[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“It’s definitely a very pretty game (Photo courtesy nxcuso)”] [/caption] Well, guys, I finally did it. After all the hype and all the insistence of my friends, I plopped down $60 and bought me Skyrim. Mind you, I found Fallout 3 to be dull most of the time and marginally entertaining at other times and I never had even the slightest interest in playing Oblivion, but here I was, buying into the hype. ...
To the abovementioned small man and to others like him, to all the craftsmen of these mommy’s-credit-card-number-snatching games like Tap Zoo and Tap Pet Shop and Top Girl and what-have-you, I offer this lesson from the annals of economics: “Monetize” is a fucking stupid word. The idea of a business is to make money. “To do business” means “to monetize something”. A “product” is something a business makes. To speak of “monetizing a product” borders on ridiculous. ...
So you walk into a Boss Room, and your six dudes are there, talking about how “You can’t do this to us!” “Let’s get him!” “Yeah, let’s do it!” And then the fight starts: and you’re just the three dudes you had picked previously on the menu. Then the battle ends, and there’s all six characters, some of them wounded, others just winded. “We did it!” Uh, okay. What were the other three characters doing during the fight? Were they fighting some other boss that the artists didn’t care to draw? (They were probably off in the corner smoking a bowl and talking about what it’d be like to get a blow job in space.) ...
In a sense, doing this blog is a really strange thing for me. I’m more than happy to share my opinion with anyone about the music, movies, or games that I love, but I get nearly crippling anxiety when it comes to actually compelling them to sit down and experience the media I’m trying to recommend. It makes no sense, of course. Why would it matter if they like it or not, right? I mean, it’s not like it’s life or death or that they’ll stop being my friend, but I still get nervous. ...
[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Wallpaper courtesy Pet-Shop on DeviantArt”] [/caption] Ruminations on video games as an art form - this could very well become a Mother 3 review. There will be spoilers here. Seriously, don’t read it if you want to play Mother 3 and not have the plot spoiled. There’s a trite comparison that floats around the internet almost every month that always gets my eyes rolling. Inevitably, someone will call such-and-such the Citizen Kane of video games or ask what the Citizen Kane is or claim that the medium is immature because we’ve yet to hit our Citizen Kane. It’s exhausting and, quite frankly, futile and stupid. To begin with, Citizen Kane opened with good reviews and was generally well-received, but it didn’t start to gain notoriety for ten years. It didn’t even make #1 on a top movies list until twenty years had passed. When the Citizen Kane of gaming hits (god I hate that phrase), we probably won’t know it for quite some time. The more important point is that movies and games are apples and oranges. ...
Another year closes on IBNttT and while this blog is still less than two years old, I feel like it’s been steadily improving since its inception. When I first started it up, I wanted to keep an editorial voice and keep my personal life out of the mix. I strove to develop a unique, editorial voice, but I stopped short of personal anecdotes and opinions beyond critical expression. I can’t say that this blog has morphed into a forum for me to talk about my feelings or anything, but I do know that a combination of reading a lot of tim rogers and coming across Gamers With Jobs and attempting to get a writing gig with them opened me up to a more personal writing style that integrated my life experiences into my work. It’s a style I’m still experimenting with, but it’s nice to see that it’s generally well-received among my readers. ...
It’s really been tough coming up with the music that has most resonated with me in the 2000s. Wanting to represent the entire decade is tough, since I don’t really find the music that I used to listen to before I went to college all that good. Once I had more money and exposure beyond the mainstream acts I was familiar with in high school, I feel my tastes really changed up some. This list is definitely not representative of the actual best bands of the decade, they’re just bands that had a strong effect on me and my musical development. ...
Apotheosis- 1. The fact or action of becoming a god; deification 2. Glorification, exaltation; crediting someone with extraordinary power or status. Do you know who Tim Schafer is? When I still lived at home, my dad used to ask me, “When are you gonna grow up and stop playing video games?” He tells my mother that he’s sure I’m addicted to the medium. It’s true that I spend the vast majority of my free time playing games. I can name developers, producers, writers, designers, and even composers for games from my favorite series of games. This vast information age enables me to know everything about a game, down to its minutia, just by checking an online database. If there’s not enough information there, I can almost guarantee there are five or six fansites devoted to uncovering every last detail. It must be daunting for developers nowadays to produce in this environment. ...
Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen. There’s been a lot of news this week, so let’s get right down to it. The Xbox Live Summer of Arcade schedule has been announced and it looks like there are some great games coming soon. 22 July - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled - A 3D update of the classic arcade and SNES beat-em-up, this game could be fun, but then again, the 3D models just look so uninspired compared to the cartoon and their pixelated counterparts. ...
Hey loyal readers, I need your help in deciding what game to play next. I haven’t quite gotten my polling software down, so here’s a nifty embedded poll instead. Basically, I want to continue to write impressions about games that I’m playing, but I don’t know which one to move on to next. A little about each of the choices: Earthbound (Mother 2) A fantastic, Dragon Quest-inspired RPG series by Shigesato Itoi, Earthbound is fantastic, quirky, and interesting. I played this back when I was in middle school, but I think it deserves reexamining. Ideally I would be hooking up my SNES, which I still have, to get this to work, so that would be an adventure in and of itself. ...