October 2009 Archives

Over the last few years, Guitar Hero and Rock Band have given us hundreds of songs to tap out on plastic guitars—-not even talking about any of the DLC. But there's still something missing.

I'll be honest; I find that orange key down at the end nearly impossible to press and still make it back up to the others. I've never been able to get very far in hard or expert difficulty. Instead, I try to make the game a bit more challenging instead by singing and playing at the same time. To me, this is the ultimate rock star image; whether it's James Hetfield or Paul McCartney, the singer playing guitar is the image that comes to mind.

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After checking out a few DS games, our friends from Nintendo had pulled out and set-up the Wii (trust me, you don't leave anything sitting out in one of these trailers when you're driving, unless you want it in pieces).

First up was Wii Fit Plus, the follow-up to the absurdly successful Wii Fit. Despite the Plus in the name, this game doesn't make any use of the Motion Plus peripheral, much to my chagrin. Despite that, I think Nintendo took the right route with this. After establishing a pretty solid base of what the Wii Balance Board can do in the first installment, there isn't too much entirely new to add to the experience. With that in mind, Nintendo is making this version of Wii Fit only $19.99 without the Balance Board.

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After skulking around the Warehouse district of Minneapolis for half an hour, I found it: Gleaming in the morning sunlight, Nintendo's silver Airstream trailer. Nintendo's representative introduced himself as Brent Smith. We chatted for a while about the coast-to-coast tour that's taken the bus through places like Salt Lake City and Denver and now to my beautiful city, but quickly got down to business.

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If you ask my friends what I will completely nerd out for, more than anything else, you're going to get three answers: Video games, Ghostbusters, and Batman. And rightly so, this summer has been a blast. I picked up Batman on release day and played through it from end to end within the week. The fourth-quarter gaming rush isn't over yet, but Batman is definitely one of my favorite games so far this year. Right after finishing that, I was finally able to get my hands on Ghostbusters. It's… not as good.

So why am I bringing up the two? Both are well known, well loved franchises, both games were made with involvement from writers and actors very experienced with the characters. The two are, however, completely different, and it's easy to see why one succeeds and the other fails.

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(note, special thanks to Matt Green also of Kombo for linking me on PressTheButtons.com!)

Recently GameSpot posted a story quoting Bobby Kotick's ideas for running Activision. One of his goals was "to take all the fun out of making video games." It is his intention to install into company culture "skepticism, pessimism, and fear."

And then if you remember, he's also joked—-no one knows how jokingly—-that games should be more expensive than they are. Maybe $90! And of course who can forget Activision dumping Ghostbusters and Brutal Legend because they can't—-in the words of Kotick himself—-exploit those franchises every year on every platform.

And this brings us to one of the biggest conundrums gamers deal with. We, as a community, argued with Roger Ebert about whether games are art. We argued passionately, sometimes intelligently (other times not), for our favorite medium and pastime. We cited games like Rez, Beyond Good and Evil, Katamari Damacy and the like as shining examples of interactive games as art.

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I’ve set this as my bio page, but it’s worth posting here as well.

I knew, with absolute certainty, that I was a gamer during the week of November 13th, 2000.

In one week, Shenmue and Skies of Arcadia hit the Dreamcast, and I was in heaven. I understood the true meaning of the fall rush for the first time, and I liked it. It was like a drug rush. More games than I could possibly play were coming out, and for the first time I had money to buy them. It was awesome.

Yeah, I’d played lots of games before Skies and Shenmue. And they certainly weren’t the best ones I’ve ever played, either. Games like Shining Force and Final Fantasy VI had captured my attention long before and extracted many hours of my life through my fingertips.

Metal Gear Solid was one of the first games that gave me that “Wish I could see it for the first time again” feeling. Silent Hill taught me the true meaning of survival horror in a video game.

I’d even faithfully read NextGen magazine for some time before that, something I kept doing right up until the last, sad issue.

I knew I was a gamer before that week, but here’s what I figured out: Gamer is the word I would tell people to use to describe me. I am a gamer. It’s a lifestyle, where the first thing I pay for after utilities and necessities is games. Even as early as my NES, the focus of my waking life has been games. I’ve always been renting new games, saving up for new game systems, and reading magazines and later on, sites.

Books like NextGen and even IGN’s Dreamcast site are ultimately what led me to major in Journalism at the U of M (and my interest in animation and Japanese culture brought me to my Asian Languages and Literatures major, obviously). During my time at the U, I had a few personal blogs, but it never occurred to me to start a video-game specific blog before then. I just kind of dreamt starry-eyed about writing about video games someday, wondering how I would ever get that far.

After finishing college, I got a job fixing DSL and figuring out how the Internet works. I’m still doing that today, and I’m damn good at it. During the past few years, I’ve brought my resume to Game Informer—the locally based and internationally read gaming magazine that’s been around almost as long as EGM before its bucket was suddenly, forcibly kicked. Once, I even got to talk to none other than Andy McNamara. It was kind of like an interview, but more like a fan tour. I was… well, really immature then. If I had a chance to go in today, our conversation would be very different. But then, I don’t know that without that conversation, I would be who I am.

That conversation, and the regrets that came from it, fueled me over time to actively work on writing. First, my good friend and writing mentor Serdar Yegulalp introduced me to anime.advancedmn.com. I began writing anime and manga reviews for the site, something I still do. I also started my own blog on my webspace. I’ve had this blog for just over a year and while I don’t post on it every day, I do post regularly. I’ve also started writing at gaming site Kombo.com, a higher-traffic site under the same corporate umbrella as the anime site.

To fuel the fires and oil the gears in my head, I increased my intake of gaming commentary tenfold. It started sort of a renewed fire for games and writing as I read more and more sites, started listening to podcasts like ListenUP and RebelFM, and started interacting with more successful writers via Twitter and through Kombo.

So that’s me. I’m a gamer. More than anything, I like to play, think about, write about, and talk about games. When I get home tonight, I’ll play games. When I wake up this weekend, I’ll play games. I could’ve said that ten years ago, and I’ll be able to say it 10 years from now.

When the Harry Potter books were still coming out, a number of my friends would go reread the last book or two right before the new one hit the shelves. I never understood why. Then I read Eden, and understood why from the inside out.

I’ll admit Eden isn’t exactly a six-hundred page epic, but author and artist Hiroki Endo manages to squeeze so much stuff into each volume that it feels necessary to go back and read the previous volume before picking up the new one. It’s a pleasure instead of a chore, as my friends demonstrated by re-reading Potter.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Eden is really complicated. There’s no way to describe it in a single sentence without leaving out all the things that also make it such a wonderful story. Sure, it has nigh-invulnerable cyborgs, the South American mafia, and the coolest looking virus ever. Even with all that, though, Endo reminds us that without equally interesting people, almost any story would be instantly forgettable. Volume 12 is no different. Along with all the catch-up, action, and detail, we finally get acquainted with Elijah’s younger sister and delve into her past.

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So many of the manga and anime I enjoy are about characters striving, confidently and relentlessly to be the best. Guys like Slam Dunk’s Hanamichi and Miyamoto Musashi in Vagabond never give up, never waver. You know that no matter what happens, they’re going to get back up.

I think that’s part of why Welcome to the NHK hits so close to home for me. Instead of characters I admire, or want to study, I see parts of myself and my friends. While these characters don’t fit into the usual things that hallmark my favorites, they’re precisely why this show was such an intense experience.

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Talking about Slam Dunk volume-by-volume is always difficult for me. If you’ve read any of my other reviews, you know I’m a huge fan of the series. I’ve watched the show in its entirety twice, including the movies. The TV series (watchable on Funimation’s video site!) doesn’t cover everything that happens in the manga, but what it does show it follows almost frame-by-frame. I know this stuff by heart.

Even so, the ebb of emotions as I read stays the same. Shohoku finishes their practice game against Ryonan with a surprising result. As the last moments of the game tick away you can see not only the steel determination of the team, but also their relative immaturity as they begin to celebrate a few seconds too early. Hanamichi, despite attempts to make people believe otherwise, has worked harder than anyone. His cheap sneakers have worn through completely, and look a bit more like sandals than tennis shoes. He takes the loss especially hard, but his feelings only serve to remind his friends that finally, the red-haired bully has found something worth his attention that doesn’t involve flying fists.

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