Like I said before, the RE5 trailer makes me itchy.
At least twiceon Kotaku this week, the racial implications have caused a commenting explosion, instigated chiefly by an African-American weblogger voicing her concerns about the game.
Here's the full trailer, the one I downloaded on my PS3...
I don't think Capcom, a Japanese developer, intended to make a political statement, but here in America, it seems impossible not to see it as such when taken, and I'll italicize this, taken out of context of the actual game.
Coffee Prince Trailer (YouTube) A quick trailer for Coffee Prince, a new show airing on Korean TV. The series began running last month, so they're only up to episode ten at the moment. We've started watching subtitled dubs of the series on Veoh using the PS3's web browser. (The Wii browser just isn't fast enough to run a huge stream without sputtering.)
I always get jealous when see those photo essays from guys in Dublin who grout tile sculptures of the Space Invaders sprites onto buildings. So I've been scouting for any sort of local random video game art.
I swear this Pac-Man sticker has been on this sign since the mid-'80s. The sticker is from those cool Pac-Man bubble gum card sets, the ones with the scratch-off maze cards. This is about a mile up from my parents' house. No, I did not place the sticker. I didn't go outside much, and certainly not a mile from home.
I know I'm getting close to tackling the Elite Four, but my team isn't ready. Out of the eight or so that I'm considering placing on the team, half of them are only in the high 40s, which just will not do. So lately I've been doing some training, mostly up in the snowy region where it's an easy 600-1200 XP no matter what stupid critter jumps you.
I also focused on catching those three legendary floating alien cat things, which cost me a lot of money and a lot of time.
I needed 30+ balls to capture Uxie, mostly wasted Ultra Balls although it was a Dusk Ball that did the job. Same story with Azelf.
Those two idiots at least have the decency to stay where you find them. The third one, Mesprit, vanishes as soon as you activate him, and you have to track him down using one of the Poketch's map screens. It's awful. You can see his current location, but if you Fly there, he moves. If you take too long to walk there, he moves. If you cross into a city, he moves. I headquartered myself in Jubilife and walked in and out of town until he flitted within a short walk. (I did like how the background music changed when you start a battle with Mesprit.)
Devon's Kinda True Cully Hamner Story (Seven Hells) I totally thought Cully Hamner was black too! I remember reading an interview or something with him where he mentioned an art school teacher who chastised his work by saying "Are you afraid to draw big lips on your black figures?"
We had some Animal Crossing-loving guests this weekend, so I set up an AC dream room, with GBAs (for Island visits), the eReader and my nearly complete collection of Animal Crossing trading cards.
I can't believe I kept the packaging to this, or maybe I can.
This is the LCD game of the NES game of the Metal Gear sequel that nobody wanted. You can check it out on Wikipedia, but the upshot is that Snake's Revenge is the Kojima-less sequel made specifically for the US. And if Kojima-san had nothing to do with the NES Snake's Revenge, I'm sure he had even less to do with this poor boy LCD version. As the story goes, after hearing what his company had approved in Snake's Revenge, Kojima started work on his true sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.
After his iron clad plan to rule the world rusted away in Metal Gear, crazed Colonel Vermon Cataffy retired from the terrorist business. But before going on tour, Cataffy gave the secrets for Metal Gear II (an ultra-sheik nuclear attack tank) to the world's premier bad guy - Higharolla Kockamamie. Now, you're ordered on a mission to infiltrate Higharolla Kockamamie's heavily guarded Fortress Fanatic and to destroy Metal Gear II.
"Colonel Cataffy"? "before going on tour"? "ultra-sheik"? "Higharolla Kockamamie"? Uwe Boll, is that you?
I get these email surveys from Nintendo quite a bit, and I always make a point to fill them out. You don't get anything for it, other than your chance to bake them over bad games. Like Pokemon Battle Revolution. Here's some screens of the survey (I skipped the dull(er) questions, like Are You Male Or Female) along with some additional commentary.
Animal Crossing Film Trailer (YouTube) Dude. I need a subtitled version of this right away. Can I get a region-free, please.
Guitar Hero '80s Is Harmonix's 'Metal Machine Music'? (GameSetWatch) Great editorial on how the lackluster Guitar Hero Rocks the 80s is the contractual obligation release, and that the GH guys are now long gone into Rock Band. Me too.
For a month or two, my office Windows XP machine has been trouble, throwing virus-like errors in Explorer. A site would load but than instantly turn into an error page as IE shifted from the genuine URL to this f-ed up local URL: res://C:\WINDOWS\system32\shdoclc.dll/navcancl.htm.
It seemed to be random, because sometimes I could visit a bunch of different websites with no problem, but later I would try the same sites and get the error.
It also felt like the keyboard was slow. I would type at my normal blistering pace and every fourth letter would be dropped. I punched my PC's flatscreen twice for that. Dead on, fist into screen. It took both shots with no ill effect, so I have to give the Dell product top marks for that.
I tried Googling that bizarre res: string, but IE did the same FU trick on the Google results page, effectively blocking me out of teching my own problem. So I did my searching on my iMac... I don't know why I'm even bothering to use my PC's web browser, except when somebody at the office sends me an email with a link in it.
We had two big events scheduled for this morning... both our local Toys R Us and our favorite comic store (Comic Store West) had Grand Re-Openings today. The TRU recently completed a nice renovation where they gutted the always-lame Kids R Us portion and turned it into a Babies R Us... and the Toys R Us part FINALLY got an R'Zone.
The Comic Store just moved to their fifth location in twenty years. If you're keeping track, I always think of their evolution as The First One, The One Beside The Porn Shop, The One Beside Off-Track Betting, The One On Route 30, and now The New One.
The big draw at Toys R Us was Spider-Man. Clark had been talking about this fateful meeting for days.
I'm about to hit endgame in Okami, so this weekend I put a couple hours in on some mini-missions and item collection. I dug up a sidequest FAQ on GameFAQs and cherry-picked some of the more interesting tasks. For example, I had no idea that you could upgrade certain brush techniques by donating money to those underground springs. Sheesh. Then there's this:
I am so glad that they had the balls to name that move "Golden Fury." Pun(s) intended.
You think gaming today has outrageous prices, a confusing abundance of consoles and formats, ridiculous hype, and too many cash-in licenses and Me Too titles?
It ain't "nothin'" compared to 1993.
Witness the EB product catalog, May 1993 edition, fresh from the fourhman.home archives. Let's review. The Super NES vs. Sega Genesis war was over and the Genesis had won... but Sega's crazy CD add-on had been out for a year and already a failure. The Game Gear was only two years old and widely presumed to destroy the five year old Game Boy, even though it wasn't.
The Saturn would arrive one year later. The PlayStation, two years. The N64 wouldn't bare its stupid claw controllers for another three years. So we still had a good long time before the gaming universe's next major rivalry.
I'm going to leaf through this catalog issue with you over several weblog updates... all twelve pages of it, although I didn't bother with the back half of DOS 6.0 games and PC "productivity" titles (but I did snigger at the aptly named pre-Windows accounting software, "Microsoft Profit".) All of these thumbs click out to full-size versions, so feel free to zoom in and make your own jokes at 1993's expense. Just about every text block is hilarious.
The Mesopotamians Audition (YouTube) Quasi-mysterious TMBG cartoon featuring audio from an episode of The Monkees, with imagery from their new awesome song, The Mesopotamians.
It's the Tourists... (Mice Age) Insightful article on what DisneyWorld vacationers look for, and how Disney meets - or fails to meet - those needs. Includes a few brilliant points on why FastPass doesn't work.
Zune = anus (Fake Steve Jobs) This graphic so perfect, you'd think it was planned this way.
I know I'm getting close to tackling the Elite Four, but my team isn't ready. Out of the eight or so that I'm considering placing on the team, half of them are only in the high 40s, which just will not do. So lately I've been doing some training, mostly up in the snowy region where it's an easy 600-1200 XP no matter what stupid critter jumps you.
For a month or two, my office Windows XP machine has been trouble, throwing virus-like errors in Explorer. A site would load but than instantly turn into an error page as IE shifted from the genuine URL to this f-ed up local URL: res://C:\WINDOWS\system32\shdoclc.dll/navcancl.htm.
