Stay classy, EA.

I’ll give you a minute to re-read the ‘How To Win’ section a few times.

That’s right, EA literally wants you to sexually harass the booth babes at Comic-Con. You don’t have to settle for staring awkwardly at scantily-clad flesh and working up the nerve to brush your hand against an ass or two as you walk past them; their employer has actually posted a sexual bounty on them — so please feel free to grab a handful and get your money’s worth! And if your photos are the most ass-grabbingly great (keeping in mind step 3!) you’ll get to take them out to dinner in a fancy limo!

…

Goddamn it if EA isn’t the worst thing to happen to video games since Ultima Online. (Actually, scratch that. They published Ultima Online. I guess they’re just the worst thing.)

Every now and then I think about dropping everything and getting back into the video game industry, but then I am gripped by this fear, this panic, that somehow someday somewhere I would end up working for EA, and that’s enough to shake those dreams from my hair.

…

Oh, booth babes. Have we not yet visited enough ignominy and nerd germs upon you? Truly, you are the most underappreciated of all sex workers.

Corey & Vampirella. photo: roadkillbuddha

Duke Nukem Forever, the game that was promised to be a Quake II killer.  The game that was already so late by 2001 that they stopped announcing release dates. The game that had won the Vaporware Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003.

Now, we will likely never see the pixelated stripclubs and alien cops that were promised to us back in 1997.  All we have are a few minutes of footage from E3, and a handful of leaked screenshots and promo art.

In memory of what could have been, I will end this post with highlights from a list of things that have happened while DNF was under development:

• Over 25 Final Fantasy games and 2 Final Fantasy movies
• The entire Sims and Grand Theft Auto series.
• Also Unreal, Dance Dance Revolution, Tony Hawk, and Halo.
• The rise of P2P filesharing, including Napster.
• All three Star Wars prequels, and the LOTR film trilogy.
• Bullet time, Family Guy, South Park, and Harry Potter.
• Two Mars rovers and the International Space Station.

…and things that happened in less time than DNF’s development took:

• Everything The Beatles ever did.
• The United States moon program.
• World War I.
• World War II and the entire Manhattan Project. Including the fucking atomic bomb.

Rest in peace, Duke.

This just might be the best co-op game I’ve ever played. 4 players versus insane zombies, running from building to building, fucking shit up proper. From the Shacknews Review:

It’s actually very easy to quantify just how replayable Left 4 Dead is, in the same way that one can identify an infectious disease.

Because that’s what playing Left 4 Dead for the first time feels like–the beginning of a terrible affliction. We played the game for two straight days at Valve, only occasionally surfacing for a gasp of fresh snacks. We played so much Left 4 Dead that it made us all physically ill. We came home thoroughly infected, bed-ridden and moaning like the undead.

And the most common phrase going around our chat channel? “I wish I could play more right now.”

It really is that much fun.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be on Xbox Live.

All of this video is in-game. That is what the combat actually looks like.

The battles are real-time, the skill system is a perfect combination of the job system and the materia system, and I’m over 20 hours in and I just got off the first continent.

This game is to the 360 what FF7 was to the PS. It’s worth buying the console for.

…but don’t take my word for it, ask Famitsu (who gave it 9-9-9-8), or ask Japan (where 360s are now sold out at every major retailer in the country).

Weekly practice is between 7 PM Friday night and 5 AM Saturday morning. Perks include private jet and groupies.

Bonus points for helping to find my lost shaker of salt. (salt! salt!)

Discretion guaranteed, Inquire within!

I am!

It’s not Mass Effect, even though it’s the first game that’s ever made me miss Star Control 2.
It’s not Portal, even though GLaDOS is the best villain since Sephiroth.
…and it’s not Bioshock, even though it has the perhaps the best boss fight (Ryan, not the other one) in the history of RPGs.

It is not any of those brilliant, beautiful games which have brought me countless hours of enjoyment this year.

It’s Rock Band.

– Danny’s rave was fantastic. I opened with Apotheosis, and closed with Hellsau. I’m an asshole like that.
– Mass Effect just might be the best non-Japanese console RPG I’ve ever played. This is what Star Control 3 should’ve been like.
– There’s an instrumental mix of NIN’s Year Zero floating around. It turns a good album into an incredible one. You should find it and listen to it.
– I should be sleeping.

Class was good. The students are all pretty fun and friendly, so it wasn’t too tough. Mostly people I’d end up hanging out with outside class, if I lived in ALBERTALAND. The oldest student is sixty, but he’s easily the most fun. His daughter is a professional snowboarder, his son is an actor (Dead Like Me, Final Destination 3), and he loves industrial music. I might’ve sold him on coming to COMA in April.

In other news, I stumbled upon a Wii. It is sitting in a shiny white box, waiting to be loved upon my return to Ottawa – and loved it shall be.

I had more delicious burgers today, but paid the ultimate price for them: Hiccups. As the wise Siddhartha knew, life is suffering.

Delicious beefy suffering.

The highlighted letters spell ‘I am trying to believe’.

…which brings us to iamtryingtobelieve.com, which then leads us to all kinds of crazy audio files and fucked up and awesome websites.

I don’t know what to feel anymore, Trent. I am trying to believe. :(

A typical program:

Uematsu Play! A Video Game Symphony Fanfare
Uematsu Final Fantasy
Kondo Super Mario Bros.
Mitsuyoshi Shenmue
Eriksson Battlefield 1942
Uematsu Aerith’s Theme ur Final Fantasy VII
Nakamura Sonic the Hedgehog
Iwase Metal Gear Solid
Hülsbeck Apidya
Shimomura Kingdom Hearts
Soule The Elder Scrolls III
Uematsu Swing de Chocobo ur Final Fantasy
Grefberg The Chronicles of Riddick
Mitsuda Chrono Cross-Chrono Trigger
Hayes World of Warcraft
Yamaoka Silent Hill
O’Donnell/Salvatori Halo
Kondo The Legend of Zelda
Uematsu One Winged Angel ur Final Fantasy VII

Mike/Oni T, you guys down for a roadtrip? The tickets are, unfortunately, orchestra priced, but there are some fantastic seats available.

(More from always_black: Possessing Barbie.)

May the Revolution be kind to you, my friend.

Due to my crappy DVD drive, my XBox can only read DVD-R media. No CD-RW for me. Gonna have to get me a Phillips or maybe just the Thompson laser. After several unsuccessful attempts, I had DVD-R media my XBox could read.

Then came Debian. Or, more appropriately, Xebian. Even though it has horrible documentation, I managed to come out on the other side, a few hours later. I pulled a fakie on the FS so that it thinks all the needed partitions are inside one big 3GB file on my HD. This makes things simple.

THEN!

The Apt-Get nightmare. Hours and hours spend fighting with compilers, version conflicts, dependencies, and everything else I hate about Linux. I made it through, but just barely. I’ll have to take it easy for the next few days, glibc has sapped my strength.

In the end, however, it was all worth it. It took the day, but I got what I wanted. Linux running on an XBox, with full joystick support. Not because I give a crap about Linux, oh no. A much, much better reason.

The Ur-Quan are coming, bitches.