I bet you missed me, huh? Don’t lie~

Anyway, Sonic games. Yeah yeah, I know. sonic has been REALLY bad lately. And it hurts me deep… but there are good ones. Lemme show yah what ones.

Starting with a newer game:

Sonic and the Black Knight

No, really. I’m not kidding. The concept for this game was HORRIBLE, but the execution is pretty damn good. Sonic is summoned to the land of King Arthur by a cute loli version of Merlin named (surprise!) Merlina and after some delicious chili dog eating, Sonic gets a magic talking sword named “Caliburn”. The action is fast, and the sword allows you to obliterate most enemies without a care in the world. Now, like Secret Rings, there are a few slowdowns. There are points where you have to give villagers rings and there are large enemies that don’t go down in one hit, but everything else in the game is a pretty damn good time. I don’t really recommend it for someone who doesn’t like Sonic, but it’s worth a try even if  you don’t. (continue reading…)

They say that variety is the spice of life, but I believe passion can be equally spicy. It’s what drives people to write fanfiction and to petition developers to turn dreams into reality.

Passion can be a double-edged sword, though. Sometimes, all it takes is a single real or perceived disappointment  to turn your feelings against the object of your emotional attachment.

Take the case of a little discussion I had with a friend of mine last night. Being die-hard fans of the Atlus’ Trauma Center series, my friend and I were understandably elated when we heard that Trauma Team would be coming to the Wii in the near future.

Please note that my friend is a BIG Nozomi Kimishima (aka Naomi Weaver) fan. Being the inquisitive student that she is, she immediately Googled around for more info about the game and her favorite character. What she discovered made her emotions do a complete one hundred and eighty degree turn. You see, she unfortunately came upon this little article.

Remember the comment I made in my other article about how some of the new doctors look like younger versions of verteran Trauma Center surgeons? It turns out I was partly right. The lady with silver-blue hair in the roster of Trauma Team specialists is apparently Dr. Kimishima herself, and she has graduated from being a hotshot doctor to being a forensics expert.

My friend immediately flew into a rage at the revelation. She vehemently argued that Dr. Kimishima is a master surgeon, not a CSI agent. This led to a bit of a discussion wherein I tried to calm her down. Perhaps this is an alternate universe Kimishima, I theorized. After all, didn’t producer Kanada-san mention something about Trauma Team being a whole new game and not a sequel?

Despite my best efforts, my friend would have none of it. Seething with righteous indignation, she seems to be dead set on boycotting this new medical sim completely.

On the other hand, I’m feeling a bit more forgiving. Granted, the good doctor may have made a rather…odd career move, and her new portrait makes her look suspiciously younger than she’s supposed to be (plastic surgery, perhaps?), but it’s still nice to see her alive and well after Second Opinion.

Now all Atlus has to do is to announce the existence of a playable obstetrician slash gynecolotist in Trauma Team and my day will be complete.

It really pays to subscribe to newsletters sometimes. You’ll never know what bit of fantastic news might just leap out at you when you least expect it.

I just opened my e-mail inbox recently when I came across an Atlus announcement: a new medical sim (a genre made popular by the Trauma Center series) will be coming to the Nintendo Wii sometime spring of next year. Dubbed Hospital slash Trauma Team, this new game passes the torch to six new doctors ready to continue the legacy of Drs. Styles, Weaver, Vaughn and Blaylock.

Of course, I’m assuming that those three veterans aren’t in the game to begin with. Three of the doctors look like younger and stylishly redrawn versions of the veteran surgeons. A fourth doctor in the series gives us a glimpse of what Dr. Styles may look like sans glasses, darker hair, vampiric bloodlust and an androgynous charm borrowed from a certain Persona 4 sleuth.

The prospect of having six specialists this time around instead of two miracle doctors who do all the work (with a hot nurse nagging them all throughout the process) sounds like an interesting concept. This way, you can have one doctor stitch up all the wounds  while another glues back broken pieces of bone with mystical antibiotic gel. A third surgeon can focus on removing tumors with impunity while the other two are preoccupied.

Of course, we’ll have to wait and see if all of them will actually be working together during the operation itself, or if they’ll be taking turns during the entire process of testing, diagnosis, surgery and post-op. The latter case may be likely, as one of the doctors is supposed to be a diagnostician.

Also, a quick glance at the initial screenshots will tell you that the classic syringe, forceps, gel et al are still in there. Some gameplay elements may also involve timing bits reminiscent of the defibrillator and “massage” scenarios of past games. There’s appears to be a part where you have to hammer some bones into place as well.

It’s most unfortunate that the official website contains very little info as of this time. I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled on this one, though. Anything that gives me a good excuse to probe a woman’s bare midriff is A-okay in my book.

Nintendo broke away from competition with Sony and, new arrival, Microsoft with what some call the “Blue Ocean” business strategy. The Blue Ocean strategy is the metaphor of leaving a “red ocean” (one dyed by the blood of competition) for unclaimed waters filled with the potential for creating new demand. From a business stand point this brave (or stupid) move has paid off and now Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are competing for second place.

Nintendo managed to succeed because they did something more than incrementally improve and repurpose old features. Yes, Gentle Reader, I’m talking about the “I” word, innovation. It’s debatable if the Wii controller is a true innovation as some gamers will still belittle it and mock it, but from a business standpoint it’s a successful change that’s brought in tremendous profit. Nintendo is as guilty as everyone else of giving us sequels by the truck load, most games in each series offer something new every one or two games. In truth, sequels are not really a bad thing as long as they are different enough that it stands on its own or adds to the previous experience. (continue reading…)

What do you do when you’re faced with a major loss? Some people go for the extreme “solution” and commit suicide. Others attempt to drown out their sorrows with alcohol. Me, I fixate on video games.

This was especially true during the first half of 2007. During that year, two people were diagnosed with cancer.  One was the father of a friend of mine. The other one was my mother.

To make a long story short, my friend’s father pulled through. My mother didn’t.

I’d already played a bit of Trauma Center: Second Opinion before she died. After her passing, I went all out. I rented the Nintendo Wii at my friend’s Internet Cafe.  I played almost non-stop everyday from the time it opened till the time it closed its doors before dawn. At the time, it seemed to be one of my main forms of coping with the stages of Kubler-Ross’ model. (continue reading…)

In the current generation of party games across the platforms – Mario Party, Wii-Sports, Guitar Hero/Rock Band, Rayman Raving Rabbids, Wario Ware, etc – there’s one major thing these games have in common

Co-ordination and or timing – and mini-games.

Now I don’t know about you, but back in my day, we were lazy. Our ‘party’ games so to speak were the likes of Madden, Tecmo Bowl, NBA JAM, Blitz, You Don’t Know Jack, Pong and such. (Shh I’m leaving Track N Field out of this one.)

What I mean by this, is they were relatively sedentary games, learn a few button clicks, maybe a little bit of choice quick finger movements, but that was really it. We had buttons dedicated to juke around an opponent, or to dribble between their legs. Long gone are these games and their lazy ire for the lazy video game playing nerd. Now we have the six-axis to flick our controller in various directions to help angle his shot, a guitar with a gyro in it to detect when we are swishing our instrument into the air to ‘rock out’ harder, or a wii-mote to swish around in a graceful ark to do make a hook at a guy’s jaw. (continue reading…)

Presenting…

…The Top Five Signs That a DLC Should Have Just Been Free

Brought to you by Fedora Man

Well it finally April and you have to love how easy it is to open an article with the lines “so it’s finally whatever month we’re in right now”. It’s time for the next step in my great journey to earn money through a video game blog. Now I know you might be wondering “I thought you had billions! Were you lying to me?” The answer is of course, no. Stupid. Why would I make something like that up? But the difference between that money and the money I’ll earn on this site is I actually had to do work to earn it, unlike my corporation where I really don’t do any work at all. I can show all my friend “yeah this is the ten dollars I earned THROUGH WORK!” and if they say that they also have a job and have made more money, I’ll pull out my emergency one million dollars that I always keep stashed in my pants and laugh at them, probably while rubbing the money all over myself. (continue reading…)

The Five Hats of Gaming present…

…the top five games not worth full price

Brought to you by Fedora Man

Well it’s finally March; or rather it has been March for half a month now, whatever. It’s hard keeping track of time when you’re on another planet fighting the living embodiment of anger with nothing but hat based weaponry and your wit; not to mention making love to all the alien women who all suspiciously speak English (call me). In fact it’s nearly impossible to keep track of the time when you’re fighting robots and defending humanity twenty-four hours a day seven days a week (or sometimes eight days a week depending on where I am) so cut me some slack on the issue. But in between throwing my Fedora-rangs (not a rip-off of Batman) and solving super crime in my Fedora Cave I did manage to get down to Gamestop to browse the selection. I was thinking “Damn, I need some new games to play in between sleeping and fighting five dimensional creatures that my mind can’t fully comprehend.” Because honestly, what the hell else am I going to do in my spare time but play games on my super computer?

A horrible thing happened as I browsed the new games list: most of them weren’t worth the displayed price and I’ll be damned if I spend a cent of my billions of dollars if it’s on something overpriced and uninteresting. At first I believed some crime was afoot. Perhaps my non-arch-nemesis (but a nemesis nonetheless) The Emo-inator replaced all the great new games with some games that were released last year and already had at least thirty dollars shaved off the price tag in reality. But I quickly found out he was still in jail after his last big scheme (replacing all the pen ink in my mansion with black eyeliner). So I returned to Gamestop and demanded answers! “Why are these games priced at sixty dollars!” I demanded to know. “There is no way in hell they’re worth that much money!” I grabbed that pimply faced bastard by his collar and pulled him close to my face to show him I was serious. The rest after that was a blur, but I’m pretty sure the police came and I think I was trying to explain my innocence to them while being beaten with their night sticks. I couldn’t do anything since I wasn’t in costume (my fedora) so I just had to take the ass kicking. There is some good news though: I did manage to write down a list of games to bring to the public’s attention before I got sent to jail. Now the list was hastily scrawled on a dollar bill and there’s also a lot of blood on it but I’m pretty sure I can read it so I hope you can appreciate what I’ve done for you in the following list.

(continue reading…)

Something for all you blood lusting Wii owners, it’s MadWorld by Platinum Games. With the drought of something worthwhile, MadWorld will delight all out there who owns a Wii. Carefully crafted by Platinum Games, the former developers of Clover Studio, you know it’s going to bring own the bacon.

MadWorld is stylized game, consisting of mainly three colors – if you haven’t guessed already. Taking the look from Sin City, MadWorld does it extremely well. The graphical presentation is nice, smooth and creamy; or rather, nice to look at as the spectrum is actually really fitting for the game. The game does a good job making the world, well Mad, as it seems to a broken down trash heap of no humanity left. The level design sports good variety as no two levels looks the same, giving out nice atmosphere to the bloodshed that is all around you. (continue reading…)

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of bullshit about this generation sucking and people waxing nostalgic about the last gen as the pinnacle of gaming. Let me just say, I’ve been around the block for a long time. I can assure you, this generation isn’t as good as the last generation; Not because this generation sucks, but because it isn’t even over yet. We are only 3/4 years into what will ultimately be an approximately a 10 year generation. Now, I’m going to field a couple of complaints about this generation and tell you why you all suck for complaining.

(continue reading…)