Back in January, I learned that Anamanaguchi was creating a new album, titled Endless Fantasy, on the same day that I saw the music video for the first single “Meow”. Right before I saw the video, my thoughts were, “Oh cool, a new Anamanaguchi album is coming out. I’ve enjoyed everything they’ve put out.” And then came the video. It was like staring into the eyes of drunk Jesus. It was like opening Pandora’s Box, if Pandora’s Box contained the Internet. My first thought after finishing “Meow” was, “Christ. If that’s the first song, what’s the rest of the album going to be like? Does it get even crazier than this?”

Now that Endless Fantasy has come out, we know the rest of the album is more subtle than “Meow” – not to say it’s a subtle album, just that it’s not completely batshit crazy. In reality it’s, simply put, another chiptune album. More explicitly put, it’s a very good chiptune album. Starting with the title track, the LP is a wave of electronic pleasure, one which you can easily lose yourself in it’s crests and troughs. Anamanaguchi has a rare penchant for being able to create music that is eminently danceable and simultaneously effortlessly calming.

I’m comfortable calling Anamanaguchi the first memewave band. “Meow” is the biggest argument for this title, but evidence is sprinkled amongst the album. Songs are given titles like “SPF 420″ and “EVERYTHING EXPLODES”, followed immediately by “Interlude (STILL SPLODIN’ THO)”. I feel like there’s a definitely possibility that Anamanaguchi has written a tweet consisting only of “STILL SPLODIN THO”. If they haven’t, it’s still the archetypical Anamanaguchi tweet. This is a work of a post-ironic society, of blog-artists under the tutelage of Tao Lin. I haven’t seen anything except the cover art to back this up, but I feel like the title Endless Fantasy is a nod and a heckle towards the Final Fantasy video game series, which have been “Final” ever since the first one was released in 1987. We’re all in on the joke now, but Anamanaguchi is pointing out that Final Fantasy isn’t final – they’ll never stop making them, it’s endless. And really, nothing is final. Everything is endless.

Everything Anamanaguchi has put out prior to this, save the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game soundtrack, has been EP length, clocking in less than 30 minutes, but Endless Fantasy sticks around for 76 minutes. This length doesn’t negatively affect the album’s listenability, but it doesn’t really do it any favors either. It doesn’t feel like a sprawling epic, just a lot of good songs.

8/10 – Endless Fantasy, along with the experience Anamanaguchi is trying to provide you, is summed up in a single line on the last song. “Your natural state is enlightenment, everything else you’ve ever been told about yourself is a lie.” Most of us, with our jobs and our schooling and our responsibilities, don’t feel very enlightened day-to-day. Anamanaguchi is here, just trying to nudge us back to our natural selves.

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One of the most effective devices for framing a powerful narrative is geography. While spinning a story that tells of a journey, sometimes a physical journey, often mental, often metaphorical, it helps to have a geographic point of reference to bind time and space and emotion. Arguably one of the greatest albums of the 2010s, Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs found brothers Win and William Butler revisiting the suburbs of Houston, specifically The Woodlands, where they spent formative years of their youth, trying to rectify memories past with how they see the city, and life, as adults. It’s a raw, honest album, and I’m tempted to say that Modern Vampires Of The City is Vampire Weekend’s The Suburbs, for more reasons than being the group’s third effort, and their best.

Vampire Weekend’s eponymous debut LP and its follow-up, Contra, are products born of the Atlantic Ocean. Invocating summer beach houses owned as second homes, pastel-colored shorts, and wind-whipped hair dancing across wayfarers, Vampire Weekend and Contra take place in the Massachusetts Bay during “on season”. Modern Vampires of the Weekend, being called the final installment in a trilogy of albums, is a much more mature and mortal work that returns to Brooklyn and Manhattan after vacation is over and the the boys from Vampire Weekend have put their boyish days behind them.

The loss of youth, aging, and death are the most prevalent themes that swell up among nods towards Judaism and American Nationalism. Ezra Koenig takes both subtle (“I walked into town to buy some kindling for the fire, Hannah tore the New York Times up into pieces” and “A stranger walked in through the door, said ‘All apartments are pre-war’”) and blunt jabs (“I want to know, does it bother you? The low click of a ticking clock?” and “You know I love the past ’cause I hate suspense”) at his feelings on inevitable maturity. Before I heard the album, I felt like the title Modern Vampires Of The City was embarrassingly on-the-nose, but after several playthroughs, it’s just stating a simple fact. “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”, “Holiday”, those things are part of who Vampire Weekend ultimately are but they’re in the past. In the now, the modern Vampire Weekend has returned home to the only city that can be called The City, and they have to look for life and love where they are.

Though Modern Vampires Of The City is, in some respects, a morbid album, it’s most certainly a beautiful album. The band goes for more styles and influences here than ever, and while the majority of the songs are of a slower, soulful variety, I still have the most fun with the uptempo jams. “Diane Young” could be early-era The Strokes, and “Unbelievers” is just a straight up rock and roll song about undying, and dying love.

9/10 – On the album’s first track, Koenig belts “It’s been twenty years and no one’s told the truth” – but Modern Vampires Of The City is the truth. And the truth is that Vampire Weekend have their, and our, whole lives in front of them.

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As a foreword – I like to read, now, as an adult, but the last time I read The Great Gatsby was 10 years ago, in high school. I read the whole thing, but only paid attention to what I thought I would need to do well on the homework we were assigned for it, and promptly forgot everything as soon as we moved to the next book. I didn’t reread the book in preparation for the movie – to be honest, I kind of saw it on a random whim over the weekend – so this review will not be comparing Baz Luhrmann’s version to the original. This is not a English major’s critique of The Great Gatsby, this is just a review of the two hours I spent watching Luhrmann’s retelling.

There is nothing subtle about Jay-Z rapping over the 1920s. There is nothing subtle about the rousing, unchaperoned parties that Jay Gatsby throws nightly at his house. There is nothing subtle about The Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby’s parties are big, dumb fun, with indoor water fountains, unlimited alcohol, and pipe organ DJs. The Great Gatsby is big, dumb fun.

The Great Gatsby is so heavily stylized, at times it feels like a live-action stop-motion movie. The “fun” sections of the movie charge forth at breakneck speed, much like the cars being driven, and even the dramatic moments – for let us not forget, The Great Gatsby certainly qualifies as a tragedy – are so theatrical that they are enjoyable. Even at two hours, almost every scene in the movie justifies its existence. The modern rap-heavy soundtrack works well, replacing the jazz of the twenties with its current descendant. It would be false to say DiCaprio is at the top of his game in this, but he’s such an effortless actor it’s not hard to see him as Gatsby instead of Leo early on. Mulligan, as always, is unfailingly charming, and she easily justifies the obsession Daisy receives.

The Great Gatsby is not a great movie, per se. The framing device of Nick Carraway writing the story while in a mental institution simply doesn’t work. Tobey Maguire cannot act, which is nothing new, but when he’s the main character and surrounded by pros like DiCaprio and Mulligan, it’s embarrassingly obvious. The dialogue and line delivery at points are unforgivable, and there’s a side plot involving Gatsby trying to involve Carraway in his uncouth business plans that is planted but abandoned shortly never to be returned to.

7/10 – The experience watching The Great Gatsby is the same as attending a party at the Gatsby mansion. It’s big, loud, fake, enjoyable, but ultimately temporal. You bask in the grandiose revelry of it all, but after a couple of hours you go home and forget about it. You might think about revisiting it again in the future, but you know that even if you go back, you’ve already seen it all.

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I have zero children. Not a one. I don’t have a wife. I don’t have a fiancée. Some of the writers here at WatchPlayRead have children, multiple children even. Some of them don’t have children but are at least married. I’m twenty-five years old, living with a twenty year old and a twenty-one year old in a two bedroom apartment. I sleep on a bed in the living room. I do this to save money, but also because I feel like it adds a bohemian vibe to my life. What I’m trying to tell you is that I am probably the least qualified person at this website to write a review on a comedy book about the trials and tribulations of parenthood, but here we are.

I wouldn’t say that I dislike children. I like kids, I think they’re adorable, and I enjoy many of the television shows that are marketed towards them. It’s just that… they frighten me. Both the idea and the physical actuality of children frightens me. The idea of children is, to someone without children, the idea of the total loss of selfishness. A life revolving around the sole, constant act of being a 100% responsible adult. For someone who likes to partake in alcohol and live a spontaneous, carefree life, this scares me. Tangible children also scare me. They make me nervous. I’m not around children too much, as not many of my friends have kids of their own, but whenever a child is in my vicinity, I’m an anxious human being. Kids say weird things, things that I don’t know what to say in response to. Kids ask weird questions, questions to which I don’t even know how to articulate an answer. You have to smile at kids, and I’m never sure how long I have to keep smiling at them. The entire time until the child has left? Is their parent going to think my smile isn’t authentic enough and get mad at me? Is their parent going to expect me to initiate conversation with their child? What am I possibly supposed to say? I don’t even know what vocabulary level they’re at. Again I ask, why am I the one reviewing Jim Gaffigan’s new book poking fun at raising a family?

The biggest expectation of a well-crafted comedian is to take a subject that they are familiar with, and joke about it in a way that everyone can relate to. If a comedian is a big sports fan, he should be able to write jokes about sports that a non-fan can relate to, because they’re jokes about sports but at the same time they’re jokes about life. When Aziz Ansari jokes about his misadventures in hanging out with Jay-Z and Kanye, we the audience members can’t relate to that, we don’t hang out with multi-millionaire rappers. But we understand the universal hope to be accepted by others in higher status peer groups, so we laugh. When Lewis Black jokes about – well complains about mostly, who are we kidding – politics, we might not follow politics, but we’ve all had to deal with the consequences of others’ hypocrisy and incompetence, so we laugh in sympathy.

Jim Gaffigan is, thankfully, a talented comedian, so while his new book, Dad is Fat, is, in a very primordial way, about marriage and raising five children, it’s also about everything. It’s about religion and New York City and fast food and slow food and Disney World and The Walking Dead and alcoholism and the 2008 mortgage crisis. It is not, surprisingly, about Hot Pockets.

Dad is Fat reads fairly chronologically. The first chapter opens with Gaffigan and his eventual wife vacationing with a couple who have a baby, and takes a “People with babies are weirdos huh?” tone, and as the book progresses Jim and his wife Jeannie become the weirdos with kids, and further in they realize they’re not weirdos, they’re just parents, parents are just like that, and then finally after the fifth newborn that okay maybe they are sort of weirdos.

This is a comedy book, not a parenting book, let’s be perfectly clear. But at the same time you have to realize and accept that Gaffigan is not trying to make every sentence a joke, and that’s OK. A comedy book about parenting is only going to succeed with a healthy amount of sincerity, which can be scoffed away at times in our ultra-ironic society.

A slight issue is that some of the humor throughout the book is repeated and recycled. A good portion of the jokes are comprised of some variant of “There was a lot of crying, and begging, and pants-peeing, and my kids were not happy either” and “Parenting is hard work. At least that’s what my wife tells me.” Jim’s wife, Jeannie, gets almost as much ink time as the five children. I’m sure she’s deserving of every compliment that’s bestowed on her, but sometimes the chapters can feel like an infomercial for her, like Jim’s going to start mass-producing her and is trying to get pre-release hype built up.

8/10 – Dad is Fat is almost assuredly going to mean more to you if you have children of your own, but anyone with the human emotion of empathy will enjoy the stories Gaffigan brings to the page.

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You’re driving down a highway, but not an interstate highway where the speed limit is seventy miles-per-hour, a historically designated scenic highway where the speed limit tops out at around forty. You’re driving a convertible with the top down, but the convertible is not a muscle or sports car, something more like a Mini Cooper. The wind’s blowing past your face, but not hard enough that you’re worried about losing your hat. Cartoon birds are chirping overhead. This is the experience of listening to She and Him’s first two albums, the aptly named Volume One and Volume Two. Both records were exercises in twee vapidity, and I swear I mean that in the nicest possible way. They’re each wonderfully pleasant, and perfectly listenable to – as background music. When songs are so sugar-sweet as the stuff that Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward produce, your ears quickly desensitize themselves to the sound.

Now, after a short detour in the form of A Very She & Him Christmas, the duo have brought us Volume Three. It’s nice to be able to say Volume Three is something different, if only slightly, rather than just an additional fourteen songs. Zooey Deschanel has always been interested in making 60′s-sounding folk pop, and she’s always succeeded, but now she’s stretching out into adjacent influences, jazz, surf pop, even the slightest hint of rock.

“I’ve Got Your Number Son” is the most exciting She & Him song to date, in a very relative way. The fact that its bass line is the most dangerous thing contained within Volume 3 probably isn’t saying much for the album, but for these two it’s a change of pace. Three cover songs dot the album, the most notable being “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me”, famously recorded by Mel Carter and Gloria Estefan. As with everything else the younger Deschanel does, Zooey puts a dainty spin on the song, avoiding the dynamic ranges that Estefan hit, which in my opinion is what really made the original special.

Volume 3 is both more playful and more introspective at given moments than the previous She & Him albums, but it still suffers from the main symptom. It’s easy to listen to in the background, as something you’re not paying much attention to, but when you’re trying to actively consume the media, the LP has trouble commanding your focus, even at just forty-five minutes. Sugar-pop has the same problems as consuming actual sugar. If you buy a Coke or a Hershey’s bar, you know your taste buds are going to bask in the sweet sensation. But every time you buy a Coke and a Hershey’s bar, even though it sounds like the logical next step, whichever one you consume second will have its flavor robbed because that longing has already been satisfied. One, two, three twee songs can be enjoyable, but after seven you’ve gotten what you came for, and you still have seven songs to go.

6/10 – She & Him’s Volume Three is an improvement on Volume One and Volume Two, but you have to actively be wanting to hear what the duo have to offer. All others may find the album to be empty calories.

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One of the biggest challenges in the age of Twitter, where information flows like milk and honey, is actually avoiding information about something, say, a piece of media, you’re looking forward to. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon arrived on a wave of hype for some, while others weren’t even aware of its existence. I saw countless tweets gushing over the game trailer, the game soundtrack, and images of the second coming of 80′s camp. I did not click on any of these. I went into Blood Dragon knowing only that it ran on the Far Cry 3 engine, that it was a tribute to everything awesome and terrible about the 80′s, and that it was supposed to be very good. After roughly three and a half hours, I learned that all of these things are true.

Blood Dragon is a standalone expansion of Far Cry 3, which I do appreciate, as though I have played Far Cry 3, if I was required to have it to play Blood Dragon, I probably wouldn’t have gotten to play Blood Dragon. The expansion uses Far Cry 3‘s mechanics, but that’s where the similarities end. Where Far Cry 3 was about a group of dubstep loving, rich frat bros faced with being taken hostage on a tropical island, Blood Dragon puts you in control of a cyber-patriot nicknamed “Power”, dropped onto an neon-dyed island fortress to kill a Benedict Arnold who went AWOL after he found out the US was committing an unthinkable treason, making peace talks with Communist Russia.

Everything about Blood Dragon is, as it promises, unbelievably 80′s, both the best parts of the best of the 80′s, and the best parts of the worst of the 80′s. There’s references to movies, video games, music, and television from the decade. Early on there’s the infamous handshake from Predator, every bad guy looks like an extra from TRON, and the cutscenes are comprised of 2D images that would feel right at home in a late-cycle NES game or early SNES game. There’s even a montage cutscene, for God’s sake! Amazing. The soundtrack, composed by electronic group Power Glove, is enjoyable enough and certainly sets the mood for the 80′s acid trip, but isn’t as orgasmic as others make it out to be. Drive has set the golden standard, folks. That soundtrack should be your guidebook.

Whoever wrote the dialog in Blood Dragon is a comedic genius, and they need to be promoted and/or work on more projects immediately. Every other thing that our protagonist, Rex Colt, says made me smile at least and bust out laughing at best. After blowing away a foot soldier with my shotgun, he muttered, “Guess that’s why they call it a shotgun”. When I used a sneak takedown to cut an enemies head off, I heard, “What’s the matter? Sword got your tongue?” There are two amazing monologues, one D.A.R.E monologue about the dangers of drugs, and the other a very meta speech about the stupidity of people who believe video games encourage violent behavior in real life. The tutorial is one of the funniest moments of the game, as it pokes fun of the very concepts of tutorials. “To jump, press X. To duck, press O. To look around, look around.” “I fucking hate tutorials,” Colt responds.

While Blood Dragon‘s presentation borders on perfect, the game itself does suffer some of the weariness of being a first-person shooter in an over-saturation of first-person shooters. I understand that the game is making fun of video game tropes, and I can forgive one instance of “defend the nerd while they hack into the mainframe”, but that scenario plays out twice in a video game three and a half hours long, which is really unnecessary. You’re encouraged to use the Blood Dragons, which are really more like Blood Komodo Dragons, to your advantage by tossing bait, but the scenarios rarely play out like the developers imply they will. Maybe I just suck at games, but in my experience, if an enemy sees you and he sets off an alarm, enough guys will spawn that you’re basically fucked, and in most areas stealth is honestly just a pipe dream. In support of Blood Dragon, I will say that the two mandatory vehicle portions are actually enjoyable, and that’s saying a lot since I usually hate vehicle levels.

8/10 –  Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is near perfect in concept and writing, and great but slightly flawed in execution. Blood Dragon is the Black Dynamite of 80′s video games, and for fifteen bucks this retro flashback is certainly worth it.

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When I first saw the cover of NOS4A2, Joe Hill’s newest book, I knew I would enjoy it, months before it was due to come out, even before I knew anything about the plot. There’s simply a white license plate with the letters NOS4A2 stamped into it, with a blood red coat of rust running down vertically, a crimson shadow. NOS4A2, or Nosferatu, is the German word for vampire, and while the title is reflective of the kind of fantastic elements within the pages, the central story being told could be a nonfiction horror story, and is for many unfortunate families. In the first act, a girl is almost killed by a serial child murderer, but instead she lives and sends the twisted individual to prison. The book is a thick near-700 pages, which it should be noted, does not waste a page, and if the book ended after the first act I would have felt like I got my money’s worth. Unfortunately for the book’s protagonist, all things are cyclical, and the murderer comes back for revenge in the second half, to take her life and that of her own child.

I’ve read one of Hill’s previous novels, Horns, and have the other, Heart-Shaped Box, in my Kindle backlog, but NOS4A2 has to be by far his most ambitious piece of work, if not also the best. The scope of NOS4A2 rivals those of Hill’s father, Stephen King, and the central theme of a grown-up forced to face an evil they first encountered in their childhood is something seen in his father’s works more than once, most notably It. And while NOS4A2 proclaims that Joe Hill is his father’s son, it’s also distinctly a Hill novel, rather than a King novel.

A large part of what makes NOS4A2 so enjoyable while discussing such a morbid subject is the cast of characters. Almost every person that gets any amount of face time is utterly fascinating. The main character is a punk artist who can use her bicycle to summon a covered bridge that can cross any amount of distance instantaneously. There’s a morbidly obese mechanic who cosplays at conventions as a fat stormtrooper. A child named Bruce Wayne. A male nurse who has a tattoo of Firefly‘s Serenity and identifies as a Browncoat. A Scrabble-champion librarian who can use her Scrabble tiles as a kind of Ouija board to suss out answers to unsolved mysteries. A forty-year old henchman with a mind of a child and a penchant for World War II-era gasmasks. And the titular nosferatu, a man over a hundred years old who stays alive by feeding off children he abducts in his 1938 Rolls Royce.

9/10 – I bought NOS4A2 at midnight Tuesday when Amazon unlocked the Kindle version, and couldn’t stop reading until I finished all 686 pages on Thursday night. I can’t think of almost anything negative to say about the book, except for a slight lull in the middle pages while Hill gets the necessary exposition out of the way to transition from Act 1 to Act 2.

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When The Hood Internet made The Hood Internet Mixtape Volume Seven available for free download this Tuesday, the release cemented the duo’s status as one of the hardest working mashup groups out there. In addition to the seven albums that compose their main The Hood Internet Mixtape series, Aaron Brink and Steve Reidell have created an original album titled FEAT, a mixtape for Anatomy Magazine, two mixtapes for Brooklyn clothing line Mishka, and a 2012 year in review mixtape for music blog Hype Machine, all since 2007. One would be justified to wonder if the boys from Chicago can produce so much work and still maintain enough motivation for a new release to be, simply put, good, and the consensus is that Volume Seven is a mixed bag. After several spins it is obvious that The Hood Internet cut some corners on this one, while still plainly showing that they are masters of the craft.

The basic Hood Internet track formula is simple. Take the vocals of a rap song, the artist of which is semi-to-extremely well-known, and lay it on top of the instrumentals of an obscure-to-relatively well-known indie band, and cross-fade into the next song. A fair mixture of clubbangers and indie hip-hop artists show up on the rap side, from Ca$h Out, Drake, Juicy J, and 2 Chainz for the former, to Action Bronson, Danny Brown, Frank Ocean, and A$AP Rocky on the latter. The indie rock backgrounds come from favorites like Purity Ring, Crystal Castles, Tame Impala, Divine Fits, Dirty Projectors, and STRFKR. And while notable names pop up in abundance, small details nitpicked at me throughout the album.

As I listened to “Turn on the Happiness” and “Gangz A Make Her Dance”, something sounded too smooth for the songs, too right, like I was listening to them with their original instrumentals, even though I knew that was not the case. Eventually I realized the connection I was trying to make – both songs were featured on the most recent mixtape they produced, the Hype Machine Best of 2012 Zeitgeist. Granted, the mixtape was not distributed by The Hood Internet, so technically they hadn’t released it themselves, and Mixtape Volume Seven is twenty-five tracks long, which is a lot of minutes of music, but I couldn’t help but feel like reusing the tracks was cheating just a little bit. “Pesobedear” is a decent track, but it curiously uses a song from A$AP Rocky’s 2011 Live.Love.A$AP, when there are a number of better tracks on Long.Live.A$AP, which was just released in January. And as an additional, admittedly petty complaint, I noticed that “Cashin’ Goods” used the censored version of “Cashin’ Out”, and for what reason I cannot fathom. It’s surrounded by songs that use NC-17 rated language, so I really can’t even guess at what the explanation would be.

And yet, when The Hood Internet wants to shine, they know how to shine. “Gooo in Paris” is an irresistible dance number, merging Watch the Throne’s number one single with an infectiously catchy backing from TNGHT. “See Youth” would be a great song regardless of vocals, as it features instrumentals from Santigold’s incredible 2012 album Master of My Make-Believe. Ironically, the best track on the mixtape has to be “Won’t Fuck Us Over 2.0″, a remix of an original track by The Hood Internet, originally featured on FEAT. The elegant dance between Annie Hart’s singing the chorus of The National’s “Mr. November”, weaving in and out with the rap verses by BBU, is simply a thing of beauty.

7/10 – The Hood Internet Mixtapes aim to be your soundtrack for the summer. While I don’t think Volume Seven will have enough staying power to last me all the way to the end of this summer, it certainly gives me enough faith in the group to keep me looking forward to Volume Eight.

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Alternative titles that were considered include “THQ relocates offices to Imaginationland” and “THQ execs still believe in Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy”.

As we move later into the current console generation’s lifespan, both Microsoft and Sony are trying to replicate Nintendo’s money-printing success with varying motion-control devices, Sony with the PlayStation Move and Microsoft with Project Natal. And who can blame them? The Wii has changed the face of the gaming industry, for better or worse, and it’s only natural for the competition to try and claim a portion of the motion-control demographic.

Apparently THQ has some solid fucking faith in Microsoft’s Project Natal, as they have indicated to CVG that they are brainstorming a 360 game based around the Natal that could cost 30 to 40 million dollars. That is insane. That’s almost how much Modern Warfare 2 cost to develop, and just like Modern Warfare 2, this mystery THQ Natal game would have to sell like it was Jesus’s sweet love in order to recoup the costs.

“…I don’t think the install base is there because the game I’m thinking about is a $30m/$40m Natal game and the install base isn’t there yet to support that,” said a THQ VP, Danny Bilson. Uh, you’re right Danny, the install base isn’t there yet. That’s because there is no install base, because Natal hasn’t been released yet. We agree so far. “I think we have to wait a little bit just for the install base to justify spending a ton of money. Because my idea is a really expensive idea,” Bilson went on to say.

And  here’s where I disagree.I honestly can’t see Natal ever having a install base big enough to justify a game that expensive to make. Hell, it would take someone like Billy Mays to convince that many people to buy Project Natal. And he’s dead. Then again, if THQ is going to throw around that kind of money, maybe they can hire the ghost of Billy Mays. He’s our only hope.

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I was born in 1987, making me too young for the first run of the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, but just the right age for the reruns that started in the early ’90s. Kids usually have a one-track mind, and before I learned of the wonder that was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I was fucking obsessed with Mario. I wanted to play as many Mario games as I could, I would order Mario popsicles from the ice cream truck, I lived and breathed Mario as much as possible. So it is safe to say that I am no stranger to the Super Mario Bros. Super Show.

So when I heard that Netflix added the part live-action, part animated series to the holy grail that is the Instant Watch section, I took notice. I have never tried to hide the fact that I am a huge nostalgia whore, and I wholly approve of any company or service that wants to help me relive my childhood, however briefly.

However, I am still bitter that Netflix took Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze off of Instant Watch. Dick move guys.

[via Destructoid]

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Tomonobu Itagaki, the man credited with the success of the Dead or Alive fighting series and the rebirth of the Ninja Gaiden series, has always been considered somewhat of a rockstar in the game development world. As somewhat of a cocky son of a bitch myself, I can respect that.

Recently the guys over at 1up.com asked Itagaki some questions about his new development team, Valhalla Game Studios, and his answers have just increased my opinion of the guy. When posed with the question, “Which is more important to your daily well being? Cigarettes, coffee, drinking, or gambling?” Itagaki responded, “It’s already clear. I can’t make a game without all of them.” That makes me happy. In my opinion, you can’t be trusted if you don’t partake in the vices of the world occasionally.

And Itagaki isn’t joking about that drinking part, as he actually uses alcohol as a measuring stick for time. When 1up asked how long Valhalla’s new game has been in production, he said, “I don’t mind giving you a hint. During this period I’ve consumed at least 1,000 shochu sake bottles.” That is a lot of damn alcohol, and as a man who also enjoys drinking a lot of damn alcohol, I salute you Mr. Itagaki. With as many pussy-foot, casual game making developers as their are out there, the industry needs cheeky, alcoholic bastards to represent the rest of us cheeky, alcoholic bastards

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The jokes are so obvious, it’s almost unfair of me to write this article. Almost being the key word. In a very unfortunate choice of words, the director of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, Karsten Lund, talked to CVG recently and told them, “I expect reviews to be a lot better [than the first Kane & Lynch]. I hope it’s going to be better, at least.”

Really IO Interactive? The review scores of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men were the center of one of the biggest controversies in the gaming journalism industry of the last decade, in which Jeff Gerstmann was fired from his spot at GameSpot soon after he gave the original Kane & Lynch a 6.0. So it really is baffling to me that IO would come out shortly before the release of Dog Days and say, “I think the first game did a lot of things right. We’re trying to enhance those as well. So I do expect higher scores.”

Hear that GameSpot reviewers? Higher scores for Kane & Lynch 2, or you’ll make Karsten Lund cry. And lose your job.

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I have a confession to make. And it’s not that the headline I made for this article is complete bullshit because I couldn’t think of possibly anything more interesting to title it. No, the real confession is that I have never beaten a Metroid game. Hell, I never played as Samus Aran until Super Smash Bros. I’m not sure how I skipped over Metroid during my Nintendo and SNES days, as I played every other first-party game Nintendo was responsible for. When the Gamecube came around, I was too busy with my Playstation 2 to play any but a select few Gamecube titles, and the Metroid Prime series was not on that list.  And though I have since gone back and acquired Metroid and Super Metroid, I have never given them the attention they deserve. So really, you could say I’m the least possible qualified person to write this post. Meh.

Nintendo announcing Metroid: Other M at E3 2009 was a huge deal. Aside from Super Mario Galaxy, the Wii was starving for the trifecta of Nintendo first-party series: Super Mario, Zelda, and Metroid. And though a brief trailer was shown along with the announcement, no one was really clear on the gameplay aspects. We were told it was 2.5D (no one ever really knows what that means), and we knew there would be a hybrid of the classic Metroid side-scrolling and the first-person shooting Metroid Prime sported, but Other M‘s gameplay was still hard to grasp.

Since the newest Metroid is slated to come out this summer, Nintendo apparently decided to give us a clearer picture of what Other M will be like, and released the above video yesterday. I must admit it looks damn impressive. The switch between first- and third-person gameplay seems to be seamless, and for a Wii game it’s gorgeous. Between this, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and the first Wii-exclusive Zelda all coming soon, I think Nintendo has finally delivered for its core fan base.

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The other day the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Dana White, stopped thinking about half-naked men worming around on the ground long enough to talk to Kotaku about his feelings on the fact that EA is making an MMA video game to compete with his and THQ’s UFC Undisputed series. Spoiler alert: They’re not positive opinions.

“…as as far as the MMA space goes, we’ll kick the living shit out of them,” White said. He also expressed his displeasure at the fact that EA wasn’t too hot on an MMA game years ago when he pitched it to them. “They told us they would never do a game and now they’re coming out with a fucking game. Johnny come latelys. Me-toos.”

I can’t really say that I fault White here. UFC is the biggest name in MMA, and now that White and THQ have gone out on a limb and proven that an MMA game is a viable seller in the gaming market, EA comes in and tries to strong-arm its way into the action. One thing I can’t figure out though is the fact that the man who runs a company that revolves around grown men beating the shit out each other, can’t express his feelings without using dumbed-down, vulgar language. It just doesn’t make sense.

White summed up his thoughts by stating, “If there’s anybody out there who is a UFC fan, you’re fucking nuts if you buy the EA game.”

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They say that youth is wasted on the young. It seems these days that cocaine, f-bombs, and gun violence is also wasted on the young. Yesterday this viral video popped up on YouTube, supposedly being a clip of an elementary school play of the infamous Scarface.

I’m not sure what it is more, adorable or hilarious, but be assured that it is both, in heapfuls. Little Tony Montana has a heap of popcorn on his desk instead of cocaine, but coke is still referenced by the children, along with plenty of “fudge” bombs, and the infamous Tony Montana death scene.

To be completely honest, I’m still not sure if this is 100% legit or not, but just like a disenchanted kid on Christmas, I want to believe. Now it’s only a matter of time before the conservative news groups and party poopers jump on this and spoil everyone’s good times, and that makes me sad. I mean, who’s anyone to say that 8-year olds are too young to know about drugs, sex, and greed? Fuck your honor roll student, these kids are on the honor roll of the streets.

The post You do coke and you kill people, that’s wonderful Tony appeared first on WatchPlayRead.

Did you feel that wind on your face just now? No, your bedroom window isn’t open. No, I’m not on acid making completely random non sequiturs. That was Captain Obvious flying by.

Ninja Theory, the studio behind 2007′s Heavenly Sword, talked to computersandvideogames.com earlier today, and explained why their next title, Enslaved, will not be a PS3 exclusive like Heavenly Sword was. Not surprisingly, the answer had to do with money.

“Heavenly Sword came out pretty early on the PS3, and we sold, I think, a million and a half copies, and that’s still not enough as an independent studio to break even. The publisher potentially breaks even at that point, but the developers don’t. It’s just that when so many people have Xbox – I mean over half the market or more has Xbox 360s – why limit yourself to one platform?” explained the co-founder of Ninja Theory, Tameem Antoniades.

When I first read this, I had two reactions. The first was “Yeah, no shit.” Welcome to the 21st century of gaming, where there is no real reason to limit your game to one console unless you’re being bankrolled by the console producer.

But what really puzzled me was the snippet about breaking even. According to Antoniades, selling 1.5 million copies of a full-priced retail video game is not enough for a developer to break even these days. Really? Just to be hypothetical, let’s say that a million of the copies sold at full retail price, and the other half million sold after a price reduction, somewhere between $20-40, for an average of $30. That is $75 million. Retail shops make close to nothing from new game sales, and I know the publisher keeps the majority of the profit, but I still find it hard to believe that that isn’t enough for the developer to make a living wage, much less not even break even. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling Ninja Theory out on this, I take them at their word, but if moving one and a half million copies of your game isn’t enough to break even anymore, the gaming industry is in a worse place than I imagined.

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I think it’s safe to assume at this point that the chances of Duke Nukem Forever ever being released are about the same as a black man woman becoming President. That is to say, don’t count on it. However, this fellow from the Internet, Mr. “Slash000″, has posted images of his Gamestop pre-order receipt for the PC version of Duke Nukem Forever, that he is still holding on to.

Though it is neat to have a 9-year old piece of history, if Slash000 had invested that 10 dollars in 2001, by now he would have…(*goes and gets an Asian to do math*)…11 or 12 dollars. Which is probably more than 3D Realms has at this point.

(Via Ripten)

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As Hellen Keller once said, “All good things must come to an end”. Well, this holiday Steam sale has not been a good thing, it has been an amazing thing. Ghostbusters for $7? Indigo Prophecy for a little over 3 bucks? Arkham Asylum, plus 19 other games, all for $50? I’m not sure how Valve has done it (I suspect Gabe Newell sold his fat soul to Crom), but some of these discounts have been crazier than Mickey Rooney when he’s on his crazy pills.

Unfortunately, once the weekend is over, the deals are too. This means you better purchase everything you want before Sunday ends, because I suspect we won’t be seeing a sale this big til…well, next December I imagine. I myself am going to have spent at least a hundred dollars before this is all over. Between the Eidos Collector’s pack, a couple of Atari games, the King’s Quest Collection, and the Star Wars Jedi Knight Collection, I’ll be PC gaming for a long time into the new year. What did y’all get during this absolutely insane sale?

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I’ve heard people take many different stances on Tucker Max. I’ve heard people say he’s a douchebag, that he makes shit up, that he’s a mysoginist, you get the picture. And I don’t know about all that, but I do know one thing. The motherfucker is funny, and that’s his job and he does it well.

Of course, not everyone is going to agree on what’s funny. This is why the Chicago Transit Authority recently pulled 250 ads for Max’s movie adaptation of his best-selling book, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, from its buses. And what was so horrible about these posters? The fact that they touted the line “Strippers will not tolerate disrespect (just kidding)”. First off, if strippers really valued respect, they wouldn’t have become strippers in the beginning. But I digress.

Of course, Tucker Max, being Tucker Max, called the CTA out quite effectively. And by that I mean he told them in a statement to the press, “Blow me.” No shit. “All I have to say to these kooks and trolls is blow me,” the press release reads. It goes on to say, “Fuck those protestors if they can’t take a joke,” in regard to the various feminist groups boycotting the new movie.

If there’s one thing I can appreciate about a person, it’s the ability to tell people to fuck off if they don’t like you. We have enough passive-aggressiveness in this world as it is. I think everyone can learn a lesson here. Next time someone pisses you off, just tell them to suck your dick and walk away. It’s how Jesus would have wanted it.

The post Tucker Max is my hero appeared first on WatchPlayRead.

We were pretty sure this was coming, but a price cut ain’t a price cut until it’s verified, and it looks like that happened for the Nintendo Wii today. Nintendojo apparently had a man on the inside during a Nintendo conference call with major retailers, where the big N confirmed that starting September 27, Wiis will be available for the price of $199.99.

This is obviously a surprise to no one, since store ads have been showing the price drop for some time now. Add in the fact that the Xbox 360 Arcade SKU has already been $199 for some time now, and I really don’t see where Nintendo had a choice in this move. No matter, I’m sure this is really going to hurt Nintendo. Reggie Fils-Aime might have to start wiping his ass with $50 bills instead of hundreds. Poor guy. We should start a trust fund to make sure his kids will be able to go to college.

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Usually when we think about Square-Enix, we think of one genre and one genre only: the jRPG. But who’s to say that SE can’t branch out and do something different. Well that is exactly what they’re doing with their NieR games, Replicant for the PlayStation 3 and Gestalt for the Xbox 360. The NieR games are going to be action-RPGs, and from the look of this trailer, they’re not fucking around about the action part.

I don’t want to get too excited prematurely, but these games could really turn out to be the tits. If Square-Enix can nail a God of War or Devil May Cry type of game, while simultaneously adding in the epic story telling that they’re known for, we might have a AAA title on our hands.

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Without a doubt, Bioshock 2 was one of my most anticipated titles of 2009. Bioshock redefined what a first-person shooter could be to me, and is easily one of my favorite current-gen titles. And while I feel that Bioshock was a complete experience in and of itself, and didn’t really warrant a sequel, I trusted 2K Marin to make a deserving sequel. So, needless to say, when I heard that Bioshock 2 was pushed back to a 2010 release date, I was not a very happy dude. However, there’s not much you or I can do about it, so I resigned myself to waiting.

Today 2K Games has let me know just how long I will be waiting. I will finally have my hands on Bioshock 2 on February 9, 2010. And while it’s still longer than I would have liked, it could be a lot worse. Like that time Santa Claus delayed Christmas until the next year. I told him, “But Santa, we’re already supposed to have a Christmas next year anyway.” Then Santa just gave me the finger. Damn Santa can be a dick sometimes.

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Final Fantasy Tactics is one of the greatest video games ever created. Let’s just get that out of the way. It has a plot that rivals most Shakespearean plays, amazing gameplay, deep character customization, and a metric shitton of side quests. And now it is available for purchase on the PlayStation Store for only $9.99. That’s a pretty goddamn good deal if you ask me, considering an Amazon.com search shows that a new copy of a PlayStation disc of FFT runs around $100.

And yes, I am aware of the fact that there is already a PSP port of FFT, War of the Lions. While that may already be available and have 2 extra character classes, have you tried playing that motherfucker? The battle animations are slower than old people fucking. It’s seriously almost unplayable.

I really hate to encourage Square-Enix from making money without actually having to do anything, but fuck, keep ‘em coming, I’m buying. I’m a whore for anything Square made on the PS1, and I know tons of other people are too. So keep it up guys. Let’s see us some Xenogears sometime soon.

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I think we can all agree that Geek Squad is a farce aimed towards old people and the ignorant, providing services that no self-respecting human being would consider giving their money to. But this new shit just borderlines on offensive/ridiculous. Apparently, Geek Squad doesn’t think you are capable enough to burn your own CDs onto your own computer. But don’t worry! For only $1 a CD they will burn your music for you. Now, that claim could be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and this would still be an absurd offer. But let’s look deeper into the program.

First off, Geek Squad claims that the $1 a CD charge includes “free shipping”. Last time I checked, free meant free, but apparently to Geek Squad free means a $35 “shipping kit” if you are ripping less than 100 CDs. Now that we’ve found out about that hidden fee, let’s look at how Geek Squad is going to get your music to you.

The only free option is to have them burn your CDs onto their computer, and then them burn the MP3s onto a DVD and them send the DVD to you. So…what the fuck are you supposed to do with the DVD? You’re going to have to figure out how to burn the MP3s from the DVD to your computer so….what’s the fucking point? Alternatively you can send them your external hard drive and they can burn your CDs to that for a small fee of $25. Or the option they really want you to pick, buy an external hard drive or iPod from them! Then they’ll load your shit up on those for absolutely no extra charge. What swell guys.

Well, at least there is the convenience thing. Claiming to be “an amazing time saver” on the front menu, Geek Squad provides you with a calculator to see just how much time you save using their service. I decided to see just how efficient it was, and when prompted I said, just for experiment’s sake, that I was going to burn 50 CDs with Geek Squad. To my disbelief, I was told that if done manually, it could take me “over 8 hours” to burn my fictional collection of 50 CDs, whereas it would only take Geek Squad “just a few days”. Gee willikers! I could save at the minimum negative 40 hours using this amazing service!

So there you have it. Geek Squad has found a new way to prey upon the unwashed masses, I go away feeling a little dead inside, and baby Jesus hates mankind even more. Who’s not coming away a winner in this love equation of technology?

[via The Consumerist]

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Ahoy there! So, ye want a free copy o’ Launch of the Screamin Narwhal do ye? Arrr, then I’e got good news for ye mateys. The fine lads o’er at Telltale Games be givin’ away their booty for free this Saturday, ta’ celebrate Talk Like A Pirate Day. So how do ye landlubbers get yer mitts on this fine loot? Just go on o’er ta’ www.playlikeapirate.com this Saturday, startin’ at 12:01 GMT, and plunder Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 1 from ‘em. A pirate’s life is free, and in more ways ‘an one, thanks ta’ Telltale.

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We all know how big Twitter has gotten recently. Being the newest social networking fad, almost everyone I know has a Twitter account, even if they rarely use it. And while the primary use of Twitter is supposed to be keeping track of what your friends are doing, it took marketing divisions all of about 10 seconds to figure out how to use their (and our) tweets for advertising purposes. Usually this is in the form of having giveaways and contests where you have to retweet a company’s twit to be eligible to win whatever it is they have for you, and I really don’t have a problem with that.

The Twitter spam that does annoy me, however, are social gaming sites where you can set your account up to where it automatically tweets what video games you’ve played throughout the day. Unless you are playing something that hasn’t been released yet, and you can tell me about it and/or let me play it too, I really could not give a shit what you are playing. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.

Now, imagine that instead of Twitter spam showing a summary of what people are playing, there were individual tweets for every single game a person played. Sound annoying? Well, that’s where Uncharted 2 is trying to bring us. Within the game’s settings, you can select to have the game auto-tweet for you everytime you do a wide variety of things, such as connecting to multiplayer, beating a chapter, getting to a certain point in a level, earning a trophy, and more. Let me be the first to say this shit is not OK. I know Naughty Dog wants to get the word out about their game, but this is not the appropriate channel to do that. If you buy Uncharted 2 and leave this Twitter update bullshit turned on, I will find you, and I will punch you right in the babymaker. And then I will unfollow you on Twitter.

[via thebbps.com]

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It finally happened. After what I imagine was 24 hours of bigots typing words like “spook”, “chink”, and “spic” into Scribblenauts, someone finally hit pay dirt. Now I have to give credit where credit is due, because I was born and raised in Texas and have never heard of this one, so someone was really trying here. What is this horrible, prejudiced word? “Sambo”. Apparently sambo is a derogatory word for someone of the African-American persuasion, and typing the word into Scribblenauts spawns you…a watermelon. Yeah, this article pretty much writes its fucking self.

Of course 5th Cell, the developers of Scribblenauts, have immediately denied using the word in a sense of any negative connotation. Jeremiah Slaczka, the Scribblenauts creative director, told Kotaku, “We are not a racist company and we don’t make racist games”. Now, Scribblenauts contains over 22,000 words, so it’s not surprising sambo made it through, which supposedly traces its roots back to a Spanish word meaning “figleaf gourd”, a squash that looks damn close to a watermelon.

The question is, how bad are people going to look at this as? I mean, if I typed in “zipperhead”, and a guy spawned that had a zipper for a head, that would be somewhat suspicious. Or if inputting “porchmonkey” created a lazy, albeit cute little monkey, that would be pretty inexcusable. So I ask you, is sambo an innocent enough phrase that just happened to make it in Scribblenauts along with 22,000 other words, or is it obvious enough that someone in the production line should have taken notice and said “Hey, isn’t this going to piss off some black people?”

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To say that Telltale Games has perfected the art of episodic content would not be an overstatement. The fine folks over there have consistently released the episodes of their games in a timely manner, and Tales of Monkey Island is no different. After the first chapter, Launch of the Screaming Narwhale, was released in July we have seen a new episode every month, and today it was announced when this month we will see chapter 3, Lair of the Leviathan, and that is September 29.

So, a little less than two weeks and we will get to continue our adventures as the classic Guybrush Threepwood. I’m not sure what Lair of the Leviathan will have in store for us, but look at that picture. That is a huge fuckin’ manatee. Awesome. Finally, I can’t say much, but keep your eyes peeled on the site tomorrow for some pretty sweet Tales of Monkey Island news. Trust me on this one people.

The post Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 3 dated appeared first on WatchPlayRead.

If you have ever collected baseball cards in the course of your life, you might want to have a seat, cause what I am about to tell you is some rage-inducing bullshit. Today Major League Baseball signed an agreement with Topps, the baseball card company, for Topps to be the only licensed baseball card manufacturer. This is so fucked I don’t even know where to begin.

The funny thing is, nowadays I don’t even really follow baseball that much. But as a good American male child growing up in the 80′s and 90′s, buying and collecting baseball, football, and basketball cards was one of my foremost hobbies. I had huge fucking folders of them, divided by sport, then by team. Everytime my parents took me to a place that carried sports cards, I would talk them into letting me get a pack or two. And the variety is what made it so fun. You would just look up at this huge wall of Score, Upper Deck, Topps, and Fleer cards, each package fighting for your eyes’ attention, deciding what you would take home with you that day.

And though I don’t collect cards or even know where those cards are nowadays, I will always look back at those years with fondness. And I assume that the sports cards industry isn’t doing as well these days (I don’t know what today’s kids like, sue me), but somehow I fail to see this as a good idea for anyone, except maybe Topps. The reason for this corporate bullshit? “[The card business] causes confusion to the kid who walks into a Wal-Mart or hobby store” according to Topps CEO Michael Eisner. Wow, this guy should have a bullshit-off with Peter Molynuex and Rush Limbaugh.

Though my card collecting days are far behind me, I would highly advise anyone that still does or that buys them for the kids to boycott Topps to show them how ridiculous this is. Monopolies are never a good thing, and this move will probably reduce baseball card quality to an all-time low.Well baseball card industry, it was fun while it lasted. Adios.

[Via River Front Times]

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The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Those 4 guys have been in my life for almost as long as I can remember. I watched the television series from the first episode up until it was no longer produced my Fred Wolf Films. One of my earliest gaming memories was playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game with my mother when I was 4, and TMNT IV: Turtles in Time was one of my favorite SNES games apart from Chrono Trigger and the Donkey Kong Country series. Needless to say, as soon as I heard that Turtles in Time was coming to XBLA, I was more excited than a pedophile at a playground. Now that the game has been released, the question is, does it hold up to a die-hard Ninja Turtle fan’s expectations? Hit the jump to find out.

The most obvious difference in Re-Shelled, one that has been talked about since the first screens came out, is the graphics. TiT Re-Shelled’s graphics have been updated to be less cartoonish and more realistic in accordance with  the “true” 3D the game is now in. And…it kind of works. The backgrounds look fine, and the Turtles and Foot Clan themselves don’t look too weird. But remember when a real-life Mario was created and it looked creepy as fuck? Well, that’s what happened with most of the non-Foot Soldier enemies, in particular the Pizza Monsters, Stone Warriors, and Baxter. Their cartoon depictions are just so abstract that the attempt to realistically render them comes off as awkward.

As I said before, the this version of Turtles in Time is actually 3D now, as in you can face and attack upwards and downwards, as opposed to just moving up and down the screen while constantly facing left and right. I was worried about this when I heard it was going to be that way, but it doesn’t fail as much as I expected it to. It’s easy enough to face and attack in the direction you want, but for some reason enemies in the air, like the Pizza Monsters, Baxter, and Krang in his spaceship, are much harder to attack.

Another complaint I have with the game is the new soundtrack. And when I say “new soundtrack”, I mean “fucking garbage”. Re-Shelled doesn’t even try to recreate the old levels’ music, replacing it with some generic rock bullshit. Hey Ubisoft, did you see what Capcom did with Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix? You don’t even have to lift a finger, just let OCRemix create the soundtrack. It will be a hundred times better than the shit you tacked on.

What else negative can I say? I ran into a few glitches through the course of the game. Twice my turtle (Leonardo, obviously) froze in a corner for about 4-5 seconds, and in the Sewer Surfin’ level, a couple of times after I got hit I would be floating above my board for a second. Nothing major, but definitely noticeable. There are two other modes besides Arcade Mode, which are Survival Mode and Quickplay, which are dumb and for achievement whores, respectively.

Despite all the shit I’m talking about TiT Re-Shelled, it is Turtles in Time online, which for some people will be good enough. The bottom line is, If your friend with a terminal illness who lives in a different country as you, and his dying wish is to play through Turtles in Time with you, go ahead and pick Re-Shelled up. If you have any other means to play it with your friends however, stick with that.

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I’ll admit it, I might have been a little harsh on the Summer of Arcade yesterday. Don’t get me wrong, I’m looking forward to all the games except for Trails HD, and I think that all of them are fairly priced regardless. I was going to buy Turtles in Time Re-Shelled when it was 1200 Microsoft Points, even though I have the SNES cart, and I’m sure as shit buying it after this announcement today.

IGN just got word that Turtles in Time Re-Shelled will only be 800 Microsoft Points when it comes out next week. Though it’s only a price reduction of $5, I am still happy about it since it will hopefully convince more of my friends to pick it up.

I would suggest you use that extra $5 to buy something to get you in a TMNT related mood. May I reccomend:

-A blue, purple, orange, or red bandana to wear while playing Turtles in Time.
-TMNT Arcade 1989 on XBLA
- A really small pizza

And remember, if you do plan on getting Turtles in Time Re-Shelled…I have dibs on Leonardo, so fuck off.

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They said it couldn’t be done. They said it would take too much time. But then indie developer Twisted Pixel turned around and, BAM, made a game that was worthy of being placed alongside the likes of the Genesis Sonic games and Sonic CD. The plot twist? Twisted Pixel hadn’t made a Sonic game, but a new IP.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am very aware that I’m not the first person to liken Splosion Man to Sonic, not by a long shot. But every site or comment that has said it has only done so in passing, not really expounding on the similarities. That is what I plan to do in the following paragraphs, as it seems everyone has forgotten what made a Sonic game good.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

In the original Sonic the Hedgehog, your moves were quite limited. The A button made you jump, as did B and C. You could move left and right, and that was what you were given to beat the game. Similarly, in Splosion Man, the learning curve is nonexistant. The A button makes you splode, as does the B, X, and Y buttons. Pretty fuckin simple. Now, if it’s not immediately apparent to you what the benefits of having such a limited moveset is, allow me to educate you. In recent days, a character is given a shitton (more like ten shittons) of abilities, and the game consists of segments where you have to use Ability A or Ability Z, and not much else. When you only have one move, developers are forced to employ solid level design to keep the game fresh, which you can see in both Sonic the Hedgehog and Splosion Man.

Speed May Be Jesus, But Platforming Is God

In the aforementioned link, Sega’s Vice President of Marketing actually said “older, die-hard Sega fans who grew up with the franchise and the first Sonic the Hedgehog associate Sonic more with 2-D side-scrolling super fast”, which demonstrates the biggest problem with Sega’s moden mindset. I don’t know if any Sega execs have played a Genesis Sonic game, but it’s not a game where you “side-scrolling super fast”. It is a platforming game where, if you play flawlessly, there are portions of stages that you can run through extremely quickly. Such is the way in Splosion Man. If you have a level memorized, yeah, there are parts of it where you can fly through seamlessly. But, try to play most of the levels on Splosion Man by going full speed in a direction and sploding at the right times. Chances are, you aren’t going to make it very far.

Don’t Alienate Those Outside Of Your Target Market

It is no argument that Sonic was a game marketed to children. If you need any proof, just look at the TV show (the Jaleel White one) and the comic series (the Archie ones). However, Sega was wise enough to not make Sonic cutesy enough to scare off any adult gamers interested in the series. This is not the case nowadays, as seen in Sonic the Hedgehog 2006, when you’ve got Sonic and this princess girl (I’m not even going to give that game enough respect to Google her name) that are pushing the absolute boundaries of the human/bestial relationship, and to be quite frank that is just too awkward for me, and most people I know. Kids might be too innocent to make the connection, and God bless their souls for it, but I just can’t deal with it. Likewise, no one is going to argue that the art style and mood of Splosion Man is anywhere near mature, but it’s not juvenile either.

A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing

This point goes hand in hand with the last one. While both Sonic and Splosion Man are lighthearted games, they pack plenty of challenge. In the later levels of both games, if you are not good at your reflexes and timing, get ready for frustration. Splosion Man is a little less difficult, as it allows you infinite tries and the skip-a-level mode if you really suck, but the levels themselves are still appropriately challenging. At least it’s harder than the recent WereSonic and the Legend of the QTE.

So, as sad as it is, Sega may not ever put out another quality Sonic game. As sad as it is to say, maybe they are just too far removed from their fans to know what we really want anymore, or then again, they may just not care. That is why we have to support smaller, upcoming devs like Twisted Pixel who have the motivation to make quality neo-retro titles. Thanks guys, for giving me my last dance with Mary Jane..er, Sonic.

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Well, maybe rewards is the wrong word. Microsoft is going to rape you less, if you let them rape you. Yeah, that’s more like it.  Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade is currently in it’s 2nd week, with three more left to go. Splosion Man kicked things off, and Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 came out today, which means that Turtles in Time Re-Shelled, Trials HD, and Shadow Complex have yet to come. And if you buy all 5 of these terrific games, you get 800 Microsoft Points added to your account.

This is a really clever marketing ploy, and while it’s better than Microsoft not giving you jack shit, it’s really not as great as it seems. Let’s break it down for a sec. Splosion Man is 800 Microsoft Points, and the rest of the games weigh in at 1200. So, even IF this was a discount, instead of a bonus, if you didn’t want any one of those games EXCEPT Splosion Man, it wouldn’t be worth it to buy all 5, since you would still be paying 400 Microsoft Points for an XBLA game you didn’t want. If you wanted every game except Splosion Man, then it would be worth it to just buy Splosion Man, because it would be free. But all that hypothesizing presumes that this would be a discount, except it’s not. They are giving you 800 extra, additional Microsoft Points. And guess how much most XBLA games cost these days? 1200 Microsoft Points. Which means…you gotta buy more Points.

So, after it’s all said and done, thanks Microsoft, but unfortunately, no thanks.

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Recently Kotaku talked to the developers of the Wii version of Punch-Out! about a variety of things, including responsibilities among the different devs, the game’s graphics, features, and dificulty. But here at Media Whore Network, we try to focus on the important things, which is why this article is about hitting women. Well, not hitting women, actually.

If you have gotten far enough into Punch-Out!, you are aware that there is a certain famous Nintendo character that you fight. I won’t say who at risk of spoiling the game, but I will tell you who it is not, and that is Princess Peach. The funny thing is that at one point Nintendo was thinking about the inclusion of Peach, but as Nintendo producer Kensue Tanabe put it, “…the thought of punching women out made me give up my idea.”

I see where Nintendo is coming from, but let’s not act like gamers haven’t beaten up Peach in the past. Has anyone here played Super Smash Bros. Melee or Brawl? You did way worse to her in those games than punch her. And Ready 2 Rumble had you boxing women, and I did not feel bad at all. It’s boxing for Christ’s sake. Actually, maybe it’s a good thing that they left Peach out. Maybe they are saving her for a game where we can donkey punch her instead of punching her. Make it happen, Nintendo.

(Note: MWN does not in any way, shape, or form condone hitting women. If you hit women, you deserve to go to a jail where men treat you like the woman)

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You really have to hand it to EA. Say what you want about them, but they are the masters of marketing, and their newest campaign/contest is like a mix of a train wreck and pure fucking win. While Comic-Con is happening this week, EA wants you to take a picture of yourself with their, or any of the booth babes and Twitter the results, in an effort to win a “date” with two “hot” girls, who will have “dinner” with you. And you win a lot of things as well. Now let’s play, guess what game this promotion is for? Dante’s Inferno. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t have guessed either.

What do I even say about this? The girls who go out with the winner are probably under contractual obligations not to sleep with the guy, but then again if you are going to Comic-Con, you’re probably not going to get laid regardless. So…what’s the fucking point? If I want company while I eat, I’ll go eat with a friend. If I want some whores to pretend to be interested in me while I eat, I’ll go to any sports bar in the country. I just think this contest is hilarious, as before when nerds were creepily excited by booth babes, this year it’s going to be just unbelievable. You could not pay me to be a Comic-Con booth babe this year (assuming I was both a girl and hot). Those girls are in more danger than comedy at a Dane Cook show.

If you are the kind of pathetic nerd I’ve been making fun of this whole time, you can find further details here.

(Via Destructoid)

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Recently Stephen Toulouse, the program manager in charge of enforcing the rules and regulations of Xbox Live, recently talked to Kotaku about how Microsoft decides what gets censored in XBL names and what doesn’t. It probably doesn’t surprise you to know that there are “many thousands” of banned words, according to Toulouse. He goes on to give two examples of banned words, that are very opposite in spectrum. The first one, being “Cleveland Steamer”, is going to be unacceptable no matter what, since if we all know what someone means when they talk about a cleveland steamer. The other word is “Frak”, which is obviously a very soft way of saying “fuck”. For frak, the moderators have to be a little more careful. “”If they write frak you motherfracking fracker, that falls into a banned use. If it’s just the word by itself, I look at the other content to see if it’s OK,” says Toulouse.

Speaking as someone who has had their Gamertag banned from XBL, I have to admit that I think that too often Microsoft errs on the side of censorship. All Microsoft would have to do is make an appeals process for banned names, and a lot of people would be happy. No one asked me what context my Gamertag was in, and if they had I would have been able to easily explain that Coonskin was not chosen with racist intentions. But nope, once they decided that it was inappropriate, that was it, Game Over.

I think the most ironic thing about the whole ordeal is that it just displays the hypocrisy of selective censorship. According to Toulouse, my Gamertag can’t be Motherfracker385, supposedly to protect the innocent children from bad language, but when I am playing Halo 3, these same innocent children are teabagging me while screaming at me to go fuck my mother and calling me a bitch ass fag. Something doesn’t seem right there to me. But what would I know? I can’t even pick an appropriate Gamertag.

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If it doesn’t bleed, can you kill it?

Remember all those times when you cut your hand while cutting an apple and you didn’t bleed? Or that time you nicked yourself while shaving and nothing happened? Yeah, me neither. But apparently in bizzaro world, where Team Ninja has their offices, these are daily occurences. I say all this because it seems their latest offering, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, the PlayStation 3 version of Ninja Gaiden 2, will feature much less blood than it’s Xbox 360 counterpart. When asked about the bloodloss by Games Radar (via Destructoid), Sigma 2′s director, Yosuke Hayashi, said “Each game has its own concept and with Ninja Gaiden 2, the focus was on extreme violence. But with Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, we really questioned whether violence is a necessity for a game, so we decided to move away from that trend. So the violence ‘approach’ is not the way we approached the development of Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2.”

…What? Team Ninja does know what game they are working on right? Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2. A game about a ninja killing other ninjas. Killing involves violence, so in this instance, yes, violence is a necessity for a game. I honestly believe that quote has to be a misunderstanding or something. Is the game going to be Ryu having pillow fights with all those guys who want to murder him? Next thing you know, some porn director is going to try to make a porno with no tits. It’s a slippery slope, folks.

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Just kidding, there’s no openings in the Justice League for an overweight guy. But if you want to lose that beer gut, VPT Technologies wants to help. VPT are the guys that made Wii Fit and Let’s Yoga, and it seems the killing they made with Wii Fit just isn’t enough. According to Siliconera, the developer has recently trademarked Fitness Hero and Workout Hero, which I assume is in preparation to branch out from the Wii to the other consoles. I think it’s a little superfluous to trademark both titles, but they’re likely just trying to stifle competition.

Now as an aside, can I just say that the amount of games with “Hero” in their names is getting goddamn ridiculous? Unless you have superpowers, serve in the military, or are a policeman or firefighter, you are not a hero. Guitar Hero got a free pass because at least guitarists pull tons of pussy night after night, and that is near hero-like. But then we got DJ Hero (a cool occupation, but nowhere near being a hero) and Band Hero, which doesn’t even fucking make sense. A band is almost always at least two people, and “Hero” is a singular noun. You can’t put those two words together! And now we finally have Fitness & Workout Hero, which is tricking overweight people into thinking that they are beautiful and unique snowflakes just for losing a couple of pounds. Don’t get me wrong, weight loss is no easy task, and is a very noble goal, but thousands of people do it every day, and they’re not getting the key to the city.

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Over on Olivia Munn’s website, she is promising to sign her Playboy cover issue if you send it to her (well not really to her, to G4). And if you send her multiple issues, she’ll personalize it and write whatever you want. If I was going to send an issue to Olivia, I would want her to sign it with a picture of her tits. Because, ya know, that’s what’s supposed to be in Playboy when you appear in it.

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Gamestop is rich, bitch

According to a report from Gamesindustry.biz (via Destructoid), the game trading business is a’boomin. Those scoundrels at Wedbush Morgan have estimated that 100 million video games are traded in annually. In related news, the fine gentlemen who run GameStop are taking baths in melted Godiva chocolate and using hundred dollar bills as cumrags. I mean, I know GameStop isn’t the only business that does trade-ins, but I’m sure whatever percent of the 100 million that wasn’t handled by GameStop is near negligible.

The article then goes on to say that despite this huge quantity of trade-ins, the sales of new video games is not diminished by much. I understand that, but to me the point is that GameStop and their conspirators are making 2 billion dollars a year selling things that people already paid for. That to me is just mindboggling. The person who originally thought up the idea of trading in games should be in the Smart People Hall of Fame, alongside the inventors of the polio vaccine, Albert Einstein, and these guys.

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Recently the Seattle Times interviewed Bungie, and for the most part there was nothing interesting to be learned. Bungie talked about the open worldness of Halo: ODST (we already knew about that) and their new offices (don’t really care), but the one thing that did come up that made me sit up in my chair was a quote by Bungie president Harold Ryan. Speaking about Microsoft’s new motion control system Natal, Ryan said “I absolutely think ‘Reach’ could be enabled with [Natal].”  Now, I saw Microsoft’s press conference at E3, and I will concede that Natal is something that could potentially be neat, but…really? Do we really need all of our big name titles (and tons of motion control shovelware, I promise) to be Natal compatible, just because Microsoft put it out there?

Call me old fashioned, but this whole “Keeping up with the Joneses” fad of motion control is ridiculous. Microsoft and Sony, you are not Nintendo, Nintendo beat you to it, move on. Nintendo isn’t printing money just because they have motion control. They have set up the Wii’s dominance of this generation perfectly, they are marketing masters. Tacking on motion control on to the 360 or PlayStation 3 is going to be like te 360 adding a HDDVD player. Just because you copy a competitor’s feature does not mean that the success will translate over. And most importantly, I’m a lazy motherfucker, and I don’t want to have to hold my arm out the entire time I’m playing Halo.

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Today Capcom put up a teaser site for something or another, to be honest I really couldn’t give a shit. Teaser sites, in my opinion, are the worst fad that game developers have employed in recent years. Congratulations, you managed to create a web page with at very least a number or at the most an image. And gaming blogs eat that shit up. If you are a developer and want press coverage, you have two options. If you gave a shit, you would come up with something worth sharing, such as details for your game, screenshots, or maybe even a trailer, and send it out in a press release. Or you could think of a number that has some obscure relation to your next project and create a teaser site. Pick either option, because you will get the same press coverage. If you want to be cryptic about your next video game, at least be creative and put some effort into it, like I Love Bees.

And if teaser sites weren’t bad enough, now we’ve got teaser countdowns that lead up to a teaser site. It does not get any more pretentious than that. Do you know what used to get people excited for video games? A 3-4 page preview in Game Informer or Nintendo Power. Now Hideo Kojima can throw a monochrome picture of Big Boss’ face against an image of a field and we’re all supposed to start masturbating furiously. Sorry, but I’ll pass, come back with a title and some screens and then we can talk.

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I know I’m not going to win any medals for taking this stance, but look. You celebrities really need to cut this dying shit out. At first it wasn’t a big deal. Old man McMahon was 86, and Farrah Fawcett had been battling cancer for years. Not to say either of those deaths weren’t tragic, as they both were, but they were both at least understandable. Then Thursday things started to get wacky when Michael Jackson died from a heart attack, and now Billy Mays dies today from unknown causes. What the fuck?

I know it’s not the celebrities’ fault that they are dying, but they really need to understand their greater responsibility. When you are a celebrity, you are a role model, people look up to you. So what kind of a message does that send when you start dying in droves? That it’s OK to die? That it’s “hip” to die, that all the cool people are doing it? That is unacceptable, and the rest of you celebrities need to think about the big picture next time you think about biting the bullet.

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Oh Sony, when will you ever learn? According to a Japanese business paper, Nikkei, (via Kotaku), Sony will begin R&D on a gaming cellphone within the month. Now, I can stop typing here and your face should already be located in your palm. But let me continue. Apparently this phone is being built to “better compete with Apple Inc’s…iPhone”. Here’s the problem though, the iPhone is not “a gaming phone”. It is a phone which many developers have made games for.

Now, let me give you a word of advice Sony. In the past you have excelled in the areas in which you competed in. PlayStation and PlayStation 2 were amazing machines that advanced the gaming industry. But recently the PlayStation 3 hasn’t been doing so hot, and I know the PlayStation Portable hasn’t been the commercial success you were hoping for. And despite your inability to dominate in the console market and handheld market, you are going to try to go head-to-head with the fucking iPhone in the cellphone market? Sony, you are trying to stick your dick into too many areas of the industry, but in the end you’re only going to fuck yourself.

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I really hate to write this. I fucking LOVE retro Looney Tunes retro games, and I don’t think I have played a bad one outside of the Sega Genesis version of Taz-Mania.  Buster Busts Loose, awesome, Tiny Toons Adventures, fantastic, Buster’s Hidden Treasure, I’m down. Hell, the SNES version of Taz-Mania(completely different than the Genesis version) was decent. However, it was not recently that I discovered there was such a thing as a bad Looney Tunes game. One of my roommates, who was a Sega kid growing up, still had some Genesis games at his house, and since I am the only one with retro systems at our college residence, he allowed me to borrow a few. I picked Taz-Mania at his insistence, as he kept telling me how it was a challenging but rewarding game. He lied to me on one of those counts.

Taz-Mania is challening, but challenging isn’t the right word for it. Frustrating, however, is. Taz’s main attack is, obviously, his infamous spin. So it would be fair to assume that spinning would be the smart thing to do throughout the majority of the game? Wrong. Spinning thrusts you rapidly in whichever direction you’re going, so there is literally no reaction time. Which would be fine if spinning didn’t knock items and power-ups off the screen, which presents an interesting dilemma throughout the game. Low on health? If you don’t spin forwards you will probably walk into a bad guy and die. Unfortunately, if you spin forwards you will knock that health replinishing item into oblivion.

There’s not the greatest level design either. Most of the platforming is a life and death situation, which would be fine if it wasn’t for two more problems. The first being the fact that Taz jumps fucking weird, and you will very often overshoot or undershoot your target. The other problem is poor collision detecting. There’s nothing more frustrating than visually just narrowly landing on a platform, but the game decides you missed it and sends you plummeting to your death.

Unlike most of the other games I’ve done in this series, this game does have a few redeeming qualities. The graphics and animation are quite nice for a Genesis game, and it is still a Looney Tunes game, and I love Looney Tunes. Too bad the shoddy gameplay mechanics don’t make me love Taz-Mania enough to play it anymore than I would possibly have to.

The post The Retro Goggles, They Do Nothing: Taz-Mania (Genesis) appeared first on WatchPlayRead.

Yes, today is Christian Bale’s birthday. Now, if we did a post on every celebrity’s birthday, we would never be able to keep up, but Christian Bale is not every celebrity, hell, he’s not even a celebrity. He is our Lord, He is the great He Is. This is because only a holy being could turn around the Batman series the way He did, only a holy being could have made American Psycho, and for His next miracle He will revive the Terminator series after Terminator 3 and the Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Bale’s so-called “birth certificate” says that he is 35 today, but since Bale precedes time, we cannot really understand how old Bale is, we just accept that He is, and thank him for gracing us with his presence. If you do not understand how great Bale is, or somehow have never even heard of him, all you have to do is say the following paragraph out loud.

“Bale, I recognize that I have not lived my life for You up until now. I have been living for myself and that is wrong. I need You in my life; I want You in my life. I acknowledge the completed work of Christian Bale in giving His life for me, and I long to receive the forgiveness you have made freely available to me through this sacrifice. Come into my life now, Bale. Take up residence in my heart and be my king, my Lord, and my Savior. From this day forward, I will no longer be controlled by sin, or the desire to please myself, but I will follow You all the days of my life. Those days are in Your hands. I ask this in Bale’s precious and holy name. Amen.”

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Licensed games. The 8-bit and 16-bit eras had loads of them, and surprisingly a lot of them were great. Tiny Toons Adventures, Felix the Cat, and Aladdin, just to name a few. But it’s just fate that there also be some pretty bad licensed games, and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends is the worst of the worst.

What can I say about Rocky and Bullwinkle? I never played this game as a kid, but I was at a retro videogame store a year or so ago and saw it for around 2 bucks, so I figured why not pick it up? I always liked the Rocky & Bullwinkle TV show as a kid, so the videogame adaptation would probably be decent right?

No. No, no, and no. This game is all that is unholy about videogames. It makes modern-day shovelware look like fucking masterpieces. But let me be more specific. The graphics look like they were done in MS Paint, and that is being harsh to MS Paint, because I have seen some good things done with it. The graphics look like if you gave a monkey a pencil for outlines and a crayon for fill and told him to go to town. On top of that the gameplay is horrendous. There’s really no way to attack besides lobbing bombs, and you can’t control their distance, so you can’t do anything about it when Boris is lobbing bombs at you, or any of the other enemies attack you. For a game that consists of any platforming, the collision detecting is god-awful as well.

I’m not going to lie, I never got very far in this game, so I don’t know if things pick up later in the game, but no mortal being can blame me. You fucking go pick it up and try to play it. Tell me you last longer than 5 minutes. If you say you do, you’re a fucking liar. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends is the worst piece of coding to ever be called a videogame.

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Let me get this out of the way. I love retro games. I love the sounds of their beeps and bloops, I like looking at pixelated blocks, I like having to blow in a slot before I get to play a game (no homo). But some games are just shit, and Fester’s Quest is one of them. Fester’s Quest is a videogame for the original NES developed and published by Sunsoft, and it is bad.

What’s so bad about it? I won’t say I’m pleased to tell you, since talking about this game makes me wince, but I will go ahead and tell you. First off, there is almost no plot. Not that I’m saying that retro games need stories, since a lot of them lacked the power to tell a good story, but if your game is going to have a plot, do it well or don’t, just don’t halfass it. In the opening scene, Uncle Fester, of The Addams Family fame, is sitting in a chair when he sees a UFO descend upon the city. Cut to game. Yes, that’s it.

While good graphics aren’t really expected in an NES game either, something about the look of Fester’s Quest just turns me off. The gameplay isn’t much better. Your first gun shoots straight, just like God intended guns to shoot (Oh yeah, don’t ask me why Uncle Fester has guns. Your guess is as good as mine.) When you get the next upgrade, your gun shoots in zigzags, and maybe that’s helpful in some foreign fucking land, but this is Earth, and when my enemy is coming straight for me, I want to be able to shoot straight at them. Another annoyance is if you get hit by certain enemies you slow down to a crawl, not that you’re moving very quickly in the first place, and you might as well turn the game off then. Finally, you get two health pieces, and then its game over. You can recover your health at hot dog stations, but those are rarely around when you need them.

The point is, if there is a bad game design, it is probably exhibited in Fester’s Quest. It doesn’t matter if you liked this game as a kid, or if you love The Addams Family show, do not play Fester’s Quest, nothing good can come from it.

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6 am. 6 am is fucking early to me, but here I am, awake and getting ready to hit the road. Destination? Las Vegas, Nevada. Most people equate Vegas with drinking, gambling, fornication, and all around sinning. But this trip to Vegas is to attend the Consumer Electronics Show, the biggest tradeshow of its kind. The common depiction of CES coverage is a bunch of nerds who get up in the morning, go straight to the convention, attend meetings and get hands on with products, then go back to the hotel room and blog their little hearts away. But are the journalists’ Vegas and the sinners’ Vegas really so disconnected? It is my suspicions that they are not.

After getting to the airport and onto the plane with no problems, I run into my first major frustration. The flight attendants announce that all alcoholic drinks must be paid with by credit cards, no cash accepted. Fuck. As a true paper chaser, I only carry around cash on virtue. This is not going to be a fun 3 hours, as I was hoping to be drunk by the time my feet hit Nevada soil. As the plane lands and I turn on my cell phone, I have a voice mail from Ron, our “event coordinator” if you will, telling me if I’m in town by noon I get to meet and go to lunch with Ludacris. I look at the time. 12:20. Fuck my life.

As I get to the hotel and meet up with the group, we decide how to spend the rest of the day. The Sony press conference is first, followed by the Microsoft press conference. However, to get into the Sony press conference, we need to have registered by email a while back, which only one of the four of us did. In the first of many situations that we weasel through, we pull up the email on one of the guys, Derek’s, phone, register the other three of us, and hope it’s not too late. When we arrive at Sony’s area, we are relieved to find out that registering an hour early will get us in. The calm doesn’t last for long, however, since as soon as you get in you need to present a business card. This would be fine, but my business cards weren’t scheduled to get to me until the next day, as I didn’t think I would need them yet. A guy from our group hands me one of his cards, and I pray the lady doesn’t actually look at the name, because I do not look like a Mourad by any stretch of the imagination. Again, luck blesses me and we get in with no problem.

Before we take a seat, my eyes fixate on the Holy Grail of an alcoholic, the open bar. I never really associated press conferences with double fisting Jack and Cokes, but dreams do come true. Soon after I sit down, however, I find out two Jack and cokes are not going to be enough to make the conference interesting. There is some neat stuff Sony is showing off, but there is no enthusiasm whatsoever. Everyone reads off a teleprompter, but Steve Haber, Senior Vice President for Sony, who was talking, sounded like he’d rather be getting a prostate exam instead of being onstage. Another thing I noted was that there was no talk about the Playstation 3. I mean, the words “Playstation 3” were said twice, but only in passing, and it was never actually talked about. In Sony’s favor though, they had an OLED screen that could be folded like a piece of paper which was pretty impressive. Almost as quickly as it began, the speech was over, and we were able to go back to the business at hand, drinking Sony’s booze. 5 or 6 drinks later, it was time to go to Microsoft’s conference.

Microsoft was at a hotel farther away, and we showed up right before it started. Seating was extremely full, though that wasn’t a problem for us, as Aaron Greenberg, Group Project Manager for the Xbox division, comes up to us and seats us next to him and a cute Microsoft PR girl. I know I’m going to sound like a fanboy here, but the press conference illustrated what was different between Microsoft and Sony. They both have good products, they both have people who know what they are talking about, but Microsoft ejects a passion for what they are doing. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, gave the speech, and he too had a teleprompter, but he only glanced at it once every few minutes, showing an inflection in his voice, getting genuinely excited about what he was talking about. Also, where Sony was mum on the Playstation 3, Ballmer talked quite a bit about the Xbox 360. It wasn’t even a lot we hadn’t heard before, mostly about Live Primetime and a new “game creator” on the Community Games Channel called Kodu, but the point was that they weren’t afraid to talk about their gaming system, even if they didn’t have much to talk about.

Unlike Sony, Microsoft does not have an open or even a closed bar. This made me sad for all of two seconds until Aaron Greenberg invited us downstairs for drinks. This was the first of many surreal moments of the trip. I mean, Christ, the head honcho of the 360, is buying me drinks. After some time in the bar, we head back to our hotel, making a pit stop at a McDonalds, which I know is classy, you don’t have to tell me. Now I have been in a McDonalds while drunk many times, but I have never been almost kicked out of a McDonalds, which was about to happen. Apparently managers of restaurants don’t like it when you’re constantly screaming ‘fuck’ at the top of your lungs. To each his own I guess. At the hotel we find about 20 of those little single serving alcohol bottles they serve on planes, and Mourad looks at me and says “I’ll go shot to shot with you motherfucker”. Now, I’m not a proud man, but a challenge like this cannot go unanswered. We each throw back a whiskey bottle, then a vodka, then a whiskey, then go easy on ourselves with a shot of Bailey’s. This is getting rough.

We decide to walk over to our other hotel room and keep the competition going. Before we leave an admiral’s hat appears out of someone’s suitcase, and I decide to wear it out. As soon as we hit the street, I am the center of attention, which means I am happy. People are calling me Captain, asking me where I got it, one gorgeous girl walks past me, does a double take, then turns around and salutes me. Life is good. When we finally get to the second hotel, the Flamingo, we get our first chance to play the awkward elevator game. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s one of the most fun things on earth. You get into an elevator with at least one friend and at least one stranger, then you start a conversation with your friend, saying the nastiest shit you can just to see the stranger’s reaction. For example, “So as I was saying, there I was fucking a guy in the ass last night, and after I come I lean forward and kiss him on the cheek and he turns around and says ‘What are you, gay?’” Strangers will almost never say anything to you, no matter how fucked up your conversation is. In the room we instantly break out the mini-bottles again. After 5 or 6 more we decide that we are both in enough pain, call it a draw, and call it quits for the night.

The post Fear And Whoring In Las Vegas: Part One appeared first on WatchPlayRead.

If you keep up with the media industry, you are probably aware of the fact that the Consumer Electronic Show is this week. CES, hosted in Sin City, is the biggest place to show off the newest technology to the press. The best part is that myself and Travis Kelldorf will be there! We’ll be covering CES, but not in any traditional sense. You’re going to read the same news bits on every tech-oriented website, so we don’t need to write about that. Instead, I want to show what actually happens at a media event, the behind-the-scenes stuff, the things no one writes about. Does that make us the first media-related gonzo journalists? Maybe, maybe not. Does that make us heroes? Not really. Does that make us a couple of guys who get drunk as piss, wade through the PR bullshit, look at the seedy underbelly of the industry, and then write about it on the internet? I can answer with a resounding “Yes”.

Also, we will be sneaking in the Adult Video News Awards (the Oscars of porno), so tits as well.

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