By the waaaay, the 3DS was just released yesterday.
People seem pretty happy with the device so far, but there are
already complaints about the screen size (from EGM alum
Chris Johnston) and abbreviated battery life. Remember
when you could count on a Nintendo handheld to give
you at least eight solid hours of gaming on a fresh set
of batteries? Ah, those were the days! Then again,
none of those other handhelds packed the punch of a
portable Wii, either...
Before I go, I'd like to thank reader Gogogoldberg for his
generous donation. I've made arrangements with the
landlord to stay at the apartment for another couple of weeks,
but this will cover various other pressing expenses.
Speaking of that, I've still got plenty of games to sell, so
if you're interested, make me some offers!
EDIT: The latest Katamari Damacy game may be called
"Katamari Amore Rolling Whopper." Does that mean we can
expect a cameo appearance from the Burger King of all
Cosmos?
Let's try something REALLY
different! We've got a forum here on the Blitz, and
that's all well and good, but commenting on individual posts
has never been an option. However, Disqus may change all
that. I've been a member of the service for about a year
now- I think I signed up for it so I could post on Tiny
Cartridge- and I'm going to try applying its
handy features to this site. This is going to be
rocky at first, because I honestly have no idea what I'm
doing, but I'm willing to give it a shot.
Speaking of Tiny
Cartridge, you might want to swing by
to check out the title banner I drew for the site.
Pretty spiffy, huh?
COMMENTS
| March 6, 2011... And Now
For Something Completely
Different |
Okay, we're going to try something
new. Make that several somethings. First,
the "Mneko" twitter feed has been taken off the sidebar.
That's going to be my crabby personal account from this point
forward. Replacing it is the appropriately titled
GameroomBlitz, which will be used for gaming news and general
promotion of the site.
Second, you'll note that the big purple bar on the bottom
of the front page is gone, replaced with a site map which
should make navigation more convenient. If the research
I've done on SEO is accurate, it should also make it easier
for the site to be found by Google and other search
engines.
Third, I'm going to slap on the happy helmet and give this
site a more upbeat tone. I'm a naturally cynical guy, so
this will be a tough transition for me to make.
However, people don't read moping. They've got
enough hardship in their lives... they don't need outside
contributions. That's not to say that I won't lay the
smackdown on games that deserve it, but hating
everything kind of clashes with the site's
slogan.
Fourth, I've been informed that the site's design is retro
in the worst possible way and needs to be modernized.
Funny, I thought the 2009 design was the best one yet,
but I'm always open to suggestions!
More news as it happens.
| March 4, 2011... It
Wasn't A Rock! It Was A... Rock
Tumblr! |
The one thing I think this site has been
missing for the last fifteen years, aside from an editor with
good personal hygeine, is promotion. There are still
people out there who have no idea that The Gameroom
Blitz even exists... including some of the folks watching
me on Twitter. (Ouch.) So I've decided
to start an account on another mini-blogging site that
starts with T to help spread the word. No, not about my
appalling hygeine! The Gameroom Blitz
Tumblr was created to celebrate the
history of the site, and to ensure that when people hear its
name, they don't respond with blank faces and inquiries about
the song from Wayne's World.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've built up quite a funk over
the last few days and I need to scrub myself clean with
abrasive sponges and Clorox.
| March 2, 2011... Let's
Make A Deal |
People have asked what it would take for
me to start making video reviews again. Previously, my
answer had been "the apocalypse," but now my conditions
are a bit more reasonable. Lately, I've been doing
the bulk of my gaming- well, all of it, really- on my iPod
Touch. It's a great system and I love it to bits, but my
first generation model is growing long in the tooth and is
overdue for a replacement. Some games don't run well on
the unit, while others, like Chair's killer app Infinity
Blade, are just too advanced to function at
all. If I had the latest system and a way
to capture video from it, that would give me both the means
and the incentive to make videos again.
An iPod Touch 4 for new videos, folks... those are the
terms. I just can't do this stuff for free anymore,
regardless of what the internet expects. I'm not in my
twenties anymore! I can't afford to be a
slacker! I've got to monetize this content, not only
because I feel it's worth the price, but because I've got
expenses just like anyone else. In short, I've got the
skillz, but I need to pay the billz... and I need
the hardware to make it all possible.
Speaking of all things Apple, there's a new review on
iFull, along with another issue of the fanzine. This
time, the theme is bosses, and there's a feature with
contributions by several high-profile writers, including Chris
Kohler of WIRED fame and online comics kingpin Josh
Lesnick. I'm really proud of this issue overall... it's
more readable and relevant than the previous one, which was an
indulgent experiment with mixed results. Some highlights
include the letter from Deep Space Nine: Crossroads of Time
producer Maurice Molyneaux, a pre-launch analysis of the Sega
Dreamcast, and a lengthy interview with Chris Bieniek, editor
of Tips and Tricks. Go ahead, give it a look. The
link should actually work this time!
| February 25, 2011... He
Smelled Real Bad and He Said His Name Was
Bernie |
First things first, since this has
really been getting under my skin as of late. If you're
making an iPhone game, and it doesn't need the
extra clock speed and RAM of the new models, DON'T
MAKE PEOPLE BUY A LATER MODEL TO PLAY IT!!! Do you have
any idea, even an inkling, of how obnoxious this is? I'm
not going to dump my iPod Touch in a landfill and replace it
with a new model every year because you chumps are too lazy to
offer truly universal support in your apps. That crap
doesn't fly on the DS and PSP, and it shouldn't be okay
here. Before you even open your filthy mouths, I'm
quite aware of what the legacy models are capable of
running, and they shouldn't have any trouble with a Pac-Man
spin-off that isn't anywhere near as impressive as Pac-Man
Championship Edition. So knock it off, you
dills.
I promised to talk about the fourth issue of The Gameroom
Blitz last week, so let's do that. This is colloquially
(and alliteratively!) known as the "Super Spectacular
Sega Sucks Special," because it was filled with rants about
the horrible mismanagement at Sega that killed the Saturn and
planted the seeds for the Dreamcast's future failure.
We've since come to understand that it was Bernie Stolar,
the Satan of Saturn, who was responsible for nearly all of
this. However, back in 1998, I didn't know my Stolar
from my Madoff, and just thought this was a pattern of
behavior from the company that offered us a pointless new
system upgrade for every day of the week.
Like the iPhone developers of the present, Sega didn't
understand the importance of the five year console cycle, or
of going the extra mile to keep the customer satisfied.
The customer isn't always right, but if they're going
to throw down a kingly sum of money for your product, you'd
better make damned sure they're happy with their
purchase. If you burn them once, they're not likely to
make that same mistake again.
Sega lost sight of this almost immediately, with an
approach to hardware support that could only be described
as frivolous and cavalier. While other manufacturers
like Atari and Nintendo were getting as much mileage out of
their old machines as possible, and reaping the rewards of a
loyal fanbase in the process, Sega was either supplementing or
obsoleting their own systems every two years. It seemed
like Sega fans couldn't open a copy of EGM without
discovering that their latest purchase had become a
doorstop.
This is a cardinal sin in an industry where costs run high
and loyalties shift like the tides. A game system isn't
an inconsequential purchase, like a stick of gum or a
toaster. When a player pays two hundred, three
hundred, even four hundred dollars for one, they expect that
to be a long-term investment. They'll be playing games
on that machine for years to come, and if the games dry up
before the next generation of systems arrives, they feel like
they've been swindled. They've been left with an instant
antique; a gadget that can no longer be used for its intended
purpose.
Sega hadn't subjected their customers to
this once... it became an ugly habit for
them, culminating in the premature cancelation of a game
system that was not only massively expensive at four hundred
dollars, but massively popular in Asian
territories. The Sega Saturn had no chance of catching
up to the Playstation in Japan, but it routinely outperformed
the Nintendo 64 at retail thanks to its CD-ROM format and a
software library that was quintessentially Japanese.
When Bernie Stolar called the Saturn a "stillbirth" and
ended support for the system just two years after
its US debut, sales of the Saturn and its games fell
off a cliff, and Japan's loyalty to Sega went with it.
For all the damage he did, Bernie may as well have fed the
Saturn's Japanese fans to Kesagake.
What's most baffling about the decision to retire the
Saturn was that Sega didn't have another system to
replace it; at least not right away. There were still
two years before the architecture of the Dreamcast was
finalized and the system was ready for launch in the United
States. That was two years of nothing for
Sega's disillusioned fans. Gamers just don't stop
playing for two years because their favorite company (if Sega
was anyone's favorite at this point) stopped making games...
they move on, to the industry-leading Playstation or
Nintendo's less popular but still actively supported Nintendo
64.
Bernie Stolar didn't just sabotage the Sega Saturn with his
stunningly stupid handling of the system; he laid the
groundwork for Sega's departure from the console manufacturing
business. He led customers by the hand to Sony's
doorstep, and raised serious doubts that Sega could ever
support a game console for more than a couple of years.
Those doubts were ultimately justified when Peter Moore
announced the cancelation of the Sega Dreamcast two years
after its own American launch. This raised the ire
of Sega's few remaining fans, but it wasn't really Moore's
fault... he was just forced to play the hand he
was dealt by his predecessor.
I didn't really talk about the issue, did I? Oh well,
maybe next time.
| February 21, 2011... Man,
Even The Games I Like Are Old
Now... |
Happy birthday, Link! Hope you
like retrospectives!
There's more to come, folks. I'm
just finishing up an iPhone review which should be finished in
under an hour.
EDIT: Sorry for the delay! The
three new iPhone reviews are ready and in the usual
place. Right now, I'm gauging the
reaction to the Zelda article, and it seems to be pretty
popular! After reading it, one Twitter user stated, "I
don't think you'll ever need any other article about Zelda
after this one." Is that a compliment? I think
that's a compliment. I'm taking it as a
compliment.
| February 16,
2011... Beginning of the
End |
Those fools at IBM have doomed us
all! First, their machines will beat our Jeopardy!
contestants, then they'll crush all of humanity under their
iron-alloy heels! Worst of all, we'll have to sit
through an awful sequel with the star of the first two movies
awkwardly grafted into the action with sketchy computer
rendering! There's no hope for any of us!
Anyway! There's a new (to you)
issue of The Gameroom Blitz available in the sidebar.
This time, it's the Super Spectacular Sega Sucks Special,
featuring over a dozen Saturn game reviews and a whooooole lot
of bitching about Sega. Hey man, you'd gripe too if the
console you just bought was obsoleted by the president of the
company a month later.
I'll talk more about the
issue later, along with my own issues with
Bernie Stolar, the Satan of Saturn. Right now, I'd
rather discuss the aftermath of all those Valentine's Day
iPhone sales. Over the holiday weekend, games were
offered by five different industry heavyweights (and tiny
Korean outfit GamEvil) at a small fraction of their already
low prices.
I'm going to say this right now... if
you're a gamer and don't own an iSomething, you're
stark raving mad. The software in the App Store is
often as good as anything you'll find on a dedicated gaming
handheld, and almost always sold for a pittance. Right
now I'm plugging away at Spider-Man: Total Mayhem and Wild
Frontier. The former is a near-Playstation 2 quality
beat 'em up that piles on the love for both the character and
the player. The latter is a quirky Korean action-RPG
that looks like Secret of Mana and plays like Monster Hunter,
but without all the aggravation of a third-person
perspective. Both cost less than a dollar each.
The last game I downloaded for the DSi cost twice
that much, and I only bought it because it punched a hole in
the system's security. It sure as hell wasn't for the
gameplay!
Now there's news that a download store
won't be available for the latest DS until two months after
its release. Come on, Nintendo... you're slipping
here. You have a reputation for being behind the curve
on industry trends- you wouldn't even touch the internet until
2006!- but you can't afford to drag your feet on digital
distribution. It's the future of gaming, and if you
don't hop aboard the clue train in a hurry, you're going to be
left in the past. Even Sony, the company that gave
us such out of touch catchphrases as "giant enemy
crabs" and "Riiiiiidge Racer!," understands the
importance of downloadable content, embracing it
with both the Xperia Play and their own next generation
portable. What's your excuse?
| February 12, 2011... The
Season of Love |
Well, for your iPhone, mostly. All
kinds of games for the device and its cousins have dropped to
a dollar, including the exceptional port of Street Fighter IV,
which... uh, I paid seven dollars for last year. Blast
my impulsiveness!
Just as April flowers bring May showers,
sweeping iPhone app sales bring new reviews to the iPhone
section of the site. Head on over to get
the scoop on Star Trigon, Caster, and... Pin-O-Ball?
Wow, you guys in the iPhone reviewing department are really
scraping the bottom of the barrel this week. What
happened to the reviews of Cut the Rope and Spider-Man: Total
Mayhem? They're not finished? What do you
mean you can't get past Rhino?! Have you tried
playing it on easy? You started on easy.
Oh crap. Look, we'll talk about this later.
In
not-really-relevant-to-the-subject-of-games-but-still-pretty-big
news, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has
finally surrendered his post after eighteen days of
heated (yet surprisingly civil!)
protests. Unfortunately,
that other callously
indifferent tyrant, Bobby Kotick, still rules Activision
with an iron fist. He's not only brought the Guitar Hero
series to an ignominious* end, he's twisted poor Spyro the
Dragon into this abomination.
Great horny toads! Wait, that's
not the right picture. Let's try this
again...
OH GOD! Take it away... I
can't bear to look at it! It looks
like the hellspawn of Peter Lorre, or Lars
Ulrich from those old Metallica flash
cartoons!
"Insomniac GOOOOOD, Activision
BAAAAAAD!"
Anyway, it's rumored that the game is
being developed by Toys for Bob, so you can rest assured that
this new version of Spyro will have been raised by a kind
herd of wild cows. There's also talk
of an interactive toy line, with action figures that actually
enhance the experience. In the respect that you can
turn off the game and just play with the toys, no
doubt.
* The term "ignominious" is a trademark
of Jeremy Parish. All rights reserved.
| February 8, 2011... Double
Double Toil and Trouble |
It's that time again, folks! No,
not time for me to huddle in the corner and cry through
another loveless Valentine's Day. I mean the other
thing... the second issue of the fanzine. This
time, it's the retro-themed issue, and released in 1997,
well before retro was cool! I'm a jetsetter like
that.
You're probably wondering what the hell
is going on with the cover, so allow me to explain. Way
back in the early 1980s, when even I was a
kid, there was a television show called
Starcade, with kids playing arcade games for
prizes. The series was hosted by the dorky beyond belief
Geoff Edwards, who's shown here taking abuse from several
old-school video game characters. Fun fact: the host of
the Starcade pilot was Alex Trebek,
but he left to take a risk on a remake of Art Fleming's
Jeopardy... and the rest is history. ("And where's
Geoff," you ask? Well, you'd be the first.)
Oh yeah, in case you were wondering,
that's Josh Lesnick as a contestant. We were pretty
tight in the fanzine days, before the internet came and
he got all semi-famous on me.
I don't know why I used the Mary Tyler
Moore font for the introduction. I had a bit of a
typeset addiction back then... keep in mind that I only
recently upgraded from Timeworks Publisher to Microsoft
Publisher and was punch drunk on its
advanced features. WordArt gets a strenuous workout
for the same reason. Ooh, stretchy titles!
Next is the feature article, with
reviews of ten different video game emulators that were
actively supported in 1997. Nearly all of them were
put into retirement by the 21st century, with the notable
exception of MAME. I marveled in this issue that the
arcade emulator could support nearly 120 games... fourteen
years later, it's blossomed to over eight thousand.
Don't you just love progress?
On the next page are a silly story I
think I wrote for a creative writing class, a hybrid of the
Blitz mascot Byron with somebody else's character, and an
eye-opening discovery in a Game Gear title, in that
order. Most of it's self-explanatory, but for those who
may have missed it, Mish-Mash comics was a parody/rip-off of
the Marvel and DC collaboration Amalgam Comics. Sure,
they can come together to make comics, but Capcom
still can't convince the two companies to lock
horns in a fighting game. What a shame!
The mailbox features letters from a wide
assortment of fanzine editors, including the always
entertaining Josh Lesnick and Chris Kohler of WIRED
fame. There's also a little back and forth with Chris
Bieniek, the editor of Tips and Tricks and an all-around swell
guy. Have you checked out Video Game Ephemera,
his online museum of gaming memorabilia? You
should.
Next comes Zina: Warrior Newsletters
(boy, those Dominion guys were serious douchebags...) and one
of the issue's highlights, Josh and Zoe's Now Playing.
There's a rant for every topic under the sun in here, as long
as the topics are fighting games, Phil Collins, and Japanese
pop culture.
All the games reviewed are classic
remakes, although at the time the concept was relatively
new and not many companies were making them.
Sometimes I had to fall back on sequels like Castlevania:
Bloodlines and Q*Bert 3, although Super Mario 64 was such a
radical overhaul that I think it counts as a modernized
update. In the Frogger Game Gear review, you'll
notice that Michael Palisano hoodwinked me with a phony
report of a Frogger movie. Let's be fair, though...
there actually has been talk of a Pac-Man film, and
that sounds at least as ridiculous.
Nothing dates the issue quite like
Half-Ass, the Suspiciously Familiar Column of Miscellaneous
Crap! In it, I discuss such timely topics as Gex and the
game.com, Tiger's beyond doomed handheld. I pretty much
called it when I said "I get the funny feeling that Tiger
Electronics is way out of its league here." Of
course, I dropped the ball a sentence later when I said,
"I'm not even sure if there's a market for portable game
systems anymore..."
Hey, there's another chapter of the Top
100 Games of All Time! And look what's on it... Ridge
Racer?! Jess from 1997, Imma smack you. Oh well,
at least Gunstar Heroes, Street Fighter Alpha 2, and the Super
NES conversion of Smash TV are right where they
belong.
Chris Kohler supplies the book reviews
in this issue, while I offer my thoughts on 3D fighting games
in the article that follows. The game I'm describing
sounds a lot like every beat 'em up Dream Factory ever
released, doesn't it? Oh, and ignore the Arnie Katz
comic. I had a pissing match with the guy for nearly ten
years, but now it all seems so... petty. Most of
those old squabbles seem that way in
hindsight.
"Before I go, I thought I'd mention that
Sega is going out of business." Man, I didn't know how
right I was! Even I couldn't have guessed how far down
the tubes they'd go in fourteen years.
Man, these summaries get insanely long,
don't they? I need to do a better job of,
uh, summarizing these old issues. At least it's got
me writing again!
| February 4, 2011... The
Arcade is Closed |
First, I'm switching up the links in the
sidebar. Gone are Waxing Erratic, which hasn't been
updated in months and shows no signs of being revived;
and Penny Arcade, which no longer has the vice-like hold it
had on me in years past. The Dickwolves fiasco is only
part of the story... in fact, it's my opinion that the
unflattering things it revealed about the authors of the strip
should have been obvious to everyone from the
start. After all, Gabe and Tycho were flaunting
their editorial irresponsibility ten years ago in a battle
with the editor of Arcade @ Home that quickly escalated to
libelous insinuations. (Granted, he was kind of a
schmuck too, but I digress...)
The main reason I'm dropping the link is
because the comic has become foreign territory to me,
featuring games I don't play and characters with whom I can't
identify. Worse yet, it's just not bringing the funny
the way it once did. The shtick is way past its
expiration date, while it feels like other comics still have a
few good years left in them. The Flash series Homestar
Runner is nearly as old as Penny Arcade, yet it still
hits the funny bone hard enough to put your arm in a
cast!
I was willing to give Penny Arcade the
benefit of the doubt at first, and even defended the
comic against its most strident critics during the
Dickwolves mess. However, after nearly losing two
friends in the process, I had to ask myself if it was worth
the trouble. I'm willing to fight, and fight
ferociously, for free expression, but do I really
want to stick my neck out for what has become a creaking
monument to mediocrity? Not really. Sorry guys,
but you're on your own.
Taking the place of the
two scuttled links are VG Cats, a more vibrant and
enthusiastic comic about the video game industry, and Video
Game Ephemera, a promising new site by Tips and Tricks' Chris
Bieniek. Rather than covering games, the venerable
journalist focuses on the swag used to promote them,
while offering detailed backgrounds on their origins.
There are only twenty-six exhibits in this online museum so
far, but since Chris has been a member of the gaming press for
nearly a quarter of a century, you can be sure the site will
grow by leaps and bounds in a very short time.
I promised to talk about the fanzine,
didn't I? In that case, let's dig right in! The
Gameroom Blitz was intended as a reinvention of myself as both
a writer and a fandom personality. My previous
newsletter, Project: Ignition,
could charitably be described as "colorful," but Zy
Nicholsen of Super Play described it better when
he recommended that readers of P:I open their mailboxes
carefully to keep the issue from leaping out and clamping onto
their jugulars.
Project: Ignition was a snarling, rabid
badger of a fanzine, and I was looking to make The Gameroom
Blitz more of a housecat; something with style and grace, but
also a sense of stubborn independence. After taking
a creative writing class at a community college to sharpen my
jagged skills, I went to work... first on this web site, then
on the fanzine. I decided to give each issue of GRB a
central theme, something that would unify the content and keep
my scattered thoughts focused.
The theme chosen for the premiere issue
was science-fiction, not only because this was a
traditional setting in video games, but also because
I was a Trekker who was absolutely obsessed with Deep Space
Nine. I decided that the two pillars of the issue
would be a feature covering all four Star Trek
television series (Enterprise hadn't come along yet... thank
god), and reviews of the early Sega release Star Trek:
Strategic Operations Simulation. I also drew a cover
illustration featuring the editorial staff as crew
members of DS9... along with Avery Brooks, for reasons I can't
quite fathom. It must have seemed like a good idea at
the time!
I was still talking to other fanzine
editors, so I had plenty of letters to print even for the
premiere issue. The big score, however, was an E-mail
from Jeff Minter, the developer of Gridrunner, Tempest 2000,
and (in another ten years!) the Xbox 360's trippy music
visualizer. I also printed a fragmented letter from Russ
Perry Jr., one of fandom's most beloved and respected
figures.
The games featured in "The Re-View
Mirror," the fanzine's review page, included Duke Nukem 3D,
WipeOut, Blaster Master, and the original Mega Man. I
praised Mega Man for having a harder edge than the sequels,
which is strange in hindsight as it's one of the things I
disliked most about the Mega Man X series. The
Genesis game Deep Space Nine: Crossroads of Time would also
get a drubbing for being a lousy adaptation of my
favorite Star Trek series. (In a later issue,
Maurice "Don't Call Me Peter" Molyneaux would describe in
great detail why the game was a disaster, along
with everything he was forced to take out of the final
release.)
Finally, there's El Libro, a nifty
column about video game strategy books published
before the crash of 1984, and Windows 95: The Clouds
Don't Have Silver Linings, which punched a
lot of holes in Microsoft products released in the mid
1990s. Did an article like that belong in a
video game fanzine? Probably not, but I was a computer technician at the time, and it
gave me a golden opportunity to vent my frustrations about the
school's transition from Windows 3.11 to its buggy,
resource-hungry successor.
It's worth noting that of the seven
issues of The Gameroom Blitz, the premiere was the shortest,
weighing in at a svelte 14 pages. The double issue, at
22 pages, came next, followed by the last four issues which
tipped the scales at 24 pages each. I even printed
articles in 8 and 9 point sizes to squeeze even more text into
the later issues! The readers got their two dollars'
worth, but they probably had to spend another eighty for an
eye exam later.
| February 2, 2011... A Step
Back in Time |
Remember that new direction
I mentioned earlier? After some brainstorming
with a friend, I think I've finally found it. Twenty
years ago, I was a member of a community called video game
fandom. Before the world wide web, the game-obsessed
nerds of the early 1990s shared their opinions about the
industry in self-published newsletters
called "fanzines." Fandoms for other hobbies,
particularly science-fiction, had existed decades earlier, but
video game fandom was an entirely different animal,
driven by youthful enthusiasm and heavily influenced
by the professional gaming press. Generally
speaking, video game fanzines were designed to be
the kind of magazines that their editors wanted
to read, without the suspiciously high ratings and transparent
promotion common in Die Hard Game Fan and EGM prior to its
acquisition by Ziff-Davis.
Fanzine editors didn't have the
resources or the industry connections to get news on upcoming
games, but they could
offer the kind of insightful editorials that were absent from
the intellectually void gaming
press. These days, we take writers like Nadia Oxford and
Jeremy Parish for granted, but outside of a few short-lived
exceptions, gaming magazines in the 1990s were utterly
starved of meaningful content. After Video Games
& Computer Entertainment surrendered to a mainstream
audience, there was no other place
to get hard-hitting journalism than in a fanzine.
There's much the video game fandom of
the 1990s had in common with the online
gaming communities of today. Egos were quickly
inflated and easily bruised, and drama between warring
factions spread like wildfire throughout the fandom, with
many editors getting caught in the flames. However,
there's just as much that separates the old mode of
communication from the new. There wasn't much room for
deliberate trolling in fandom, because the hobby was not only
expensive, but didn't afford much anonymity to the
griefers. If you sent a harassing letter to a
fanzine editor, postmarking made it a lot easier for your
victim to find the source of his
irritation.
This also resulted in a higher signal to
noise ratio... when it costs forty-four
cents for a stamp and a dollar and a half for
copies, you make damn sure that your opinion
counts. A few fanzines were stinkers
(usually because the editors' enthusiasm for the hobby far
exceeded their mastery of the English language), but the high
overhead of fanzine publishing nevertheless kept the lines of
communication relatively free of clutter. That's in
sharp contrast to the internet, which has become the landfill
where billions of stupid comments are left to rot.
All this has me thinking that maybe it's
time to leave the new media behind and return to the old
one. All of my online ventures have been failures, from
this web site with its four active readers to the games that
have sold dozens of copies to the video reviews that received
more attention from YouTube's notoriously picky
copyright bots than actual people. I'm
a little fish in an impossibly vast ocean, and frankly, I
was a lot more comfortable in my bowl.
I'm not going to abandon the internet
entirely, of course. What I'd like to do is
merge the old media with the new, since print publishing has
only gotten more expensive in the twenty years since I first
got involved with video game fandom. Besides, paper is
so last century... these days, it's all about tablets
and e-readers. My best bet is to publish a
fanzine in the PDF format, which is compatible with these
devices, but lets luddites print out hard copies for a more
traditional experience.
I should probably warn you that this is
all very preliminary. It's been over a decade since I've
published a fanzine, and I have no idea what direction I'll
take this one. While I'm figuring this out, I'll
upload an issue of my previous newsletter to
this site every week for the next two months. If I can
find hard copies of the final issues of Project: Ignition
and Concept, those will be added as well. The "compact"
version of each issue will be available free of charge, while
the crisper high quality version can be purchased for two
dollars, sent to my PayPal address. That's the
current pricing model planned for Third Life, but with
everything still early that's subject to change.
That's all for now. Come back
tomorrow when I'll have a description of the first issue of The
Gameroom Blitz.
| January 28, 2011... A Tale of
Wicked Excess |
After months of speculation by the
gaming press, the PSP2- er, NGP has officially been announced
by Sony. Planned for release by the end of the year,
this uberhandheld has two cameras, touch surfaces on both the
front and back of the unit, twin analog joysticks, a four core
processor, a high resolution OLED display, a fold out spork,
and a partridge in a pear tree.
Good lord, I'm exhausted just
thinking about it. Anyone else get the feeling
that Sony is overcompensating just a little with this
system? It's like they took a look at everything
Nintendo offered with the 3DS, and decided to put two
of everything in its own portable just to spite them. A
touchpad on the back? Really?
I'll be honest with you... bleeding edge
technology is exactly what I don't want from a
handheld, because it always brings with it the kind of
bloated, overproduced games I've grown to
hate. Portable gaming is supposed to be about ease
of use and instant gratification, yet we're already hearing
reports that the NGP will offer the exact opposite, including
straight ports of top-heavy PS3 titles like Metal Gear Solid
4. Do you want your handheld experience to
include twenty minute cut scenes and monotonous inventory
management? I sure as hell don't.
The only company that hasn't lost sight
of what makes handheld gaming work, as embarrassed as I am to
admit this, is Apple. Yes, that Apple, the
company whose past involvement in the video game industry
could be charitably described as hapless. That's
all changed, though... today, Apple is the only handheld
manufacturer with a vibrant online marketplace, the
only one that embraces small developers, and the only one
with software prices just about anyone can afford. It's
also likely to be the company that wins my loyalty when the
handheld wars begin this December. Sorry, Nintendo and
Sony... bigger isn't always better, especially when "bigger"
is reflected in the price.
| January 19, 2011... Here Is
the News |
It's likely that Baby Doc Duvalier will
be charged for the horrible crimes he committed during his
reign of terror as Haiti's dictator. Score one for
karma!
Now here is the news you actually
wanted. The Nintendo 3DS will be released in the United
States on March 27th, at the kingly sum of $250. It's
not as bad as it could have been (I was hearing
rumors last week that it would retail for three
hundred dollars) but still, that ain't good. I
bought the PSP at launch for that price, but back then, I had
money!
Here are the finer points
of Nintendo's early morning presentation, as
reported by Ars
Technica. First, this new system is
being marketed to everyone, not just garden-variety gaming
nerds. This suggests that Nintendo is finally ready to
compete directly with Apple's iPod Touch, but the company will
have to drastically improve the anemic selection of software
on its online store (and make a deal with Amazon to sell music
for the 3DS, a deal that has yet to materialize) before they
can put so much as a droplet of sweat on Steve Jobs'
forehead.
The 3DS has a data
broadcast feature called Street Pass, allowing it to
communicate with nearby systems even when it's not in
use. The utility of this feature beyond trading Miis and
other knick-knacks with strangers is unclear, but on the plus
side, it ought to give American kids on the plus
size some incentive to get out there and
exercise. It's an intriguing inversion of modern
gaming's tendency to turn players into hermits, and it will be
fun to see how developers take advantage of Street Pass
in future releases.
Oh yes, releases! The 3DS will
have not one, but two major fighting games available for
it at launch, something which will no doubt thrill the
Shoryuken set. It's not the first Nintendo handheld to
actively court that audience (the GameBoy Advance had
everything from Tekken to Street Fighter to Guilty Gear in its
library), but it's likely the first one that audience will
take seriously thanks to its robust hardware, online features,
and the fighting-friendly cycloid dial perched above the
D-pad.
Other games squeezed into the launch
window include Pilotwings Resort, Nintendogs (and cats!),
Madden NFL, Pro Evolution Soccer (hey, the rest of the world
needs its football too!), Resident Evil: Mercenaries,
and Ridge Racer, astutely described by Tiny Cartridge as an
"eternal launch title." (Seriously Namco, could you give
it a rest with this crusty old franchise already? People
cared about it in 1995, but we have Burnout and Gran Tourismo
now.) Attack
of the Fanboy reports that the 3DS
will have thirty titles available by June, although there's no
word yet if the resurrection of the Kid Icarus series will be
among them.
That's the long and short of this
morning's announcement, folks. Before I go, I should
probably mention that there are new iPhone
game reviews in the usual place, as well
as a revamping of a classic (read: old) GRB banner. Hey,
even Tom Fulp of Newgrounds fame gave me props for that logo,
so it had to be worth bringing back!
| January 13, 2011... You've
Got the (iPod) Touch |
I should probably take down the
Christmas decorations, but I've been busy attending to other
matters. I refer of course to the new iPhone
section of the web site. There are
nine game reviews there right now, with more to come.
Stay tuned!
| January 2, 2011... The
Birthday? Post |
This is the first time in a long, long
time that I've missed a post on my birthday... so I'll remedy
that situation by temporarily switching to HAWAIIAN
TIME! Thank you, King Kamehameha!
Anyhoo... I still don't know what I'm
going to do with this site. I thought about shuttering
it completely yester- uh, today, but decided against
it, since the 15th anniversary is just around the corner and
it would be a shame to miss that milestone. I'm just not
sure how to fill the time until May 23rd arrives. With
On-File long gone, I ought to post PDFs of all the old print
issues of The Gameroom Blitz... I suspect they'd be of
special interest to my long-time readers and would be a
fun time capsule for the newbies to crack open. I really
should start reviewing iPhone games as well, as heaven knows I
have enough of them. Damn Steve Jobs and his habit of
giving away software that would cost twenty dollars or more on
other systems! (Wait, maybe I shouldn't discourage
him.)
Before I go, remember GORF? Took a
few months to make, went unrecognized by the retro gaming
public, nearly ruined a friendship? Yeah, that
GORF. Well, I don't know what happened to the cartridge
release. Beyond a handful that were sold at last
year's Classic Gaming Expo, I'm going to go ahead and
presume that it never happened. I stand by the
quality of the actual game, but the marketing and
distribution was a train wreck from start to finish, and
I'm eager to wash my hands of the whole affair.
Wait wait, let's end this on a happy
note. The Playstation 3 release of Mass Effect 2 is
running on the engine that will be used for Mass Effect 3,
which means... I don't know what that means! Smoother
gameplay, more spontaneous gun battles, less of that planet
scanning nonsense? I guess we'll find out at the end of
the month. Well, someone will, but since I sold my
Playstation 3 for rent money, it's not likely to be
me.
(Damn, that was supposed to be a
happy
note!)
