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This article started as a comment on a friend’s blog, but I ended up typing what would appear in a tiny comment box as an entire article in and of itself. We all know what sensitive subjects these are, and this article, along with those linked herein, are sure to somewhat upset someone, somewhere, at sometime.

So the original article can be found here (The Binary Biker: Pseudo-Science and Religion). The article (in case you’re too lazy to read it) is basically about the birth of a skeptic through misleading information provided by the now-skeptic’s church-comic containing information attempting to prove falsity in the moon-landing. It’s a pretty good read except for the last paragraph, to which I retort with the following retortion and have thus retorted.

Everybody and their mother knows I dislike sports games. And if you don’t, I’ll tell you now:

Sports games are usually those sloppy, redundant, boring piles of fail that publishers scrape from the bottom of their development queue…usually. That’s not to say I wouldn’t work for a studio that strictly develops sports games — with the exception of Tiburon of course — but I am saying that they must be the most overworked & underpaid game designers in the industry. Sports games are so overrated that most people who play them religiously are so blindly pumped about the game itself being released a whole year(!) after the previous one that they’ve been failing to see horrid workmanship for over twenty years.

I have no idea why I haven’t published this until now, but I know you’ve been ready to kill yourself waiting for it. So, here it is…

Now GO check out all the other cool ones I’ve designed. If you’ve already done that… DO IT AGAIN!

Mirror’s Edge is…a unique game. The demo available on Xbox Live sat on my hard drive for months before I actually played it. When I finally boot it up, it was a breath of fresh air to be greeted with the vibrant primaries against clean whites that make up a majority of ME‘s color palette. Quite the contrast from the plethora of grit & grime, post-apocalyptic mess that has been the video game industry as of late.

Not that this is much better, really. The game is set in a strict government regulated future where large amounts of cash are invested in keeping buildings clean and deploying armies of mindless gunslingers to take out rooftop ninjas carrying bright-yellow shoulder bags. Mirror’s Edge is first-person platformer that consists of scaling sky-scrapers and clearing gaps in between all while watching your girlie figure and maintaining your calluses. You play as Faith (or maybe Faythe; that would be cooler 🙂 ), a faithful employee of service “X” consisting of couriers, or “runners”, delivering “Y” to “Z” by hand to avoid conventional means of communication by keeping under the radar of a government that apparently closely resembles a Fourth Reich.

Mirror’s Edge definitely has a lot going for it. This is most apparent when you’re sprinting along ledges of rooftops hundreds of feet in the air jumping from one building to the next. The next platform lights up red, and you know you’re next jump is gonna be a doozy. Pick yourself up and zip line across the jagged skyline, fall a couple storeys & land into a roll, sprint to the door where you shoulder your way inside to a narrow corridor where you wall-jump up to the air-duct vent that leads outside & you do it all over again.

So I loaded up my dashboard today and widened my eyes as I quietly & internally got excited to see that I’ve got 3 whole spam comments to chuckle over!

OMG. OMG. OMG.

I’ve been getting comments from coworkers about how picky I am when it comes to gaming. The truth is, I’m just a snob when it comes to my favorite hobby/passion/whatever you wanna call it. Sometimes, though, it’s just that I hate sh*tty games. Period.

I hate sports games. What in the bloody hell is the point in releasing an entirely new disc, every single year, most of the time including nothing different than an updated roster? Ever heard of DLC? Is there seriously so much changing in the game that one disc with a yearly $20, $30, even $40 downloadable upgrade or patch couldn’t cure? I doubt it. They still use cardboard cutouts for the audience; I mean, come on! The latest issue of Game Informer has shots from Madden 2010, another fantastic franchise by NFL bed-buddy, EA. I’m unfortunately unable to locate said cardboard cutouts due to the focal range of the real-time depth-of-field introduced. Sneaky bastards.

Nintendo announced a new Metroid game slated for 2010. From the looks of it, there seems to be a lot of Super Metroid gameplay elements; specifically around 1:27 – Mother Brain using the eye-laser on the super-metroid.

I dunno. I was excited as all hell when I was waiting for the video to load up for the first time. Overall, though, I just wasn’t all that thrilled. Call me old fashioned, but I’m just not all that thrilled about the studio making the next Metroid title being the developer best know in the game industry for…

OK, enough staring. Back to work… 🙁

The sequel to THE best racing game ever made was announced today; and with a sooner-than-later release date of October ’09. Forza Motorsport 3 called me up today at work to completely and utterly destroy my lunch with mere minutes of video-watching car-game porn. One can’t even help but chuckle at the fact that the miracle workers at Turn 10 will have released TWO Forza titles in the time it’s taken Polyphony to make ONE demo of Gran Turismo 5.

By any means, I’m no PlayStation hater. I don’t own a PS3, and I’ve gone out of my way to make sure I’ve made reviews for multi-platform games as unbiased as I can. Sony’s units had always been my console of choice until around the time Midnight Club 2 came out and Xbox LIVE hit it off. I’m not bashing them at all by saying they need to get their act together, but I’m sorry, the GT5 demo sucked ass. The same boring menu music, car lineup, and imaginary track selection has gotten old. Get a clue.

Observe…and require a change of underwearz as I did.

Source: ForzaMotorsport.net

Ok, so this is a Metroid, the star of the Metroid series of video games for numerous Nintendo consoles (like you didn’t already know that…) :

A Metroid as it appears in ‘Super Metroid’ for the Super Nintendo.

Now, normally one might think it would be extremely easy to sculpt something like this in 3D; at least as someone with 3D experience might. Throw some spheres together to represent the nuclei, throw that into a larger sphere, add some claw-tusk-lookin’ things and you’re set! Here’s the problem: that image and it’s subject are two dimensional, and that means there’s no cheating and turning him around so you can see him from different angles. I’ve run into a few problems in doing this…

The World War II genre of video games has become an extremely saturated market over the last couple years thanks to our friends over at Electronic Arts shitting out a new Medal of Honor title every six months. But it’s not just EA, really… check out this list. Of the 170+ games in that list, 135 of them were, or will be, released since 2000. This should give you a good idea of just how many games have cluttered such an interesting topic; one that might have people scratching their heads as to why anyone would even make a “game” about in the first place.

If you read the article I wrote on BIA:HH, you’d know that obviously I’m not all that thrilled on what’s happened in the industry to my favorite historical event. Not since the famed opening level in Medal of Honor: Frontlines, where you participate in a Saving Private Ryan-esque beach storming, has there been a WWII game as good as this. I say that with 100% sincerity, so you can go buy the game now.

I’ve never really been a fan of the Call of Duty titles; I always thought they were too stiff, boring, and inaccurate. That’s where this game helps the franchise take a turn for the better. As soon as the campaign starts up you’re pummeled with real archive footage of soldiers dodging bullets through trenches, seamen shooting Zeros out of the sky only to be kamikaze’d by another, and all the death, guts & glory that comes along with such an epic war. Hands down I knew right away this game was going to set some standards for the genre. The sheer fact alone that they used footage as graphic as what my eyes were just raped with meant that the developers at Treyarch were serious about this game.