NFOpocalypse

Once upon a time, games journalism was all fact.

Well, actually, there’s no way games journalism could ever be all fact. In the same way that movie reviews are never “all fact”, game reviews, previews, and other such articles have been subject to a journalistic bias since the dawn of of the medium. It’s just a fact of life that when somebody looks at something, they perceive something different from the person next to them. What is an amazing experience to one is a catastrophe of creativity to the other.

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In the last decade video games have gone from being something nerds did instead of meeting the opposite sex to that thing almost all people do instead of meeting the opposite sex. While video games have become possibly the largest entertainment industry in history, they have also gained some of the most sickly parasites of all. I speak, of course, about hack critics. While you are playing a game to enjoy it’s deep mechanics, gorgeous art, or complete lack of either, your critic counterpart is busy picking big words from a thesaurus so he can shit on your favorite new title. The OBRR is the line in the sand, and I stand on one side armed with poor grammar and crude language. Watch where you step.

Let’s start this off with the most obvious fart-sniffer on the whole goddamn Internet

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Don’t you just love that nice alliteration? But the crassness and vulgarity of this article’s title captures the essence of it perfectly. Sometimes when a series moves forward, the hardcore fans bitch and moan because the game isn’t exactly like it was before. Fuck Fallout fans. Fuck them so hard.

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I don’t care what everyone else says. Akitoshi Kawazu is a genius. He work’s with an indie gamer mindset—unafraid of experimentation and rejection, and just making whatever game he feels like making at that moment. So, I’d like to talk for a little bit about the first SaGa game I played—Final Fantasy Legend 2.

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There’s just something that draws me in about Survival Crisis Z. I can’t quite place what it is, because there’s so many amazing aspects behind the game. I guess the biggest thing that compels me to play it would have to be the persistence of my character’s progress, even if the random generation removes the emotional attachment I have to the characters and the persistence isn’t really true persistence. The only person I really care for is myself, since eventually my party comes back and just leaving and reentering buildings respawns the characters. It’s a sort of let down, but I can understand why.

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A demonstration video I made yesterday using the magic of debugging. Shows Hibachi’s bullet patterns. All I have to say about it is holy shit.

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In almost every town in Dragon Warrior 7 there’s a well. Most of these wells don’t contain anything. Some of them contain quite a lot.

In Dragon Warrior 7, there’s an item called a Tiny Medal. You can collect these, and eventually give them to a medal collector to get special items and equipment based on how many you’ve found. It’s sort of like the Golden Skulltulas in Ocarina of Time, or the little red gems in Illusion of Gaia. Sometimes you find these in wells.

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Hopefully the portion of the gaming populace that will at some point read this is familiar with Contra 4. Just in case you’re not, here’s a summary (skip this if you’ve already played it).

Contra 4 for the DS is (as of this writing) the latest 2D release of the Contra series, Konami’s classic chronicle of run-and-gun action where everything that moves can kill you just by touching you. It was designed with a very similar engine to Contra 3: The Alien Wars, as it incorporates the same weapon-switching move, but it also throws together a lot of elements from the whole series.

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My next column article is up on Massively. It is called Under The Hood: The Depths Of Space

My next column article is up on Massively. It is called Under The Hood: Strategy on a Massive Scale