4/29/04

Here's something you haven't seen on The Gameroom Blitz for a while... a Zoo Logic comic!  You might want to go through the archives at Toastyfrog before you read this strip... otherwise, it's going to make absolutely no sense.

So, what's been going on in the world of video games?  Well, it looks like Acclaim's made even more enemies... this time, it's the Olsen Twins, that grating, self-absorbed pair of orangutangs who first appeared in the miserable sitcom Full House.  It seems that Mary-Kate and Ashley have built up quite a fortune since leaving that show, and they're convinced that the video game division of their media empire isn't pulling its weight.  The million dollar babies are demanding lost royalties from Acclaim, claiming that the company hasn't done all it could with the Mary-Kate and Ashley license.

Hey, I hate Acclaim as much as the next guy, but the simple fact is that there's really not much it CAN do with the bratty baboons.  Mary-Kate and Ashley just isn't a license that lends itself well to video games (not that this has ever stopped Acclaim before, but I digress).  The simple fact is that Olsen Twins games aren't going to sell well, regardless of who's making them.

4/26/04

Recently, someone on a forum I occasionally visit made an unsavory accusation about The Gameroom Blitz, claiming that I'd stolen one of my Mega Man X7 rants from a random LiveJournal.  He never bothered to offer an address for this LiveJournal, or tell me when this journal entry was posted... I guess he thought it would be a lot more fun to call my journalistic integrity into question without offering a shred of evidence to back up his claims.

Why would anyone think that I'd resort to stealing content from random LiveJournals when I could just as easily write it myself?  I'm not sure, but I don't take accusations of plagarism lightly, and I intend to do whatever is necessary to get to the bottom of this one.

4/20/04

After putting up with over a year of poor support, fans of Nintendo's e-card reader have discovered a way to print their own cards for the peripheral.  It's not just for piracy, either... one hobbyist has even written his own game, a clone of Microsoft's famous time-waster Minesweeper, for the e-reader.  I'm hoping that it won't be the last.

Anyway, it's a little late, but I've finally written the Full Spectrum content for this month.  Last month was a look at all the games in Hudson's Bloody Roar series.  This month?  Well, you'll have to divy up the dough to find out.  Regular contributors get to check out the column for free, but, uh... what happened to my contributors, anyway?  If you're out there, gang, I'd really appreciate your support.

4/15/04

Several days ago on my LiveJournal, I contemplated putting The Gameroom Blitz into retirement.  I just haven't been having much fun editing the site lately, and my interest in video games (or more accurately, the video game industry in its current state) has greatly diminished.  This has changed updating the Blitz from a fun diversion to an annoying chore, and the articles on this site have become increasingly bitter as a result.

This led me to consider ending the eight year run of this site.  However, after discussing the situation with an online friend, I've come to the realization that there's nothing wrong with The Gameroom Blitz... it's my priorities that are seriously out of whack.  I spent so much time desperately trying to draw in readers that I've lost touch with why I started publishing the site in the first place.

That's why I've removed the hit counter from the site's navigation bar.  For far too long, I've worried about finding the elusive formula for Internet success.  The Gameroom Blitz has been online for nearly a decade now, and the daily hit count has never risen above a hundred, except in the rare instances when much more popular sites have directed their traffic here. 

The simple fact is the the Blitz will never be as widely recognized as Homestar Runner or Ain't It Cool News.  That's not its destiny, but at the same time, that isn't its purpose.  The Gameroom Blitz isn't fueled by the number of people who visit it, but by the quality and diversity of its content.  If just one person visits The Gameroom Blitz and discovers important information about a game that they couldn't find anywhere else, then it has proven its worth.

All that remains is for me to better understand why I started editing the site in the first place.  Out of the thousands of hobbies I could have adopted, why video games?  What is it that I found so fascinating about them?  What drove me to write about them, and why did I enjoy it so much?  When I discover the answer to these questions, The Gameroom Blitz will once again be a whole lot of fun for both my readers and myself.

Until then, updates will be small, infrequent, and devoted largely to site maintenance.  There's eight years' worth of content on the site... that should be more than enough to keep you entertained while I'm out dotting the t's and crossing the i's in each of the articles.  Or was that the other way around?  Well, you get the picture.

4/12/04

Sorry about the lack of recent updates... I needed a week off from the site. 

4/2/04

I came down pretty hard on April Fool's jokes in my last update, but I have to admit that the one on the Digital Press message board was absolute brilliance.  Moderator Joe Santulli rolled back the clock over twenty years, starting dozens of discussions set in 1983.  Of course, if it actually WERE 1983, nobody could read any of his posts, but despite this logical flaw, the idea worked beautifully.  I swear, I haven't had so much fun on the Internet in a long, long time.

By the way, in case you were wondering, I considered doing an April Fool's joke of my own.  First, I was going to make a Cho Aniki tribute page, but decided against it as the flamboyant alter ego I planned to adopt would probably have been considered homophobic.  Frankly, I get enough hate mail as it is without tweaking the gay community in the nose.  My next idea was to create a page of Zoo Logic outtakes.  This plan never came to fruition because, well... all right, I have no excuses.  I was feeling lazy and didn't want to spent five hours on a page full of comics that probably would have ended up looking like crap anyway.  Such is the life of a self-doubting artist.

Ultimately, I went with the pictures from the Saturn game Keio Yugekitai, because I wanted to find a place to use them SOMEWHERE.  It's a complete bitch trying to unlock all the artwork in the game, so I figured I'd save my readers the trouble and just post it all on the site.  Since it was too late to do anything else for April Fool's Day, I just uploaded the pictures to the site and left it at that.  By the way, in case you're interested, you can still access these pictures from this page.

After all is said and done, perhaps the more humble April Fool's update was for the best.  I did some surfing around and noticed that there were a lot of folks on the Internet who refused to participate, and who expressed a strong resentment toward the holiday.  One person even referred to April Fool's Day as "National Worthless Internet Day", since the sites he visited most replaced their content with dumb jokes about losing their domain names or going out of business.  So my April Fool's Day update may have been a cop-out, but at the very least, I offered my readers something useful, rather than yet another predictable prank.