Guys, I slipped out of our week-long screenings just long enough to post this piece of content. Don’t tell anyone.
Everything I’ve seen this week is under embargo, but I am allowed to say that so far Activision has offered the best wine. However, Square Enix’s bar featured creme de cassis, which is pretty classy.
I don’t drink much, but sometimes it’s simply a matter of survival.
“I don’t understand why no one is buying our new Super NES game, Harvest Moon.”
“Well, it is a sort of kids-looking game.”
“Yeah, I don’t know….”
“And the Super NES is almost dead. It’s 1997, you know.”
“Sure, but both of those things are true of Kirby’s Dream Land 3, and it’s doing OK for itself.”
“Hmmm. Well, we have been getting reports of children having nightmares after being terrified out of their minds by that quote-unquote ‘creepy as hell’ box art.”
“Which box art? I don’t think I– OH SWEET JESUS”
“Yeah.”
“F-fire the artist. And then nuke him from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
I need to get over my weird apathy for emulated games. I loved (LOVED) SoulBlazer, and Illusion of Gaia was pretty great, too! So why have I not played Terranigma, their Europe-only sequel? I think it is because I am a big dope, maybe.
Forgive the slightly dated text of this issue. All that Xenoblade and Last Story doom-and-gloom. My goodness!
My Protestant guilt is kicking in about this site. It’s not my fault my webhost crapped the bed for a few days, but man, that outage really threw me off my stride. And Sunday morning I head down to Santa Monica for my first-ever E3 Judges Week. From what I understand, it’s a five-day procession of publishers showing all their big games for the year in private screenings. Cool, right? Except it seems we’re trapped live veal calves in hotel ballrooms for 14 hours a day and eventually go mad from sunlight deprivation and overexposure to aggressively vetted demo presentations. Anyway, by all accounts I will have little time to sleep or even stand occasionally to avoid deep-vein thrombosis (thanks, Nich, for introducing me to that particular life terror), so it’s a safe bet that not much will be happening here.
And the week after that, 1UP explodes into complete awesomeness. So that’ll probably keep me pretty busy.
I still love you, though.
We’ve been trying to figure out this whole “video” thing ever since the 1UP Show was cut down in its prime. Live streams, game nights, daily news shows, static talking head videos, you name it. None of them ever quite stick. But I like this one! I want to do more of them.
Delightful, isn’t it? Or if not delightful, at least moderately entertaining. Which is about all I think you could hope for from free Internet content.
The Super NES era consistently caught me by surprise. Secret of Mana was amazing! Super Metroid somehow managed to exist without my knowing about it until after launch! But perhaps most startling of all was Street Fighter Alpha 2, which showed up in the twilight days of the system and somehow made me care about Street Fighter again. I didn’t even mind the way a cartridge somehow suffered from load times. Or the random dropped frames. Seriously, how did this game exist on Super NES? Wizard people, dear readers.
Pardon the brevity of posts for the next, I dunno, forever. I’m slowly trickling content over to a new web host, but I’m pretty sure the entire purpose of the Internet these days is to infuriate me with how utterly frustrating and inefficient it is.
I’ve heard complaints that the biggest flaw in the current season of Mad Men is that it’s a little too on-the-nose. I don’t think I actually felt that way until last night’s episode, which ended with a montage set to The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” — the entire season has revolved around the uncertainty of change in the late ’60s, and for Don to very pointedly bring that song to a screeching halt (because the music the kids listen to these days is too darn loud) seems not at all subtle. The bit about him staring down into an empty elevator shaft was a bit overt in its symbolism, too. Another good episode, though.
The site’s back, finally. Sorry for the downtime — it was out of my hands. The site will be a little less active than usual until I can move to a host that isn’t terrible. I am done with Dreamhost. For as much as we pay for their premium service, they’ve done a terrible job of making it feel premium over the past few months.
Did you know that when you do an image search for Kirby Super Star, you get a lot of results that involve Imperial Super Star Destroyers? I can’t even begin to imagine what Kirby would morph into if he swallowed the Executor, but I bet it would be very pointy and very awesome.
Why do the best Kirby games always show up at the end of a console’s life and fly under everyone’s radar? Much as I obsessed over the NES, I never realized that Kirby’s Adventure was amazing until I discovered emulation. And for all that I loved the Super NES, I didn’t even really know what Kirby Super Star was until they remade it for DS.
I should probably crack the shrink wrap on my copy of Mass Attack sooner than later, huh?
Hey gang, we’re almost done with GameSpite Journal 10 posts! Then you’ll be forced to read about things that aren’t Super NES games. My sympathies. I guess you’ll just have to slog through this loving tribute to the wonderful masterpiece that is Tetris Attack. I know. Life sucks sometimes.
Normally I link to articles with a piece of official art, but I found some wonderful Tetris Attack artwork here and just had to celebrate it:
Go rack up some hits on that guy’s page and make him feel good for being so rad. I like when talented people on the Internet do neat stuff in honor of great things.