Aeropodcast #59 and sort-of-lame video game cons. | Joe, 11.25.08
Numba 59 is live and again it is just me and Mssr Haygood. I even managed to drop the f-bomb thirty seconds in! Stephen will bleep it out, but the uncensored phrase in question is "I'll tell you what I don't want to talk about, fucking PETA." I talk smack about Home, which apparently you're not supposed to talk about since being in the beta carries along your tacit agreement to a non-disclosure agreement. Which is probably bunk, in all likelihood. I mean, Home has been in beta for like a year and a half and I think fully 80% of all PS3 owners have now made it inside the beta through one means or another. For me, my beta invite arrived last Friday as Sony closed down the increasingly irrelevant PlayStation Underground. I guess the Home beta was intended as a final thank you for years of Underground membership - which was originally a pay service I think, but became just a fan club sometime during the PS2 era. Anyway, the Underground is being folded into the more popular and accessible PlayStation.com account system, so at some point I need to work my way through that. But Home? Yeah, I checked it out on Friday. It's dopey. I know that game launching and the micropayment store and other features are not in there at the moment, but it's still fairly purposeless and entirely lacking in personality. Sony has had years to work on this - as a concept it should have launched when the PS3 itself did - and this is all it is? [more]

Things We Learned This Week | Joe, 11.23.08

My free Rock Band 2 tracks were almost lost in the mail.

People started talking about the invitation emails for the 20 free RB2 songs around early November. I didn't see any such email so I figured I was just getting mine late on the staggered rollout. And then I totally forgot about it until this week... I checked my junk mail folder and found that the RB2 mail had been grabbed by the Yahoo Mail spam filter. Moral of the story: check your spam box.

The GameStop God of War bonus pack for LittleBigPlanet is hot.

I came into some codes for the God of War pack this weekend (more on that later!) and that was one slick preorder bonus. Whereas the Best Buy preorder only netted you the Nariko costume elements, the GameStop GOW pack gets you three costumes (as widely reported) and at least ten exclusive stickers (which was not). I actually lost count of the new stickers as I was trying to locate them in my Popit.

The Week in Links | Joe, 11.22.08
Official Sony PS3 Home Video Trailer (YouTube)
In celebration of me getting into the PlayStation Home beta, here's an extremely old trailer. This is the one where the voice over says Home is "infinitely more exciting than anything on the other consoles" at the two minute mark. I just exited the beta and she's wrong.

Presenting Animal Crossing in Pictures | Joe, 11.20.08
A basic rule of thumb around here is that if your game has a way to save out screenshots, I'm going to post them. So in lieu of retreading the same old weblog ground with Animal Crossing, I'm going to just run my shots and nonsensically chat around them.

Full archives available at fourhman.com.

game reviews:
Bully | ps2
game review by Joe 01/13/07
When I initially walked through the gates of Bullworth Academy, the first student to walk past me yelled "I hate you!" Later on, I had that same kid eating out the palm of my hand. That's pretty much the character arc of Bully. You, as career ne'er-do-well Jimmy Hopkins, show up at a new school full of fools, and you end up as Mr. Popular. Not really the school slaying simulator that certain crusading lawyers and easily-swayed-by-the-press-release media outlets would have had us believe. Whether Rockstar intended Bully as a colossal bait and switch for the video luddite crowed, or... [continued at fourhman.com]

Cooking Mama | nds
game review by Joe 11/09/06
Two years out, the DS has nicely matured. We’re past the days of tech demos being sold as full games (ahem, Yoshi’s Touch-n-Go). We have enough new-concept, high-profile games to outweigh the launch day panic of N64 ports ahem, Super Mario 64DS). And thanks to the GBA’s agonizingly slow price point death, Nintendo finally feels confident enough to stop selling their first-party DS games at the $35 level (ahem, Pokemon Trozei). The DS rode out that initial wave of gimmicky criticism and has positioned itself as a must-have, just in time to lateral a little of that mindshare over to... [continued at fourhman.com]

Starfox Command | nds
game review by Joe 09/12/06
I've been sitting out on the Starfox franchise for years, thanks to all the lackluster offerings during the GameCube era. It sucks, because I really liked Starfox 64 and I really want a new hip iteration in that style. For some reason, Nintendo is bound and determined to avoid that classic, blistering on-rails shooting action... giving us Starfox-as-Zelda and Starfox-as-Rogue-Leader-2 instead. Starfox Command is a return to the game's roots, but not in the way we all expected. Most franchises are ridiculed for not offering enough change-up. Starfox is the rare bird that gets smacked around for not maintaining enough... [continued at fourhman.com]

Odama | gcn
game review by Joe 05/24/06
I'm only about ten minutes into the first level when the thought occurs: "This is a pretty crappy game." That's never a joyous realization - especially when $50 was tossed like so much salt over the shoulder - but it is particularly grating when the game in question is something you've been anticipating for months. Odama is exactly the kind of offbeat, undefinable game that pulls me in. Games that offer up more than just various degrees of running / jumping / shooting / driving. I live for the thrill of locating games like this. They're underappreciated, underplayed... and in... [continued at fourhman.com]

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