- First off, my latest piece of GameSetWatch went up earlier today. It’s my review of 8 BIT, a brand new documentary that looks at the world of art that’s sprung forth from the medium of video games, which you can check out here.
- Oh, and real quick, since I’m on the subject of movies, time for a bunch of random clips, including (and sorry if you’ve seen them already)…
… what a live-action Katamari Damacy movie might possibly look like.
… Bollyood doing Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
I’ll refrain passing along the vids of that break dancing/kun fung fighting Bollywood midget from the 80′s since pretty much everyone’s seen it by now, which is SOOO last week anyway (but if not, just do a search in YouTube for “Little Superstar”).
- Anyway, same old story: been super busy, trying to do a million things at once, so I’m totally out of the loop video game-wise. I haven’t even gotten a chance to watch last night South Park season premiere featuring Worlds of Warcraft (never mind that I don’t have cable, since you’ve got YouTube and BitTorrent… speaking of real quick, my Torrent of Alex Winter’s old MTV show the Idiot Box actually downloaded successfully!). Though I did find out that the nerdiest of the nerdy nerds had to say about it, and my head pretty much almost exploded from reading some of the inane banter and complaints from the nerdiest of the nerdy nerds. The highlight is obviously the complaints from “Shermdawg”:
“Uh, this isn’t totally accurate…
1.You can’t summon scorpions
2.Randy, and Butters couldn’t be in the Arathi Highlands at their level and expect to fight anything. It’s like a mid-thirties leveled area. And furthermore, they’d have to run there, so they couldn’t log back in, in that area, UNLESS they had a Warlock to summon them….”
Then once people realize that the guy’s not joking and start goofing on him, Shermdawg decides to respond to one person’s suggestion that he “just die” with…
Trust me my friend, I have. I have suffered many deaths in my adventures in the lands of Azeroth. Some heroic, some embarrasing, but each was a learning experience, because it made me a stronger warrior (er, player I mean, I never roll stoopid warriors).
And one day I shall pass all my knowledge down to the noobs that walk the streets of Stormwind that tell the tales of Klu…(oops, almost gave away my character name) … um Thatguy, and of all the dragons and whatnot he has slain over the er… year (11 months actually) since he first logged in.
Every weekend, they gather in the Blue Recluse and sing songs of my journeys (kinda like that one episode of Firefly) and countless scrumdiddlyumptious Night Elve maidens fight over the chance to spend the night with yours truly. (I tend to take after Alan Rickman in Robin Hood:Prince of Thieves “You my room, 10:30 tonight…You, 10:45…and bring a friend!”) I remember the time I caused a near riot in Darnassus. Yikes.
What can I say, chicks dig the dwarfs.
Its all a hundred times funnier when you imagine everything being said with any nerd voice from the Simpsons. And no, I have no fucking clue what he’s tallking about. Oh, and the best handle/alias has to be JeanLuc Dickhard.
And yeah, I also know about the new Burger King game for the Xbox 360 where the Burger King goes around and sneaks up on unsuspecting women while holding onto his Whopper…
Things have also been so hectic that I haven’t been able to follow the real news either, though I did hear that teleportation, a la Star Trek, is starting to become a reality. Though as exciting as that sounds, all I can think about is the transporter accident scene from the first Star Trek movie. Still sends chills down my spine.
- Though back to video games, here’s another bit of news I’m more than happy to (finally) share: the Blip Festival has been formally announced. And what is the Blip Festival? Well, it’s basically what is sure to be the greatest gathering of chiptune maestros in North America ever. Over the course of four days (November 30 through December 3) my good pals Bit Shifter and Nullsleep will be rocking their Game Boys, along with Mark DeNahrdo, Glomag, Bubblysish, Virt, Cory Arcangel, Hally, x|k, Portalenz, Aonami, YMCK, and many many more. Yes, that’s right, YMCK will be in NYC!!!
- Anyway, despite everything going down (its not even one week into October and this month is already killing me… I don’t even want to think about whipping together a costume for Halloween, though I will say that its looking like the Hamburglar) I am still trying to find the time to actually play some games. I recently returned to GameFly both Auto Modellista and Genji.
Auto Modellista is the cel-shaded Capcom racer that I’ve always wanted to play, since it looks so friggin’ awesome, but like everyone said, the controls are pure crap. Though I did enjoy one track when played with one particular car since seemed as if there actually was a chance to place first (the other tracks and other cars are so impossible to handle that it ain’t even funny). But after finally getting the top slot in that track, I decided it was time to finally ship it back. It’s a real shame that the cars play so badly (I’ve never felt so nervous in a driving game, ever)… the graphics are still pretty killer, and I really dug the music (it’s the same type of jazz heard in Marvel vs. Capcom 2, meaning people will either love it for what to stab their ears when hearing it).
I also realized that I had my fill of Genji, Sony’s (well, Game Republic‘s really) samurai slash ‘em up. Never before have I played such a beautiful, yet so utterly boring game. I tried giving it a chance, but after being stumped at one particular boss encounter for a bit, I decided to pop in Onimiusha 4, and there was simply no going back.
Also been as of late on a total Game Boy kick. First off, I got a Game Boy Micro recently and its sorta amazing how playing old GBA games on a tinier (and very crisp) screen can make games feel new again all of a sudden. But I’ve also all of sudden embraced my old Game Boy Color as well and have been playing all my old GB and GBC titles as well (what few I have left at least… now more than ever, I am so kicking myself for selling Donkey Kong ’94 all those years ago). I guess it mostly has to do when I watched 8 BIT; one of my fave parts is when all the chiptunes artists show off the Game Boys they use, and I realized once again how f’n amazing the original system truly is.
Hey, does anyone know of any good sources to buy original Game Boy and Game Boy Color games online, preferably copies?
Devil Kings and Everblue 2 both showed up in the mail today (courtesy of GameFly, naturally. Really been looking forward to Everblue for a while now; undersea sight seeing seems just about perfect these days, especially since I’ve been so stressed out as of late. Though I’ll have to wait a bit on those two. Earlier this afternoon I got my copy of Final Fantasy XII and I’ll be giving that a spin first later tonight. I actually want to try and beat the game, and maybe do a review for it for this site.
- As you may have noticed, I’ve had a reviews page for months now, but there really hasn’t been anything. I know I sound like a broken record, but I’ve just been so damn busy that I just haven’t had the chance to do a lot of what I’ve wanted to do this year. But I hope to change all that real soon. In fact, I’m meeting tomorrow with Jason to talk about implementing some improvements to this site, including a better search feature (which I could personally use, bit time), maybe a site re-design, and maybe content in Japanese! So stay tuned for details, and if anyone has any suggestions, please let us know.
Back to Final Fantasy XII; I’ve actually been wanting to play this one for a while, primarily due to it resembling one of my favorite all-time Square games (before they became Square-Enix), Vagrant Story. Mostly because the guy in charge was Yasumi Matsuno, till he had to leave due to health reasons. And they guy who took is the dude that did the Romancing Saga games, which I’ve heard are less than great things about. So it’ll be interesting to see how XII plays, though I really enjoyed what I saw during the press demonstration this morning. At the very least, I’m eager to hear the Hitoshi Sakimoto score (I still listen to his Radiant Silvergun and Gradius V tunes almost everyday on my iPod on the way to work).
- Oh, one last thing from today (now that I think about it, it’s actually been a pretty eventful day)… I’ve been nominated for a Nerdlinger! It’s the all new, and officially super cool award that will be give out at SPX next weekend. What have I been nominated for? I don’t know! That’s the thing; the awards committee actually decided upon the winners first and then created customized categories for the persons. Also, the award itself is a “functional object” whatever that might be.
The ceremony takes places next Friday night, so between that, Katie-oke (the Katie driven karaoke spectacular) Saturday night, and the soccer game that MK is whipping together the Sunday after the show, SPX might just be something awesome after-all!
