I watch too much TV

To start things out, below is my little montage assignment for Editing class featuring the vocal stylings of Vince Offer of Sham! Wow! fame and special guest appearances from Marvin's Magic, Oxyclean, Set it and Forget It and The Power Juicer.

Also, as long as we're on the topic of advertising, check out these two Japanese fast food ads if you want to see a combination is disgusting and delicious fast food products. I'll probably have that Japanese Pizza Hut "SAUSAGE ROLL" song stuck in my head for ahwhile, they should totally bring that here alongside the inevitable return of Dominos Oreo Pizza.

Yesterday marked my first college snow day, which included tons of Luigi's Pizza and three or four B-horror movies back to back (Demons, Killer Klowns from Outerspace, Bloodsucking Freaks and Ghoulies 2). I still had to return my copy of The Iron Giant to avoid an overly expensive late fee of $12 a day (you can probably buy that movie for $6 at a Costco) but otherwise it was a pretty fun day and I had enough time to finish my Editing assignment and push over my half broken rig that I'm probably going to start over anyway. I also finally got to live out my dream of watching Heroes with a live

Apart from those musings, I've currently been playing a ton of Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection on the Xbox 360 alongside bouts of Castle Crashers and Braid. Its weird how 75% of all my current generation game playing has been downloadable or retro titles off of Xbox Live Arcade or the Wii Shop Channel. Despite consoles now having "teraflops" of processing power and whatever else the marketing executives are trying to throw at us, they seem to be forgetting the reason why most people play games...for fun. With a lot of retro titles there's a certain degree of depth but the titles are simple enough where a non-gamer can pick it up and do relatively well. In one sense, this was the point Nintendo was trying to make with the Wii console but after the console caught on with casual markets most of the Wii titles on store shelves are low-rent rush jobs from hack developers trying to get a quick buck. The most depressing thing about this is that now, even Nintendo is jumping on that bandwagon with titles such as Wii Music and the forthcoming ExciteBots (seriously...). I guess Super Mario Galaxy was awesome and my 180 hours of Super Smash Bros. Brawl made the console worth the price of admission alone, but I want just more simple and fun titles like what Mario Kart Wii was promising to be.

After getting used to spending $8 a pop for a Sega Genesis title on the Wii shop channel (or consequently a slightly more reasonable $5 on XBLA), thirty bucks for fifty Sega Genesis titles seemed like a no brainer to me. Apart from the lack of Sega titles like Gunstar Heroes (which I got on the Wii Shop Channel anyway and its omission is probably foreshadowing its Xbox Marketplace release) the collection is surprisingly solid and polished with enough special features that you are getting a much more refined experience than playing the titles for 10 minutes off of a ROM.

My favorite thing about Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection would be how it handles the Xbox's achievements. While I don't exactly want to say all the achievements are easy, they're all perfectly attainable by just about anyone and they encourage you to play through a lot of the obscure "non-Sonic" Sega titles. Few of the games achievements force you to spend more than 10 or 20 minutes with each Genesis title and it adds a nice little meta game to the title. Alongside each achievement that you unlock, you also get video interviews and some arcade and Master System titles. While, with the notable exception of Space Harrier, none of these arcade titles are really THAT phenomenal, its a nice touch, especially for those who don't really care too much about their GamerScore.

I'm already five or six hours into Castle Crashers which reminds me of what you'd get if you mixed together Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and Golden Axe. Like Crystal Chronicles, this game is painfully boring alone and despite featuring a level system, each incremental stat boost is miniscule enough where a beginner could easily drop in at any stage of the game and catch up pretty quickly. Its a huge time suck and an obvious improvement over the Bahemoth's Alien Hominid, which I played quite a bit of on the Gamecube. Also I picked up Braid with it being reduced to $10 as opposed to $15 last week. Despite the critical acclaim, I could never see myself paying $15 for a game that could be essentially beaten in a day but pair the price reduction with Best Buy's 2 Free Watchmen tickets with purchase of $20 in Microsoft Points and Braid could consider itself bought. I've only just started playing it and my impressions are a lot stronger than they were with the one level demo they had of it on Xbox Live. The game is a lot more surreal than I was expecting and the puzzles are pretty mind bending. I see the real length of the game comes from trying to figure out how to get all the puzzle pieces, which I'm desperately trying to avoid reading the walkthrough to figure out.

That's it for this post, now I'm off to fill out more paperwork for Pratt and get a jump start on my next batch of work for Storyboarding.

end of summer thoughts and Tropic Thunder

As August comes to an end, I might as well raise my post count for August to make up for my four posts last July. I'm back at Pratt Institute over this Saturday and classes start either Monday or Tuesday depending on whether or not Pratt recognizes Labor Day as a real holiday. My personal life's been fairly busy over the summer, between getting around to getting that driver's license I pushed aside for two years and a pretty awesome internship at Save the Children working on various web related assets I didn't really have much downtime so going back to Pratt feels more or less like getting back to what I've been doing the entire summer, save for 12 hour work days and five hours of sleep.

I'm spending my past few days off packing my stuff for the big move in on Saturday and enjoying my newly purchased Xbox 360 playing a mix between The Orange Box, Viva Pinata and The Darkness as well as a watching a few DivX files that I was able to snag off of Veoh. For most of August I spent my time playing The Darkness (a steal at $9, pick it up if you haven't) and I'm maybe about four hours into Half-Life 2 from The Orange Box. I never really saw myself enjoying either of those titles as the only FPS games I've really played over the past generation were the Metroid Prime trilogy and arcade style multiplayer titles like Timesplitters 2. The Darkness really never felt like a first person shooter game between the emphasis on your large heart eating tentacles and most of the action sequences being more of a puzzle than an adrenaline rush...it also kind of helped that the cursor's auto-aim made it pretty easy to nail headshots in the single player campaign. Also while the dialogue and voice acting is a bit questionable at times the overarching story is quite good. The Achievements are really easy too, which is a huge plus.

Likewise, I've been having a blast with the first four hours of Half-Life 2. Despite being four years late to the game it really hasn't aged much at all and the graphics on my 1080p television are about on par with most modern Xbox 360 titles and I haven't seen a single title with such an ingenious use of physics for puzzles and its use of the game engine to tell a story as opposed to cutting in and out of cutscenes. On top of that I played through the Internet and critic darling Portal yesterday and while I enjoyed the game's creativity I didn't really see it as the second coming or anything. At the moment I feel the same way about the game as I did when I got around to seeing Napoleon Dynamite a year and a half after the film was in theaters. While I could admire the film for what it was I found it annoying when I could recognize just about every other unfunny line from a hoody I've seen in the mall. A lot of the slick writing that Portal has, was driven into the ground by getting quoted and referenced by internet forums and by the end of the relatively short two hour playtime I found myself doing too many of the same things to solve puzzles and I feel if the game was any longer the concept would run thin. I'm pretty confident the Xbox Live Arcade semi-sequel Portal: Still Alive will get lower than expected reviews.

Onward to movies:

Tropic Thunder - Honestly, I've never really been a huge fan of Ben Stiller. Even when he was at his "best" in There's Something About Mary, he's mostly been exclusively in mediocre films over the past six or seven years and I was caught by surprise when I saw Tropic Thunder's 84% on Rotten Tomatoes. At first I thought it was like Talladega Nights or Blades of Glory where the film received positive press from the tongue-in-cheek celebrity and pop-culture references wrapped around the premise of an incredibly dumb movie. While Tropic Thunder had a lot of those elements the real beauty of it was in how it transcended the celebrity cameo stage and went on to lampoon just about every aspect of Hollywood and the ego-driven Academy Award seeking actors. While Tom Cruise's cameo was a little grating at times, especially when they had him dancing to rap music, this was counterbalanced by both a hilarious and surprisingly well-acted comedy role of Robert Downey Jr.

3/4

The Wackness - Oh god, The Wackness just about represented everything I can't stand about most indie movies, it was a completely pretentious movie that believed it was more original than it actually was with a cliche-ridden story and "editing" that at times felt like an overblown music video. While what was there wasn't really that bad especially with the film crammed with quite a few deliberate references to 1994, it was never particularly any good in any of the scenes. I guess it had Ben Kingsley making out with one of the Olsen twins in one scene, which may make it worth it but the chances are you'd find that scene on YouTube before the film even hits DVD.

2/4

Re-Animator - I caught this screening as a part of The Avon Theatre's Cult Classics summer line-up. Like their screening of The Animation Show they featured some vintage trailers at the beginning which ran maybe 10 minutes too long. Luckily, Re-Animator was a fantastic movie that served functionally as a well-written and directed horror movie as well as a hilarious B-movie due to the special effects not looking nearly as impressive in this CG-ridden effects day and age. Granted, Re-Animator had some black humor sprinkled around the film and the violence was over the top...I'm also sure the film's persistent effort to show Barbara Crampton's breasts did little to make the audience take the film seriously...there was also an evil zombie cat in there too that was killed with a shovel...and a talking severed head. On its own merits, this was a hilarious and well-made B-horror film that should probably have a place in my DVD collection.

3/4

The Pixar Story - Really good documentary, at times it felt almost like a promotional video for Pixar animation studios but with it being cut up into a special feature on the WALL-E DVD it all makes sense. The best part would have to be when they shown an early storyboarded version of Toy Story which under Jeffrey Katzenberg's (now of Shrek producing fame) suggestion was "edgy and adult" which was ultimately panned by Disney. I'd wait for WALL-E to come on DVD to see this again but pretty well made otherwise.

3/4

Singin' in the Rain - I'm not one for classic movies but this one caught me by surprise. Its weird to watch a film that was made in the '50s that is nostalgic of a simpler time. I loved the musical numbers, the direction made each song feel really fresh and I'd never know that the majority of the songs were never written for the movie. Completely awesome and many of the jokes were every bit as funny and snappy as they were in the 1950s, a rarity for a G-rated film.

4/4

Others:

I watched Morgan Spurlock's latest documentary Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden (1.5/4) sadly it wasn't half as good as his earlier documentary Supersize Me and it felt incredibly fabricated. I also loved Clerks 2 (3/4) and Uwe Boll's Postal (0.5/4) was every bit as unwatchably bad as I was expecting but it might just be worth watching just for Uwe Boll's incredibly shameless and hilarious cameo in the film.

Hell froze over, Chris Cookson got an Xbox 360

Last generation, Microsoft's Xbox left a bad taste in my mouth. Between the thing's massive child killing bulk and hideous industrial design, it looked like something that was trying to hard to appeal to immature 13 year old boys and little else. The console had some of the best games of the last generation with the Halo franchise generating critical acclaim and record breaking sales and Knights of the Old Republic putting Bioware on the map as a Western RPG powerhouse. Ultimately, the console lost Microsoft $4 billion but they wound up in a secure 2nd place position worldwide, pulling ahead of Nintendo's Gamecube despite the Xbox's weak Japanese sales but nowhere near touching the dominance of the Playstation 2 last generation.

Fast forward to this generation, the Wii flew under most analyst and developer's radars and is now the #1 selling console even beating out the Xbox 360 which was out a year longer than the Wii. Sony's Playstation 3 was a sales disaster and the Microsoft Xbox 360 firmly sits in second place. While the Wii's hardware is flying off the shelves the software sales are actually lower than the 360 implying that many might just purchase the Wii system as a tech toy with the packed in Wii Sports demo as opposed to a full-fledged multimedia console. Most of the best selling games are either first party tiles (much like the Gamecube) or the most casual poorly reviewed shovelware titles like Carnival Games and High School Musical: Sing It becoming million sellers. While I could ignore the onslaught of low-budget cash-in titles with Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Super Mario Galaxy being close to perfection but after seeing Nintendo at E3 touting the embarrassing Wii Music as their holiday killer-app and an all too similar looking sequel to Animal Crossing as their "hardcore" title, I felt as though Microsoft's Xbox 360 had more titles coming for Nintendo fanboys than the Wii did.

Over the years Microsoft has been slowly going after my heart between buying out Rare, getting an exclusive karaoke title from the creators of Elite Beat Agents and a three game exclusive trilogy Silicon Knights, the guys who did the cult classic Gamecube title Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Now that Rare's finally back up on its feet with Kameo and Viva Pinata getting rave reviews and a third entry in the Nintendo 64's popular Banjo-Kazooie franchise. With my summer job and all, I actually had enough money to pounce on the Xbox 360 as soon as I saw the 20 GB model for $270 at Circuit City and a copy of Viva Pinata to supplement that Forza Motorspot 2 game that Microsoft kindly handed out at their job recruiting presentation at Pratt Institute. I also picked up The Darkness and the Ratatouille video game off of bargain bin shelves. You can keep track of my various Xbox 360 related antics on the right nav of this blog.

My first surprise with the Xbox 360 came with just how feature rich it was. Even if you took out the entire next-gen game functionality you'd have a product that would rival the Apple TV. The console could play all Quicktime, Windows Media, Xvid and DivX encoded videos off of a burnt DVD/CD, your wireless network or any USB device plugged into one of the systems three USB ports. You can also charge your iPod and stream your songs and playlists to the Xbox and play it instead of the normal background music for any given game. Factor in its easy connectivity to the TiVo-esque Windows Media Center and the fact that its a functional upscaling DVD player and you have a system that rivals whatever you can find on cable TV at any given moment. I mean, if you know how to use BitTorrent and search Veoh properly, there's an endless amount of entertainment you can potentially get on this time. It was a fantastic feeling to tell my family about the Helvetica movie caught a screening of and listened to a Q and A with the respective director at Pratt and be able to watch it within three hours of telling them.

As a Nintendo fanboy I was kind of afraid that the Xbox 360 would mostly only have American first person shooters and action games, not to mention a slew of bratty foul-mouthed 12 year olds on Xbox Live. While both of the statements are still kind of true in my mind, the console is still pretty solid if you just avoid Xbox Live altogether. I remembered how devastated I was when Microsoft bought Rare back in 2002 and I viewed their final Nintendo published game, Star Fox Adventures as the last swan song for the company I also felt that after a number of key members left the studio for Free Radical and Zoonami I didn't think the company could ever return to its former greatness. After playing around four or five hours of Viva Pinata, that couldn't be further from the truth. I remembered laughing when I heard that Microsoft was trying to market the title as the next Pokemon with merchandise and a television series, while those ambitions never really caught on, the game has a deceptively simple concept but it contains a lot of depth. Like its more complicated than Animal Crossing but more linear than Harvest Moon, I'm not exactly sure how well the game could really appeal to kids but its a lot of fun and I feel like it could have been a real hit with the Nintendo audience. Likewise, Xbox Live Arcade has a wonderful selection of Nintendo fanboy friendly indie titles. I'm strongly tempted to pick up Braid, Bionic Commando Rearmed to that swanky downloadable version of the Dreamcast Soul Calibur.

Between playing through tons of demos and watching quite a few movie files I had on my harddrive, the Xbox 360 was totally worth it at $270 and if you factor in the price of component cables, its actually $15 cheaper than the Wii at the moment. While the Wii is a great choice for non-gamers, if you already have a nice HDTV and are fairly tech savvy I'd totally recommend taking a second look at the Xbox 360. As it currently stands, its a much better value than the Wii and it offers a much more sophisticated and polished experience for the price. While I still love my Wii quite a lot, in the meantime I'll stick to catching up on all the games I missed out on for the Xbox 360 and wait for the entire "casual" Wii game fad to pass and Nintendo to get back to making titles that require creativity and time to make and not just a marketing budget.

E3 2008 Impressions: Nintendo

With Microsoft's press conference being done and dusted we were left with whatever Nintendo or Sony had up their sleeves at this coming E3. I never even watched Sony or Microsoft's presentations last year, I mostly only just caught up on the big announcements with my handy RSS reader. All I could really remember from Nintendo's conference last year was the immense feeling of disappointment after seeing their real big guns just amounted to the announcement of the Wii Wheel and Wii Zapper peripherals both of which amounted to really cheap hunk's of plastic that simply just hold the Wii remote in place, apart from maybe a couple of hours of experimenting with both respectably I preferred the typical nunchuk and Wii remote combo, or in the case of the Wii Wheel using the Classic Controller for Mario Kart. While they did show Wii Fit (which I have no interest in buying) which turned out to be quite a huge seller and announce dates for Super Mario Galaxy and Super Smash Bros. Brawl (the latter of which was delayed by a good three and a half months) I really didn't have that much to look forward to. This year, I've felt a lot of the same things with the notable exception being that I still have no idea what Nintendo's big blockbuster game of this holiday season will be.

Nintendo's Press Conference:
The Good:

• Animal Crossing: City Folk looks like everything I was really hoping for, this wasn't a flooring announcement or anything but if its half as addictive as its Gamecube and Nintendo DS counterparts this looks like it will be quite fun, the City gives off kind of a Harvest Moon vibe to me but it fixes a lot of what was wrong with the random events in the prior installments. I'm also really glad to see that they finally put their foot down and made online play a big deal for this one, hopefully by then we would have something better than the friend code system for this.
• The surprise announcement of the Wii Speak accessory for Animal Crossing was sort of a mixed blessing for me. I liked the idea of a Microphone that can pick up every voice in the room but why didn't they release this for Super Smash Bros. Brawl? that game is far more suited for voice chat than Animal Crossing, and will this wind up like the voice chat in Pokemon Pearl and Metroid Prime Hunters where you could only chat to registered friend code friends. If that's the case, then it would be barely worth it.
• Of the three third-party titles that Nintendo highlighted, the clear winner was Call of Duty: World at War. From the brief clip it probably had some of the best third party graphics on the Wii and its one of the few times I was proven right when a developer stated that "they developed the Wii version from the ground up and that its not a PS2-port" where I'd actually believe them.
• The WiiMotionPlus accessory looks like everything the Wii remote concept was promised to be at Tokyo Game Show back in 2005. I was impressed by the amount of precision the device had and I'm excited to see how some third parties will approach the accessory. I really wish this kind of thing was a mandatory update on all future Wii remotes and an add-on for all existing ones. No developer would want to touch it if its sold separately.
• Luckily the WiiMotionPlus will be bundled with Wii Sports Resort much like how a Wii remote was bundled with the mediocre Wii Play. This one shows a lot of promise, especially with the new 1:1 sword fighting minigame that Wii owners were practically begging for since they first saw the controller. I wasn't impressed with how much the frisbee minigame relied on the sensor bar during the live demo but I'm sure these issues can all be addressed by its Spring '09 release date.
• The drum kit in Wii Music looked really intuitive, especially using the Wii Balance Board as a kickpad.
  
• There was a new trailer for MadWorld which showed off more of the gameplay though nothing much was really revealed from it.
• The Japanese GBA cult title Rhythm Tengoku is coming to the United States in form of the Nintendo DS game Rhythm Heaven. The title looked like a combination of the quirky random microgames from WarioWare with all the fun of those oh so popular rhythm games. Elite Beat Agents proved that the Nintendo DS is an excellent system for games that would allow you to tap on the screen, this will probably be pretty awesome.
• They announced that there would be a new Grand Theft Auto game on the Nintendo DS, but it could easily just turn out to be another Grand Theft Auto Advance and play like the archaic top-down Grand Theft Auto games. If it plays like a GTA III era title, then I'm pretty interested.
  

The Bad:

• Why did they devote 10 minutes of precious E3 time to the terrible looking Shaun White snowboarding game from Ubisoft? its bad enough seeing those poor graphics blown up on a large screen but was it really necessary to hear a boring 5 minute story about someone breaking their wrist snowboarding to lead into this? I'd stick to my SSX Blur for the Wii...I could at least stay on my board for that one (the people demoing this either really sucked or the game was poorly made, I'm leaning more towards the poorly made part).
• Wii Speak will be sold separately from Animal Crossing for $29.99. With such little support I don't think anyone would want this thing, it kind of reminds me of the Broadband adaptor on the Gamecube which ultimately was really only used for a couple of Phantasy Star games and LAN features for Mario Kart and Kirby Air Ride. The broadband port was so useless that it would later be the basis for the Gameboy Player attachment for the Gamecube.
• There's nothing there to convince me that the new Star Wars: Clone Wars game is really anything more than uninspired shovelware. The gameplay didn't look that much different than the already disappointing looking Wii version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and does anyone even care about the Rayman Raving Rabbids franchise anymore? I think by now most hardcore Wii owners are far tired of minigame collections, just give us a real Rayman game already.
• Wii Music was one of those things where I was initially very excited after seeing the drum kit and all but my enthusiasm was pretty much gone as soon as Shigeru Miyamoto came on stage and explained that it's impossible to lose in Wii Music and it pretty much amounts to miming playing an instrument with the Wii Remote and Nunchuk while the game does 90% of the work for you. I can't really see this having any lasting value and I broke out laughing seeing four people waggling their Wii remotes on stage with a forced smile on their face. I'm really not feeling this one.

OVERALL RATING: 2.0/4
While far from a mess, Nintendo's press conference totally ignored the demands of the "hardcore" Wii audience (and by that I mean, people who play the Wii for more than a couple of weekends) and was focused mostly on corporate bragging and gimmicks. While Animal Crossing was a satisfying announcement, the title is FAR from a traditional game and I would have much rather had at least a teaser for a real Zelda title or something. I'm a huge Nintendo fanboy and this conference just left me with lukewarm feelings.

E3 2008 Impressions: Microsoft

E3 at one time was the Superbowl of games, with stampedes of eager college students and press running in to soak in as many of the new holiday season titles that they could in a meager three or four days. Last year, they scaled down the size of E3 considerably inviting a fraction as many people and moving the date of the expo from May to July. Instead of cramming all the developers into a sweaty hanger, they instead opted for a hotel driven display where the press would have to get on a bus to go between different titles. This lead to a fairly disappointing expo with most of the games on display just being rehashed demos that most of the press members already played in some form at other public events. While there were some surprises like the announcement of the Balance Board accessory for the now unspeakably popular Wii Fit, most of the announcements just amounted to corporate gloating and confirmations of titles most people already new existed.

Fast forward to 2008, this year the scaled down E3 seemed to be taken a bit more seriously as a press outing. With announcements of Microsoft's Xbox 360 price drop and their Avatars leaking out through the internet and Nintendo's official confirmation of a new Animal Crossing game and a mysterious and ambitious Wii MotionPlus accessory this E3 is clearly a whole new animal than we've seen last year. The first conference up was Microsoft's, which I was checking up on the live-blogging and Twitter feeds at work every time I had one of those 30 second breaks waiting for computer related frustrations. As soon as I got home, I watched IGN's prerecorded coverage of the event and was both impressed and disappointed at what Microsoft had to offer.

The Good:

• Fallout 3 looks really violent and really awesome. I haven't actually played any of the other titles in the Fallout series but I immediately appreciated its subtle 1950's bomb scare style humor and its use of nuclear zombies and severed limbs. While its a multiplatform release (with the exception of my poor neglected Wii), the Xbox 360 version looked pretty solid.
• As a fanboy of both the American Elite Beat Agents and the Japanese Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! franchises, I was pleased to see iNiS was developing the karaoke title Lips. While on one hand it looked like a washed up version of Singstar, I'm pretty excited for what's to come with the motion sensitive microphone, even if its for some Guitar Hero-style titling gimmick. I'm a sucker for Karaoke, it was a blast at Pratt and its my favorite aspect of Rock Band by far.
• Resident Evil 5 is shaping up to be the same kind of faux-zombie killing fun that I played to death on my Gamecube and Wii's Resident Evil 4.
• Portal: Still Alive sounds really cool, I like the idea of it being a downloadable title from the start this time but I'm not too fond of that Xbox Live Arcade exclusivity. It was born to be a PC game.
• I thought Gears of War was pretty rad from what little I played of it, Gears of War 2 looks just as fun.
• The original Banjo-Kazooie is coming to Xbox Live Arcade, that's pretty sweet. Here's hoping for some graphical updates to it.
  
• The Avatars while being a blatant rip-off of Nintendo's Miis, seem to be a lot more open to third party usage in titles. I've also been kind of a Mii addict so whatever this brings, it gives me a small reason to be excited.
• The Netflix partnership for streaming movies to your Xbox 360 is a fantastic feature and a great kick in the face to Apple TV. Not digging the exclusivity though.
• The Square-Enix announcements really came as no surprise to me but I'm pleased to know that the RPG-starved Xbox will at least be getting some non-KOTOR style RPGs. Final Fantasy XIII makes sense with the Unreal Engine being designed for cross-platform support, not too excited for The Last Remnant or Star Ocean though.

The Bad:

• Microsoft seemed unsure of whether or not it wanted to appeal to the "hardcore" crowd (and by that I mean the immature teens and frat boys who play the Halo games) or the "casual" middle-aged Wii crowd. They opened with the "this conference may be tough to stomach" line with the "hyper violent" (and I put that in quotes for a reason) line-up for the rest of 2008 and 2009 but then they went on to introduce a new Wii Channel and Windows Media Center-esque GUI for the Xbox 360 and the introduction of Xbox Live Avatars which look like blander versions of Miis. Microsoft isn't fooling anyone with this.
• I don't think anyone will use the Xbox Live Primetime service for longer than a week. The live-game show idea is novel but game shows are more of a passive experience brought together by the liveliness of the host and a few especially smart or dumb contestants, without there being a human presense it just seems kind of lame.
  
• Resident Evil 5 looked a little "too" close to Resident Evil 4. While RE4 was one of the best games I've played of all last generation, its really disheartening to see the zombies animate in the same exact way to each play they were shot. While I'm sure they were technically superior to the three year old Gamecube game, the graphics weren't nearly as impressive to me. It wouldn't take much work to port this thing down to the Wii so why can't Capcom take a hint from the fantastic sales of the shovelware Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles and give us a real Resident Evil game?
• I'm a bit disappointed to see Mega Man 9 is also coming out to the Playstation Network and Xbox Live Arcade, I saw the WiiWare release of it as a kind of love letter to Nintendo fanboys. I'll still buy it though.
• Microsoft really shouldn't brag about sales of third party titles being stronger than that of the Wii and PS3 versions combined. Most of the ones they were touting were First Person Shooter titles where the Xbox 360 version is the one that the development team is primarily concerned with, of course the Wii version's going to sell poorly, 9 out of 10 times its a hashed together port of the perfunctory PS2 version.
• NetFlix shouldn't be "exclusively" on the Xbox 360. With the popularity of services like Hulu and the not-so popularity of Joost we really just need to be able to access these from a television hooked up console to really escalate these services beyond the unwatchable realms of a PC-screen. Why not open it up for a PS3/PSP firmware update or a Wii channel? then everyone wins.

OVERALL RATING: 2.5/4
Most of Microsoft's big announcements have already been leaked out onto the internet weeks before they presented it. While their hardcore titles were every bit as awesome as I expected they really fell on their face with their new casual branding. I'd almost say it was a great press conference but I was mostly met with indifference on this one.

Adventures in Geekery: Wii Homebrew and Panda edition

Yes, its true. Yesterday I decided to get rid of a couple of those AMC Silver tickets I had lying in my wallet and I went to see Kung Fu Panda. For those who follow my blog, you'd know I had less than favorable impressions of the movie. I had incredibly bad vibes after Dreamworks ran a PowerPoint presentation for Digital Arts students at Pratt, and the incredibly derivative looking trailer didn't help. I don't think there's ever been an American Martial Arts movie in the past 20 years that hasn't used the song "Kung Fu Fighting" somewhere in the trailer, and that "Battle Without Honor Or Humanity" track from Kill Bill has been used in every possible ironic sense since it first appeared in a film. Luckily, it was mostly void of the pop culture snarkiness and cheap gags that's a mainstay in most Dreamworks Animation movies but it still wasn't half of what I'd consider Pixar-quality.



Onward to the geekery:
Kung Fu Panda - to start things off, this movie gave off an incredibly great first impression with this 2-D animated opening from James Baxter Animation, who also worked on the opening 10 minutes or so of Enchanted. It looked absolutely incredible on the digital projection with details like a really subtle paper parchment texture showing through. It would be interesting to see if the film would be any different if they tried to make the entire thing in this style, or at least created some sort of cell-shading filter to mimic this simplicity with the control of 3D animation. When the actual movie started, I was fairly satisfied with the amount of squash and stretch they were able to pull off with the animation in this. They started using it in Madagascar but it was really pronounced in this movie. The lighting in this was quite good as well, with a fearless choice to go with red and blue lights in some of the scenes, its great to see Dreamworks finally playing around with the limitless amount of freedom CG gives them for their movie.

In a lot of ways Kung Fu Panda reminded me a lot of Over the Hedge in that it was a step above the Shrek movies and really entertaining, but not anything I'd go out of my way to see again. Like Over the Hedge's decision to have Bruce Willis play a cuddly raccoon and Avril Lavigne voice an angsty teen possum, it had a needlessly star studded cast which really only needed Jack Black at the end of the day. Some of the questionable choices included Knocked Up's Seth Rogan voicing a praying mantis, who only had a couple of snarky one-liners and an excuse to get his signature laugh somewhere into the movie. Angelina Jolie played a moderately big role as a cuddly tiger but she appeared alongside Jack Black in the Dreamworks's horrible Shark Tale movie, maybe Dreamworks is running out of marquee actors to pick from. It also had Lucy Liu and Jackie Chan in there, but only to collect a paycheck, all I can remember is that they played a Snake and a Baboon respectably and they said maybe two or three lines. You'd think they could have put a little money aside and gone with Saturday morning cartoon voice actors for those minor roles and put a little money towards the writing, which was easily the weakest thing in this movie.

While I remember at Pratt, Dreamworks touted this as an animator driven project and that's what really saved this movie in my mind. It seemed like they just let the animators have fun let it be through slapstick gags or a few ridiculously awesome action sequences that seemed a little out of place for the rest of the movie. The real problem with this movie was the fact that all the sequences that were supposed to convince us that Po (Jack Black) was not the dragon warrior were just played off as slapstick gags. I really wish there was just one scene, where you could legitimately see Jack Black get his ass handed to him and just get a look of desperation on his face. Yes, I know this is a "family movie" but they did it in a Bug's Life and it was EASILY the strongest moment in the entire movie. Instead, the scenes when Jack Black actually did give up we really had little reason to actually believe him where in most of the shows he had a "smile on his face" and it looked like he was having fun in the midst of those slapstick gags. While Kung Fu Panda had its share of flaws, you could certainly do a LOT worse when it comes to 3D animated movies.

Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro - the funny thing about Hayao Miyazaki is that even when you think you've seen all his films already, there's always one that you missed. I saw this at the library in the children's section and I was apparently the only one who's taken it out ever since they first got it a few months ago. I think this one was made before Studio Ghibli even existed and its quite odd because it still has a lot of the staples of a Miyazaki film (like flight, bad guys who are actually good) but it also has a humor and sensibility that I didn't know Miyazaki even had. I found this one pretty entertaining but I really feel like Miyazaki's style really evolved around the time they released My Neighbor Totoro, his early stuff like this and Nausicaa was good but they were fairly flawed. Only worth it if you haven't seen some of his more recent stuff yet.



OTHER GEEKERY!!!

This week I also installed the Homebrew Channel on my Wii, after hearing that the latest update will disable the Twilight Hack I figured that now was my only real chance to do it. I installed the hack mainly just so I could back up my 160 hours of data in Brawl. While my warranty expired last February (it was a launch Wii, extended for registering) I figured if my Wii ever bites the dust which I feel its getting pretty close to, I want to have a way to back up the titles that the Wii OS wouldn't let me like Mario Kart Wii, Brawl and Guitar Hero III.

Getting the Homebrew channel wasn't nearly as user friendly as I imagined it. After checking where my Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess disc was manufactured and reformatting an SD card with a very specific tree of folders. It seemed needlessly tense. Especially when I ran the Twilight Hack and this MS-DOS like bios started up and told me if my Wii doesn't work anymore that its no one's fault but my own. It was all a very nerve-wracking process and I doubt really anyone outside of maybe a half of a percent of Wii owners would ever want to go through it.

After installing the channel, it all ran kind of fine. The start-up logo for the channel was quite cool, it would be nice if you could access the Wii menu with through the Wii's bios from there and there's no way to get back to the channel's menu within any actual applications. Most of the homebrew apps were pretty much unplayable, this included a soundless version of Duck Hunt which was done much better in a Flash game before it and a version of Tetris with a fair bit of slow-down. The SNES emulator on the other hand worked without a hitch and supported the classic controller. As someone who's dropped more money than I'd like to think on Virtual Console downloads, this was quite novel. I spent most of the mod from there on playing EarthBound, which I'm actually enjoying quite a lot.

I might try to see Shakespeare on the Sound one of these days too...before it ends fairly momentarily.

I want MGS4 almost as much as I don't want a PS3

If there's a theme of the video game releases of 2008, it is that they are all just delayed big budget blockbuster titles that were supposed to come out in 2007. I can't really blame the companies for delaying the titles, Super Mario Galaxy, The Orange Box, Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and Halo 3 were all released within four months of each other. Had it been any other year, any of those titles could have easily taken Game of the Year from just about any game publication. The slew of delayed AAA titles released this year included Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Grand Theft Auto IV and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. These delayed titles, thanks to some added development time are some of the strongest games of this generation with Grand Theft Auto IV getting reviews as strong as Super Mario Galaxy (though I'd take Super Mario Galaxy or Legend of Zelda over GTA any day) and Super Smash Bros. Brawl is second to only Nintendo's top tier Mario and Zelda franchises when it comes for the best rated Wii release ever.

The rest of 2008 is really hard to judge for especially before most of the big holiday guns are revealed at this year's souped down E3. Prince of Persia and Soulcalibur IV highlight the multi-platform releases and I'm sure Guitar Hero: World Tour will sell a lot for imitating Rock Band but I doubt it will really be anything spectacular. The PC is getting Spore which is Will Wright's much delayed follow up to Sim City and The Sims franchises. While the Xbox 360 is getting Gears of War 2, Too Human (a title that went in and out of development hell for the past 10 years) and the third entry of the Nintendo 64's popular Banjo-Kazooie franchise. The PS3 has the way cool looking LittleBigPlanet and a sequel to Insomniac's Resistance franchise. Not much has been announced for the Wii yet apart from Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (which I'm hoping is as good as its Gamecube counterpart) and De Blob shows promise, I'm sure Nintendo has an ace up its sleeve for Christmas at this coming E3 convention.

With Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots released only a few days ago, I'm feeling a stronger and stronger temptation to get a PS3. The fact that Wal-mart is also offering a $100 gift card with all PS3s including the MGS4 Bundle and the ability to play Blu-Ray discs helps a lot too. While I know that there is a chance that MGS4 could very well be ported to the Xbox 360 by the end of the year much like how Resident Evil 4, Killer7 and Viewtiful Joe were ported to the PS2 despite being touted as Gamecube exclusives for most of their development. If anything, the PS3 version will still be better than anything they could release on the Xbox 360 because the game was designed around the 60 GBs available on a dual-layer Blu-Ray disc and I really can't see them cramming that onto a few DVDs without a ridiculous amount of compression. On top of that, millions of dollars were spent from both Sony and Konami for them to make the game's engine optimized for the PS3 and I doubt Sony will ever let Konami let go of it. Besides, I really REALLY want LittleBigPlanet and you can't really discount the multi-platform games like Oblivion, The Orange Box (which is fine with the new patch), Assassin's Creed, the sequel to Beyond Good and Evil and that way cool looking Prince of Persia game coming out. I'm not really all that interested in the frat boy mentality of most of the Xbox 360 exclusives anyway and most of the Japanese titles I want are out on either the Wii (which I have and love) or the PS3.

So far, I watched the first three hours of Metal Gear Solid 4 played on a live-stream off of Giant Bomb. As someone who's only really played Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes on Gamecube and just watched his brother play through MGS2 and 3, I'm actually pretty excited for this one. They seemed to lighten up the intensity of the stealth mechanic with new ways to hide, new melee attacks and a slightly more liberal cone of vision. On top of that, the game adopted a lot of the gameplay elements from Gears of War making it a fairly competent action game if you want to totally ditch the stealth element altogether. I heard they have better unlockables and hidden weapons if you play it killing as few people as possible though which is great reward for the purists of the series.

If your reading this in my blog, here are a couple of clips from the game so you can see what I'm talking about...

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/35102.html

http://www.gamevideos.com/video/id/18828

The cutscenes did drag on a bit much though. It would be generous if I said half the footage I saw was gameplay and the other half was either a cut scene or a codec conversation. Fortunately, what I saw of the cutscenes looked REALLY good. The direction of the tension and action looked every bit as awesome as the trailers shown at the past few Tokyo Game Show and E3 conventions and the themes of the war economy in a not too distant future hit a little closer to home than any other entry in the series. Did I mention that aging Solid Snake was one of the smartest moves made in this one, while each Metal Gear Solid game is famous for having an "edge of your seat torture" scene of sorts putting a 70 year old version of Snake through the bowels of war makes the entire game feel almost like a torture scene for him...and yes, that is a good thing.

Will I buy a PS3 within the next two months solely for this game? probably not, but its really hard to resist...

Adventures in Geekery: Not Many Films Edition

This past week, I haven't really seen that many films. There's a part of me that wants to see Kung Fu Panda after I saw it got an 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the best rated Pacific Data Images film since Shrek 2 (which I never really thought too highly of). I'll probably see it next week when I'm away where the movie tickets are cheaper. I don't really want to pay $11.75 to see another formulaic pop culture heavy film with snarky talking animals spewing whatever kind of crude and sexual references that could fall under the PG rating. According to Dreamwork Animation's Powerpoint presentation at Pratt, that was their "winning formula" that they discovered after making the first Shrek movie. While I can't really speak down on the company, for the concept art they've shown was top-notch and if animator blogs are any indication, there are some smart and extremely talented people working there. I just feel like the upper management is more concerned with making a movie marketable to corporate America than opposed to a timeless and artful movie that sells itself for its merits and creativity (a vital aspect that most of their 3D films lack).

Onwards to movies!
Beowulf - Just when I thought I was finished talking about uninspired 3D animated films, I haven't mentioned that I took out Beowulf from my local library. This latest film from Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, as well as that Forest Gump Oscar grab) takes the boring literary epic poem and translates it into a generic beef-headed action movie. The film uses a more large scale version of the motion capturing that Zemeckis incorporated into the Polar Express and Monster House which he served as a producer on. The main noticeable difference here is that Robert also attached small cameras over the eyes of the actors as a feeble attempt to avoid the doll faced world of the uncanny valley. While its cool to see the pupils of a virtual Anthony Hopkins dilate, it still doesn't come off as believable as they still bear the weight and rubbery texture of corpses. They should have went for a more stylized approach like they did in Monster House, where I could at least pay attention to the dialogue without getting freaked out by the hideous zombie animation.

The actual Beowulf film was a letdown for me as well. Most of it followed our aggressive titular hero in a series of violent trials against mythical creatures and long overblown dialogue sequences. I'm unsure how the film managed to get a PG13 rating from the MPAA. The over the top blood in the movie is reminiscent of an M-rated video game (I'd say God of War but that would give this movie too much credit) and it features what is supposed to be a naked Angelina Jolie (but it was really just Angelina Jolie's head plastered onto the body of the model of a 19 year old woman) that leaves very little to the imagination. I keep on getting reminded of some of the antics revealed in the independent documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated where big name studios would pretty much pay off the MPAA for the coveted mall friendly PG13 rating leaving most low-budget indie movies with R and NC17 ratings that they probably don't deserve. Maybe it was the terrible animation that really saved it from getting the R-rating at the end of the day. The violence looks so fake that its hard to take seriously and the animation is too wooden and soulless for the film to possibly be erotic. This reminded me of The Animatrix's Final Flight of the Osiris short film where the uncanny valley helps cross the narrow line between sexy and repulsive.

The movie somehow was able to garner a respectable 70% on Rotten Tomatoes but I feel that is largely in part to the fact that they screened the stereoscopic IMAX 3D version of the movie to the critics. I mean, I saw the infamously bad Open Season in IMAX 3D and didn't mind it due to the novelty of seeing 3D animation rendered for glasses. In fact, I felt kind of robbed watching it in "2D" on DVD. I'm sure when its more of a mainstay, it would be less impressive but for now I feel it will inflate the critical reception of movies that don't deserve it.


The Machine Girl - While I've already made a blog post about how awesome the trailer for this movie was, I finally saw it in its full length and I'm happy to say that it lived up to every ridiculously high (and by that I mean low) expectation I had for it. If you've seen the trailer, you'd already know what to hope for as the movie pretty much has the same exact pacing and amount of action as the trailer, just imagine it was extended to 90 minutes. The film seemed like what would happen if you gave a hyped up 12 year old $5 million and asked him to make Kill Bill and what your left with is a plot with about as much depth of a Power Rangers episode and a non-stop onslaught of over the top and anatomically impossible violence. Unlike Beowulf, The Machine Girl understands the immaturity in its exaggerated violence and instead of trying to convince the audience that its a serious movie, it plays off this fact and just tries to give you a good time. While it may not be a fulfilling movie experience to watch alone, it makes for excellent riffing material if you can get a bunch of sarcastic friends together in a room to watch it.


Rocky Balboa - I was surprised at how much I liked this film. Having only seen the original Rocky movie from 1976, I was afraid I would have been lost because I haven't seen any of the four sequels that followed. Thankfully, Rocky Balboa was as much as a sequel as it was a remake, where its plot was self-contained enough to entertain a new generation that hasn't experienced a Rocky movie but it had ample references and appearances of the characters from the past Rocky films to please the longtime fans. In that respect I'd consider it the perfect family movie. Pretty much anyone can grasp the story of a retired boxer who goes in for one last fight but the fact that it was a Rocky movie gives something for parents to be excited about as well. There was very little action in it surprisingly, with most of the film just building up to the final fight in the last fifteen minutes. What it did have was corny dialogue and an innocent sense of humor that was harmless enough that you can't help but really celebrate this movie.


With the underwhelming Gamestop "Game Days" sale, I also picked up a couple of video games that I would have never picked up at full price...

video game geekery:
Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games - This is one of those titles that I pounced on as soon as I saw it for $30. While I'm against the idea of a minigame compilation released for the Wii at full price, the shallow ten hours or so of messing around and the value as a party game make me a lot more open to a budget price tag. Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games falls somewhere in between Wii Sports and Track and Field in my mind. At times, the game is pretty easy and straightforward ideal for the typical middle aged Wii consumer and young children but then at random intervals the game becomes needlessly convoluted and difficult. The amount of precision and patience with the unforgiving difficulty of these minigames harkens back to the difficulty of most NES games, and often on these games the controls more rely on button presses than on motion, making it kind of difficult to explain to the "non-gamer" this was marketed towards. The novelty of seeing both Mario and Sonic on the screen at the same time was handled much better in Super Smash Bros. Brawl with this game putting more attention on the Olympic Games in Beijing than the idea of two rival mascots finally appearing together in the same title, very little of the aesthetic and catchy music from the two franchises is actually implemented into the game, which is a bit of a disappointment to me. At the price though, the game itself was pretty fun and if you could overlook some of the apparent shortcomings you have a fairly solid and deep collection of minigames.

Octomania - I'll admit it, I mostly picked up this game for its overtly Japanese intro movie and its horrendously bad voice acting. This game makes it no secret that it was supervised by the creator of Puyo Pop, which I consider the best puzzle game second to only Panel de Pon (known here as Tetris Attack or Puzzle League) and Tetris. While you probably haven't heard of Puyo Pop, the game has been released to the United States under the names of Kirby's Avalance on the SNES and Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine on the Sega Genesis. More recently though the game has made appearances here in its original Japanese form in a Gameboy Advance remake and its sequel Puyo Pop Fever which appeared on the Gamecube and Nintendo DS systems. Between that and the fact that games like Puzzle Fighter and Dr. Mario have an uncanny resemblance to the title, you've likely played something that was derived from Puyo Pop. Octomania follows the same basic structure where you'd often be facing against an AI where you'd compete to get big combos and ultimately drop useless tiles on the opponent to the point where they'd lose the game, or vice versa. These are sandwiched between cutesy voice acted "story" sequences as each opponent gets progressively harder.

While its not as addictive as the aforementioned Puyo Pop its fun enough to warrant the $15 purchase. The game also supports Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection multiplayer but the game's so obscure that its next to impossible to find a stranger to play it with and your better off exchanging friend codes with someone you know from the internet. Its worth noting that the game is just about unplayable with the default control scheme which requires you to use the Wii's IR based cursor to switch over tiles, its not precise enough to really get that far into the game. You can toggle to a more comfortable NES style horizontal configuration with the minus button on the remote or through the options area of the main menu.

Octomania was localized and published by Conspiracy Entertainment. This was the same company that brought us Ninjabread Man and Anubis II, both of which were some of the absolute worst games to ever grace the Wii. While both of those titles were developed by the British based Data Design Interactive, I have to commemorate Conspiracy for finally bringing over a solid and fun game to the Wii instead of cramming up the shelves with cheap budget cash-in titles that take advantage of mothers and casual consumers that just don't know any better. Sadly I don't think this is really a trend, there's still a sequel to Ninjabread Man coming out...

perhaps the coolest Wii game I never knew existed

Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy from Joystiq.com on Vimeo
I only just noticed this awesome title today on Giant Bomb and I'm already pretty excited. Its release is only a week away and this is the first word I heard of it. While the narration of the trailer is pretty lame, I'm pretty excited to see what kind of creations the community is able to come up with for this title. With another "me-too" shoot-'em-up released just about every week for the Virtual Console on the Wii Shop Channel and an already overcrowding amount on the new WiiWare service in only the first month, its great to be able to potentially access a ton of great schmups (that's short for shoot 'em up :P) without having to fork over $6-$10 in Wii Points Cards. It will also allow for bullet patterns a la the underground Gamecube now XBLA title Ikaruga.

Another plus, is that it will come with the cult indie PC titles TUMIKI Fighters, rRootage, Gunroar, and Torus Trooper right out of the box. While the games are already available online for the PC as a free download (and trust me, I was addicted to Torus Trooper last year), they'll feel much more at home playing on a console. Especially, holding the Wii remote horizontally, NES style. I'd almost say its worth the price of admission alone for those titles.

Sadly, a game like this is only as strong as the community that supports it and with Majesco's track record with Psychonauts and Advent Rising, I wouldn't be surprised if this title wouldn't last more than a few months on store shelves...only to be replaced with another flock of low-grade PS2 ports and casual minigame compilations.

These Mario stages play themselves...to music!

The Apple Store has my laptop at the moment and it just doesn't seem right to blog on any other computer so I'll keep this one fairly short, I've just seen Indiana Jones and Forgetting Sarah Marshall in theaters. Expect a more elaborate post on that whenever my laptop comes back from the land of Apple. My laptop started to make a scary mechanical jingling noise over from the fan but it would not make the sound when the laptop was off (but it would in sleep mode), they've had it for the last couple of days now.

I've seen a fair bit of movies from my library too. So in the meantime I'll post this really cool custom level of Super Mario World that syncs to some pretty sweet music. I've seen a couple of ones in the past but none were of this length.



The Haruhi Suzumiya chime in the last video reminded me a bit of this slightly less impressive Mario level that I've seen about a year ago. Still fairly cool.



UPDATE: I found one with lyrics...check it out

the blue blur goes for a walk

I always find it hilarious how defensive Sega is on their Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. I sure hope the video posted below is a glitch and not the actual Havok physics engine they backed the game on, where the bad guys would have ragdoll physics. With that being said I can fully understand why Sega wants to completely ignore the 2006 next generation entry of the Sonic franchise in their hype for the upcoming Sonic Unleashed. I almost find it pathetic that the biggest addition in this year's entry to the series is the fact that the game will switch to 2D style side scrolling during the fast moments of the game and then switch back to 3D.

Its as if they're starting to give up on the notion of making a 3D Sonic game and just giving the fans what they want. I guess this would make sense, the only good Sonic games in the past 10 years were 2D style games on the Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS, all of which weren't developed by Sonic Team. Its almost as if the Tokyo based Dimps team knows Sonic better than Sonic Team themselves. We'll find out soon enough since the Wii version of Sonic Unleashed will be handled by Dimps while the Xbox 360/PS3/PS2 ones will be from Sonic Team. The fact that they have yet to unveil the new "unleashed" werewolf gameplay aspect of the game is just a bit unnerving to say the least.

tetris is officially gangsta

I saw this the other day on TV and I couldn't help but feel warm and fuzzy over the very concept of rapping to the "Tetris theme". While there is one part of me that wishes one of the rappers was not wearing a NES controller jacket because the NES version did not feature the Russian folk song Korobeiniki but rather classical tunes from the Nutcracker, I can still forgive them for the remix being fairly awesome. Unlike other nerd culture with rap clashes such as Kanye West and Busta Rhymes rapping over Daft Punk songs, I actually liked this...sort of.


Tetris by DaCaV5

MadWorld looks beautifully distasteful

The trailer for this game leaked onto video sharing websites a couple of days ago but was removed fairly quickly by SEGA's request. Now that the four game contract with Platinum Games has been officially unveiled the trailer is now here to stay on the world of YouTube. The team is composed mostly of former staff members of Capcom's Clover Studio which created Okami on the PS2 and more recently Wii as well as the Viewtiful Joe series and God Hand.

The game apparently follows a man with a chainsaw for an arm who is caught up in a twisted game show. Over the top violence, an obnoxious TV announcer and some level of hilarity will ensue. The plot seems reminiscent of the first Manhunt game and the visual style and humor seems to be a mix of No More Heroes and Sin City (probably more along the lines of the film, Renaissance, but that's barely worth mentioning) and I believe one of the writers of Killer7 is working on the plot of the game too.

The game is due out in the first quarter of '09 (around the same time No More Heroes came out) and will be out on the Wii. Here's hoping it will deliver better chainsaw thrills than the port of the already underwhelming Scarface game...

No More Heroes for $20 this week

This week Circuit City has No More Heroes for the reasonable price of $19.99, if you have a Wii and haven't picked this title up now's the perfect chance. I got it when it first came out back in January and while the style's a bit rough around the edges there was enough heart in the game to overshadow those shortcomings. The dialogue and voice acting are beautifully Japanese and its eccentric B-movie-esque humor is enough to set it apart from any other game I can think of.

I mean seriously, its a game about an anime fan that buys a lightsaber off of eBay and tries to become the #1 assassin with it. What more could you ask for?

Link