MW2 Y'all.

Steve Agee of Sarah Silverman Program fame on his Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 purchase:



His caption reads "a 40yr old man way too happy about his video game purchase!"

I can empathize. I stood in the cold for about forty-five minutes in the middle of the night with about 100 to 150 mouth-breathing weirdos, purchased my game, played it online until about three in the morning, then went to work at eight. Waking up hard after my four hours of sleep, I thought, "This is ridiculous."

Still, it's not like I'm not going to buy Modern Warfare 2 on launch day. Now, where's my "mouth-breathing weirdo" shirt?


P.S. Ice-T enjoys the video games as well.

Have People Gotten Dumber and Lazier?

I've been thinking a lot about a post about modern cinema on my brother's Dancing Chicken blog. Coincidentally, I recently purchased a Playstation One system at my local game store for dirt cheap, and also picked up the Final Fantasy Anthology collection, which contains Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI. Now, Final Fantasy VI is considered by many game snobs to be the best Final Fantasy game ever created by famed Japanese game company Square Software. The game came out in 1994 and was released in North America on the Super Nintendo as Final Fantasy III. I'd never played the game before, and it was the major reason I picked up a PS1 again. I won't get too deep into it, but the opening credit sequence of the game impressed me in such a way that I couldn't help thinking about this ongoing debate, between a lot of folks, about whether or not we live in stupider times compared to the past.

The reason I say this is that the two minute credit sequence to a Super Nintendo game from the mid-1990's seemed to me to be more cinematic, dramatic, and effective than the majority of big-budget, mainstream movies and/or games that I've experienced in the last few years. It's simple, quietly beautiful, and just plain well executed, within the realm of its medium, than most pieces of culture today. Maybe this sounds like hyperbole, and maybe it is, but it is one of only a handful of game cinematics to make me say "wow" in a very long time, and it's from the early 1990's.

I'm mainly talking about the last couple of minutes of this video:


This reaction was pulled from me not with state-of-the-pants, cutting-edge graphics and sound, but with 16-bit, fifteen-year-old technology. It depicts, in it's limited way, a slow, plodding march of three war machines toward a snowy village that the player knows can only end badly for the people involved. We've already been shown that the two soldiers only care about getting their hands on the object that they've been ordered to take, and that the woman with them is a powerful individual who has been brainwashed with some kind of device to help the soldiers against her will. This opening scene fills the player with a feeling of melancholy and doom in just a handful of minutes. It's an example of how big-budget, contemporary games and films try to create drama by throwing money at the problem instead of simple, but powerful, craftsmanship. It's as if many of these projects are made under the motto, "Just wow them, just throw more of everything in there until they don't know what the hell is happening."

I felt much the same way when I watched Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, a film discussed in two of the essays that are referenced in the Dancing Chicken post. The action in that film is intense, but it is also very clear and understandable. We know what is happening, we know the goals of the characters, and we know the consequences of the characters' actions. The movie is extremely effective because it is well thought out and well crafted. The tension comes from what is specifically happening in a given situation and the characters involved, not from loud noises and quick, over-the-top violence. Instead of flashy camera tricks and vomit-inducing editing, she does it the old fashioned way, the same way I feel Yoshinori Katase handled Final Fantasy VI.

Tall Nerd/Short Nerd

Offworld, Boing Boing's video game site, have a really great TV documentary from Europe posted right now. It's an hour long conversation between Jason Rohrer and Chris Crawford. One is young and tall, the other is old and short, and they're both really intelligent guys who have a lot of interesting things to say about games and game design. If you're interested in video games at all, you should take a look.

Magic Internet, bring me to the desired page (this is the link).

Happy Bungie Day!

I just found out that it's Bungie Day. Bungie, the makers of the fine Halo games, are celebrating their existence by playing Halo 3 with us regular jack-offs all day long. I'm going to pop on in a little while and will hopefully get a chance to play with some of the developers. Keep your fingers crossed!

The Great Fake Game Cavalcade

Here's a fun link that Kotaku posted. It's the result of a bunch of folks creating screen shots from fake, 8-bit games based on real movies. It's fun.

Weekly Free Time Blackhole

In an effort to bring this blog back from the dead, I'm attempting a weekly post about what I've personally been up to in the video game department. We'll see just how "weekly" it actually becomes, but here's keeping my fingers crossed because, as we all know, everything always gets done through pure luck, never hard work and perseverance. Basically, I'll be briefly giving an update on what games and game experiences I've been sinking my time into during the previous week or so. Here goes.

This week consisted of a few games that are a little old, something really old, and something brand new but actually about something that is pretty old.

I saw a dramatic increase in online-first-person-shooters. Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 have been getting a lot of play time recently. Considering these games are both over a year old, the fact that a ton of people all over the world still play them online says a lot about how good they both are. I'm mediocre, at best, at both of these games, but I can usually do well enough that I don't become completely frustrated.

I mostly play Halo 3 with some guys from work, and that makes a big difference in how much fun it is. In fact, I never really got into Halo 3 until I played with someone I actually knew in real life. That's when the game really clicked for me, and I saw the amazing digital playground that Bungie has built, where all kinds of crazy things are possible. I must warn you, though, Halo 3 can temporarily turn you into a dude's dude. M. said that she actually heard me from the other room yell into my headphone mic, "This is my bridge, motherfucker!" I don't remember any such exclamation. I guess my testicles must have taken over for a few minutes.


Call of Duty 4 is completely different than Halo in almost every way except that they're both online FPSs. It's difficult, intense, and can be very frustrating, but the game is almost always fair. If you suddenly die and you're not sure what happened, it was probably completely your own fault. If Halo 3 is like playing with a Nerf football at the park with some friends, then Call of Duty 4 is like playing in the National Championship. Both are a lot of fun for completely different reasons.

The really old something that I started playing this week is the classic sci-fi RPG Phantasy Star II, originally for the Sega Genesis. I picked it up on Xbox Live Arcade for just a few bucks because I'd always heard that the Phantasy Star games were really good, and I've been in the mood for a late-80's/early-90's role-playing game recently. I don't have a lot to say about it yet because I've just started, but how could you not want to play this game. I mean, just look at the awesome cover.



The "something old made new" game is, of course, Ghostbusters the Video Game. I've only had it for a day, so I can't talk a lot about it. I'm on the fence right now. There has been moments where I'm having a lot of fun and feel like part of the Ghostbusters crew, but there have been stretches where I've just been bored by repetitious gameplay and weird game mechanics. I'm really excited to try the online co-op mode when I get a chance. I'll probably write more about this game when I've had some more time with it.

Well, that's it for this week. If you close your eyes as tight as possible and wish for it, maybe I'll be back next week with a more concise synopsis of my gaming life. Long live Gozer.

You Got Mike Patton in My Video Game. You got Video Game in My Mike Patton.

Continuing to prove that being able to talk and sing in goofy voices and make weird sounds with your mouth can be both artistically rewarding and financially lucrative, Mike Patton, I just found out, was the voice of all of the infected creatures in Valve's awesome co-op FPS Left 4 Dead. He will also provide the voice of the main character, Nathan "Rad" Spencer, in Capcom's upcoming Bionic Commando reboot/remake/sequel. Crazy!

Take a short dip into this long video to check out some of his great zombie noises:


Here's the trailer for Bionic Commando: