Archive for March, 2008

Punctuation Optional

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

For a while now I’ve been smacked around the face every few weeks with notices that “OMG there’s a new Zero Punctuation review of <New_Game_Flavor_Of_The_Month>”, but I haven’t really done anything about them other than ignore them. Mostly because absolutely everyone on the face of the planet that’s ever played video games, or know someone that’s ever played video games, or knows someone that’s heard of someone that’s played video games feels the urge to tell the entire world what he thinks of them.

I keep having these announcements snuck into my drinks when I’m not looking, or shoved into my face when I go find some video game twaddle to waste time on. But I resisted. I don’t even really know why. I don’t really seek out game reviews any more, but I don’t think I’m some kind of elitist game review snob, either. But everyone assured me that they are ‘teh funney’ so I broke down and watched one.

I guess the hook for the thing is twofold, the guy doing the review talks real fast, like there isn’t any punctuation in his monologue (clever, eh?), and he’s rapid-firing game information and what are supposed to be jokes at you while some tangentially-related animation plays.

I can only assume that the jokes, which are only tangentially related to the imagery in the video, come in such a ludicrous pace and with such high density that a couple of them are bound to be funny, and even if they’re not there’s another dozen to take their place almost instantaneously. It’s like a bad comedic version of the Law of Large Numbers.

Its ridiculously frenetic pace with absolutely no pauses means that I didn’t really have time to process what in the world is going on in the video, I suffered from a kind of buffer overflow.

I guess if you like run-on sentences that go for upwards of four minutes and you think mediocre jokes are hilarious, then the ‘reviews’ might be for you. Me? I’ll just be sitting over here playing with my commas, periods, and increasingly rare semicolons.

Brawling, Wii Style

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

I’ve been spending far far too much time with Super Smash Bros. Brawl lately. I mean, the game’s only been out for five days and some change at this point, and I’ve gotten nearly one full day’s worth of playtime in the thing.

I’ve been feverishly unlocking as many goodies as I could, and I’ve done a pretty good job of it, I think. But I wanted to take the game to a friend’s house who, for reasons I can’t even begin to fathom, hasn’t quite been following the game as obsessively as I have. The problem was that when I went to take my precious Save Data over, I was greeted with the message that the game save could not be copied.

This is stupid.

One of the huge draws to the series has always been hidden away in the unlockables. And I can kind of understand that Nintendo doesn’t want some random guy on an Internet message board somewhere unlocking everything, copying his game to an SD card, copying it to his computer, and then uploading it for the world to download.

Can you imagine the pandemonium? Kids getting their hands on completed game saves? They get all the reward without any of the effort? To me it just seems like a cheap way to force the people into actually earning all of the goodies. That’s kind of futile. I mean, I’m all for putting challenge back into games but not at the expense of inconveniencing me.

Updates

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

I updated the backend of the site again today. This one was a little hairier than I’m used to, so things might be extra broken for a while.

Working on that.