Mario Kart Wii, the other half of our nonstop new release blitz for the past month, releases today, too. So all is not GTA IV. If any of you backsliding heathens skipped church to snag your copy, assuming ya don’t have blue laws forbidding the sale of video games ‘afore 1 pee em in your county, let us know what you think in the comments.
Rockstar Games and the UPS corporation—sorry for calling you Fed Ex yesterday!—came through in a major way this morning, dropping off a hot (but legit) copy of Grand Theft Auto IV at Kotaku Towers West. Naturally, I took an appropriate amount of time playing the game before posting that it had arrived. But this isn’t one of those disgusting bragging posts, where some schmuck editor taunts you with an early release; it’s a reminder.
I swear to God, that’s what this looks like. See, Kirby, that pinkish blob in the middle, vaguely phocomelic appendages, with smiling eyes … and what looks like three members of The Last Family around him. That’s a Kirby-Robotron mashup.
Destructoid dares to ask the question: “Is Chun-Li a post-op transsexual?” Hard hitting and thought provoking, to be sure, but, you know. Meh. Her hands are big? yarly.
But it’s as good a jumpoff for me to reminisce about the intersection of Street Fighter, my fraternity in college, and a case study in cognitive dissonance.
This happened back at N.C. State, where I was a member of Tau Kappa Epsilon’s Beta-Beta chapter. Names have been changed to protect the ashamed, but the frat nicknames are, I swear to God, real. Here goes.
You know, I don’t play Assassin’s Creed, I don’t own a PC, don’t game on PCs, but every time I watch this video I feel a mixture of amusement, sympathy and outrage. Plus I love the jolly music. I imagine it as an accompaniment to some poor bastard stepping on rakes and skateboards cleaning out his garage. Or a Rube Goldberg contraption gone horribly wrong.
Alright, the draft is over, and you are bitching about the picks and touting your own, which is what I had in mind all along. But now we’re going to Grade the Draft, as the NFL analysts like to do.
… So Margaret Robertson argues, at least when it comes to graphics — why did everyone abandon monochrome for colour? Wouldn’t a little variety be nice?:
Why were we so quick to leave black and white behind as we moved on from Pong and Spacewar!, and so quick to assume that these 15, 52, 512 or 16.7 million new colours were necessities not possibilities? Why, other than the small consideration of it being certain commercial suicide, did so few designers chose to keep things monotonous? Why can’t I think of a single voluntarily black-and-white game, from the last ten years, since my best candidate, Vib Ribbon, turns out to have a little hint of pastel indulgence in its scoring display.
Man, I am on a mission to get Jack Thompson to spam my inbox. I figured anything pairing “Grand Theft Auto” and “hookers” might trigger his impotent, wasted bot-army of letter writers which is, of course, himself alone.
GamesRadar has an amusing tribute to one of the most indispensable classes in the GTA franchise, the hooker. I’ll have you know — this is written with as serious a face I can muster — I’ve never killed one. Ever. I consider it a point of pride that I never, even to see the outcome, lowered myself to the top-of-mind stereotype everyone has of a GTA gamer. Nor do I kill the cops. Unless I have 3 stars and have been separated from a burning vehicle. But I digress.
Kieron Gillen has a nice ‘rise and fall’ article over in The Escapist‘s ‘Post-Mortem’ issue, which isn’t looking at games so much as the industry …. Mucky Foot was a little studio started by three former employees of Bullfrog, who found that being absorbed into Electronic Arts just really wasn’t working for them:
