Nucular

I'm for Nuclear Power. No, not Nuklear Power(although I am in favour of that as well). I'm talkin' power plants.

Yes, even after the March 11th series of disasters in Japan. I'm not saying it's not without its risks, but I also believe the paranoia about it is doing more harm than good, and that the alternatives(like burning coal) are actually a lot worse(and certainly more dangerous).

Imagine my surprise when Germany decided that, by 2022, they will have shut down every single nuclear power source in their country. Now, for the ones that are old, that are barely being kept functional, then fine. Good. Nobody wants another Chernobyl. The problem is that a depressing number of people can't tell the difference between Chernobyl, a half-assedly built and maintained reactor even by Soviet Union standards, with a Three-Mile Island. These are the people who are afraid they'll go sterile if they're in the same room as a microwave preparing a hot-pocket.

Grimace

This makes me shake my head.

"GRIN", a game developer that went bankrupt a couple of years ago, recently talked about why the company shuttered, and why(according to them), it's entirely Square-Enix's fault. Namely that they expected the Swedish developer to "meet every milestone" for a Final Fantasy-ish game without, you know, actually getting paid for any of this. And then they asked them to send the game's code and music files through... a fax-machine.

Music.

By fax.

That trolling couldn't have been more hardcore if they'd faxed over a picture of Rick Astley.

Turtle Rock

Turtle Rock Studios, creators of the "Left 4 Dead" franchise were bought by Valve before the game was released. They parted ways. I honestly cannot blame them. Fucking Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 was a more polished, complete product, and Daikatana had better friendly A.I. I really am convinced Valve didn't give a shit about the property, and needed a quick buck. So they half-assedly rushed a game not even past its Beta onto store shelves, while charging the same price as games that have the distinction of actually having been playtested at some point.

It's either that, or they're actually proud of a game with no story, non-existent hit-detection and an in-game dependence on a group of suicidal retards(human or simulated). That one seems a little more terrifying to me.

So now that they're free of Valve's uncharacteristic failure permeating their hard work, they're moving onto the greener pastures of... wait, THQ?

Seriously guys?

I know Valve fucked up worse than almost any game developer has ever fucked up in the last ten years when it came to Left 4 Dead, but... THQ? The guys who made "Homefront"? Left 4 Dead was Valve at its absolute worst. Homefront is THQ at its absolute best, which is still pretty awful from what I hear. Is that really a step up?

I hope you know what you guys are getting into, here...

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~A.H.

Classic Friday: The First

Every Friday, I'll showcase an article from the past I've written on earlier blogs that I feel merit making the transition here. I'll try to limit myself to only my favourite articles, or at least the more in-depth ones. Lazy? Yes. Masturbatory? ...Yes. To those of you new to this, it'll give a weird look at my thought-process in months(and years) past. To those of you who are already familiar with these posts, um... Sorry.

Click after the jump to see this week's soggy leftovers BLAST FROM THE PAST(!!!):

Daily Dropped

There's a show at The Escapist called "Daily Drop". I avoided it for a while, since I prefer content that's a little meatier there. Here, something drops, a slow-motion camera records what it looks like as it collides with the floor, and that's that. I didn't want to have to load up a video player for something so meager. Especially when half the time it gives me a "STREAM COULD NOT BE FOUND" error message, and I have to refresh the page 8 times. And it would be especially annoying to have to sit through a 20-second long intro every time, when what comes after it is only about... well, 20 seconds long.

But eventually curiosity got the better of me, and I started watching them in immediate succession. Sometimes 5 or 6 in a row. I admit I cringed a little when they dropped an original PSX. The condom-filled-with-pudding one is a must-see, however. Those things can take some punishment.

And just as soon as I started getting into this show, they stopped doing it forever. Goddamnit.

Now we only have like, twelve shows by the "Loading, Ready, Run" crew. *pouts*

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~A.H.

Resistance 3 Cover Art

Speaking as a guy who has never played, nor cares for the Resistance series of games, I gotta say: not a bad cover for the third game, guys. It's simple, it'll stand out on store shelves, and it does a pretty decent job of communicating that aliens are attacking New York in this thing, without resorting to anything overly expensive and lens-flarey.

But I still see some of Olly Moss' actual artwork underneath all of the brazen corporate logo diarrhea splattered all over. Couldn't you fit an ad for Burger King on there, or something?

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~A.H.

The Playstation Network

Looks like Blogger is back up and running. I was considering making a proper post on the PSN outage a long time ago, but then this place was under maintenance, and then everyone else said everything that could ever deserve to be said about this issue. Not that I have any authority to speak on the matter, since I don't own a Playstation 3. I haven't seen Kaz Hirai's video apology or anything, but from what I hear it looks like this company might have finally gotten its act together. I'll believe it when I see it.

In any case, to those of you with PS3's, here's hoping the worst is over, and you can finally start playing Portal 2 online.

Speaking of, here's something related I wrote on another blog a while back:

Keiji Inafune

It's news stories like this that remind me why I think Keiji Inafune, despite some ambitious missteps, is good for video games, and for those who play them. I won't get into the stories about how he and a few of his co-workers practically rolled up their sleeves and made the first Mega Man games in their spare time, while committed to other projects. Try that today.

Instead though, I'll focus on more recent developments.

In a time when developers are trying to keep a sinking ship afloat, he's the one experimenting with new and different sources for profit, like digital retail. When other developers pander to their country's sensibilities to play it safe, he's working with far-off studios to capitalize on international profits. And now I find out that to get Lost Planet and Dead Rising made, he had to cheat.

An Open Letter To Russ Pitts

To Russ Pitts, Editor in Chief of The Escapist,

Jim Sterling is a cunt.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. In the last year, The Escapist has made some commendable strides to acknowledging popular culture, and especially video games, as important topics worthy of serious discussion. There was nothing to suggest that you would then hire on a woman-hating manchild with nothing of value to say to fill a hole in your programming lineup.

And then the magazine you work for gave Jim Sterling a show. Despite the fact that he does precisely dick to back up his hateful opinions. Even though he doesn't realize that if you fucking swear too goddamned much, then it's not fucking funny or edgy or controversial, it's just shitfuckdickcuntpeniscunt. Even though he tries to hide zealous bigotry behind "edginess", on a website that already has Ben Croshaw. Even though he has absolutely no understanding on how to record or film a 3-minute segment, without repeating the same "FIRE HOT" so-obvious-it's-stupid statements over and over. Even in light of a good 90% of the comments he gets in the Escapist forums being hate mail. The amount of people who think he is a worthless, shallow, ego maniacal misogynist with nothing to offer The Escapist outweighs any imagined benefit he might bring.

Apples & Jewel-Encrusted Crowns

So I'm pretty ticked that Chrono Trigger won't be in the Smithsonian exhibit exploring the artistic significance of video games in popular culture. And that instead, A Link To The Past will be presented in its place... Even though Ocarina of Time, Twilight Princess, Wind Waker and the original NES Zelda will all be there as well.

I was afraid that Call of Duty fanboys would spam the votes in their favour, so I guess I should be grateful it didn't come to that. But we're talking about my favourite video game here. It doesn't mean what's going to be there when this exhibit happens will be bad, in fact it's a pretty swell lineup on display. I'm not saying people should have only voted for MY favourites instead of theirs. Dems the breaks, I get that. I can still be pissed off about it.

One suggestion for why this happened was supplied to me by a fellow at deviantArt:

Well, Earthbound really deserved a place, but I think ALTTP deserves the place over Chrono Trigger in the art department which was the judging point. CT is one of the best games of all time, but I do think ALTTP is better looking and was more of a break-through in graphics and art direction.

Arts In Media

The National Endowment for the Arts now recognizes "Interactive Media" as a potential recipient for a grant, among other things. If you're okay with it not making a profit, and if you think it will benefit the public from an artistic standpoint, you can now apply your game about those farting lesbian trolls or whatever horrible thing you're working on in your spare time.

Weirdo.

I imagine it will be a lot tougher to convince them that a video game application will be more deserving over say, short films, documentaries, songs, sculptures and all the rest of the other, more established fields. That said, here's a legally recognized institution acknowledging the artistic potential of video games.

I was going to end this post by saying "Eat that, Roger!", but um... he can't.


You win this round, Ebert. BUT I'LL BE BACK!

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~A.H.

Alphaland

Isn't it funny how the AAA games with the multi-million dollar pixel-buffer high-dynamic range-rendering bullshit have less to say than a game where you play as a blue rectangle?

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~A.H.

Art of Video Games Winners

It's a big list. Not a bad representation of the medium. I won't spoil the whole thing here, but here's what you need to know:

Better Late Than Never

I am amazed it's taken this long for a game developer to show the Humans vs. Orc conflict so common in fantasy settings from the Orc's perspective. Really, I thought we'd be there by the PSX era at least.

Also, Mass Effect 3's been delayed. Delays aren't the end of the world for me, unless it gets so ridiculous and out hand that it becomes a mark of shame in the industry(See: Duke Nukem Forever, Half-Life Episode 3). At the very least, it looks like Bioware might have learned a lesson from Dragon Age 2's one-year development cycle.

Maybe not THE lesson, but a lesson.

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~A.H.

Grizzly Slash

It seems "Closure" is a common theme today. Bin Laden's dead, and now we know why the bosses in Mega Man X5 were named after Guns 'N Roses members.(No, he didn't name them). An actress named Alyson Court was asked by her husband, who was apparently in charge of localizing the game, to name the 8 Mavericks. I think it's funny how the guy asked her to name those characters, then got mad at her when people didn't think it was so funny. Maybe that's why he's listed as her ex-husband.

Also, dudes, she was the main character in "Big Comfy Couch"! The Big Comfy Couch gal named the bosses of Mega Man X5!

This is the world I live in. I think I'll stick around for a while.

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~A.H.

Allied Star Police

Make-A-Wish and Popcap Games helped a 9-year old Leukemia patient accomplish more in his life than I have at 24. It probably doesn't help that by sheer coincidence I was listening to: "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" while watching it. ಥ_ಥ


But seriously though, games will turn us all into murderers and stuff lololololoololo

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~A.H.