You may also recall me threatening to return on Wednesday.
It was a long morning at work, so I was considering running out to this Toys R Us as part of a very late lunch (like, after 2pm). I was looking forward to being away from the office, as I haven't taken a real hour lunch in weeks. So I'm discussing the merits of the plan with Arthong and Shovesy. They suggest that I call and ask Toys R Us about these games.
The thing is, no matter what they tell me over the phone, I'm not going to believe it. If they say "Yes sir, you bet we have those" I won't believe it because I'll be convinced they misunderstood my request and I'll be looking at a stack of PS2 Buzz games and a copy of Flubber on DVD. If they say "No sir, we do not have those for sale" I won't believe it because how in fuck can they not have two week old games in stock. It's the kind of thing I have to see with my own two eyes and as I expressed this devout desire I pointed right at my eyes with two fingers to illustrate how serious I was about it.
First things first: I hate that Buzz host guy. I just don't like the look of him. But he's far less obnoxious that the overplayed voiceover guy from You Don't Know Jack, so that's a plus.
The game, however, is a hoot. Rhonda and I did three 1-on-1 matches tonight, and each was no longer than 20 minutes... so it seems nicely brisk for multiplayer. We also did one online multiplayer game, and I think that was even shorter. In summation, nice short chunks of gameplay rather than dragging it out for an entire evening, a la Mario Party.
Some of the trivia games skew towards unfair. There's a hot potato style game that penalizes whoever is holding the potato when time is up, and you have no idea when that is... effectively making it entirely random. The Pie Fight game lets you choose which opponent to hit with the pie by clicking when his or her name is highlighted, but it also includes you in that list so if your timing is off, you whack yourself with a pie. These are small design mistakes that are accentuated in a two player match; both would be less annoying with three or four contestants.
Anyway, most of the games are fine. Some include video clips or Getty Images style still photography, which is nice.
LittleBigPlanet - The Human Body Level (YouTube) Straight from some guy in the LBP beta: a level that takes place inside a body. I hope I can create something half this cool during my time in the beta.
High Steaks (Mark Evanier) A little about the utter nonsense of having candidates show up in City A to be photographed eating City Food Specialty B. In this case, Philadelphia and cheese steaks. Disgusting on all counts, but there's a great Bob Dole story in there.
Which of the EIGHT Versions of the Iron Man DVD Should You Buy? (Gizmodo) Funny-sad. I hope they have to count all eight of these stupid spin-the-wheel bonus bundles as separate movies, so Iron Man ends up being the dud of the week in sales. That said, we're probably going with Best Buy because it's cheapest: $25 for blu-ray.
Although I knew about existence of the Fatal Frame 2 "Promise Ending," I had never looked it up because it was a hidden ending only available on the Xbox port of the game... and what could possibly be canon about that?
But this week I finally read up on it, most notably in the form of a beautiful screenshot image of the ghosts of Tachibana kids standing together, finally united as part of the game's "happy" ending. Wow. I am a sucker for anything to do with dear little Chitose.
I'm never playing Zack & Wiki again.
Hey, I found out why nobody bought critically acclaimed third party adventure game Zack & Wiki: because it sucks.
Seriously, I was trying to figure out one of the ice world levels (which is not that far in the game, by the way) and died for like the millionth time in an area that I had no right to expect was dangerous. Fuck that shit. Who in the hell enjoys this trial-and-error bullshit?
Here at the Celebrity Vegetable Museum, there's exactly two celebrities you should keep top of mind. One is that ratbag villain of the piece. The other is a famed naturalist.
I'd normally save this for an end-of-week roundup post, but these videos are too great. Today on Gizmodo, they posted a pair of videos that use a tilt-shift lens... which I of course have never heard of... but the end effect is that it makes real-world stuff look like a tiny intricate toyland. It is difficult to watch these and believe that it's not some kind of composited SFX shot.
I often talk about how I never trade games back for store credit. But "never" is really just "almost never," because I have done it from time to time. I remember trading in Diablo 2 for PS1 many years ago (but I kept the bundled Diablo-stickered memory card!). What was that PS1 Descent rip-off? Forsaken? Also traded in.
There are many reasons why I make it a general rule not to trade in games, but my need to continue to possess items tops the list. Yes, I don't approve of the GameStop business plan of reselling games because they're making continued profit without kicking anything back to the game creators. Yes, I know you can generally do better on eBay with a little effort. Yes, the GameStop system pretty much pays you dirt, and the prices have gotten even lower now that they want to further con you into buying their magazine subscription and benefit from "increased trade-in rates!" But mainly, I just like owning stuff.
I did a fairly large trade pile about a year ago, and then completely forgot about it until this week, when I did it again. Here's last year's firing line:
Some of those actually escaped the bullet, but we'll get to that shortly.
Mappy The Robot Runs a Maze (Kotaku) I've read about this, but never seen it... it's from a micromouse competition, where folks build robots that use AI to get through a maze. Mappy is a natural at this.
My Name Is Bill Swadley, And I Work For Fox (Huffington Post) It's true... mention that you work for FOX and everybody immediately makes the conceptual leap to FOX News, which is embarrassing and incorrect. This weblog confessional tries to educate people on the difference. (Thanks to Tony for the link!)
Related aside: in the latest issue of Jonah Hex, it is revealed that Hex continues to wear his Confederate uniform (until his death in 1904!) not because of any loyalty to the Confederacy (he has no such feelings) but because it becomes a quick way for Hex to determine the value of the folks that approach him. If they express sympathy for the plight of the South, he knows right away that they are foul, evil folk. And as a side benefit, it keeps everyone who hates the Confederacy away from him! Hex dislikes people, so this is a win-win for him.
This is precisely how I'm going to tackle the thorny issue of my own employment by a FOX (not FOX News) television station.
FINAL CRISIS ANNOTATIONS Doug Wolk with some stellar synopses and timelines of DC's Final Crisis event, including all the tie-in series.
Yesterday we went to an annual Chuseok holiday event, which is a traditional Korean harvest festival. According to the calendar, Chuseok was actually a month ago, but as none of us are farmers, I doubt anybody noticed.
There's always an arts and crafts activity, some Korean performance art (singing, dancing and kickass folk drumming), and a food area run by a local Korean women's association.
Hoo boy. I was under the impression that No More Heroes kinda sold for crap, so this is surprisingly good news. Here's hoping Suda 51 tackles the big problems: ugly graphics, empty city and awful motorcycle.
Aeropodcast #53.
We had actually written off #52 due to several days of technical errors, but Stephen managed to cobble it together. And then #53 went off without a hitch.
Careful listeners may notice the catch in my voice when Haygood suggests that the LittleBigPlanet demo ends Saturday night (podcast night) instead of Sunday night. Thankfully he was incorrect.
Also, I got to bring up some favorites during the Tokyo Game Show segment... No More Heroes, Katamari, Klonoa. And I describe Let's Tap, an upcoming Wii game that uses a cardboard box for a controller. No lie.
Not enough hardcore games on the Wii? Maybe, unless you consider shmups to be hardcore! Not only is the Virtual Console packed to the gills with them, but here comes Blast Works. A traditional shmup with an interesting hook: enemy ships, once killed, can attach to you, creating a giant ridiculous Katamari starship of death. Add to that a complete game editor, allowing you to design your own levels, enemies, ships and firing patterns - plus the ability to download other players' creations - and you've got uber hardcore. Original retail was $40; I found it for $20.
Ragdoll physics demos have been popular for some time, but none have the polish or gameplay quite like Pain. Appearing on PlayStation Network for $10 - and marked down to $5 during a special sale event - Pain lets you launch hapless abuse-addicts into a thriving downtown area. By controlling the character mid-flight, grabbing objects and lurching around on the ground after landing, the goal is to chain combos and run up a huge high score.
Take On Me: Literal Video Version (YouTube) If the lyrics to Take On Me matched what was going on in the classic video. Sad as it is, this video pretty much defined my generation. This one and Money For Nothing, I guess. Oy.
No Games Support PS3 Screengrabs (Yet) (Kotaku) Bullshit. Complete bullshit. Apparently, in order for the PS3 to take a screenshot, that feature needs to be activated by the game itself. And since v2.5 just appeared, there's not a single game that can do this (aside from games like MGS4, by figuring it out on their own). Pissed.
People Not Having Fun: A Gallery of Wii Music Models (Aeropause) This is a good one. I did a quick feature making fun of the models Nintendo used in their silly Wii Music videos... and somebody posted in comments purporting to be a good friend of the one I ragged on the most. Seems like they took it in stride, though.
Here's my preview highlights from the podcast we recorded on Saturday and will likely hit Aeropause early this week.
I out Sam and Max Season One for Wii as being a crappy, glitchy port.
Should MGS4 come to the 360, I suggest replacing the in-game Macs, PS3s and PSPs with Dells, 360s and Zunes.
Joe Haygood makes a South Park joke and again it takes me a second to realize what he's talking about.
Mike Koss and I bond over an old Magic card.
I talk about reading game manuals on the potty.
I confess that I lied to Capcom.
Our work week without Tony
To be fair, this week would have sucked even if Tony still worked for us, but with him gone, it seemed all the worse. Tony and Josh have already mutually fellated each other on their weblogs, and Tony said some nice stuff about me as well, so check that if you're into reading that sort of thing.
For over five years the three of us have shared an office, so it's definitely a change. At least we'll all buy Animal Crossing: City Folk and have that, right? RIGHT?
For the third year running, we went to a local farm store's fall festival. They hold it for several weekends... hay rides, corn maze, kettle corn, a few animals, that sort of thing.
Somehow we managed to get a shot of Clark and all the ancient rusty farm equipment without people milling around in the background.
It's difficult to say that I've been playing Doki Doki Majo Shinpan 2 Duo, not because of any personal shame over owning a game based around tapping anime girls, but because there's barely any time spent playing it.
I talked a little about it on Aeropause, but this one is absolute murder. Your patience will be severely tested, as will your interest in tapping anime girls.
You're expected to wander around a map talking to various NPCs. Every time you go to a location, a clock rolls forward, so I guess you have to find certain people at certain times in order to advance through the non-touching section of the game. Obviously I can't read Japanese, so I'm just clicking aimlessly. Areas you're supposed to enter are made rather obvious, however, so it's not a totally blind expedition. And like other import games I've played, you find English in odd areas. Like the menu screen, or as part of the HUD in battle mode.
Even if I could read Japanese, I suspect the game would be just as tedious... because there is reams of dialogue to go through. There must be the equivalent of a New York Times Bestseller in there. Holding down the Y button speeds through the text, which is a boon.
Weird internet voodoo. For the last 24 hours I've been trying to sync my RockBand.com account with my PlayStation3 account, and it errored out... but just now I tried again and it worked without me entering in anything. I guess maybe it pulled the sync info from my Rock Band 1 account?
Anyway, now that I'm a fully operational Rock Band 2 owner, my online profile page is up to date. As expected, they niced it up a bit. You can finally make shirts and such based on your band. The promised band member render figurines are live... they're very cool looking, but mad expensive at $70 apiece. Of course I want one, but I need to get suited up with the right shoes first. And I haven't decorated my guitar yet.
My first mission in Rock Band 2 was getting everything calibrated. The stock settings were way off, and the tick-based automatic calibration didn't seem to help. The manual has some suggested settings for various TV types. Again, the DLP tweak was spot-on. I do not have a DLP set... mine is a Sony LCD Bravia W. It's crazy how important those milliseconds are. When I was testing the other settings, it just did not feel right. But now I'm back to 100% Medium on Last Train to Clarksville.
This afternoon I was drumming in Rock Band 2 and then decided I wanted to switch to some singing. (Can we stop calling it Rock Band 2 and just call it Rock Band? I'd like a patch that erases the "2" from the logo, please.) I had just opened up Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" and was super-psyched to belt it at the cat. So I unplugged the drums, put in the USB mic...
...and failed out on Medium inside of five lines.
WTF? I know this song. Is something up with my calibration, I wonder? So I screw with the audio settings, but still fail out right away.
Hurra Torpedo Appliance Junkyarding (YouTube) I don't know anything about these guys other what I've seen on YouTube. This mini-documentary of the band searching for new appliance-instruments at some American junkyard is just fabulous.
Apple surpasses goal of 10 million iPhones sold in 2008; outsells RIM in September quarter (Mac Daily News via Daring Fireball) Great list of quotes from analysts, pundits and competitors who were sure the iPhone would fail. The one the really gets me is "When the iPod emerged in late 2001, it solved some major problems with MP3 players. Unfortunately for Apple, problems like that don't exist in the handset business. Cell phones aren't clunky, inadequate devices. Instead, they are pretty good. Really good." WTF? What magical cell phone world was that guy living in? Cell phones are the very definition of clunky, inadequate devices.
Fanboy Dorks Ruin Metacritic (Kotaku) I feel like we've been waiting years for this to happen. A bunch of 360 fanboys started submitting fake reviews of LittleBigPlanet to Metacritic, bringing the game's average review score down to a sad 6.4. In retaliation, the PS3 nation then dragged Gears of War 2 down to 2.8.
Guess which Venture Bros character Clark is describing.
Clark: "That guy is dressed like a girl." Me: "I think that actually is a girl." Clark: "But he talks like a boy."
That ten minute auto-off is murder on Rock Band.
PS3 2.5 introduced an optional ten minute timeout for the controllers... which is great, because I've definitely watched Dual Shocks go dead after being left on while we watch a movie. But the flipside is that it wrecks Rock Band... if you're doing a long set, the controller attached to the singer will power off, pausing the song. And it even affects the RB1 drum kit, which is worse as the drum kit doesn't seem to have an active power-on button. So when the kit gets turned off, it's not an easy button press to turn it back on.
As we enter Round Two of the 2007-2008 Cheapo Games Shootout, the following combatants stand ready for battle:
Zack & Wiki: Quest for Something or Other (Wii)
Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (Wii)
No More Heroes (Wii)
Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law (Wii)
The Orange Box (PS3)
Slide Adventure Mag Kid (DS)
Pain (PS3)
Which game will stand as Best Cheapest? In Round Two, we'll cut this list in half... only three games will advance to the Final Round!
Each game will have to face off in six specific categories, with a potential three point maximum in each (although an effort will be made to limit the awards to a single 3 and a single 0, to name the best and worst in each comparison bout). The highest scoring trio will head to the judge's table.
Finally, we're in the bigfoot party headquarters! Bruno is so close, you can almost smell him. Or maybe that's one of the dozen other giant foul hairy beasts tripping the light fantastic.
The controls are floaty. The online servers are borked. Some of the levels are irritating devolutions into repetitive death cycles. But I am more excited about LittleBigPlanet than almost anything else in 2008 to date.
What makes this game so amazing is that the pre-built levels have all been designed using the same suite of tools that you now have at your disposal. That's killer. You go through these levels looking for inspiration, not just to complete it because it's a video game and that's what you do. You see an intricate series of switches and triggers and you know that, given the time and patience and brainwork, you can make that too.
You may recall 
First things first: I hate that Buzz host guy. I just don't like the look of him. But he's far less obnoxious that the overplayed voiceover guy from You Don't Know Jack, so that's a plus.
Oh my god the Promise Ending.
I'm never playing Zack & Wiki again.
No More Heroes sequel on the way.
Aeropodcast #53.
Our work week without Tony
It's difficult to say that I've been playing Doki Doki Majo Shinpan 2 Duo, not because of any personal shame over owning a game based around tapping anime girls, but because there's barely any time spent playing it.
Weird internet voodoo. For the last 24 hours I've been trying to sync my RockBand.com account with my PlayStation3 account, and it errored out... but just now I tried again and it worked without me entering in anything. I guess maybe it pulled the sync info from my Rock Band 1 account?
Guess which Venture Bros character Clark is describing.
That ten minute auto-off is murder on Rock Band.
