These are the AKG K271s. They’re not in production anymore, but it looks like you can still find’em online for about $150. I wore them most of the evening, while playing The Witcher and listening to music whilst photoshopping. I checked out Miles Davis, Metallica, a variety of hip-hop, and some other stuff on random shuffle. The headphones sound great. They’re closed ear, and wow do they do a great job of isolating. Fair sound range, too. Everything I threw at it sounded fabulous.

Just as importantly, they’re extraordinarily comfortable. I had to wear them for almost 6 hours straight get tired of them. First off, they don’t sit on your ears but rather around them. Better yet, the padding is very nice. What really makes’em work though, is the sizing contraption on top. Rather than selecting your size, you just put’em on. The headband shapes to your head easily and stays that way without putting any undue pressure on you while you wear them.

Onto some side features. First off, on the left ear there’s a little button, almost invisible. When you take the headphones off, the headband retracts and is supposed to push in the button which then shuts the headphones off. I’ll admit that this didn’t work on this particular pair, but just because the end of the headphone band didn’t actually make contact. If I pushed the button down with my finger it worked perfectly and it never triggered accidentally. As you can see in the image, the cord disconnects from the headphones. It’s a push button disconnect, and it’s cool to know that if say, a friendly, loving cat chewed through your headphone cord, you could potentially get a replacement. Hell, I’d probably buy one preemptively.

Overall, these are really spectacular headphones and while I don’t normally wear headphones at home I’m seriously thinking about finding a pair (or the current incarnation, anyway) when money is available.

Here’s the obligatory picture of a cute Asian girl wearing the headphones.

This week, anime director Satoshi Kon, aged 47, died of pancreatic cancer. Normally I don’t get all emo over something like this but Kon’s passing is truly an important and sad moment for anime. With so many shows and movies just repeating the same memes, Kon always managed to bring something new to what otherwise has felt, at times, like a tired medium.

It probably hit me the hardest when I read some of his last words:

With feelings of gratitude for all that is good in this world, I put down my pen.

Well, I'll be leaving now.

Satoshi Kon

It’s hard to explain why the words affect me as much as they do. I think that if he hadn’t died he would’ve had much more to give to anime, but at the same time I think he was satisfied with what he’d given, and was at peace with himself. I hope that when it’s that time for me, I’ll be able to be half that cool.

In just a few minutes, I could be playing any of a few thousand Nintendo games ranging from the horrible Japanese Star Wars game to Super Mario Bros. 3, thanks to the magic of ROMs. But what about all those beautiful, seemingly indestructible (but always dusty) game cartridges from the heyday of 8 and 16-bit games that so many of us have stored in a plastic tote in our closets? I don’t know about you, but many of my consoles bit the dust years ago; some from the abuse that comes with overuse, others from neglect.

Here comes Hyperkin’s Retron3 to the rescue! In a long-past day, this gleaming, red and grey piece of electronics would’ve been smashed in a public ceremony, an abomination to be declared a harbinger of the end times. Sega and Nintendo fanboys alike would have shunned it for associating with the enemy (if licensing could’ve ever allowed its existence).

Check out the full article.

As years have passed by and I’ve gotten a bit older, piracy has become less and less interesting. Now, I’ll admit that some Japanese music that would be extraordinarily hard to find on disc has found its way to my computer, but even then I’ve purchased three or four CDs from Japan this year. Dear friends, keep going to Japan!

I have a Zune subscription for music, Netflix for movies, Gamefly for games—though admittedly I buy more of those than most other things—and a DVR for television that isn’t going to make it to DVD. There’s just no need for me to pirate stuff anymore; it’s too easy to get the stuff I want.

With that said, the market for used products is still alive and well, and has its place. While I don’t sell many of my games, I don’t mind buying used games. The ongoing argument about the role of retailers in game sales made me think about this a bit. While I prefer to buy games new, I think that the used market is absolutely necessary. Many gamers wouldn’t game if it weren’t for GameStop and the like.

Each time one of these developers goes off about the used market cannibalizing sales, I want to ask if they’ve ever bought a used car, an older house, a DVD from a bargain bin, or a book from Half Price Books. Buying things new is best when possible. If everyone only bought used, no one would make anything new. But if no one ever bought used, no one would buy anything. Except rich people. I would totally buy rich people.

Wait a second, that’s not what I meant.

Anyway, games have a limited life-span. Except StarCraft, apparently. And the great thing about console games is that they’re easy as heck to sell. Sure you could laze it up and go to GameStop (lazing it up has nothing to do with lasers), but if you’re a real savvy entrepreneur you could hit half.com or Gamefly’s used-game service and get more for your game. You could also visit Goozex and barter your way into new games, neither contributing nor taking away from the economy. Win-win!

Without those used game sales, you can bet that developers would be fretting that much more about new game sales.

Genres in video games are already confusing mazes of definitions: action games, adventure games, platformers. As gaming technology develops, some genres slowly become obsolete, such as top-down racers and on-rails shooters, yet we as an industry cling to ancient terminology and archaic descriptors for modern games. This leads us to ask what exactly is a role-playing game, and how can Western and Japanese versions of the same genre differ so dramatically?

Traditionally an RPG would have taken the form of a pen and paper game, like the timeless Dungeons and Dragons. It may also be live action - known as LARPing - yet no matter where you look, the basis for such games will be individuals assuming the role of an imagined or pre-created character.

If this is the sole prerequisite for a game to be considered to be an RPG, then almost every video game is one, as players have been assuming avatars for the past thirty years, from Pac-Man to Mario. Instead of having a human game master, however, the actual game environment and rule-set become the limiters and directors of the role playing. We no longer bother to classify a film if it has sound or color as practically all of them do, so what on Earth is the point of having a genre called RPG within a field almost entirely made up of them?

Check out the full article.

First off, it’s about zombies. Second, it has gorgeous animation. Third, the characters seem interesting.

The thing that will act as a barrier for the most people, I think, is the character designs and their origin. Just about every girl in the show is massively boobtastic. There’s a reason for this. Reason, not excuse.

The artist, Shouji Satou, is better known as Inazuma, a fairly prolific author of hentai doujin. The cover to the left is one of the few that is safe enough to post here. It’s easy to see in the female characters. They’re walking fantasies – schoolgirls with high stockings, a big-breasted school nurse, a girl with twin ponytails and glasses (not to mention she’s a full-on tsundere stereotype).

So, the show is heavy on fanservice. Now, it seems to subscribe to the Queen’s Blade school of service, where the people in the show aren’t aware of the jiggling and flashing going on. They’re just going about their day killing zombies with baseball bats and wooden swords. That’s enough for me to balance it out, but I know a lot of people will find it off-putting.

I want to go on a tirade here for people disrespecting my wife for liking shows with boobs in them, but I’ll save that for another post.

Anyway, just to make sure this is THE most boobtastic post in the brief history of 60fps.net, here’s a promotional image from the show. Also, I’ve used boobtastic, including that use there, three times. So enjoy!

I guess it makes sense that you’d eventually run out of clothes in a zombie-infested high school. You can only narrowly escape a zombie grab so many times.

Wei-Hwa Huang is a four-time individual winner of the World Puzzle Championship and winner of the 2008 Sudoku National Championship.  He has co-written two books of handcrafted Sudoku variants, one book on the Rubik's Cube and related puzzles, and was a key organizer for the first World Sudoku Championship held in the United States.  When he isn't working on puzzles he develops and designs games, and has been playing on Nintendo consoles since 1984.

1. Of the 350-plus puzzles in the game, how many did you create?
I wish I was involved in the Picross 3D puzzle creation, but all the puzzles were created by the developer (HAL Laboratory). I've personally created a few puzzles using their built-in editor and if you can find me and my Nintendo DS I'd be happy to share them with you!

2. How long does it take to make one of these puzzles?
Designing the puzzle is pretty easy and is as simple as building something out of colored bricks; it's the creativity that's difficult. Of course, this assumes that you have a good puzzle-generation engine, and Picross 3D definitely has one, so you don't have to be good at the puzzles to be able to make a good one.

Check out the full article.

The Cloud is The Future!

That’s what everyone’s saying, right? Everyone over at OnLive, anyway. So, what is the future like?

I’ve been checking out the much-hyped service for the last few days from home, and the claims made by OnLive are surprisingly pretty accurate.

Check out the full article here.

That said, every time I pick up a new volume it’s easy to see just why it takes so long to release a new book. There’s more detail in each page than most artists could be bothered to put into a single piece of work.

Berserk, Volume 27, Page 2

Thinking about how much time Miura must spend on each image is enough to just about drive me mad. And he’s been working on this series since 1991. 34 volumes, 200+ pages each; The guy’s done something like 7,500 pages of this.

Somewhere in the middle, I started to get worried; it felt like he’d moved over to Monster of the Week, and the crew following Guts feels a lot like a D&D party (Druid, ranger, rogue, healer, and of course the Berserker). That said, the last few volumes have felt a lot more like the story I’m used to. Guts is getting beaten senseless on every page, interesting character interaction is everywhere, and again that detail.

Berserk vol. 31, page 1

I just wish it could move a little faster. I’m going to be sitting in the old folks’ home with my friends, reading the newest volume of Berserk (probably volume 42 or so!).

On the plus side, the sequel looks way better. The environments and character models are beautiful. Most adventure games only wish they could look this good. The music and voice acting is on par as well as some of the best out there.

Some of the problems with the game come from the desire of the developers to reproduce the game as closely as they could to the original. Some things just don’t hold up well.

First there’s the matter of the control scheme. In the first Monkey Island, this didn’t matter so much. In LeChuck’s revenge, though, there are all sorts of parts that require some fast-paced clicking. Waiting for someone to put something down so you can grab it is just one example. The end of the game is especially irritating, and since we’re long past spoilers, I think it’s okay to go into it. Eventually you end up in this series of tunnels (tubes, if you will) and LeChuck is chasing you around with a voodoo doll he made of you. While avoiding him, you have to pick up all these different parts for a doll of your own. Each time you get to one of the rooms you have a few seconds before LeChuck pops in and zaps you again. It makes searching especially irritating and draws it out far longer than it should.

So, how do you resolve this without pulling the game apart and just making a new game? Well for one, buy it on PC. that’s the easy answer. But I like playing games in my living room. Having a click-snap option would make the game too easy - though there are some parts where I really would’ve appreciated it. There’s a spot where you have to hang something on a hook and the gorgeously lush art made the hook virtually impossible to spot.

Another way this one feels like a step back from the first Monkey Island Special Edition is the hint system. I remember loving the hint system in the first one, and while this one works for the most part, it has some major progress-halting problems. I’m not going to mince words: I’m terrible at Monkey Island games, but I adore them. I need the hint system. I haven’t played this game in, what, 15 years? Yeah, I forgot a few things. Due to the more open nature of the game I did a few things way out of order, and as a result something just didn’t occur to me at all. The problem is, if I was away from the location i needed to be at, the hint system would just tell me to go there. So I go there, and all it would tell me is “You should try to think of a way to get this item.” WELL THANK YOU VERY MUCH HINT SYSTEM BECAUSE I WASN’T ALREADY DOING THAT!!1 I ended up having to check a FAQ. For Monkey Island 2. What is this, 1994?

On the voice-recording side of things, there are a few things to talk about. First is the addition of the director’s commentary. Getting the original Monkey Island guys—including Psychonauts’ Tim Schafer and DeathSpank’s Ron Gilbert—into a room to talk about one of the earliest creations? Brilliant!

The voice acting, while mostly good, is not perfect either. Things that aren’t annoying in text can be very annoying when spoken. On Booty Island, Kate Capsize is advertising for her ship. “Glass bottom boat. Cruises. Glass bottom boat. Glass bottom boat.” The developers really should’ve… I don’t know, slowed down the repeat time on that. Just put a 10 second gap after the first round. Maybe a 15 second gap. Or five minute gap. Ugh. Also, the sound effects during the spit contest made me want to puke. UGH.

Of course my overall impression is positive because it’s Monkey Island. I LOVE Monkey Island. I just hope they bring the third one out as a special edition. Now THAT would be cool.

I started playing Darksiders today. I’m trying to decide if I want to keep going. Playing it right after playing Bayonetta was a poor decision.

Bayonetta was an incredibly well tuned action game that just oozed style from every pore. Everything that happens in the game is crazy, sexy, and cool. Like the TLC album. At one point Bayonetta loses her lollipop and instead of just letting it go she runs down the wall and dives toward lava to catch it.

Not only that, but the characters are pretty cool as well. I’m not going to suggest that the characters in Bayonetta are award-winning by any means, but they’re fun to watch the same way Dante is fun to watch in Devil May Cry.

War in Darksiders is the opposite. He’s this one-dimensional World of Warcraft-reject, giant shoulder pads, huge sword, and everything. Normally I have a weakness for a badass with a giant sword but War manages to take everything I like about a character and make it boring. I’m also getting a little tired of the whole “War between Heaven and Hell with Man caught in the middle!” thing.

Total disinterest in the main character aside, the worst part for me is probably the gameplay.

Bayonetta’s long fight sequences were alleviated by the sheer variety of moves and animations. No matter what, you were always doing SOMETHING cool in Bayonetta. Darksiders has been compared to the Zelda series by more than one review and it’s easy to see why. Not only do you go along finding things like bomb plants, the first item you find is a boomerang. The combat, unfortunately, is about as deep. There’s one kind of attack, making any real combinations or moves uninteresting at best. Further, dodging and blocking often just don’t work. If I’m trying to dodge a swing and my character dodges INTO the boss, that’s a problem. Same if he dodges into the swing.

Whilst fighting Tiamat, the grotesque, bare-breasted bat-queen, I eventually set the controller down when I realized the game was making me swear.

Will I go back? Will I play again? Find out next time, on Dukes of Hazzard!

Splinter Cell, Tomb Raider, and Heavy Rain after the cut!

Tomb Raider

Heavy Rain

Nintendo Magic starts with Nintendo's resurgence at the top of the charts, detailing the origins and successes of the DS and Wii, along with in-depth profiles of the Nintendo executives that made it possible. Too bad the book reads more like an amalgam of edited-together company brochures instead of a disciplined, thoughtful overview of one of Japan's most secretive and transformative companies.

Check out the full review.

There are a few schools of thought.

The first goes something like my method of judging anime. That is to say, I know before the end of the theme song whether I’m going to like the show or not. Some people will give a show 30 episodes to “pick up.” Similarly, some people are done reviewing games as soon as they find some game-breaking mechanic or it’s too, you know, “Japanese.” Or whatever.

On the opposite side, some people—gamers and reviewers both—feel that a game review must, similar to a DVD review, encompass all the content. The same way a DVD review includes not just the movie, but the extras, menus, box art and everything else in between, some reviewers and gamers expect a review to encompass not only the main game and primary mechanics but also every little minigame or sidequest, collectible, and every line of dialogue.

Me, I’m somewhere in between.

The review has to fit the game, obviously. But game reviewing is, if nothing else, time consuming. As the reviewer, you want to be sure that nothing is missed because gamers are mean, and will tear apart every little mistake you make. But there’s a line. It’s thin, faint, and fuzzy.

I have never felt the need, for example, to beat all the challenge levels in Peggle to review it. That’s not something most players are going to bother with, and you don’t learn anything more about the game by doing it.

With longform RPGs like Fallout, Final Fantasy and such, playing them to completion is often a lot of fun but again, not necessary for a proper review. Certainly, the main quest must be seen through to completion, and other aspects of the game should be played to the point of having a good idea what’s there for gamers to enjoy (or not). But will playing another 20 hours of the same minigame to get that last unlockable tell you anything more about the game? No, it won’t. And if it does, then that’s great but the designers had a responsibility to make the game a little more welcoming. If someone under Miyamoto tried to put a feature into a game that took 20 hours to become fun, he’d go Super Saiyan and unleash some Dragon Ball Z shit upon them.

But then again, what about a game that’s so broken that playing through the main quest puts you at the border of insanity? Should people really expect the reviewer to dump 30 hours of their life into something so painfully bad? The pay-versus-play ratio is so poor most of the time that it’s not only unreasonable but laughable as well. Unless, of course, you’re a salaried worker and you make your living playing games.

In playing Deadly Premonition, I played through the main quest and did a few side quests. 20 hours with a game is plenty of time to figure out whether you like it, though with a good game it’s a shame to miss the sidequests, admittedly.

Does it matter, in the end, how someone reviews a game? I suppose it probably doesn’t in the grand scheme. Reviews are a timely thing though, and letting a game languish to drill down into every minigame just isn’t worth it.

/rant

First, visual flair.

The instruction manuals of old were often the only content gamers had to flesh out the more primitive 8-bit versions of heroes to bring them to life. As graphics improved and more accurate representations of characters begun appearing in games, the need to do that has faded.

However, that doesn't mean we don't still want it! A full-screen, hi-def manual would be a great place to show off some of the concept art and supporting artwork that comes out of game creation. Normally reserved for an unlockable gallery that no-one every looks at, the freedom from paper should make for some great looking instruction manuals that encourage players to read by rewarding them with cool images.

Check out the full article.