Welcome back, folks. I hope you had a tragic weekend, full of self-loathing and misery after reading the Pokémon story that you all demanded and that I tried so valiantly not to show you. I hope that will teach you that some things only Daddy touch, okay? There's a ton of stuff to get through today, but let's start with a little live-action Donkey Kong made entirely of post-it notes. It's quite impressive, not least of which because I had no idea they made brown post-its. (Via I Heart Chaos)
Consumer culture is a mixed blessing. We have cool gadgets, free network TV and junk food available at every whim. This utopia comes with a hefty price tag, though, and it's not just free will or individuality or whatever the hippies like to argue - it's awful videogames. Capitalism is alright most of the time and gamers understand that their precious platforms ain't a charity - it's all about supply and demand, which is why historically, the number of games touting established licenses practically merits its own genre. Pimping a movie tie-in, cartoon or sports star can be ridiculously lucrative and really, there's nothing wrong with the practice as long as the games accomplish the prime directive: being awesome and fun. Unfortunately the lust for money has pushed many developers into releasing less-than-stellar games in the name of branding over the years. The quality of these games ranges from simply uninspired to straight up unplayable -- smacking gamers with IPs like a canoe paddle to the parietal lobe. Read on to examine the ten corporate games most worthy of snob scorn and hippie hostilities.
I normally don't do this, but with the announcement that Universal won the rights to make a feature film based on the classic videogame Asteroids -- and by classic I mean impossibly shallow -- in a goddamn bidding war with three other studios (!), I'm just going to quote FilmDrunk, because he said it better than I could.
A F*CKING BIDDING WAR. For a movie based on three dots that shoot one
dot at other small clusters of dots. If you can think of anything
stupider than this... someone in Hollywood will pay you a lot of money.
GREAT NEWS, EVERYONE, TOM CRUISE JUST SIGNED ON TO PLAY BLINKING LIGHT NUMBER FOUR! SOMEONE FINGER MY ASSHOLE SO I KNOW I'M NOT DREAMING!
These are the end times, my friends. It's all downhill from here. By which I mean someone's eventually going to make a movie of Oink!.
As in Final Fantasy I. Japan's Weekly Jump revealed Square Enix's new Nintendo DS game this week, which is titled The Four Warriors of Light -- better known as the nameless main characters from the first Final Fantasy -- and hilariously subtitled A Final Fantasy Anecdote, as if even Square has stopped pretending these FF side games matter at all ("Oh, I wouldn't call it an epic or adventure, per se. It's not even that much of a story, really. It's more of an anecdote I once heard.") although I admit I'm being sucked into it just because it fits somewhere in FF Uno's storyline. Besides, I heard that WiiWare's FFIV: The After Years was pretty darn good, despite being very short and hideously expensive. Sigh. I know. I'm just trying to justify my crippling inability to not purchase things with the words "Final Fantasy" on them. I sound pathetic to me, too. (Via Kotaku)
Really Batman? You couldn't just beat these thugs up like a regular superhero; you just had to slam that one guys head into the railing then toss him off the guard tower, and do a flying drop kick on that other guys from 50-feet up, didn't you? Here's a mystery, world's greatest detective -- why are you such an asshole?
Horrible pun for not-that-clever article title notwithstanding, Kotaku dug up this video of Batman: Arkham Asylum being played by some Polish dude (no racial jokes, thanks) and it is looking sweet. I really dig the little touches, like Batman's shielding of himself when he blows his explosive gel, and really, slamming that sniper's head int the railing is awesome. Awesomely dickish.
Some dude named Raficus has made the above periodic table coupled with characters from all the Final Fantasy games, so that, for example, Ag (or silver) is also Aerith Gainsborough. Every element has its FF equivalent, and it works out marvelously well. I'm sure it's a powerful mnemonic device, but it's also just cool to see how the dude partnered everything up -- check out his website, and click on any element to bring up info on both the element and the FF character. It's a hell of a pleasantly nerdy way to kill a bit of Monday morning. (Via AnimeVice)
Remember our world of Warcraft-loving pal who was so distraught over his WoW account's cancellation that he tried to shove a remote control up his ass? I think you might. The video has made its way to Japan, where some enterprising soul made the above remix (which is set to the theme song to some Kirby game, apparently). I'm still not sure if the video is real or not, but if it is, this kid's totally going to kill himself. (Via Giant Bomb)
By which I mean the incredibly skilled golfer Tiger Woods sucks at the videogame bearing his name. See, Late Night host Jimmy Fallon -- who I'm still not a fan of his manner or delivery, although he's having some increasingly excellent segments on his show -- challenged Tiger to a round of Tiger Woods videogame golf. They actually played first on the screen in Times Square in a three-hole tournament, where Fallon crushed Tiger. Fallon shot for par on all three holes, and Tiger just sucked ass.
So Fallon and Tiger had a one-hole rematch last night on Late Night (yeah, it's a Hulu vid, sorry non-Amercians) and it's worth noting how fucking mad Tiger Woods is at losing earlier. Oh, he's smiling, but he's so obviously pissed at being beaten by Fallon earlier in the day and at the possibility of losing again that the smile is frozen with absolutely zero humor behind it. It's pretty fantastic. Furthermore, I'm almost positive Jimmy Fallon noticed this and let Tiger win. Like you would a small child so they didn't feel bad. Except it's a grown man whose at the top of his sport, has a supermodel wife, and has millions of dollars. Good on you, Fallon.
The Dallas Cowboys have a new stadium (bear with me, because my story gets better). In the middle of this stadium is the world's largest TV -- an LED screen that measures 72 feet by 160. It's a little weird, since there's really no point in going to a football game if you're just going to be watching the action on a TV anyways. Whatever. You probably don't care.
But you might care that someone hooked up their Xbox 360 to this TV, and played the world's biggest game of Halo 3; check the video for proof. If you're insanely jealous and need someone to hate, the guy playing is Jonas Brothers video director Steve Fatone. (Via Shutdown Corner)
For instance, take this guy, who suddenly discovers someone in his family secretly canceled his WoW account, and proceeds to freak the fuck out. This epic video of his reaction is as insane as it is fabulous. Actually, it's so insane and fabulous it almost has to be fake, but between the kid hitting himself in the head with a shoe, throwing himself in the closet not once but twice, and most importantly, trying to shove a remote control up his own ass in rage -- well, I don't actually care if it's not real. And now I know this is how all World of Warcraft players deal with adversity, with no exceptions. Learning is fun!
Actually, it looks pretty good. Like I said before, it's appears to be a Transformers version of Virtual On, which I always thought was a helluva fun arcade game. The environments look nice and destructible, and it appears -- although this is just a guess from the short clip of the jet Transformer (Starscream?) flying into the Transformer on the aircraft carrier -- you can attack in your vehicle mode as well, so it might have more uses than just running the hell away. Plus, I'm sure some of the G1 styles are unlockable at some point. Now, I won't be buying it, so I really don't care about any of this. But I did want to have one final, semi-positive Transformers-related post before I get back to hating on it.
Apparently, it's a day for awesome and impressive acts of nerdery, and now we can add to the list that Penny Arcade's Cardboard Tube Samurai is apparently going to be a playable character in Tekken 6. However you feel about the immensely popular webcomic, it's pretty goddamn amazing that one of the characters they created is going to be in a major videogame release like Tekken (and yes, I find this more impressive than their specific episodic online game). Think about it -- the last guest stars in a Bandai Namco fighting game were Darth Vader and Yoda, for fuck's sake, and before that, it was Link and Spawn (back closer to his heyday, at least). That's some pretty impressive company to be keeping.
Plus, the CTS is appearing in Tekken, a game I can't stand anyways. So I can sit back and be a huge douchebag and know that my beloved Soul Calibur franchise isn't being pimped out and diluted with its goofiness. This time. For the moment. Because a guy wielding cardboard tubes really breaks the cold reality generated by a blind Italian leather S&M freak from the 15th century searching for a magic sword. (Via Kotaku)
Few games warped kids quite like Mortal Kombat did. Violent, controversial attractions have clung to the game industry ever since the 1970s and Exidy's Death Race, yet Midway did something special by putting Mortal Kombat into arcades back in 1992. For a quarter or two, any passing child could try out a digitized, blood-spurting battle to the death, and they didn't need home systems, the Internet, or permission from mom or dad. Mortal Kombat was soon a massive, gory success, with all of the parental complaints and hand-wringing it deserved.
Mortal Kombat also got the imitators it deserved: garish, horribly made fighters that made even Mortal Kombat 3 look appealing. This also makes Mortal Kombat clones a bit more interesting than the even larger field of Street Fighter II knock-offs. Street Fighter II started the whole fighting-game craze, but it was a more sedate and cartoon-ish game, and its copycats were usually bland and forgettable. We'd much rather look at Mortal Kombat rip-offs, with their eye lasers and dismemberment and fireball-spewing crotches. One note: don't look for Killer Instinct or Primal Rage. Next to what we're covering, Killer Instinct and Primal Rage are high art.
Now, we all know that despite how the mass media occasionally portrays women, girls have never, ever been nerds. They don't go to San Diego Comic Con, and they don't play videogames. Well, Ubisoft has made one of the first videogames targeted to women, based on the popular and very woman-y Grey's Anatomy TV series, and boy... it's a good thing women aren't nerds, because they'd probably be hideously insulted if they were.
First of all, don't think the above video is supposed to be funny -- it's not a skit, just some folks over at College Humor playing the game. They aren't important. Instead, pay close attention to the gameplay footage, which breaks down human interaction in to either one of two choices, both of which are hilariously absolute, and many of which include flirting, not flirting or just the level of flirting. The other aspect of "gameplay" involves the world's shittiest mini-game where the player moves the Wiimote to collect emotion balls so that their character can... have that emotion. Best of all, sometimes the emotion you need to collect is "anger," because sometimes someone needs a sass-talkin', girlfriend! Woo!
Jesus. Admittedly, I have a penis (it's true!) but I'm appalled on behalf of all you ladies. Shit, I have to imagine those Bratz games whoever-the-hell pumps out have more gameplay value and respect for womankind than this travesty. (Via Warming Glow)
Stupid World of Warcraft-playing girls. I was all set to make a joke about how girls never play World of Warcraft and thus would never buy the Horde and Alliance flavors of Mountain Dew Game Fuel, let alone turn into an elf and orc and start fighting each other in a supermarket over said beverages... but then I remembered that many attractive women do play WoW and probably do transform into elves and monsters and fight in supermarkets and would be pissed if I said they didn't exist. Goddammit. You're ruining it for me!
