Microsoft Thinks We're Made of Money

...because with the new Xbox Live update, you can buy your cartoon avatar a Star Wars lightsaber to play with for 400 MS points. $6 damn dollars!

Kotaku's Top 5 List of Top 10 Lists [Lists Of Lists]

This list of lists should have you reeling on the floor. Somewhere, an inter-space portal has ripped open and started sucking all the awesome out of our world and into one that is completely unoriginal in all it's aspects.

Sent to you by Justin via Google Reader:

Kotaku's Top 5 List of Top 10 Lists [Lists Of Lists]

via Kotaku by Owen Good on 7/26/09

Another thing I want to do with our expanded weekends is this: The List of Lists.

Each week throws off several new lists ranging from the humorous to the trivial - Top 6 Phallic Objects in Video Games; Top 12 Most Hated Non-Human NPCs from 1990s RPG, you get the idea. Rather than run one as a single post, I figured we can put together, in digest form, a roundup of the rundowns out there, ridiculous to sublime.

Here are five that caught my eye recently:

• 11 Downright Dirty Video Game Titles [The Bits, Bytes, Pixels and Sprites]
This list of dirty-talking game names, includes, of course, "Tongue of the Fatman," "Booby Kids," "Nuts & Milk" and even "GOLF Magazine Presents 36 Great Holes Starring Fred Couples," which sounds like gonzo porn I would never want to see.

• The Citizen Kanes of Video Games [Games Radar]
Games Radar spends about 3,000 words telling us that, yes, Donkey Kong, Tetris and Ocarina of Time were, in fact, important games. Most of the list of 25 games is predictable. Toward the end it heaps in a lot of sequels and shooters.The titles each game influenced are cited in making the case for their transcendent achievements.

• Top 5 Reasons Retro Games Beat Modern Games [MSNBC]
This gives equal time to the old school after MSNBC's Top 5 Reasons Modern Games Beat Retro Games of two weeks ago. Old games are definitely more of a challenge, but "they play longer"? Really? Longer than 100 percenting any of the Grand Theft Autos since III?

• 10 Recently Hyped Video Games that Disappeared too Quickly [Joystick Division]
Haze, Too Human, Mirror's Edge, we all sort of get why they flamed out sooner than their pre-release hype would have let on. But Assassin's Creed? Mass Effect? Street Fighter IV? By what measure are we saying they "disappeared"?

• The 10 Best Nuclear Explosions in Video Games [IGN]
This goes back to the beginning of the month, but it's still a big hit on Digg. Plus, who doesn't like explosions? Problem is, IGN serves up some tiny-ass pictures to go with the list. Anyhow the top 3, in order, are Fallout 3, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and World in Conflict.

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Gamer Credit Card - Capcom

Don't get me wrong, I love video games, but love them enough to put myself into more debt buying gamer related stuff to get another credit card? Not hardly.

But in case your insterested, Capcom is teaming up with Visa for you to earn discounts to their online store. That's a first in my book! I'm already going to get laughed at when I use my custom printed Homestarrunner.com checks...

(p.s. I don't even remember the last check I wrote...)

Harrisonburg Video Game Theft

Get this, some guy at our local K-Mart had been stealing video games (I think it was his department) and selling them for cash. $15,000 worth. They caught him last week.

I've only been in that store for games a few times, all of which the place was pretty dead. He was probably so bored working in the electronics department he decided to find something better to do with his time.

Here's the news story.

Thanks Brent!

Someone Feel My Forehead

I just told my wife that "we don't need to spend our tax refund on a PS3."

Next thing you know I'll hate chocolate, beer, motorcycles and computers. OH MY GOD COMPUTERS!!!

1 Hour Review: Earth Defense Force 2017

So far, my favorite thing about this game is that I've been given access to a new weapon created in 2008. The current year is 2017. You see where the humor lay.

This game is the most pitiful game I've ever seen. It truly belongs on an Xbox or PS2. Or GameCube. Or a web browser. But for some reason, some really strange reason, getting access to big guns that never run out of ammo and shooting ants the size of tour buses is amusing in a Space Invaders meets 4th of July fireworks kind of way.

I look and saw that the game has 6 achievements: 1 for each difficulty level and one for collecting all the weapons. I've been playing for almost an hour and I'm halfway through the normal difficulty. It's a short, unimaginitive (all the levels are in the same city setting) and poorly programmed. But hell if it's not playable, loud, and mindless.

And that IS why we play games, right?

So I'm going to enjoy this $13 purchase for the time being.

Internet Ads = Crap

I don't understand how click-through ads make money in the first place, because I never use them. But I also don't watch late night infomercials or buy stuff out of those as-seen-on-tv catalogs.

But I love how search engines on the internet turn everything you look for into an ad. My example:


Don't get me wrong, I'd love to own a suit of Mjolnir armor, but a Halo "brand" of it? There really needs to be a better formula for these ads other than, "Buy your *insert search request here* for cheap!"

And trust me when I say, no one, absolutely no one sells items for your '07 Warthog that is sitting your imaginary driveway.

Obsolete Gaming

Ever since the idea came up that next generation consoles could play older games via Xbox Live Arcade or the Nintendo Wii Shop, online websites have started to re-review them. Realize that ten years ago, they already had reviews of these games up. Then as time went on and readership of that particular console's content went down, they removed all the old reviews and stories about the games and moved on.

Now, IGN's Wii Editor's Choice page is flooded with the "virtual console" entries in it's database. It's annoying at least.

But today I read the absolutely stupidest review for a virtual console game, Street Fighter II Turbo. It was the third or forth game in a huge series of games (there were 11 Street Fighters on the PS1 alone).

So imagine the irony when I read this.

The problem with recommending it is that, eventually, it will be rendered obsolete – just as it is itself rendering the Christmas-released original version obsolete with its own debut.

Really? I couldn't imagine how it could be rendered obsolete. Has technology really come that far to render a 15+ year old video game obsolete?

I wonder how many times a video game has to be obsoleted before I run into my future self and smack him with an original copy of it.