Team Fortress Arcade

Finally, a version of TF2 I can run on my machine.

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~A.H.

Colony Wars

Some games you don't realize how much you missed until years after it left your memory.

Granted, this article by a determined fan trying to get answers on the creation of the series isn't the most informative read, but after this long it's not hard to see why info would be scarce on a series that hasn't been updated since before the Playstation 2. Still, it shed a small light on video game history.

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~A.H.

The Gunstringer

Huh. So it turns out you can get funding for a game concept you literally pulled out of your ass, just by frantically looking around your nearest location for inspiration. Really puts my super-secret idea for a game I've been nursing for 18 years into perspective.

It also reminded me of this.

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~A.H.

Character Showcase: "Rarity"

Growing up as a young lad, there were "boy shows" and "girl shows". There was a certain code among the boys that girl shows were, and I quote: "icky". They were not tolerated. We were only to watch Manly shows, with Men doing Manly things without any pesky women getting in the way. Because otherwise it would be "gay".

I think if that was the point, we may have had our priorities backwards. Far be it for me to question the wisdom and time-honoured traditions of insecure 1st-graders.

But then, I was mostly raised by my mom and sister. And since life was and continues to be an emotionally crushing hellhole which leaves me "too scared to die and too damned to scream", I was in need of some distractions when the boy shows weren't cutting it. I wasn't above watching the occasional programming for whom I was never the intended audience. And I didn't have friends until the 5th grade anyway, so it's not like I had any reputation to lose by giving Sailor Moon or Hello Kitty a chance.

I think the major thing keeping me away from these Girl Shows and franchises wasn't the fact that they were for a different audience. It's that the majority of them that I tried watching were, quite frankly terrible. Even by 80's/90's kid show standards. It was as if they were made mostly by clueless men who greatly underestimated little girls or something, but LOL THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN, SEXISM AIN'T NOT THANG RITE

I'm glad to see those days may be behind us.

Smash Bros. Brawl Remixes

Super Smash Bros. Brawl has the most soundtrack of anything that's ever needed music. It was a gargantuan project, assembling pretty much every name in eastern video game composition into one project, to remix classic Nintendo songs. Pretty much any song I ever enjoyed from all across this companies franchises were represented, sometimes by composers I've admired and followed over the years.

Oh, and they got my favourite composer, Nobuo Uematsu, to compose the main theme song. Nothing that awesome and nerdy will ever happen again.

Here's my 10 favourite song remixes from Super Smash Bros. Brawl, in no specific order(not including original tracks like Final Destination, or songs that were included but not remixed):

Professor Layton Vs. Phoenix Wright

Nintendo's reluctance to bring Xenoblade, The Last Story or Pandora's Tower to the west told me, in no uncertain terms, that it doesn't want my business anymore. That my money is no good to them. And I can respect their decision.

And by "respect" I mean "face-palm".

I really don't want to give up on this company or its products. Honestly, I'm not trying to boycott this here, but I'm not convinced they haven't given up on me. That said, if they ensure the release of THIS GAME in the States, they will do a lot toward rebuilding some of the goodwill they've lost.

Image courtesy of portablegeneration.com

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~A.H.

5 Ways To Tell You're Irrelevant

John Cheese and David Wong of Cracked.com have in the past said some of the more frightening and honest stuff about the state of modern video games. That their latest article leaves such a sour aftertaste is unfortunate. These two rarely miss the point this badly.

It's called "5 Ways to Tell You're Getting Too Old for Video Games", and it tries to pass off all of today's hideous failings in the industry to us just being a bunch of old coots. They also make the claim that video games today are no different than they were in the Pong era, by virtue of the fact that there were copy-cat games there too, in comparison to our onslaught of brown FPS games.

Oh, and they also insinuate that Final Fantasy VI is on the same level as Call of Duty's zombie mode. Just because kids today are more immersed in that, in a -vaguely similar- way we were enraptured in the world of magicite and espers. See, it's not that games themselves are getting shittier, or that the industry is focusing too much on the racist 8-year old demographic. No, it's our fault because we aren't letting our inner-child roam free, free like the birds and the bees and the cute little bunnies.

Guys... NO. Holy shit, that's just... no.