom.

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category: games | forums | eleven comments | §

Indiana Jones and the dawning self-realization

16 April 09 | 08:56 | Posted by: vsrobot

I recently screened Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on Blu-ray, and a few things struck me, not least of which is how much I really enjoy the film. I posted a bit about it to Twitter, and predictability got some pushback about the film. If Internet commentary is to be believed, it's not a very good movie. But why should I trust Internet commentary when I have the evidence of my own two eyes? It made me wonder why I like the film when so many other people don't, and I came to a few conclusions.

First of all, I'm not stranger to liking genre movies dismissed by the fans of said genre. After all, I'm on record as an ardent support of the Star Wars prequels. I used to think that I liked those movies not because of any inherent quality, but because I have a blind spot when it comes to Star Wars that allows me to love it unconditionally. But in light of Crystal Skull's reception, I no longer think that is the case.

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category: film | forums | 38 comments | §

Public service chronicles

15 April 09 | 18:09 | Posted by: calorie_mate

Guys, I have a recommendation. You should go buy Valkyria Chronicles now.

Gamestop has the game on sale for $30 this month, which is a steal. I played the demo and loved it, but hadn't gotten around to purchasing it yet due to an insane backlog (among other things), so grabbing it new for half off seemed perfect. I placed my order online, and waited. And waited.

Today I realized my order appears to have been cancelled. Being the super sleuth I am, I decided to investigate. I spoke with a very nice man at Gamestop’s customer service center, and he informed me that the cancellation came direct from the publisher –- something that, according to my source, only usually happens when they’re not manufacturing a game anymore. I don’t want to prematurely alarm anyone -- Gamestop dude could have been completely wrong, or it could be a temporary thing (though their website now confirms it's unavailable) -- but after just 6 months of poor sales it looks like Valkyria Chronicles might be joining the pantheon of criminally underappreciated RPGs that will go for more than a game should on eBay in a few years. I’ve never watched it happen in real time before; even with Suikoden II, it wasn’t until many years later I was informed that my copy was worth something.

I know it’s just one sale, but I’m kicking myself now for not picking it up when I should have, particularly in light of my disappointment in some of the other “big” games that came out last year. I really should have supported something so, so...fresh, something I'd tried beforehand and actually enjoyed! If you have any interest at all in playing the game some day (or want to make mad bank on eBay some day, I guess), you might want to look into securing a copy while you’re still able to.

category: comic | forums | 31 comments | §

Add to Queue 84: Naproxen

14 April 09 | 09:33 | Posted by: vsrobot

Media | A2Q Archives | A2Q on Twitter | A2Q #84 | April 14, 2009

---

Speaking of pain, my God, The Spirit. I couldn't make it more than twenty minutes into the movie. Written and directed by comic book icon Frank Miller. Look, I like his hugely influential graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns as much as the next guy, but let's not forget that Miller also wrote The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Sin City was a pretty good movie, but Miller also wrote Robocop 3. Seems for every great work Miller gives us, he also produces something... not quite as good.

So, anyway, I watched enough of The Spirit to see that they took the visual style of Sin City and mixed it with the over-the-top camp of the Schumacher Batman films, which is not a good idea at all. The "Digital Copy Included" starburst on the cover isn't a selling point-- it's a threat. Stay away.

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category: film | forums | 20 comments | §

GameSpite Issue 13.4: The pivotal finale

13 April 09 | 09:50 | Posted by:

I couldn't figure out why I was having so much trouble birthing this final update for the current issue until I realized, oh, hey -- it's the final installment of Issue 13, being posted on the 13th of April. I guess I was just taunting disaster with this one. Anyway! Unless I suffer a heart attack and die before I can click "Publish," we're past the rocky waters of our ill fortune. Our personally-tinged Pivotal Moments edition wraps with not two but three pieces. So read up. Next issue: something magical will happen.

BioShock
Proving that you don't have to suffer from verbal diarrhea to be a new gently-used games journalist, reibeatall offers up a concise summary of the single most profound video game moment he's ever experienced. Danger: it involves spoilers.

Deadly Rooms of Death
Nearly two years in the making, Merus delves deeply into a game that you've probably never heard of (or at the very least, never played) but which had a tremendous impact on his life. Personally, this piece made me feel like an unappreciative jerk for never spending more time with DRoD.

Sword of Vermillion
Finally, Mightyblue looks deep in the soul and wonders, how it is that I could ever have experienced so much affection for an infuriatingly awful video game? The results of his geeky vision quest are splayed across the page for all to experience.

category: blog | forums | ten comments | §

Spring has sprung

12 April 09 | 13:17 | Posted by:

Merry Easter, everyone! 1,970 years ago (or thereabouts) a man died, then undied, all so he could bring you the Good News. Based on the traditions that have built up around the event, that news appears to have been, "Hey guys, a rabbit hid a bunch of boiled eggs in your lawn." Of course, if you don't manage to find them all on Easter morning, this becomes very Bad News a few weeks later.

Incidentally, since my new-ish job duties are basically expending all my game blogging energy, I hope you don't mind if I start writing about less specifically game-oriented things here. (Of course, the weekly articles will still be game-y, because there's no place for gently-used games journalism on 1UP.) If you do mind, please let me know. Not that I intend to change my habits or plans because of a couple of disgruntled people, but this way I will know who to be watching for when I compulsively look over my shoulder in paranoia.

category: blog | forums | 41 comments | §

They say I'm all about the wordplay

10 April 09 | 10:11 | Posted by: Azar

Growing up equal parts voracious reader and student of capitalism and imperialism (Monopoly and Risk, respectively), you'd think a game like Scrabble, combining the fun times of a competitive board game with the trapping of lit'rature would be, well, up my alley.

It wasn't.

As a kid, and well on up into my teen years, I loathed Scrabble. The mere mention of it as a contender for family game night rendered me vehemently opposed, eyes ablaze and jaw firmly set in an unequivocal veto. Well, mostly I just whined. But you get the point: the two of us didn't mix, jive, or coagulate whatsoever.

I always assumed it was the game itself -- which is a little odd, considering my aforementioned appetite for all things fiction. Turns out, that wasn't it at all. Because, you see, I hate Scrabble, but I love Lexulous. If you're unfamiliar, despair not -- I was among your sorry ranks but a few weeks ago. Lexulous is, basically, free Scrabble for the Internets, written in Java and as competent as any of the simplistic gaming services offered by Yahoo! and, well, whoever else offers free Java games.

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category: games | forums | six comments | §

And a silent tear of blood trickles down his cheek

08 April 09 | 21:32 | Posted by:

I have to send off my (almost completely brand new) laptop to be replaced tomorrow. Apple's been very pleasant and friendly about this whole "catastrophic failure" thing, but it does mean I'll be without a system of my own for a couple of weeks. I'll post here as I can, and I intend to look into coming up with some sort of electroshock system to make sure that other site contributors are holding down the fort in my partial absence. Bear with us, though! When I'm back up and running at 100%, I intend to announce the Next Big Thing for GameSpite: a significant change of focus that will kick off with Issue 14. Speaking of which, Issue 13 wraps next week, and to make up for the week we took off it will be a jumbo-sized three-article post. Exciting.

Also: The only song I heard today on the radio? "That's All" by Genesis. I'm telling you people, I'm being haunted by Phil Collins. And he's not even dead! Imagine how bad it's gonna be once he's actually a ghost.

category: blog | forums | nine comments | §

We got the beet

07 April 09 | 14:53 | Posted by:

I'm spending the first half of this week in sunny Sonoma county, which has turned out to be less sunny than advertised. At the moment I'm peering out a window at a downpour of rain that's about 60% of the way to "torrential" classification. I won't complain too vigorously, though...despite being at the outskirts of Santa Rosa and right along the edge of the highway, my current lodgings are redolent of being up in the mountains. Maybe it's the fresh air, or the fact that the hotel is situated on a hill, or the way the entire complex is made to look like mountain bungalows. Either way, rain is pretty much the unavoidable companion of summer camp in the mountains, so the dreary skies are somewhat nostalgic.

A more crucial misrepresentation is my impression that I was coming to lodge in Wine Country. And yeah, OK, the wine here is awfully good if what I had last night at dinner is any indication. Weirdly, though, I've found beets to be far more prevalent than wine. Last night I had beet risotto for dinner, which was tasty enough, if weird. The night before that I went to a steakhouse where every dish was garnished with sliced beets. And then there was the beet latte...well, OK, not really. But if someone were to offer me a beetshake at lunch today, I doubt I'd flinch.

Sonoma also appears to be Phil Collins country. It's almost eerie: everywhere I go, I hear songs by Phil Collins or Genesis. I think he's following me. Or maybe Sonoma has decided that it's time for him to make a comeback? Of course, I suppose there could be darker implications as well....



Edit: Oh god, it's "Sussudio." SOMEONE HELP

category: blog | forums | 18 comments | §

If you're friends with Pyoro, well, then you're friends with me

07 April 09 | 07:39 | Posted by: m_nicolai

Nintendo's recent offerings have a rewarmed quality to them. Pokémon Platinum, the DSi, and Rhythm Heaven are all previously released products that have been reissued with new features. The new DSiWare service is no exception, offering Bird & Beans, a rechristening of the WarioWare mini-game Pyoro. Like the WarioWare games, Bird & Beans is a simple, single-button diversion in which you move a bird left and right across a brick platform as beans float down from the sky. The beans will break the bricks if they fall to the bottom of the screen, so you must gobble them with your extendable 45-degree-angle tongue, with higher points awarded for snagging them near the top of the screen. The speed increases as your score grows, and the background slowly becomes more festive. Beating the high score unlocks a second game where you shoot seeds that can hit multiple beans at once.

And with the exception of a slightly larger playing field, the game is identical to its WarioWare counterpart. While this may be a disincentive for those who already own the original, I find the idea of building my own private WarioWare on the DSi, stocked with mini-games I've picked myself, to be exciting. When Nintendo's president, Satoru Iwata, addressed this year's Game Developers Conference he spoke about how his company will often revisit unused game designs and give new ideas the time they need to grow and mature. In that context, perhaps Bird & Beans can be seen as a twice-baked potato instead of another serving of leftovers.

category: games | forums | six comments | §

He's leaving home, bye bye

05 April 09 | 15:46 | Posted by:

Humans! I am away from home and work and, god willing, the Internet through Wednesday evening. I was presented with the opportunity to stay in a really nice hotel in the Sonoma area for free for a few days, and it seemed like a welcome opportunity to escape from all this "real life" nonsense for a little while -- some much-needed downtime between the madness of GDC and E3. Don't expect to hear from me for a while, and be nice to the other posters in my absence.

I notice that my Rhythm Heaven review has gone live over at 1UP. This is one of those cases where I'm choking back my urge to apologize for an article so people won't grip about empty self-deprecation -- but I really am a bit unhappy with how it turned out, even after revising and rewriting it several times. I blame Nintendo for not having the decency to release the original GBA Rhythm Heaven in the U.S., because if they had I wouldn't have had to spend so much time explaining why the DS version is a mild disappointment. Everyone would have played the GBA game and would therefore realize how and why the sequel falls slightly short. Instead, I had to waste a lot of space explaining the difference between the two versions and breaking down a complaint leveled at a somewhat intangible failing, and now it seems like the review veers dangerously close to import elitist snobbery. But it's not! It's just that, having experienced the other version, I can't knowingly brush off this version's stumbles.

Actually, I guess I'll just blame Kurt Kalata, since HG101's critique of the game pretty much covered all the bases ahead of me, forcing me to write something different. Thanks for nothing!

That being said, it's a quality game and you should buy it. So please do.

category: games | forums | sixteen comments | §

Doin' dishes samurai style

04 April 09 | 21:42 | Posted by: Azar

 

It's something most of us have to deal with, sooner or later. We all reach the age when parents begin to hand off household responsibilities, exposing us to one of life's bitter truths: washing dishes sucks. That must be why The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai feels so right -- the seeming absurdity of an undead dishwasher exacting bloody vengeance on legions of cyborgs makes a little sense, if you think about it. The torturous existence of a career dishwasher must surely fill a reservoir of repressed, unhealthy rage...and when that reservoir overflows, well.... Or at least, that's my justification. Paper thin or not, it makes about as much sense as the vague, blurry comic book narration jammed between each level of The Dishwasher's story mode, which somehow manages to be more nonsensical than I'd expected.

Thankfully, story isn't really a major concern when it comes to the beat 'em up genre. Weapons, combos, enemies, and levels are what matter, and Dishwasher delivers those in spades. Each of the five weapons can be upgraded to unlock new attacks, as can the health and dish magic capacities. Castle Crashers is arguably the premier brawler on XBLA, but Dishwasher provides some surprisingly fierce competition. While I miss the four-player co-op, comprehensive leveling system, and wonderful aesthetics of The Behemoth's $15 title, The Dishwasher may have just stolen my heart; it's the 2D equivalent of Itakgaki's Ninja Gaiden, right down to the medium and heavy attacks, brutal finishing moves and blood-spurting, eviscerated torsos. But as much as I love all of those things, there was one final element that pushed it over the edge: the chainsaw.

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category: games | forums | five comments | §

The wonders of technology

03 April 09 | 18:03 | Posted by:

I've just made a fantastic discovery: the Nintendo DSi won't boot review ROMs. You know, the majority of carts I play.

Also, my MacBook Pro (the one I've had for five weeks) no longer works correctly; when I try to put it to sleep the hard drive goes insane and it enters a permanent freeze loop that requires a hard shutown. But that's OK, because I'm no longer allowed to use it for work anyway (even though work is the main reason I bought it in the first place).

Hurt me more.

category: blog | forums | fourteen comments | §

The cake is a litmus test

01 April 09 | 22:19 | Posted by:

Nintendo transformed me into a microcephalic cake decoration today. It was weird, and when it came time to discuss who would have the honor (?) of consuming my itsy-bitsy head things got a little uncomfortable. Fortunately, we ultimately decided it would be best for me to simply bring home the entire chocolate DSi upon which my shrunken skull is emblazoned. People kept referring to it as "my cake," which notion I did my best to disabuse...but I'm OK with claiming the topper for myself. For one, the cake was awfully good, so I assume the chocolate will be even more delicious. As I'm a fiend for quality chocolate, this is promising.


More importantly, though, this thing is going to freak out the fiancée when she gets home. And isn't that what really matters, in the end?

The DSi system that came with the cake (almost an afterthought, really) was enclosed in a mirrored box that lights up and cheers when you open it. So, I put the choco-DSi in the box, placed it in the fridge, and will quietly watch as Cat comes home, discovers the box, and opens it to be greeted by a chorus of cheers and a bizarre (and edible) photo manipulation of me. I guess it's kind of an April Fools prank, but only due to an accident of timing. Mostly it's just something random and ridiculous. And, I suppose, a sort of warning. "This is your last chance," will be the subtext. "It's not too late to call this whole thing off." If I come home tomorrow and the locks haven't been changed, I will know it was meant to be.

category: games | forums | twelve comments | §