Why I love the Giant Bombcast

From the News of the World section:

on The Old Republic
Ryan: "We Played as Sith inquisitors."
Jeff: "That sounds like the first 22 minutes of Law and Order."



Seriously, I'm a dork who loves video games, but even if you aren't, the Giant Bombcast is pretty awesome.

Ouch

Dead Space Extraction sells 9,000 in the month of November. I think my community radio show gets more listeners in the 3rd hour.

Mature Wii games are officially not going to happen anymore.

Source- 1up.com

Brutal Legend Review or The Collective Conventional Wisdom of the Gaming Industry Disappoints Me

Guess what, this isn't really a review, so as they say on Pandorra: pis off.

Brutal Legend and the Temple of the Gaming Culture’s Conventional Wisdom

Brutal Legend is not a good game. I don’t know what the problems are. I’m sure parts of it work, but just parts a game do not make. Maybe I’m a snob, or my lack of love of heavy metal don’t allow me to care as much about the “subject matter,” but I just didn’t care.

And that fucking sucks.

I was talking to a buddy about Brutal Legend and how he found it pleasant, but forgettable. He was already trying to sell it. Which bummed me out. He asked me what I thought about it and I said what has been said: that I found it extremely underwhelming, overly ambitious, but inherently shallow. I asked him if he had played any other Tim Schaefer games. He said no.

This is not a comment on how my buddy is lacking in gaming literacy for not playing Psychonauts or Grim Fandango. This is partially because I don’t think it matters in enjoying Brutal Legend, and because gaming literacy is about as dumb of an idea as I can think, but that’s for a latter day. It’s a comment on how he expected the game to be good because it is from Tim Schaefer. It’s a strange off shot (or maybe the main goal) of the marketing behind Brutal Legend: that this is a Celebrity Game Designer and he doesn’t dissapoint. Too bad the game was almost all premise, no meat on the bones.

The closest game that I can compare this experience of mine with Brutal Legend is Spore, which I played for literally 2 hours.




Man I’m a fucking bummer.

A Stupid Problem in Abundance

"No delay on PC for Modern Warfare 2. You'll also have Prestige Mode in PC as well as lots of Steam support. Hopefully min specs will be soon (via @fourzerotwo)"
-Twitter

Never before has my amount of plenty been a cause of concern for me. Most folks don't have a good gaming pc and a xbox 360 and a ps3. I shouldn't be complaining, I should be enjoying my upper-middle-class place in America. Yet, when it comes to this game the kids are calling "MW2", or as I like to call it just to upset people IW4, I am confused. I really have a problem with buying multiple copies of a game even if its for multiple platforms, so what platform do i get it on?

The Aim-bots are a plenty on the PC side, but the fidelity of gameplay and graphics are far superior. I find the online fairer and more stable on consoles, but shouldn't I play my super intense shooters on pc?

Tell me...

What should I do?

Maybe I'll jusy play Uncharted 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 instead...

I don't want to make a big deal out of this...

As I sip this effeminate energy drink, I realize how awesome my joke in class was. Thats right motherfuckers, nothing is funnier than comparing the cap and trade system to seminar discussion rules.

I know that I should make some statement about Obama winning the Nobel Prize. Honestly, I think the main thing I am getting out of it is just seeing conservatives' heads explode, but besides that, I'm currently indifferent.

I did notice that Twitter kind of exploded during the announcement. It actually was the first bit of news I ever heard about through Twitter. This is supposed to confound me. It didn't.

The best tweet, at least from what I saw was from the ever awesome Eugene Mirman:

Congratulations Mr. Obama! You won fair and square, even though I’ve been texting Hamas & Isreal requesting peace for weeks.

Also, Jesse Thorn had some pretty good ones too:

Without the new diplomatic tone set by Pres. Obama, my wife and I would never have reached our historic new-apartment closet-sharing accord.


But that's just me.

classic fanboi arguments are still pissing me off.

Why does this happen so often?

It seems that every time I leisure on over to the industry discussion forums at Cheap Ass Gamer, which I guess is the community I'm most active in (I'm not a big forum guy), there is always someone in some thread writing about how "its all about gameplay! Graphics don't matter! The Wii is the only real inovation of this generation! Blah blah blah blah!" I don't know why, but this argument frustrates me more than any other argument you ever hear in the flame bait ridden world of gaming fandom. This bugs me even more than the classic "PC gaming is dying" one,which even as a rabid pc player, is true in some forms (Ill save my explanation of that for another post), because this own is truly built on a really simplistic world view that is brutal with subjective facts and lack of intellectual curiosity, I realize this is just games here, but it still frustrates me.

My issue with this argument, which, let's all admit (we're all adults here), come from your average Nintendo fanboi on an eeirely regular basis. I guess I just don't understand it. It's so neo-ludditic on the graphics front thats it presumes that there is no real difference in gameplay of Doom and say, Halo 3 or Killzone 2 (notice the fanboi fairness... who knew I was this good!).

Maybe I'm crazy, but the sense of weight one gets from the weapons in Call of Duty or the scale of view of the Capital Wasteland are still pretty important to my experience in games. Who knows, maybe my experiece in Fallout 3 would have been exactly the same if I put my draw distance scale to the minimum, but the shrunken magnitude of the world, would, I believe effect my

enjoyment of the game. Hey whatever, I must be nuts to get caught up by the silly distinction that is graphics.

I don't care about graphics engines, physics engines, 8-cell chips, mega textures or anything if it doesn't aid to the enjoy of the product, but don't just discount the ability of images to improve one's game experience for the sake of being negative. Hey, but whatever, maybe im the neo-luddite.

Post #2 done!

-By the way, how awesome is the Justic record Cross. It's prety much like if in stead of cold robots, daft punk were cold robots drenched in really, really good congac. Ok that's absurd, but its true, I swear!-