Oh snap! BioShock 2 is dated! Dust off your copies of The Fountainhead, put your thinking cap on, and get ready for the sequel to what I consider the smartest video game of all time. The game is dated for February 9, 2010. I can’t wait. Did Bioshock need a sequel? No way. Am I concerned that they’re milking a sequel, especially since Ken Levine isn’t involved? Of course. Do I think a multiplayer mode is the dumbest shit ever? Certainly. But still, it’s a sequel to BioShock.

I’m ready to spend some time in Fort Frolic for real. Dated!

When I heard that the Brutal Legend demo was available to people who pre-ordered the game at Gamestop, I got my uncleansed ass to the store today. I threw down five dollars and giddily stared at the download bar as I penetrated my 360 hard drive with metal thunder.

God damn.

Brutal Legend looks to be a handjob to every metal geek like my friends and myself. I generally don’t play demos, since I like to keep things virgin. Like I was, for twenty-five years. But I couldn’t help it. Like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, it seems like this is the shit Jack Black was born to play. The demo throws enough ridiculous shit at the metal head in fifteen minutes to leave them panting over their Anthrax collection. Swinging huge axes, the typical Hot Topic metal chick, and electrocuting people with a Flying V guitar.

All of this would be just another sloppy homage if it weren’t for the fact that the gameplay seems to deliver. Mastermind behind it Tim Schafer throws the kitchen sink at you. You have metal-Zelda gameplay, driving a god damn hotrod, and some Prince of Persia style teaming-up with said Hot Topic chick.

And then to close it off, they preview the rest of the game while blasting Three Inches of Blood’s song “Deadly Sinners”. What sort of homo would like a 3IOB song blaring while a trailer plays? Someone like me, who rocked out to them to the point that I named my WoW guild after them.

The line starts behind me to give Schafer a blow-job.

I played some more Scribblenauts today, and I’m continually impressed with this little game. It’s gone from something I hadn’t heard of, to something I bought my girlfriend because she likes puzzles, to something I can’t get out of my head. Scribblenauts is one of the more recent games where I actually found that failing is awesome.

Consider today. I’m trying to pick up some goddamn flowers for a chick. Whatever, okay, cool. It quickly becomes clear to me that one bouquet is underneath, straight chilling with a piranha.

It seems like it has a pretty simple solution to a meat head like me. I’ll conjure up a fucking bazooka, and teach that piranha about the dangers of explosive devices. Never mind the fact that I’m wondering why this chick wants these flowers that are absolutely soaked, and ruined by a flesh-devouring monster left over from the prehistoric days.

So I’m all, you know, get ready to feast on death, Mr. Piranha. I aim, I fire…I explode. I blow up a nearby tree, I blow up myself, and the piranha telepathically conveys me the finger.

Awesome.

Solving puzzles is awesome, and half the fun of Scribblenauts has been wondering what exactly will solve the problem. I’m sitting there, having to give a fireman (or is it firefighter or fireperson?) something he’d like to hold. I’m like, here dude, hold this oxygen mask.

He ain’t feeling it.

Really bro? You’re going to run into some flaming cauldron of asbestos and you want to suck wind? Curious. But I wasn’t pissed. I equipped the chap with an axe and apparently he was ready to play the hero. I found myself talking shit to him, even as I trashed object after object, but somehow it was fun. Thinking? Fun? Well played 5th Cell.

Yeah, brilliant idea, let’s teach robots to ask questions.

Via New Scientist:

ASKING someone for help is second nature for humans, and now it could help robots overcome one of the thorniest problems in artificial intelligence.

That’s the thinking behind a project at Willow Garage, a robotics company in Palo Alto, California. Researchers there are training a robot to ask humans to identify objects it doesn’t recognise. If successful, it could be an important step in developing machines capable of operating with consistent autonomy.

Consistent autonomy? Are you out of your fraking minds? Seriously. You’d think all these tech nerds that are pushing us closer and closer to the Great Robotic Uprising of Spring of 2020 would probably watch some sci-fi. I mean c’mon, you guys are building robots. You have to be geeks. Philip Kindred Dick is considerably aggravated with all of us.

Asking questions? It’s like seventeen years before some hot blonde chick is walking up to you and asking “Are you alive?” before robotrons bomb the cities and scorch the skies. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Fallout 3 is one of my favorite goddamn games of this generation. And unlike some people’s DLC (looking at you, Bioware), their episodic releases have been jack-worthy. If I was a Fallout 3 zealot and I only owned a PS3 I would have been pulling my hair out. Them DLCs have been 360 exclusive for a while now. But rejoice, PS3 Wastelanders:

Via Kotaku:

The first DLC to hit the PS3 version of Fallout 3 will be Broken Steel, available Sept. 24. That will be followed by Operation: Anchorage and The Pitt on Oct. 1, and Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta on Oct. 8.

Good lord they’re coming at you quickly. Prepare to take one off the tits. But seriously, with this release, the whole “360 has teh uber exclusives” argument continues to erode. Oh snap! It looks like PS3 just slapped the 360’s sandwich out of its hand.

Yes, Uncharted 2 features Twitter integration. Wowzers. What exactly can you tweet?

Read the rest of this entry »

Slow Thursday morning. So let me pass along some sexy concept art from Duncan Jones next movie, Mute. Click the image for a larger rendition of it. I was unfortunate enough to miss Jones’ Moon this year which looked like a trippy riff on 2001 and other things. But this promo art along with all the good things I’ve heard about Moon have me pretty geeked out. It also doesn’t hurt that Jones intends on borrowing heavily from Blade Runner‘s vibe:

Via Slashfilm:

Mr. Jones has made it abundantly clear how much a fan of Ridley Scott and the seminal work of future noir he is and another one part unsurprising as he’s explicitly compared Mute to Blade Runner himself.

Awesome.

ZOMG, controversy surrounding Scribblenauts? I lamented the lack of dildos in the game earlier in the day, but apparently there’s buzz about the word “sambo”:

Via Kotaku:

What happens when you write “sambo”? You get a watermelon.

I’m a naive sheltered white kid who was luckily raised by two very open-minded parents. And as such, I had never heard the term before.

According to Kotaku:

The word “sambo” has been used to demean and degrade Africans and African-Americans alike. “Sambo” was a common slave name in the U.S., and the late 19th century children’s book The Story of Little Black Sambo is cited as furthering the word as a slur. While the book was set in southern Indian, it did play on the blackface iconography and African-American intellectuals have been critical of the pickaninny motifs

and:

There was even a New Jersey brand of watermelon called “Sambo brand”

Weird. The Scribblenauts’ creative director Jeremiah Slaczka retorted:

Via Kotaku:

Slaczka said that the word was included in Scribblenauts because it is an ingredient of the Ecuadorian dish Fancesca, which is listed, on Wikipedia, as including a “figleaf gourd,” or “sambo.” A Google image search of the term “figleaf gourd” produces an image that looks like a watermelon. Slaczka said that it is common to use the same image for multiple words in Scribblenauts and that that is the reason a word meant to depict a figleaf gourd appears to be a watermelon.

Oh boy. I have a feeling we’re going to be hearing about this one for a few days. I don’t really understand how this could have gotten past the Scribblenauts team. Knowing people given the function of this game, the first thing a bunch of intrepid nerds were going to do was…try every single imaginable slur, curse word, and questionable noun. While I had no idea what sambo meant or the negative connotations it carried, it is hard to fathom there wasn’t a group of people or person in charge of preventing something like this from happening.

Someone’s Christmas bonus is going to get significantly lighter!

Oh man! On the same day that the Halo 3: ODST 250gb bundle was announced, Engadget reports that there’s a Uncharted 2 250gb bundle coming to the PS3. I love the fact that both Sony and Microsoft are taking uppercuts at one another. It’s fun to watch, and it’s creating all sorts of ridiculous bundles and deals. Sure, I bought the 360 and PS3 at launch. So really I don’t have any direct benefit from it. But it’s great to see the two giants fighting over our dollars.

Right now? How can you pass up a PS3 Slim with 250gb of space and Uncharted 2 for the ODST bundle? You’re getting a superior game and a Blu-Ray player. Hot.

The way everyone is going nuts about Kanye West you’d think he was caught molesting children.

Oh wait.

We don’t lash into child molesters, now do we? Well, I mean we do. But not ones that didn’t make a significant contribution to the pop industry, molest countless boys and bribe their parents, and perform surgery after surgery on themselves until they look like an unrecognizable monster from my dreams.

I’ve found the past week to be generally disappointing for a humanity I don’t have much faith in already. The pervasiveness of Kanyegate is staggering. It’s everywhere. Twitter updates. Facebook status updates. On the news. On the radio.

Who the fuck cares. Why the fuck cares! Who the fuck cares?

I find it particularly saddening that a dude crashes the stage of a shitty pop infomercial and it brings hell down upon him. Of course he acted like a goddamn schmuck. Is that really debatable? He apologizes a day later and it ain’t good enough. No way. No how.

Why?

Because you’re being told you’re supposed to be outraged. It’s a convenient little bit of fast-food pop-news to keep the fat docile populace from really thinking about anything worth fucking mentioning.

Then there’s Michael Jackson. A man commits a laundry list of sex crimes against little boys and he’s lauded as Pop Jesus. The way people cried and cried and oh-my-gosh-I-can’t-believe-he-died sentiment that was vomited across the walls of media was disgusting.

What the fuck is going on here? How is it that a guy who crashed the gate of a Shit Castle becomes a public enemy, while another pop-star can get away from having children fondle his nipples.

It’s insanity in motion.

People’s memories have become so tailored by the exertion of the media it’s absurd. Newscast after newscast told everyone, you’re supposed to be sad, Michael died! Oh my gosh Michael died! No, not Michael! The world’s only lost a child-molesting pill-popper! How are we ever going to cope? Who is going to cure AIDS? Who is going to solve cancer? Who is going to create the ultimate renewable energy?

More importantly, who is going to be a sexual threat to our children?

Read the rest of this entry »