Advertising can make or break a product. A bad commercial can kill a new game release. Namco’s recent debacle of an ad campaign for Soul Calibur V has managed to alienate and make a large part of their fanbase uncomfortable. This is piled onto criticism that their characters have been oversexed more and more with each iteration in the SC franchise. Or you may remember PSP’s “cheese you can listen to outside” era in advertising. Or the racist billboards they put up in Europe. Or that annoying kid from Role Models. On the contrary, a good ad can really excite prospective players and encourage them to plop down their hard-earned cash on a title. READ MORE
There are many ways in which my brain and personality resemble that of a child, but moreso than any is the way I love the things I love. If something manages to capture the attention of my cold and cynical heart for more than a second, there must be something special about it. This happens so rarely that when I truly enjoy something, I just go whole hog. I’ll snatch up the merchandise, play all the games in its canon and wear my love for it proudly on a t-shirt for the world to see. No franchise in history has been more able to engulf my life in this way than Pokemon. READ MORE
Video game nostalgia is an odd phenomenon. It makes us hang on to outdated technology, spend hours upon hours sewing scarves and hats adorned with the heroes of our youth and get into heated arguments about which entry in a series is better (rather than agree that they’re both pretty great). But rarely does it lead to anything productive. READ MORE
Time for another edition of Why haven’t you played this?, the portion of Jay Button where I make you feel guilty for no reason. When games successfully made the jump from 16 to 32-bit era with the PlayStation many new ideas were thrown out of the nest before they were ready to fly, while a few were allowed to stick around a bit past their time. One relic of a bygone era was cute mascot platformers. READ MORE
As more and more action movies come out each summer, they all tend to blend together. In order for Hollywood to make sure the newest film is a sure thing, it must tread some proven ground to make sure the masses will accept it. Once in a while, a big-time action movie will stand above the rest with snappy dialogue, more impressive action scenes or a budget that allows the use of cutting-edge technology, but they’ll still include a number of cliches. The good guys will win, everything will be wrapped up and fixed within the next two hours and, perhaps most importantly, the hero will almost always get the girl. I like to call this “Speed syndrome”. READ MORE
I never need a reason to re-read a good chunk of the Penny Arcade archive. At least once every six months or so, I’ll whittle away an afternoon by clicking on a random date and reading onward. When they finally started putting the comics out in print form with the collected trade paperback volumes available at retail, it was all over. I own each of them and they’re practically hanging off the spine because PA’s gag-a-day format makes it so easy to pick up and hard to put back down. Gabe and Tycho just celebrated their 13th anniversary as the creative team behind one of the most wonderful and enduring pieces of internet humor ever. READ MORE
Bethesda is a company whom you really can’t begrudge for their faults. Sure they ship unfinished games with horrible, obvious and sometimes game-breaking glitches, but the game itself is usually really good. This actually may not be the case with the incredibly-hyped Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. READ MORE
When the Wii was about to be released, I could not have been a more jazzed little Nintendo fanboy. My bros and I were in high school and had loved Nintendo for all our lives, as many of us of course have. With well-produced videos and coy press releases, Nintendo slowly revealed info about the console and made wild and lofty promises about the mystery codenamed “Revolution”. It totally worked on me. For two nights and one day, I stayed in front of the Best Buy in my town in a tent. I was second in line and the employees leaving work Friday night told us we were crazy and to go home. They opened the store the next day to a line around the building. READ MORE
Every gamer has their reasons for enjoying the medium of video games. We’ve always been drawn to games as a narrative experience. Sometimes you get so enraptured in a game that you won’t even notice what’s wrong with it mechanically. Then, when you’re halfway through a game and enjoying the heck out of it, someone says something like, “Doesn’t the combat get a little repetitive?” Then the glass shatters in your head and you realize that yeah, it does get a little repetitive. And that climbing the terrain was annoying. And that the gunplay is a little off. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception could have been one of those games, but it isn’t at all. READ MORE
As I’ve mentioned many times in the several venues on this site through which you can hear me pontificate and whine about video games, I manage a video game store. From behind that counter, I see every type of gamer go by. There is the dude who wears a long black coat, fake fangs and a ponytail, and only buys Square Enix games. There’s the young asian girl who would be pretty attractive if she didn’t wear a foxtail out in public. And there’s a disturbingly large subset of people who come into my store, buy Madden or Call of Duty and leave, only to return when the next entry in one of these series is released. They terrify me. READ MORE
