“who killed videogames?” (a ghost story)
by tim rogers
Author Archives: tim
The Battle For E3 2K11
"another chocolate milk, please. why, hello there. i'm in town on business."
We were hungry for pizza — terrible pizza. And we weren’t willing to pay any less than fourteen dollars a slice. So we rented a 2011 Nissan Altima and drove six hours to the Los Angeles Convention Center. They just happened to be holding E3 that week. We decided to check it out. Here’s what we saw.
Happy 20th Birthday, Sonic the Hedgehog
Sonic the Hedgehog turns 20 years old today. Isn’t that great? It’s also my dad’s 61st birthday, so that’s cool, too. Like my dad, Sonic the Hedgehog’s birthday occasionally falls on Father’s Day. This makes Sonic about as much of a father to you as my father is also a father to all of you guys.
To celebrate Sonic’s birthday, I did a Kotaku. Forgive me! They offered money! The idea of the piece is that it’s “eight ways to fix Sonic the Hedgehog”, written for the target audience of a Sega who seems intent on doing the exact opposite of what people want. So I am reverse-psychologizing their reverse-psychology. It’s kind of stupid!
Though it has some fun sentences, maybe, like where I say chubbier, lighter-blue, black-eyed 1991 Sonic meeting darker-blue, longer-armed, green-eyed Sonic is “not as exciting as Superman meeting Batman — it’s more like ‘X-Men The Movie’ Wolverine meeting ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ Wolverine.”
A more sincere, heartfelt “how to fix Sonic” article is perhaps this Outrun 2 review from 2008, in which I call Outrun 2 the “16th best game of all-time”, and also “the best Sonic the Hedgehog game of all-time”, and I swear I am not trying to troll or be a jerk about that. It’s something I actually believe.
insertcredit.com exclusive: In commemoration of Sonic the Hedgehog’s 20th birthday, I made a Youtube playlist (below) of some of my favorite Dreams Come True songs. The bassist of Dreams Come True, Masato Nakamura, composed the (excellent) soundtrack for Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which is just a big, beautiful, boisterous, exuberant videogame full of confident graphical design. It’s probably the best actual Sonic the Hedgehog game — as far as I know, Brandon thinks so, too. (Brandon’s note: As much as I like Sonic CD and its music, I agree with this statement.)
news: we have accessed the little big planet beta
Hello, internet. We (by which I mean “I”) have obtained access to the Little Big Planet beta.
First impressions: it’s kind of fun! You can run, jump, and grab!
Though it’s the Japanese beta, all the in-game text is in English! Wacky! (Might be the PS3 system settings.)
The tutorial voiceover is a slightly gay Japanese man — “slightly” as in you’d not only let him watch your children, you would beg him to. He’d probably teach them something valuable about shoes!
The level tutorials are exhaustive and exhausting!
The final word: we used to think that beta tests were mythological things, because we applied for literally dozens of them during our serious careers as gamers, and never got in. Now, we got in on the Little Big Planet beta. On the one hand, this kind of sucks, because it’s basically been spelled out for us that we were wrong all this time: beta tests are real, and we just never got into one before because everyone hated us. With Little Big Planet, it’s quite possible that someone somewhere has started to either stop disliking us or (possibly even better) start actually liking us. Either way: hey! We get to play a videogame before some (most?) other people!
We made a YouTube video to commemorate this.
We were too tired and perhaps disinterested to make any rocket penises or penis-shaped moving platforms or grabbable penises made out of burlap or swinging penises made out of dark matter or stalactite penises made out of rock — or even flaming stalagmite penises made out of pink bubble bath foam. So, instead, we just used the penis in our imagination. We hope you forgive our unwillingness to do work with our videogame. :’(
This post was brought to you by Sony and dry-roasted almonds!
news: print media confirmed dead
The corpse of print media was found on a wooden folding table in the offices of small Japanese corporate office this afternoon.
The body has been identified as the April 2008 issue of Future Publishing’s Official Xbox Magazine, which might have actually been published as early as five weeks ago, according to coroner’s reports.
Detectives identified the murder weapon as an advertisement for Ubisoft’s upcoming surefire smash hit first person shooter Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2. The advertisement is fashioned to be a doppelganger of an Official Xbox Magazine cover, complete with the magazine’s logo in the upper-left-hand corner.
At the top and bottom of the magazine cover, the words “ADVERTISEMENT” are visible in bold, capital-lettered text.
Running along the left edge of the advertisement were “strong perforation marks”, “intended for purchasers of the magazine to remove the double-sided ad in order to see the real cover”, according to coroner’s reports.
The real cover is an image of Bethesda Softworks’ upcoming surefire smash hit role-playing game Fallout 3. 
Police investigations have confirmed that Ubisoft’s upcoming surefire smash hit first person shooter Rainbow Six Vegas 2 and Future Publishing’s Official Xbox Magazine have been involved in a relationship for some time, and that relationship had been ongoing even at the time of the murder.
“There’s a two-page spread for Rainbow Six Vegas 2 not even twenty pages into the magazine,” one undercover detective anonymously told insert credit.
“Magazines have been figuratively selling their covers to the highest bidder for years now,” Tim Rogers, expert on videogames and marketing in general as terrorism, told us. “This is the first time, to my knowledge, that a magazine did so literally.”
The back cover of the magazine features an advertisement for another Ubisoft game, Tom Clancy’s FutureWar, not to be released until Fall 2008.
Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Vegas is a game about what would happen if terrorists took over Las Vegas.
Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is a game about what would happen if terrorists took over Las Vegas again.
Asked to speculate on the killer’s motive or whereabouts, Rogers cited that the first Rainbow Six Vegas game’s difficulty selection screen allowed players to choose between difficulty levels entitled “normal” and “realistic”.
“This is [Ubisoft's] way of telling people that ‘Reality is not Normal’,” Rogers said.
Print media is survived by literature and the internet.
<Brandon’s note: Tim has been living in Japan for a few years, and thus is perhaps not aware that this has been going on over here for quite a while. I stand by the humor of the rest of this piece.>
[tim's clarification: i had a basic idea that it was going on for a while; just after i "discovered" this "huge scoop" yesterday, i told some chat-friends about it and they shrugged it off, which made me wonder, why the hell didn't anyone tell me about this sooner? it's hilarious! at any rate, this is one of the things that you readers the world over have a right, as americans, to complain about! so get on it!]
intervention: shigeru miyamoto, please get a haircut
Partly paraphrasing and partly pasting my recent column on Next-Gen.biz (it’s not plagiarism, even if it feels like it), I say this:
Mr. Shigeru Miyamoto, you’re the next contestant on Please Get a Haircut.
I’ve never seen a photo of him with what any rational human being would describe as a “decent haircut.” According to this interview, he was born in 1952, which makes him two years younger than my father, which means he should have better hair: not so. My father, though he eats salad with his mouth wide open, has never designed a videogame, and is not in the habit of being photographed for magazines or appearing on television, has a better haircut than Shigeru Miyamoto.
I’m not saying that I want to judge Mr. Miyamoto based on his hair — I already know he’s a lovely man with gorgeous ideas. He just doesn’t look right. Some people say he looks like a lovable college professor, which is maybe true, though if he was your lovable college professor, you’d probably want him to get a haircut, for his sake.
Literally almost anything will do. Something simple and manageable. Japan is home to some of the most talented hairstylists in the world; he owes it to himself. Hell, I’ll even pay for it. I will literally put $200 in an envelope and mail it to him. Other Japanese videogame designers who have transcended the laws of awesome human-beingship include Square-Enix’s Akitoshi Kawazu (maker of the SaGa games).
Any readers out there need only Google-image search the name “Akitoshi Kawazu” (of Square-Enix and Romancing SaGa fame). Actually, here — I’ve done it for you.
It really shouldn’t be too difficult to tell the difference between the before and the after, in Kawazu’s case. Now what about those two shots of Miyamoto above? Would you believe one was taken six years before the other? The most recent of those two photos was taken just a week ago, for crying out loud.
In short, change is good. Seriously. I know game designers don’t need good hairstyles; consider it a token of my reverence for the man that I’d like to see him not look so clumpy. And what better way to express the glorious bounty of Nintendo’s recent financial and spiritual wealth (. . .) than outwardly? Who knows? If Miyamoto gets a good haircut (I would recommend growing it out for two months before cutting), maybe gamers will start paying $200 for hot hairstyles instead of purchasing every single last god-forsaken menu-based Bleach fightingesque PSP game, and the horrible parts of the industry will all wither away and die.
Alternate last sentence: in addition to confirming that Nintendo will make new Mario and Zelda games within the Wii’s lifecycle, in his recent review in Famitsu, Miyamoto says, addressing internet rumors that Wii Fit stops being fun after a few weeks and starts to feel like exercise, “I want you guys to not give up! Soldier on!” Hard to be motivated by a guy who is obviously too lazy to creatively apply a comb!
<Brandon’s Note:> Hideo Kojima would be a handsome man if he got a decent haircut once in his life. Are people scared to tell him?
link: top 20 games of TGS on next-gen.biz
Hello, my lovelies!! It’s just me, Tim Rogers, coming to you live from a rainy Tokyo. Yes, Tokyo, where it always rains furiously the weekend after Tokyo Game Show ends. That’s God crying, sad that he’ll have to wait 51 weeks for another amazing week in videogame journalism in which large bloggers of all shapes and sizes pump out startling revelations in the tune of “Japanese people LOVE the Nintendo DS”!
At any rate, I have selected twenty games played at Tokyo Game Show, and selfishly called them the “best”, and Next-Gen.biz has for some reason believed me. Where they came across my list, I don’t know, though they not only plagiarized the whole thing, they also put my name on it. Rapscallions!
Click on it and through it repeatedly, please! If you don’t, they won’t send me checks ever again! How will I pay all these child support bills, if not with videogame journalism! Please!!
If you need enticing, know that I was able to fit Hudson’s Shooting Watch in at number 20, and it didn’t even get edited out!
Finally, a bonus for faithful insertcredit.com readers: the true game of the show was Delicious Indonesian Curry courtesy of Magic Spice in Shimo-Kitazawa (now for your desktop). Finishing the whole bowl of nuclear curry was even more thrilling and challenging than Metal Gear Solid 4!!
link: akira toriyama day on Action Button Dot Net
Tohohohoho, my lovelies! It’s me, tim rogers, once again. I’ve been fighting The Demons for a while, though I’m back now, to celebrate this joyful day — manga artist and character designer Akira Toriyama’s birthday (note: actually, it’s not his birthday) — by posting three reviews on my hot website Action Button Dot Net (that’s ABDN for short). Witness Dragon Quest Swords get roasted — two stars out of four! Witness a thoughtful, generous three-star appraisal of Blue Dragon — just in time for the holidays! And grab a Chai Tea Latte with extra Splenda and settle in for the long haul as Classic Tim Rogers bestows an almighty four stars unto the legendary Chrono Trigger! Brace yourself, darlings, for there be many sweeping generalities and portentous intonations regarding videogames ahead!
If this post wasn’t informative enough, or if you’re sitting on the fence — if you just can’t decide whether to click or not — let me reveal one of the revelations revealed in one of the reviews, namely that Robo’s Theme from Chrono Trigger borrows snippets of its melody from Rick Astley’s 1988 single “Never Gonna Give You Up“. How could anyone alive make a connection like that and not also pen a worth-reading game review?
I’ll see you all again, someday, I promise!
expose: what is a SKU?
If you’ve been reading the internet these past couple of weeks, you might have come across an acronym you don’t understand, and then immediately started using it in whole sentences as soon as you saw other people using it. It’s okay. This is something we do, with the internet. We sometimes use acronyms we don’t understand completely, or even understand at all. Acronyms are a part of our culture. I kid you not — I make acronyms out of everything I do, these days. “Gee Tee Tee Bee!” means “Goin’ To The Bathroom!” Enough about me, though.
The acronym we’re going to talk about today is “SKU”. If you read gaming’s most beloved tabloids or browse the scummiest videogame forumhives, you’ll see this acronym popping up a lot lately. People are using it in complete sentences! With punctuation marks, even! Many of them have a basic idea what it means, though few of them know what it stands for.
In short, it stands for freedom. In long, it stands for Stock Keeping Unit. According to the Wikipedia: “A SKU or Stock Keeping Unit (sometimes pronounced as a word, “skew,” or as individual letters, S K U) is an identifier that is used by merchants to permit the systematic tracking of products and services offered to customers.”
In other words, a “SKU” is a very strictly, labcoat-wearing-like, retail term. It approaches the idea of sales with tweezers and a microscope. When someone on a forum says, of the new black Xbox 360 Elite, that “multiple SKUs is going to create problems at the retail level”, they mean it’s going to confuse consumers who are not absolutely certain which box on a shelf contains what they want to buy.
For your reading pleasure, try this article at Kotaku. Use your browser’s search command on “SKU”; witness its use in the comments section. Ponder deeply how many of those usages might have been cut out or rewritten entirely to sound less like something a robot or a lecturer in the Chinet ballroom of a three-star hotel by the airport might have said during a seminar.
Also witness the amazing poise of mister Shane Kim, who convinced 75% of the internet that 1080p was “TOTALLY IMPOSSIBLE D00DZ” back in 2005, as he somewhat gracefully dodges the accusation that this “elite” Xbox 360 is just Microsoft playing catch-up with Sony. Also witness the rigid, stone-facery of the Sony PR man. (He’s the one who talks about SKUs.)
So why has this acronym suddenly popped into the videogame blogosphere? Because we like feeling elite? Maybe, maybe not. Keep in mind that a lot of the guys who get interviewed by videogame blogs are not actual game developers — they’re videogame PR guys, and unlike, say, movie PR guys, who more often than not have at least seen a couple dozen movies in their lives, videogame PR guys tend to come from strict retail backgrounds. Nintendo’s Reggie used to manage a Pizza Hut (or something), for God’s sake. Spewing “SKU” left and right is these guys’ revenge for you guys’ talking about mysterious things they don’t understand, like “graphics” or “gameplay”.
In closing, “SKU” is something you’d hear during your on-the-job training to be a stockroom monkey at a Target store at the start of that magic teenage summer that will indirectly make you a life-long smoker. It really doesn’t belong in human conversation, even on the internet. I say this as a man who shuddered and moaned when everyone started talking about “IP”s — Intellectual Properties — though maybe that was because I found it hard to believe any videogame had ever been “intellectual”. Really, though, you can keep “IP”. Use it all you want. Just promise not to say “SKU” anymore, people.
Thanks.
Feature: “gaming’s missing kane”
One-time insertcredit.com contributor and heavy aerosol addict Brendan Lee has written an article about why there isn’t a “Citizen Kane” of videogames yet. You can read it if you like.
“It’s gone. Nothing feels crispy/clicky enough; the fully-orchestrated soundtracks have a hollowness that dedicated Super Famicom sound chips never did. The more polygons they added, the less substance there is. Something’s somehow . . . missing.“
Now would also be a good time, if you haven’t attempted to already and understandably failed, read “are videogames terrorism?” (hey, kotaku linked it!) and/or “the ‘ben-hur’ of videogames“.
There is an enlightening discussion about the terrorism-like nonsense that is modern videogame production and PR going on at the selectbutton.net forums right now, along with a bit of jolly rogering about the back of the new Burnout box. That game, don’t you know, is properly titled “Battle Racing Ignited Burnout Dominator“. Not making that up.
Just because it bears repeating, here’s the entirety of said Burnout game’s back-of-box text — all capitalization is represented precisely as it appears on the box:
“2007 delivers the MOST INTENSE BURNOUT YET
SLAM YOUR RIVALS through barriers to UNLOCK SHORTCUTS.
Experience the thrill of BOOST CHAINING for OUTRAGEOUS RACING SPEED.
Choose your VEHICLE FOR BATTLE, from HOTRODS TO EUROPEAN EXOTICS.
Take risks and REAP THE REWARDS in the ALL-NEW MANIAC MODE.
Go HEAD-TO-HEAD with your friends for some MULTIPLAYER MAYHEM.
DOMINATE ANY SETTING, from the WINDY MOUNTAINS TO THE BEACH.”
Fans of erratic capitalization are also pointed, on this occasion, to the internet‘s Legacy Website “Jerk Your Own Adventure”.
If this sort of thing morbidly interests you, you’d like to know that Mr. Lee’s feature deals with similar themes. Yes — boost chaining and rival-slamming and OUTRAGEOUS SPEED (emphasis on the “speed”). So check it out and have something to talk to disinterested co-workers about around the water cooler on Monday.