Press Start!, your one-stop source for video games buffoonery. The column where I throw up five things that caught my eye in the halls of video gamedom this week. An interactive column, I beseech fellow gamers to hit the comments box with what got them excited/thinking/horny in the world of the 1-Up this week. Do it, or I’ll just keep posting juvenile treatises. I’m beggin’ ya.

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#1: Del Toro Spits Hot Fire On Video Game Respectability.
Del Toro has always been a binky of mine. I love the Hellboy movies, dug Pan’s Labyrinth, and say what you want about Blade 2, the dude directed the sickest collection of vampire spin-kicks, elbow drops, and body presses ever in one scene. So when he spoke out recently at a book signing in favor of video games, I was fucking pumped. Courtesy of Kotaku, Del Toro was quoted as saying:

Video games are the comic books of our time [yet] it’s a medium that gains no respect from the intelligentsia. They say ‘oh video games’. And most people who complain about video games have never fucking played them.

Boom, head shot. I’m going to side step the fatiguing and bothersome debate about whether or not video games are art. As a professor and mentor of mine once say regarding the art debate, “It’s not about whether or not something is art. It’s about whether or not it’s interesting.”

Well put, my Jedi Master. So rather, Del Toro addresses indirectly the question, “Can video games provide the medium for engaging and thought-provoking narrative?” and the answer is of course yes. He isn’t defending the majority of video games, but rather making an argument for the validity of the medium.

Awesome. Like comic books (and I would argue any medium) perhaps the majority of it is dim-witted and juvenile schlock. But that doesn’t condemn the entire medium. Instead, perhaps it issues the challenge for people within that field to step up and showcase how fucking powerful it can be.

I <3 Del Toro. Moving on.

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#2: WoW: Cataclysm Gets A Release Date; Stank Nuts and Shitty Beard INC.
Come December 7, I am so fucked. That’s the date that Blizzard has dropped for their newest World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm. I stunted for quite a while regarding this expansion pack. I hadn’t played WoW in almost a year. I thought I had kicked the addiction. But you can never truly get the WoW-heroin out of your bones. It’s been sitting there in the back of my mind, haunting me. “Ian” it says “Just give up, embrace it.” And I’m tired man, I’m too tired to continue fighting it.

So despite thinking that this is the expansion pack that I would actually be able to skip, it’s been dated, and its calling to me. I’ll give in. I know I’m not the only recovering junkie that’s going to give in to the siren’s call, and there’s some comfort in that.

Fucking of course the son of a bitch has to drop right at the end of my semester. I’m going to have two fifteen-plus page papers to be writing, and I know I’m going to be bleary-eyed and smelling like pizza sauce and body odor. Just having to kill one more murlock or some shit. Just one more. Just one more. Just. One. More.

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#3: Dream Club Zero Asks You to Stuff Girls’ Faces With Sausages.
Well then. A dating simulation coming in Japan for the Xbox 360 offers you the opportunity to pull off a unique task. Amongst the dating simulations, Dream Club Zero offers a more realistic task. You are capable of stuffing eerily pre-pubescent girls’ faces with sausages. Yeah dude, sausages. In what is one of the more creepily suggestive phallic mouth rapings of the week (I mean, uh ever?), there’s nothing that says let’s go on a hot date!, than offering up an ole piece of meat for a young mouth.

I don’t really have much to say about this, other than I find it fucking spellbinding. It’s like, really? Wow. As a master of the perverted and depraved, this makes even me uncomfortable.

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Somehow a fucking BioWare RPG escaped my notice last year. Or rather, I saw it, and I thought to myself “I can live without playing it.” Even I cannot explain my train of thought sometimes. Well, I fucking got into it lately, and I’ve come to a simple conclusion: my perceived apathy towards it was actually an internal survival mechanism. For after borrowing it from The Dude, I have begun playing it, and the hours have begun to melt away. One hour, two hour, three hours, and I’m sitting in a caffeinated trance, stabbing darkspawn like the baddest motherfucker ever.

It takes a lot to get me to sit down for more than an hour with a video game anymore. Even games that I dig usually have me playing with something resembling restraint. However, not Dragon Age. It’s like Lord of the Rings-themed crack. Straight up the nerd pipe.

I fucking dreamt about it last night. That shit used to be reserved for Diablo II and World of Warcraft. The sound of spells rocketing through my slumber.

Fucking Dragon Age. You gorgeous son of a bitch.

Source: Kotaku.

When it was reported that Darren Aronofsky was in talks to helm Superman, Natalie Portman was getting thrown around as a potential Lois Lane. Well, when Zack SLOW MOTION TITTY FUCK Snyder took the helm, I dismissed those reports. Well, apparently all is not lost as far as those rumors.

io9:

Although she’ll stay on as producer, both Natalie Portman and director David O. Russell have both left Pride Prejudice & Zombies due to scheduling conflicts. Thus escalating the rumors that Portman will be Lois Lane in Zack Snyder’s Superman.

Well then! Cool enough. I really like Portman, so much so that I forgive her for participating in the Holocaust of my Childhood. While I don’t exactly see Lois Lane when I look at her, I also consider two things. First, I have no idea what constitutes “looking like Lois Lane” anymore, but I know that Kate Bosworth wasn’t particularly it. And secondly, she’s a great actress, and whatever inexplicable visceral reaction I have can be dissuaded through her performance.

[Views From The Space-Ship, aka Desktop Tuesdays, aka Desktop Thursdays  is a (theoretically) weekly column where show you my worlds. Both real and virtual. Then, I invite you to share your own worlds in the comments!]

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[images & words is the comic book pick-of-the-week at OL. equal parts review and diatribe, the post highlights the most memorable/infuriating/entertaining book released that wednesday]

S.H.I.E.L.D. is the best comic book currently being published.

This isn’t a new revelation. I’ve held this opinion for awhile now. And I stand by it.

The newest issue simply reaffirms the beliefs I’ve held, further developing a story that delivers some heavy ideas through an original plot. What is the story at hand? Well, it’s pretty simple: Isaac Newton is in charge of the Shield, an organization that has protected the human race from extinction for thousands of years. Unfortunately, Newton is evil and has involved himself in a number of shady dealings like killing Galileo and enslaving Nostradamus so that he can uncover the secrets of the Five-Fold Understanding.

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Oh shit! Jim Lee is returning to Batman. Not to do something foolish like finishing off his run on All-Star Batman and Robin with Frank Miller, though its been rumored that he actually is going to complete that. Instead, the Dude Supreme of the 1990s is teaming up with Brian Azzarello for Batman: Europa.

The Source:

In the pages of BATMAN: EUROPA, the impossible has happened – the Batman is on the brink of defeat, at the hands of a virus with no cure. Surely there’s someone that can help him? Well, there is – the Joker. Who infected Batman with the virus? What does the Joker have to do to save him? And how can it all happen before the Dark Knight collapses? Together, the unlikely teammates and arch-foes travel through Europe cobbling together clues while the clock ticks down.

Well, alright then! I’m sold. I’m not a huge Jim Lee fan, but in a contradictory and ironic twist, his penciling something is enough to get me excited. Makes sense, right? Not at all? Oh, yeah, you’re probably correct. In a futile effort to defend my continual bipolarity, he’s such an icon that anything he drops is worth checking out. Especially considering that his work on Batman: Hush was friggin’ fantastic.

Over on Flickr, Adam Lowe has posted pictures of his custom made casing for the forthcoming Scott Pilgrim Blu-Ray. Aping the looks of an NES case, his work is a resplendent article of dork bonery.

God damn, Japan. You guys are out of your fucking mind. Behold Dream Club Zero, for the Xbox 360. Dropping in Japan later this year, the “dating simulation” allows you to pump sausages into eerily prepubescent chicks. Sounds like a regular date of yours? You’re probably on a red-worded list somewhere. Nothing says dating like molesting little girls with a fucking bratwurst. Good god damn.

I know that I didn’t cover any of the casting for the new X-Men movie, and here I am jerking off over the Spider-Man sheez. Well, I’ll inform you as to why I am behaving in this manner! At the time, I didn’t give a fuck about First Class. Forgive me! I’m sort of coming around on it now, though.

However, given that Marc Webb made my weepy, pussy, emo child heart leap and sing with 500 Days of Summer, I’ve been invested in his whole Spider-man reboot enterprise. Well come today, we find out that Emma Stone is going to be playin’ Gwen Stacy in the next movie. Say word? Say word! Stone was pretty dope in Zombieland and Superbad, and though I haven’t seen it, I’ve been told that Easy A is pretty snazzy.

I’m sold on it, yo. When they had reported that she was going to be MJ (since she’s always rocking red hair), I was like, oh? But now that she’s Gwen Stacy, I’m all, oh!

Yeah, I’m just babbling. Here’s hoping that Stone’s neck breaks and we all are moved by it. [Confused and aghast? LEARN YOUR LORE KID.]