1) the assertion made by other members of this site that Mario Kart Wii is better than electricity;
2) Smash Brawl’s continual presence in everyone’s life;
3) the shitstorm and subsequent adorableness of the Okami box art mistake;
4) the promise of continually being exposed to games with titles like Opoona…

So I don’t know what it pegs me as to be more excited about Earthbound than about any of those other things. Niche gamer? Nostalgia fetishist? Big fucking nerd? Whatever!!!

TO GIVE YOU AN IDEA OF HOW SERIOUS THIS IS ELIZABETH AND I SPENT A GOOD FOUR HOURS TODAY TRYING TO GET HER LOCALLY CACHED COPY TO WORK

PLEASE THROW US A STRATBERRY

(And if I may WEAR THIS STUPID WRITER HAT for a second I think there is something additionally great about games that pipe you directly to an ending despite, more or less, what you actually input into the game itself. If I had read just a little more Anne Lamott this morning I would probably point out that maybe this sort of game is like a really good short story, where you learn the interface and get accustomed to the presentation just long enough for the game to to do you what it had intended, and then leaves you with a whole afternoon where you can go outside and do something. Sort of like getting to meet something really interesting at a party who is moving to Arizona? OK now I am thinking too much.)

~
~
~
~
~
~And we’re back! aren’t you in love with it? Are you already comparing the ending song to Portal’s? (Oh DON’T, no one can win that!) At first I was worried by the in-landscape instructions - is this game going to be all about lost hope and how some bosses you can’t beat and the rope symbolizes your only hope of escaping the drudgery of life, “W3 W1LL N3v3R 4G3T T3H M3Xi4N 3M0 R3B3LLi0N”? But a quick glance at my adorable bizarro-Kirby wearing a hat and throwing Castlevania axes settled my soul, and then the game lived exactly up to its promise. And I mean exactly. Plus that song! Swooooon. For gravy, there is a god-damn manual, and fans went a step further and made walkthroughs in English, German, and YouTubese. And a god-damned text edition! Way to take back your name from Jack Black and Mos Def, you lovable swedes!

And last but most: the teaser trailer. RoeLwE you damn genius.

Next time you need to tell your special lady that you love her, do it with Toto and Photobucket! Actually, I don’t really have a problem with this guy; the song is catchy as far as these things go and the slideshow is appealingly amateurish. And, I suppose, if your special lady also loves seeing static images of Squall and Rinoa, it could even be kind of sweet. But it gets better! It turns out that the images from the slideshow were largely plagiarized (as much as one can plagiarize something that is not the source’s IP to begin with, but I’ll leave that to Lawrence Lessig) from this source (which he, in a ballsy move, actually favorited):

Now this one is an abomination; not only is it set to Bryan Adams but it demands the viewer to ask, “How is it possible that a cheesy half-assed slideshow of “romantic” anime images (that features no moving images) has gotten almost 1.5 million views?” OK, so I count for about 6 of those views. Still, is this a meme I somehow missed? It doesn’t seem likely, because there is nothing particularly funny about it aside from the jaw-dropping banality (and the part where Bryan Adams caterwauls “The one thing I’m sure of/is the way we made love” and it is accompanied by some nakedness), and banality isn’t generally a LOL-type thing. So, is it possible that this “video” has gotten over a million legitimate viewers? To test that hypothesis, I decided to conduct a scientific survey.OK, so my scientific survey consisted of searching for AMVs of “I Want It That Way.” A couple things I noticed: A lot of people chose this particular song to commemorate their love of a middling anime series, including this ineffably creepy Naruto lip dub:

(n.b. There are a bunch of Naruto “I Want It That Way” AMVs; this is the best one–try reading the subtitles! Unintentional hilarity!)

Then, however, there was this gem, proving that the “related” pane is actually useful, nay, necessary to life itself:

Somehow it sums up everything that is right and wrong about Final Fantasy and it also gets stuck in your head. From the render-porn visuals to the utterly cheesy content to the melodramatic montages–it’s all in there! And you know what? Tidus and Yuna are two worlds apart. Yuna lives in Spira and Tidus doesn’t actually exist. I don’t even know what to say. I’ll leave it to xYunaax:Every Night I dream about yOUCause yOu’re The Best Thing In My LifeAnd I Think yOu’re the One…With lOvee,Me

In sad news I have heard rumors (::cough:: Swifty) that Brawl online play is totally bad and laggy as hell. These rumors make me sad! Should I still get off my ass and buy a copy? Discuss!

The Lesson Of The Old Weird Lady
A few weeks ago, while taking the morning inbound train, I noticed a woman in her fifties sitting next to me, clutching an iPod Video and bug-eyed goggling at its little screen. You see that sort of thing, you sort of have to see what’s going on, right? So I give a little sideways glance at the screen and LO AND BEHOLD: WEIRD SLUTTY ANIME! She was watching some weird slutty anime! With balloon-tittied high-school panty witches stickfighting a dick wizard! So now I’m bug-eyed goggling too, except now the lady sees what I’m doing and sort of grumpily rotates away from me to watch her jizz battle cartoon in private. Now it’s awkward for everyone! I broke the social contract by snooping on her media, and she broke the social contract by watching Dickgirl Neko Neko Scissorkick. LESSON LEARNED: It is inappropriate to knowingly watch sexy videos on the train.

The Lesson Of The Tall Weird Dude (Who Is Me)
THIS VERY MORNING I was on the train playing my Nintendo Dual-Screen Lite Entertainment Platform, all squished up against a dude and another dude, playing the new Ace Attorney game, when suddenly the line of questioning turned to the subject of: Panties! I let out a little chuckle, because haw haw, girl underwear, there’s a vagina in there probably. BUT THEN REALIZATION STRUCK: I was in public, blithely manipulating a device to digitally experience a tale of women’s underwear. Push button; receive panties. I remembered the anime woman from yestermonth and, sweating, looked to my left. And of course!, the guy to my left is looking directly at the DS (a picture-in-picture illustration of the panties in question cheerily adorning the corner of the top screen) and making this sort of horror-smirk, to wit, “Ugh, what I am seeing is so retarded that the mook who is doing this on the train is setting off all my schadenfreude receptors.” The shrill bespectacled section of my brain got all het up and angrily prepared a defense (”THIS SERIES ACTUALLY PROVIDES A RICH AND REWARDING GAMEPLAY EXPERIENCE, I WILL HAVE YOU KNOW”) but I just sort of shrunk and huddled over, because 8:45 in the morning is not a great time to get into a debate over the relative merits of tiny computer panties. LESSON LEARNED: It is difficult to reconcile the excellence of the gaming medium with the stupid bullshit it keeps dragging with it.

So What Is The Point Of All This
If you’re out in public and you are fiddling with an expensive piece of electronics, people are going to look at you. That is human nature and you can bank on it. With this in mind, it stands to reason that, to save yourself potential shame, you might reserve the lion’s share of your handheld purchases for games you can actually play in public. Soooo…..given all that: Why the fuck did Activision decide to lash Guitar Hero DS to a giant plastic carapace that resembles nothing so closely as a fucking GRIPMASTER?

But the fun doesn’t stop there, oh no! Check out this horrifying fucking commercial for it!

Apparently, in order to get the most out of our GUITAR HERO DS experience, we have to hold the console upright with our left hand, gripping the tiny buttons on the plastic Guitar Hero Brand shroud, and strum a picture of a guitar with a plastic Guitar Hero Brand pick, while somehow keeping an eye on the other tiny screen, where all the notes are. Plus, according to some previews, you will occasionally have to drop the pick mid-song to sign autographs with the stylus, or blow into the microphone to put out stray pyrotechnics.

WHICH MEANS:

You either look like a total jackass in public, or you’re doing all of this at home, where your REAL copy of Guitar Hero is. WHICH OF THESE REALITIES SOUNDS LESS TERRIBLE??? The answer is that neither of them do, and that I hope there aren’t enough eight year olds with DSes to justify having published this game in the first place because this is basically the opposite of what I want out of my stupid expensive childish hobby. Also what is up with that girl’s stupid leopard-print sleeves. Also also what is up with that dude constantly leaning towards her awkwardly like “HA Ha ha yeah look at this…ha ha!!” because he obviously has a huge awkward boner over her and it is being telegraphed directly through this commercial and I am NOT HAPPY about it.