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Revelations - 04/16/05 - Andrew
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In the game of love, the onus has long fallen on the man to initiate the first move. For certain ruggedly handsome individuals this is no problem but many other, homelier people can find the situation hard to properly navigate. Once upon a time an ugly man approached an attractive girl and asked if she wanted to dance. When her flat out denial threatened to crush his soul like a styrofoam cup sank into the ocean's watery depths, suddenly the man's one superiority over women -- namely, intelligence -- sparked to life and he cooly replied "no, I said you looked fat in those pants."
I know this because that man was me, and after patenting the procedure and building an empire through strategic licensing and franchising, I started to branch out into ready-packaged comebacks for other occasions. First it was fleshing out material for straightforward locales like bars and coffee shops, which helped expand my user base but was hardly a worthy intellectual challenge. "I see you're reading Kant" transmogrifying into "I can smell your cunt" can throw up a wall of confusion long enough for the end user to escape the situation, but it's hardly an everyday occurrence that makes me proud of having shared my gift with the world. I threw in the towel and eventually lost my fortune in a series of protracted sexual harassment lawsuits.
In the process of writing my patters I had to be intimately familiar with the delicate balancing process between adequately destroying a woman's ego through piercing observations and rationing precious seconds before her brain reengaged and she could execute a slap move. Luckily this neatly dovetailed with two of my most prominent talents, namely 1) having my self-image repeatedly stomped and pooped on, and 2) memorizing fighting game combos. Soon enough I could Guile a five-hit re-dizzy diss like a pro. Want to see what I mean? Well, are you a girl? Because you're fat. Just kidding, of course you're not a girl. But your girlfriend, she really is fat. Kidding again, you don't have a girlfriend. But I did have sex with your mom.
So when Eidos released some shots of the newly deflated Lara Croft, my old habits sprung into action, like a retired cop shooting a black man. I pulled out some old images of the original Lara Croft too, in order to justify having the jpeg collection sitting on an unmarked CD in my drawer for the last seven years.
With a waist to hip ratio of 0.45 the old Lara was a corset fetishist's dream who ought to snap in half in a stiff breeze. Also, enormous tits, etc.
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The new Lara sports an only slightly less incredible ratio of 0.57. She'll still snap in half, but it would require gale force winds.
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The old Lara's legs, are, I don't know, legs?
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I don't know if Eidos is going for some fractal hourglass within hourglass thing but the new Lara's calves would make Carl Lewis blanch with envy.
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A simple appraisal of facial ratios reveals old Lara's fatal flaw. Is that a video game heroine or the offspring of Joan Rivers and Mongo the Magnificent? Nice lips, make them out of beeswax yourself?
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The new Lara's face on the other hand is a piece of mathematical ass. The perfect conformance from the glabella to the subnasale more than makes up for the gastrocnemial hypertrophy. I don't dare delve into a more in depth study based on the golden ratio or my pants might explode.
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Enemy Mining - 04/14/05 - Sidney
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Every so often I take a break from not playing Star Wars Galaxies to see if I might possibly want to actually play Star Wars Galaxies. With the dangerously lamely named "Rage of the Wookies" expansion pack coming out soon I figured I should see if the widely acknowledged problems with game mechanics and the general lack of interesting content have been remedied at last. So I checked out the official website
Space Mining is an exciting new type of gameplay in Star Wars Galaxies™: Episode III Rage of the Wookiees™.
Never mind then. Maybe it's time I start not playing World of Warcraft.
Who Do You Trust - 04/08/05 - Andrew
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 EA's The Godfather
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ShowBizData:
Francis Ford Coppola is up in arms over Paramount's decision to produce (with videogame makers Electronic Arts) a videogame based on his The Godfather movies. [...] Coppola said that the studio had never mentioned its plans to release a Godfather videogame. "I knew nothing about it. They never asked me if I thought it was a good idea," Coppola said. [...] "I had absolutely nothing to do with the game and I disapprove."
Eurogamer interview with game's executive producer:
Francis Ford Coppola, who obviously was the director of the film, we've met with him on one occasion and we shared with him what our vision was for the game, and where we were going to go. He wasn't choosing to participate in the project. [...] He's got [..] some original ideas that he wanted in and cross-outs that he wanted out.
Blogosfear - 03/22/05 - Andrew
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 In other news, should Terry Schiavo live or die? What will the courts decide? How do you deal with such complex moral issues?
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For a long time now I've been meaning to compile and produce a massive, thoroughly damning denunciation of so-called "New Games Journalism." I even briefly had the idea that I would write up a handful of articles in the NGJ "style" and temporarily revamp Fail Math with a default TypePad theme, then sequentially post my fake-NGJ pieces and try and get people to take them seriously by spamming links to them in the blogs of students who somehow are pursuing a graduate degree in video games. Then I would reveal the farce and everyone would be agog or something, but why exactly I never quite figured out, since I bailed on the idea soon after starting.
After The Matrix came out the Wachowskis commissioned a series of short stories set in the world of the movie. One of the stories followed a little girl who gets jacked out and turns out to be a big black man. Similarly, when I tried to write in the New Games Journalism "style" my residual self-image got in the way. Which is to say that while I might be a big loser, I'm not a big pretentious loser, and I couldn't write more than a few hundred words in the style of, oh, say Tim Rogers without looking in the mirror and seeing someone larger and blacker staring back.
 Suggestion: we could freeze her in carbonite.
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So while I was thinking about doing something, someone else one-upped me by actually doing doing something. At the crux of the latest New Games Journalism spat was an article proclaiming the Ten unmissable examples of New Games Journalism which included, among others, an article written in 1993, a long unedited story copy-and-pasted from an internet forum, and, well, Tim Rogers. Soon enough the game blogging world was abuzz with discussion on the ten examples, and while readers expounded and dissected, one of the ten articles linked was surreptitiously updated to include the following disclaimer:
I never thought of RedEye as New Game Journalism. Not just because I writing the column long before Gillen coined the meme, but also because I have mixed feelings about it as a genre. That deserves more space than this, so for now I’ll just explain that I wasn’t setting out to break ground or be pretentious with RedEye, and what the column was varied from month to month.
 Artist's rendering of a reanimated Schiavo in 2433, giddy with joy at being cured. Not shown: being told everyone she ever loved is long dead.
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Mee-ow! It might be hard to notice through the bizarrely even handed professionalism but the author responded with a resounding bitchslap cloaked in moderation and decency. Another site called UK Resistance had no such qualms and soon posted their own response about why "NGJ" is stupid. Within hours that link started propagating the internet, and pretty soon was being discussed with all the pointless banality of the discussions of the original article. Somehow some especially dense humans, perhaps unable to comprehend why anyone would be annoyed by a reviewer injecting an anecdote about the time they pretended to be a woman in Ultima Online into their review of Madden 2005, got the idea that the article was pro-NGJ, leading the site to have to post an update the next day saying
The below post isn't an "ironic defense" of New Games Journalism, it's us saying "New Games Journalism" is a bag of old shite. Just so you know.
which indicates a fundamental problem with the battle against New Games Journalism: it's impossible to fight a battle when the other side doesn't even understand what's going on. Game Girl Advance's Jane Pinckard, who herself was inducted onto the list due to an article where she posted pictures of simulated sex acts, then wrote an anti-anti-NGJ article where she says she can't understand "the bitterness, the fury over what's being called NGJ." So let me spell it out, as another Game Girl Advance editor already did: "New Games Journalism" as a medium doesn't exist. I couldn't care less what you write or how you write it. But that doesn't make it special, and trying to invent a new classification, and then retroactively inducting things into it, does not make it special. We already lost the war with the word "blog." It doesn't need to happen again.
A while back we stated that there was no such thing as a "hip-hop gaming" craze. Turns out we were wrong, or else there would be no reason for Grind Street Domino to exist. As the minorities say, peep dis, yo:
Grind Street Domino is kicking the best old school throwing bones Domino flava at ya. Fo Shizzle, Domino Dizzle! You'll be the ill'est fool on your block when you walk around with a heavy game of the flava-ful Grind Domino on your handset. Play against the AI to tune up your skillz, then flip out the Hot Seat play to take on your friends. Grind Domino features true backyard authenticity when the handset vibrates when you 'Domino!' Grind Street Domino is the hottest Domino game for your wireless handset.
Since the "About" page states that Grind Games is based in Austin, Texas, I can say with absolute certainty than every employee of Grind Games is as white as the driven snow. I'm fully aware that white people are capable of such indavertent crimes against vocabulary, but viewing it in action still gives me a sort of sympathy pain, like a father watching his wife give birth to a black baby.
I thought that maybe the ad copy could be the result of an incompetent PR agency, but the accompanying screen shots do nothing but make it worse.
Industry Maturity - 02/24/05 - Andrew
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Evolution of Midway Games
1985
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2005
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Great Moments, etc. - 02/23/05 - Andrew
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From Gamespy's recent review of the new console FPS Project: Snowblind:
Project: Snowblind takes a lot of the mechanics from the Deus Ex series and puts them in a less linear, more shooting-intensive context. [...] Many other aspects liberally borrow from the series. [...] Hell, a lot of the weapons (EMP grenades) and enemies (security bots, automated turrets) are ripped right from Deus Ex's design doc. [...] I have no problem with these similarities, even if an Eidos employee told me with a straight face at E3 2004 that the two games have nothing to do with one another. [...] Project: Snowblind isn't all copycat, mind you.
From the review it's easy to get the idea that Project: Snowblind is nothing more than a deftly executed ripoff of another game's mechanics, and while you might be right, it might also help to read the very first paragraph of a preview of Project: Snowblind published on the same website less than two weeks earlier:
Yes, Eidos' upcoming shooter Project: Snowblind was originally going to be the next title in the popular Deus Ex series of games.
Gravity Gun Watch 2K5 - 02/11/05 - Andrew
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From Gamespot:
Another one of the tricky little gadgets that Frost gets his hands on is the kicker. An experimental mass displacer, the kicker will let you push or pull objects in the world from a huge distance away. Tap the fire button for a little nudge, or charge it up to send the object flying! This is great for grabbing that spare bit of ammo or health that's just out of reach while you're pinned down behind cover.
Do Rag Or Fontanel Cushion? - 02/05/05 - Sidney
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The DICE conference last week hosted a speech by fashion designer Mark Ecko, who is working with Atari on "an urban counter-culture game" called Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. His talk identified the game industry as mired in stagnation and gave pointers on how to save it from irrelevance. In case you have never heard of him before, here's a quick look at some of the items in Mark Ecko's fashion catalog.
Macramé pants and a paint spattered jacket? What, did we just graduate from fashion academy? Up too late doing coke the night before the show?
A bullet covered in faux diamonds and worn as a necklace. It would be a perfect symbol of meaningless thuggish consumerism if it didn't have a clock built into the base, raising its utility above absolute zero and thus making it worthless. If I was feeling especially craven I could make a joke about "bullet time". But I won't.
Baby is too young to understand even the idea of the existence of the fundamental aspects of American society, much less rebel against them.
What?
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To reiterate our top story, grafitti artist and fashion designer Mark Ecko gave a speech last week, telling industry experts how to make and sell better video games.
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