In da Best Buy

Yesterday I heard the news headline that rapper 50 Cent filed for bankruptcy. At first I thought he was in the same boat as MC Hammer where he kept spending money until he was flat broke. But later on I heard the whole story where he’s not really out of money and it’s more of a strategy to keep his businesses operating while he resolves a court issue.

But until I heard the whole story, I was confused as to why he was filing for bankruptcy. How could someone with so many businesses with so much money flowing in from all directions run out of cash?

This caused me to remember the first time I heard of 50 Cent. I was at a Best Buy looking to get a copy of the dumb hexagonal shaped boxset for the .hack//Sign anime, which came with the first DVD volume, a plush Grunty, the soundtrack (?), and a shirt. While walking through the music aisles to get to the DVD section, a Best Buy employee was walking around with a sheet of paper taped to the back of his shirt that read something like “we’re out of 50 Cent (so don’t ask).” Not really into rap music, I was ignorant of the wildly popular release of his debut album Get Rich or Die Tryin', so I’m guessing the store must have ran out of stock of that album quickly and then he was constantly being annoyed by everyone asking him if they had any copies left in stock; thus going to the length of taping a stupid piece of paper to his back letting everyone know of their inventory situation.

Shortly after I would be very familiar with 50 Cent, as his music would be played constantly everywhere for the months following. But whenever there’s something in the news regarding 50 Cent, I always think of that Best Buy employee, walking around the store with that sign taped to his back.

The End

Summary from the abyss

I took a staycation over the past few days because my birthday was this week. And with it, a lot of unhealthy, high calorie, high fat, high sugar meals were consumed this whole week and I’m now starting to feel the effects of all this bad food. But unhealthy meals aside, this was a great week because for my birthday I received a PS4! Yea, I’m now officially with modern consoles like the rest of you. I received the PS4 that’s bundled with Arkham Knight. That’s cool and all, except I haven’t played any of the previous games. I was hoping this would be the kind of game where it wasn’t necessary to play the previous games, but the online gaming community proved that to be not true.

There are not many games that I care for currently (but there are many games coming soon), but I did happen to snag a copy of Alien Isolation that I got for a nice $40. I wanted to play this game so bad back when it originally came out, but I wanted to play it on a “next gen” console. So now that I own a “next gen” console I can now finally get to play it. Well, except for one minor thing: I’ve never seen any of the Alien movies with the exception of Prometheus.

I don’t believe you need to watch the movies to enjoy Isolation, but I want to have a solid understanding of the all of the little references from the movies I feel they have sprinkled throughout the game so I can have a better appreciation for them when I come across them in-game. Also, watching the Alien movies was something I wanted to do for the past few years but never had the motivation to do so. So over the past few days I watched all of the major Alien films in order of their release dates -- all by renting them on my new PS4 too!

Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, and Prometheus. My favorite was the original, Alien, followed by its sequel, Aliens. I didn’t care for the majority of Alien 3, but I thought Resurrection was a fun sci-fi flick. I hear a lot of people hated Prometheus, but I liked it; and especially after watching the original (things in that film make so much better sense now). So yeah, it was a great week with great accomplishments.

Self-destruction

Hope everyone in the US had a great 4th of July, three day weekend. Having the 4th actually land in the middle of the weekend was really special since we had a day before and after it to prep and recover from it.

For me, I ended the weekend with a bang by going to Carl’s Jr. and ordering something called “The Most American Thickburger.” It’s a burger with all the traditional fixings like lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, cheese, mustard, and ketchup, but it also includes a split hot dog and potato chips. I ordered the 1/3 lb. version because I felt the 1/2 lb. would have killed me.

The verdict? Not bad. I thought the chips would have ruined it by getting soggy, but they stayed crispy thanks to them being kettle styled and were placed on the dry side of the burger where the lettuce was at and nothing else. And while the hot dog had a sickly white look to it, it did taste delicious when you bit down and noticed two different textures of meat (of which being the hot dog and the hamburger patty). I don’t think I’m going to order it again though, as I just wanted to see what a ridiculous burger like it tasted like. I place The Most American Thickburger into the same category as KFC’s Double Down which was all the craze a few years back. But unlike the Double Down, I didn’t get sick after eating The Most American Thickburger.

Identity: concealed

I’m glad to see Google Maps doesn’t discriminate between humans and dinosaurs when it comes to blurring out faces in street view.

Just A Test

Does this site still work after I did a lot of backend stuff? If you can see this then, whew! At least new posts are showing up. Becuase things seem to be working fine, I should be back to posting junk on a regular basis again. Good thing too, becuase I have a lot of projects in the works that I can't wait to begin showing here. Get hyped!

E3 2015: Nintendo Digital Event

Their biggest new game announcement is for the latest entry in the Star Fox series, Star Fox Zero for the Wii U. A reimagining of the original, Zero will also be including elements from other Star Fox games such as the never released Star Fox 2. It looks beautiful and fun to play. I like the idea of having the TV with a third-person perspective of the ship while having an in cockpit view on the GamePad for accuracy in targeting enemies.

Zelda: Tri Force Heroes is a 3DS game that includes multiplayer gameplay that uses an interesting mechanic called totem that involves having players stack their Links on top of one another to solve puzzles and to attack enemies. The game will support both local and online multiplayer.

The absolute cutest thing shown during the digital event was seeing all of the Yarn Yoshi’s on display. For the soon to be released Yoshi's Woolly World, they are also introducing a new Amiibo that has Yoshi designed from actual yarn. It will be available in a few colors and are just adorable to look at.

This year seems like it’s the most I’ve seen Nintendo passing development duties to 3rd party studios. When it comes to physical items like Amiibo, Nintendo is teaming up with Activision’s Skylanders to include a few figurines that will work with both Skylanders and Nintendo devices. For the 3DS port of Hyrule Warriors called Hyrule Warriors Legends, it will still be Koei Tecmo’s project. And for Star Fox Zero, PlatinumGames will be assisting with the development.

My favorite game shown during this digital event was Super Mario Maker. It looks like they added a whole lot more to the game compared to when I saw it back during last year’s E3. It looks really polished, too. If I had a Wii U, I definitely get the edition of the game that comes with a booklet that shows a lot of sample courses. I’d also get the 8-bit Mario Amiibo as well.

This was a pretty neat package of games Nintendo showed off during this year’s event. They did not mention anything regarding their next gen console codenamed Nintendo NX, but I’m glad to see Nintendo is still out there as a strong competitor for both Sony and Microsoft. As a side note, it’s sad to hear that Sega doesn’t have a booth at E3 this year :-(

E3 2015: Sony Press Conference

Holy moley.

Call Sony butterfingers because they were dropping the mic all throughout their press conference. Starting the show with a show stopper, the first game they showed for the evening was no other than The Last Guardian, aaaand with a release scheduled for 2016. Many bottles of Mountain Dew were accidently knocked over by nerds everywhere when this announcement occurred.

Another bomb drop was a ways of making good on a sour note that occurred during the PlayStation Experience back in December where Square mentioned they would be releasing Final Fantasy VII…as a port from the PC version. A roaring audience suddenly going silent was all that was needed to demonstrate the disgust everyone had when the word “port” was spoken. But now, at E3, they are giving what everyone wanted by making an actual remake of FFVII. Many nerds around the country chocked on their Doritos when the word “remake” appeared on the screen.

Continuing with pushing the fandom momentum forward, Sony hosted the Kickstarter launch for Shenmue 3! Yu Suzuki was there to countdown the timer for the launch, which by the way, had a goal of 2 million dollars that was already funded in less than 24 hours. I’ve never seen a Kickstarter campaign fill its most expensive pledges so quickly. I, for one, would have loved to have 10k of spare cash to blow to get the pledge that gets me the Ryo Hazuki leather jacket.

The new game that caught my attention was Horizon: Zero Dawn. While I don’t get why giant robotic dinosaurs are roaming the Earth, it was a cool looking game with some great combat. The trailer for Hitman was super stylized and looked impressive. And while I don’t really care for the franchise, the trailer for Hitman kept me glued to the monitor. Another game series I don’t care for but caught my attention was for the third or fourth installment (depending on who you ask) for it: Batman: Arkham Knight. The whole first-person perspective stuff was interesting and brings a new type of exploratory gameplay to the fast paced action the series is known for. Here’s hoping that wasn’t just a one-time gimmick.

Media Molecule’s Dreams sounds great, but it just made me think of LSD for the PS1. Man, Sony needs to release that on PSN US, or better, get the original creator, Osamu Sato, and have him remake the game with the power of the PS4. I’d preorder that game. Believe it. When it came to discussing the Morpheus VR headset, Sony was pretty coy with info. I guess they’re seeing if people are still interested in VR.

A big surprise was seeing a Call of Duty game being shown at Sony’s show. Now I understand why they were suspiciously absent from Microsoft’s show. For publisher Devolver Digital’s showcase, I was impressed with all the games they presented. My favorite game from theirs that I’m getting soon for PC is Ronin. Another cool looking game from them was Mother Russia Bleeds. I think it might be an old school brawler game, and if that’s true, then rad. There was a lot more to the show, but those were the biggest highlights for me.

In the end, I was really impressed with what Sony had to show at their press conference. There wasn’t a lot of first party stuff (and that could be a scary thing if you think about it), but if their job was to win the hearts of gamers, then: mission accomplished.

E3 2015: MS Press Conference

With every year that passes, Microsoft has been inching closer and closer to earning their reputation back for gaming prior to the 2013 “always on” PR disaster. With this year’s press conference, a lot of interesting things will be coming soon to the green box.

For starters, Microsoft seems to be finally acknowledging that its past is something worth of value and deserving of a second chance. With this, they are planning for 360 games to be playable on the Xbox One -- both downloadable and disc based games. I was impressed when they said 360 games would run natively on the console and would include access to Xbox One features like screenshots, DVR, etc. The one caveat to this is the game studios would need to approve a 360 game for to run on the Xbox One. So you’ll need to wait for a blessing from a publisher or developer before you can play them.

I love me some classic gaming compilations like Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection and Namco Museum, so it was cool to hear that Rare would be celebrating their 30th anniversary by stuffing 30 of their games onto one anthology called Rare Replay. Spanning across a magnitude of consoles like NES, N64, 360, it’ll include certain games such as Battletoads, R.C. Pro-Am, Perfect Dark, Viva Pinata, and Banjo-Kazooie. Personally, I would be interested in playing Blast Corps.

When it comes to hardware, the Elite controller seems interesting. With it, you can swap out the thumbsticks, insert what looks like paddle shifters at the back of the controller for racing games, trigger sensitivity settings, button remapping, and a funky looking d-pad (which appears can be swapped out for a more traditional d-pad). It will be available for both Xbox One and Windows 10.

Other hardware announcements included them saying they are partnering with Oculus so that their VR headsets will come packed with Xbox One controllers. In relation, Microsoft demonstrated their VR/augmented reality/whatever headset called Microsoft HoloLens by showing it working with Minecraft. With it, they had the person with the headset on logging into another player’s world that was using a Surface tablet. With the headset, you can view the world the Surface user created from a bunch of angles that can zoom in and out of buildings and above and underground, too. It was a really neat tech demo, but not much value other than that.

I didn’t see much for games that caught my interest during the stream with the exception for games like The Division and CupHead -- which I believe were games I mentioned during last year’s E3 press conference. Hopefully more interesting games will come out of the ID@Xbox program, but overall it was a show from Microsoft that demonstrated that Xbox is all about the gamers, and I’m glad to see that the press conference proves that notion.

State of the site

“Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, my fellow web surfers.”

The post about multimedia games was the final one from my original list of games to write about. I guess you can say that’s a wrap for volume 1, but don’t fret as I already have a list of games locked down for volume 2. Work has already begun on a new game’s feature and I also have some articles completed and in the can, so things are moving along well. It was fun going back and replaying some games I haven’t played in years, so I’ll be keeping the games journal feature as a standard thing for the website.

In related news, since it will be a while before I have enough game articles stocked up to begin posting on a regular basis, I’m going to switch gears and begin working on the backend of the site so it contains a section that is dedicated to features, like the games journal or the 16-bit Seinfeld comics. This new section will hopefully keep things nice and organized for the site from a content management perspective. Unfortunately I found out this CMS doesn’t natively support sub-contenttypes (my thought was to have a sub section for each new feature I come up with), but I have an idea on how to make this work in a mickey mouse kind of way, so this’ll be the biggest time consumer for me for a week or so. This may be the reason why blog posts might stop for a week or two.

But if all works out, I’ll debut it with a new short feature. And after that ends I should be ready to begin posting game articles again. The next few weeks will be difficult, I know. “But if we work together; if we summon what is best in us, with our feet planted firmly in today but our eyes cast towards tomorrow – I know it’s within our reach.

Believe it.

God bless you, and God bless the internet.”

The cutting room floor 2

The multimedia games feature I posted a few weeks back included a megaton of media I took for the write-up. I had a lot of trouble trying to decide which stuff to post with the feature and which ones should go to the waste side. Well, I decided to post some of the rejects here in this blog entry, plus repost cleaner images of some screenshots that actually made it into the feature. See all of it after the link jump.