Television
Tetris is now universally known as the "game we play when there is nothing else to play." Everybody I know has at least one iteration or another of this puzzle building legend with them at all times! Originally designed by Alexey Pajitnov in 1984, the Russian puzzler gained industry momentum when it debuted on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989 where it officially became a household name. Now, thanks in large to Dish Network, we will be able to play Tetris on our TV's with our remote control! The service will cost a measly $2.99 a month that will be added to your cable bill but with the varied ways to play this already occupying our time, this service feels a little nonsensical and unessential. This will probably appeal to more core enthusiasts and digital game collectors. As for me, I will stick to my treasured and rare copy of Tetris DS!
Dish Network bringing Tetris to you TV! [Destructoid]
Longtime reader and IRC chatroom moderator Jetuser is currently live blogging this year's Video Game Awards in our #gaygamer channel on our IRC server (irc.gaygamer.net). IF you're without a TV and want to know what's happening, or just want to talk about it, feel free to join in. If you don't have an IRC client, you can login to the GayGamer Forum and use our web based client.
Inspired by the documentary, The King of Kong, tonight's episode of Bones (airing on Fox affiliates in the United States, 8pm Eastern and Pacific, 7pm Central) centers around a fictional arcade game, Punky Pong, that somehow leads to murder!
The victim, Steve Rifton, is the only active player known in the gaming community to have received a perfect score on a famous video game. Steve turned his success into a lucrative partnership with a gaming referee and charged fans to play on the very machine that gave him the perfect score. But between sour business deals and bitter competitors, the team at the Jeffersonian must work to narrow down the many suspects with motive for ending Rifton's reign as gaming king.
The episode is called The Gamer in the Grease, so you know, maybe don't have dinner while you're watching it. The episode is also basically a big commercial for James Cameron's Avatar, and features the characters buying tickets for the movie, talking about how awesome it is, etc. Corporate synergy! I guess whatever it takes to pay the bills, right?
According to TVGuide Magazine, the folks behind the show programmed a working version of the game featured in the episode, and a web version should be playable at some point tomorrow. Supposedly it's a cross between Pong and Donkey Kong, and I'm sure it's just great. Or at least something to check out when you're bored at work. If you're not one of those traditional TV watching types, the episode should be up on Hulu and Fox.com starting tomorrow, but again, only for Americans. I don't generally watch these types of crime procedurals, but Bones has somehow wormed its way into my schedule, largely because of the fact that it's not so damned serious all the time. Is the show a (not-so) guilty pleasure for anyone else?
The King of Kong becomes 'Bones' murder mystery fodder [Kotaku]
While this is only tangentially game related, I know a couple of people I've told were glad to hear it, so I thought I'd share with the group. If you're looking for a way to bring your (nerdy) family together around the Xbox 360 or PS3 this weekend and just can't get everyone to pick up a controller, I thought I'd give folks a heads up that seasons 1 through 3 of the classic sci-fi series Farscape are now available for Instant Queue on Netflix. If you've got an Xbox Live Gold Membership, or received your PS3 streaming disc, just log into Netflix and add them to your list.
It had a few creative bumps here and there, but If you're a fan of spacey sci-fi like Battlestar Galactica and Firefly, I definitely recommend checking out at least the first season. By now the special effects probably look a little dated (it premiered a decade ago), but the character design and set work is still a sight to behold, as long as you can get past the initial shock of being expected to take muppets seriously. Newcomers may also see why some of us were so excited to hear Claudia Black voicing characters in both Uncharted 2 and Dragon Age: Origins this year.
For some reason season 4 isn't available for streaming or rent, so if you get totally addicted and watch the first three seasons in a marathon viewing session, you may have to wait a little bit to get closure. The final miniseries, The Peacekeeper Wars, isn't streaming, although you can rent it on DVD. For a long time the series was really hard to find on DVD for reasonable prices, although a recent re-release seems to have brought them down to earth, so to speak, and this new streaming deal may be related to that.
In the late 80s and early 90s there were a lot of cartoons based on video games. Few of them lasted more than a season and even fewer of them could be described as successful adaptations. And some of them were recently put on a website called Jaroo. You can go there right now to watch Captain N, Sonic Underground, Pole Position, Super Mario Bros, and The Legend of Zelda. Most of them only have the first few episodes up right now, but probably more than enough to get a sense of these shows.
I have to admit that I've never seen Sonic Underground before today and the opening sequence alone left me speechless. As a kid I was obsessed with the 'Planet Mobius' version of Sonic and as an adult I'm obsessed with amazing television, so I can't believe I haven't seen this until now. Apparently Sonic Underground is about Sonic and his brother Manic and sister Sonica, all three of which are voiced by Jaleel White, who is most famous for his role as Steve Urkle. In case you didn't catch that, this show contains a Urkle doing a female version of his Urkle voice as a primary character. It's pretty incredible. I plan on watching every single episode they have on Jaroo, for reasons I could not begin to explain.
Also, if you haven't seen the Mario, Zelda, or Captain N shows they're all worth watching. Zelda is probably only worth watching to get a sense of context for the infamous "Excuse me, Princess!" catchphrase. The Mario show might be worth watching if only for the weird live action sitcom-esque interludes where Mario is portrayed by Captain Lou. The Captain N show, the cornerstone of my childhood fantasies (I had several recurring dreams about the Eggplant Wizard) is worth watching if only for the intense emotional turmoil you're likely to experience reconciling the show's actual quality with its potential.
Welcome to Videoland [The Mega Man Network]
Sarcasm and video game references are the cornerstones of all online gaming discussion. Sarcastic dismissal of someone else's outrage is even more satisfying when paired with a referenced to the shared subculture of the forum, further asserting your right to be there. Which is why a phrase as universal and annoying as "Excuse me, Princess!" is so powerful. In fact, the catchphrase from the Legend of Zelda cartoon is so easy to drop into any conversation that
LinkBizarro Obnoxious 80s Cartoon Link somehow managed to
say it 29 times in the show's brief 13 episode run.
But there's a problem! The Internet, and most gaming discussion, is text-based which makes it difficult to convey a specific tone. Without being sure you're conveying the proper amount of sarcasm you run the risk of sounding super polite and also confused about the monarchical system. You need to make sure that when you say "Excuse me, Princess!" people know you're not serious! That's where adding extra letters u to "excuse" comes in. By adding more letters u you can force the reader's internal reading voice to drag out the pronunciation and ensure they pick up on your sarcastic tone! But how many letters u do you need to add to convey the correct amount of sarcasm? Luckily, computational linguist,
Dinosaur Comics author, and IMHO
total stud Ryan North has found the answer:
This graph shows the correlation between the amount of Google results and the amount of 'u's in "excuse." Points of interest:
- "Excuuse me, princess!" is really unpopular, given its ease in typing: people either write the phrase with The Canonical Number of Letters U (that is, 1), or write it with more. I believe this reflects a tension between dictionary spelling and how the word is said: if you're going to break the rules, people break them in a way that's clear and unambiguously not a typo!
- There is a marked preference for 41 letters u: "excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me, princess!" has 3,770 results, while the results around it have tons fewer. That's that bump near the end of the graph! Clearly there is a connection here with the amount of time the average person is willing to hold down their "u" key before losing interest and seeing what the other keys do. [Note: This may be a result of this YTMND which has 41 letters u in the title]
- It took 50 letters u ("excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me, princess!") to get 0 results. I was going to stop there, but then I made the mistake of checking 51 letters u, which had a few hits, as did 52. It was at 67 letters u ("excuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuse me, princess!") that my Google search box was mostly the letter "u" and I realized that there is no upper limit on how many letters u could appear. It's letters u all the way down, you guys! So I stopped and wished I'd written a script to do this instead, but I really thought we'd peter out before 67.
If you're still reading this post and haven't yet found this topic totally exhausting, you can check out Ryan North's
original post which contains the complete data set, including the exact number of results per number of letters u.
While this is old news to anyone in the United States, last night Sci-Fi Sy-Fy Channel's WCG Ultimate Gamer had its debut on Australian television.
Having not heard of the show before yesterday and accidentally catching it at the last minute, I'm still not entirely sure what I felt about it. If you're unfamiliar with the show's concept, it features twelve "top gamers" living in one house Big Brother style, facing challenges each week as they're kicked off one by one. Each show has the contestants first competing in a real life competition inspired by video games, then facing off against each other playing said video game. In the first episode, the inspiration was Rock Band 2, which had the players grouped into bands to learn how to sing and play real instruments before competing with one another on the virtual ones.
While I do give the show some points for not going for the easiest stereotypes, at least for a program marketed towards mainstream "non-gamers," I was disappointed how silly they edited the episode to look with respect to gamers nevertheless. Given that the show itself was sponsored by the World Cyber Games I had hoped for a little bit more elevation, but even while watching it I still felt like I was supposed to be giggling at how seriously each player took their hobby.
From the onset the housemates were competitive and rather hostile towards one another, and the episode even got the requisite anti-social behavior from "KosherHamm," the competition's sports-game-loving jock whose biggest contribution to the show before getting eliminated was complaining about another male contestant's femininity during the band challenge.
Even putting aside concerns about stereotypes, the show itself wasn't all that interesting to me. Certainly they tried their best to make it more exciting, both between the Matrix-esque "isolation room" and Samsung Stadium, but no amount of flashing lights and plasma/LCD screens can make up for the fact that essentially, watching WCG Ultimate Gamer is about as interesting as watching over someone's shoulder as they play a video game. For me, that means not very.
Admittedly, this was only the first episode. I don't know if things improve, even though the show has finished in the US by now. Searching around online it was hard to gauge the popularity it had with other gamers, and I wasn't able to find any metrics for the show's overall ratings to see how it fared with non-gamers as well. (I purposefully haven't read the thread about it on our own forums while I decide whether or not I'm going to keep watching.) While I can give WCG a golf-clap for being involved in a project that seeks to expose "gamer culture" to a wider audience, I wish they could have done it in a way that didn't seem so dumbed down, or like a joke in and of itself. Nevertheless, I concede that I could simply be the grumpy old man that doesn't "get it."
What about those of you in the US who've seen the show come and go? Did you enjoy it or not?
This is 50% old news and 50% new news.
Back in 2006 Disney traded [ESPN] sportscaster Al Michaels to NBC Universal in exchange for the rights to the character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Al Michaels had worked for ABC Sports (a subsidiary of Disney) for over three decades and famously said "Do you believe in miracles? YES!" during the "Miracle on Ice" game (for the uninitiated: it was one of those symbolic 'beat the Russians, beat communism' matches, like Rocky 4 or Mega Man 4) that inspired the Disney movie Miracle. Oswald was one of Walt Disney's earliest creations but Walt lost the rights to him in a nasty buy-out in the late 1920s and the rights to the character eventually ended up in the hands of NBC Universal. The loss of Oswald lead Walt Disney to creating a very similar character, Mickey Mouse.
Up until this week, Disney's motive for obtaining the rights to Oswald was unknown. Game Informer's recent preview of Epic Mickey reveals that not only will Oswald the Rabbit be the game's primary antagonist (which is awesome, IMO) but when the project started Disney still didn't own the rights to Oswald. The upcoming game is so important to Disney that CEO Bob Iger traded to NBC Universal one of the most prominent sportscasters in history for a cartoon rabbit to be repurposed as a video game villain. Epic.
Little is known about Oswald's exact role in Epic Mickey, but Game Informer has hinted that he may be jealous of Mickey for stealing the spotlight. Though Mickey and Oswald are pretty similar, one of Oswald's more notable schticks is his constant reproduction--because he's a lucky rabbit, you see. A few cartoons feature him having to stop an endless flow of babies from a stork, or being heckled by his children who sometimes appear as background characters. I'm really hoping we'll see baby Oswalds as minor enemies, but that's pure speculation. We'll know more about Oswald's role as the game nears release.
Epic (Mickey) trade: Disney swaps Al Michaels for Oswald [Joystiq]
It was a sad day in the video gaming and animation industry yesterday. The amazing animator and talent Yoshinori Kanada passed away this Wednesday of a sudden heart attack. He was 57 years old.
Kanada is known for his work with Studio Ghibi as well as Square Enix. HIs body of work is almost completely unsurpassed. He was a key player in 5 of Studio Ghibi's greatest feature length films including: Kiki's Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, Porco Rosso, Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke. Most of these films are easily in my list of favorite animated films of all time.
Kanada is also known for his work with Square Enix' film Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within, and later became the animation director of several of their titles.
It is obvious that the animation world is going to be at a loss without him. He helped pioneer modern animation and he will be missed.
Yoshinori Kanada passes away [Anipages Daily]
[via Kotaku]
Watching Hulu on American PS3s was never the smoothest experience, but if you had the internet connection it was serviceable. Now appears the service has decided to take even those scraps away from us and is blocking the PS3's web browser from viewing videos on the site entirely.
As Engadget points out, if you change "a browser's user-string to match the console" you'll get the same message as PS3 owners:
Unfortunately, this video is not available on your platform.
If this is an intentional snubbing, the question is why? Perhaps Hulu is appeasing its content providers by trying to make sure people can only watch the site's videos on small laptop screens and computer monitors. Or maybe it was a request by Sony, who want to sell more video content though PSN. There's also the notion that the Hulu is just looking into separate licensing deals with each of the consoles. I mean, Microsoft or Sony announcing Hulu exclusivity would be a pretty big deal, especially as the service's offerings continue to expand.
It's probably not a great loss for most PS3 owners, and I personally only used it a handful of times, it's always a bit sad when the world gets a little less free and easy.
Hulu to PlayStation 3 browsers: "This video is not available on your platform" [Engadget]
[via: Kotaku]
[image via: FormatWarCentral.com]
While they've been around the XBLA Video Marketplace for a while, MTV Networks and its concomitant lineup of uberpopular television networks are coming to the PS3. This bit of Jones'-up-with-keeping will see MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Spike, CMT, The N, TV Land, Atom and of course everybody's favorite gay network, Logo.
The bf and I routinely use either the PS3 or the Xbox 360's video services, much like iTunes, and while it doesn't really qualify as a beloved service, it's definitely handy to have one, two, or three places to go to check out TV you've missed.
What's neat here, IMHO, is that we've now got a plurality of console-based gay video content. No matter which platform you go for, every console that sells video content (ie, both of them) will have some Viacom-approved LGBT programming for sale. It's also a good opportunity to praise big business for once, since the presence of Logo on these consoles is strictly a result of Logo's position as part of the MTV Networks portfolio. When MTVN was bringing their content to the 360, Logo was originally not part of the deal - but because of the mainstream profitability of the other channels, Logo got included as part of the package.
To see that accidental bit of progress propagated to a second console is simply fantastic. Whether you watch the shows or not, it's important that the gay content is there in the first place.
I'm an unapologetic fan of the Game Center CX series. Show, game, whatever. Gimmie it all! To the unacquainted, Game Center CX is a television show about a mock cooperation that tortures comedian Shinya Arino with the aid of abusively difficult retro video games. At the end of every season, Arino receives a promotion.
Late last year the series spawned a video game, which is scheduled for a 2008 US release by XSEED Games. Now, Japan is looking down the barrel of a sequel. Much like it's predecessor, Arino has been transformed into a dark sorcerer forcing you to play video games with a child version of himself. This time, however, the game is not focused around only Famicom-like titles, now it includes Gameboy, Game and Watch, and just general retro titles!
This two sheet article (which I can't read) surfaced in Famitsu. Lets just hope that XSEED jumps on this title faster than the last one, because I simply cannot wait to get my hands on this title. Play-asia might be getting a little bit more business this year.
[via Wii Everyday]
And girls who like girls who like rumble packs!
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