Another Friday, another work-week in the bag, and now it’s time to get halfway into it myself. After doing my normal gig and then giving a drum lesson, I headed for my local beer-dealer.

Wanting to avenge the injustice that was last week’s beer, I made sure to be much more considerate about my choice. Rather than just grabbing the first six-pack to catch my attention, I actually took a minute to look around. “No goon-fuck Pump-o-Jacktern is gonna fool me this time,” I told myself.

And I was right. Kind of.

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Oh Kenny Kutaragi, if only you were still active at Sony! You’d be doing cartwheels! The PS3 is selling like god damn hotcakes:

Via Gamesindustry.biz

Our top retailers have reported a 300 per cent lift in PS3 hardware sales and an increase of 140 per cent in total hardware revenue across the PlayStation portfolio when comparing the first week of September to the week before the USD 299 price adjustment,” said Sony in a statement.

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I’m such a douche with the Bat-puns, I know. I can’t help it.

When I found out that Frank Quitely was leaving Batman and Robin for a spell after his initial arc, I was bummed out. But then I heard Philip Tan was taking over, and I breathed a sight of relief. Well, DC has announced that Cameron Stewart is taking over with issue #7, following Tan. It’s good news abound! I’m always weary of creative turn-overs on title. Suddenly the design, and perspective you’ve been used to shift, and sometimes for the worse. But Stewart’s promo art is gorgeous, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the dude can do.

Dig the gorgeous promo, and check out Stewart’s blog for other general coolness.

Covered is a truly awesome blog that I came across today via an article by Wired. At Covered, old school comic book covers get re-imagined by other artists. The result are pretty fantastic. Artists such as Mark Grambau take something like this:

And reimagine it like this:

The contents are countless, and they’re all absolutely awesome. Check out the blog Covered.

Wait, you mean three-thousand music games, four zillion peripherals and a thousand downloads will over-saturate the market? I don’t understand. Guess that’s why I’m not an economist.

Via Destructoid:

NPD Group’s Anita Frazier has cast a grim outlook on the formerly booming music game market, revealing that sales are down 46% from last year.

I just can’t understand how this is happening!

I’m on my way to grab quick lunch with one my pals from work. We get to talking about Arkham Asylum. He’s beaten it many moons ago, meanwhile I’m stuck at somewhere in the neighborhood of barely started and waiting to see Poison Ivy.

Me: Hmm..not since Monday. (it’s Thursday)
What happened?

It hits me. I remember. I live with a woman. I’m married. Another being with my DNA on this Earth is waiting to erupt in a shitstorm of diapers, bottles and….shit.

I get to thinking of my days of playing and mowing through games like kid on christmas. I would have games beaten so fast it would make my friends head spin. I’d have it beaten and I’d be on the ‘do everything clear everything unlock the bikini for the girl’ playthrough by the time they’d ask me what I thought of the ending.

What happened?

Sometime after graduating my life grew up around me. I got the great job. I met the great girl. We got the great house, etc, etc…but…

What happened?

It’s a moment that will happen to a lot of us. At some point you’ll ask yourself what the fuck happened. What happened to me being the man to ask about how to beat the boss with the thing that makes him impossible except not for you who already beat him and are onto the next game. Now I’m the dude my friends ask about lawn care.

I still play my games. I do have time. My gal, who has no interest in gaming whatsoever understands my inner child (read: inner game/internet fiend) needs to come out and play. I make sure that she’s my priority though.

A great man once said Poon before Purples. If you know what that means…then you know what I mean.

My name is Ian Drinkwater, and I want streaming pornography on the Playstation 3. I want it sold from the Playstation store. I want to be able to click on a menu selection and choose from Goopy Load Wunders 9 or Teasing A Tasmanian She-devil. I want all of this, and I don’t see any good reason why I shouldn’t receive my wish. While there are countless valid arguments for the prohibition of porn from the PS3, I don’t think any of them are solid enough to keep my beautiful dream from coming to fruition.

I don’t have any sort of moralistic argument in support of porn. That debate is old-hat, and either you watch porn or you are miserable and kick kittens. I have done some research, and this is precisely how the two groups break down:

People who dabble in the pornographics

People so unhappy they go straight in the “Right Hand Turn Only Lane”, spend their time writing Left 4 Dead manifestos, try and tell me I have a chemical addiction or two, and still write checks at the supermarket.

I’m arguing against this argument I usually hear:

You want pornographic movies to be sold on a gaming console marketed to kids. And let’s be real, no matter what sort of restrictions you put the console, them kids will always find a way to get around it.

That’s the sort of shit my girlfriend came at me with when I initially broached the topic of PS3 porn with her. I described what I found to be Heaven to her:

Babe, you don’t understand! There’s this network, and you click on it, and they sell movies. Well, the dude from Vivid (do you know what Vivid is? Oh, okay, good), wants to put porn on the network. You could just click on a button and get porn! Isn’t that amazing?!?!!?!?!?

It freaked her out, because I was actually yelling “QUESTION MARK, EXCLAMATION POINT, QUESTION MARKRRRRRK.” I had lost it. Let me tell you, if you combine porn with caffeine, my head almost pops off.

But yeah Ian, you want on porn on something marketed for kids.

Not really. Not at all. Listen, the PS3 is an expensive piece of impressive technology. This isn’t some Nintendo 64, or even a Wii. It’s got Blu-Ray, it has equipment that is significantly more complicated to set-up. Kids who are in little league are not going to be the majority demographic here. That’s not what Sony is marketing towards. Their core audience is people like me. In their twenties or so.

Wonderful girlfriend hopped onto the Internet. With the clickety-clack of the keyboards she asked Mr. Google if I was right. Mr. Google has become the great ender of debates for my generation. Everything can be proven with minimal keystrokes.

Do you think I’d bring this up if I was wrong? Of course not!

Via Gamer.blore:

Nielsen Media Research tried to prove the point by tracking usage data by age and gender for all three of the home consoles. Console activity in all National TV Panel homes was measured.

The PS3 generally seems to appeal to the older generation, with no young kids anywhere in the mix… Both males and females saw the largest usage amongst the 18 to 24-age range.

In an interview about the Playstation Network, where this porn would be bought, PSN director of operations says the PSN demographic is:

Via Kotaku:

Primarily male. The average age is 28 years old, in usually the middle- to higher-income range. They over-index against those with graduate degrees.

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The newest Final Fantasy XIII clip to leak from god knows where and uploaded by god knows who to the internet shows clips from the newest trailer that was totally secret and not shown to the public. How do I know? Because I find this at Kotaku and they were like “This is exactly like the stuff we saw and you didn’t. Because it was secret. But we saw it anyways. We saw the secret clip. That you didn’t.” Check out the video after the jump.

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I like keeping it real with ya’ll. When I’m running on raw emotion, I’ll admit it. And so for full disclosure, I’ve bought both of the games I’m about to discuss.

The very same day that I report that Arkham Asylum has sold TWO MILLION ZOMG copies, EA CEO admits that Madden sales are dropping:

Via Kotaku:

Madden NFL 10 leads the NPD Group’s top ten with 928,000 units sold on the Xbox 360. That’s a drop from last year’s cool million. And while Madden sales were up year-over-year on the PlayStation 3, the game suffered on the PlayStation 2 and Wii, with the sports game moving less than half of what it did on the PS2 from the same period last year.

All told, Madden NFL 10 managed to move 1.9 million copies across all platforms in August, down from the 2.2 million-plus Madden NFL 09 managed last year.

Now listen, that’s still an insane amount of copies. But I’ve always looked at Madden as something primarily for frat boys and jocks. And not cool frat boys and cool jocks. There, I covered myself. So to see it getting outsold by a comic book character‘s video game makes me swell with glee. It’s juvenile, but I cackled a little bit to myself. Sorry EA! Sorry your recycled money-machine that really doesn’t change much every year isn’t printing out the cash like it usually does.

C’est la vie, blowhards!

If you haven’t been reading DC’s Wednesday Comics then you’re either stupid or crazy. Provided you’re not both, go to your local comic shop right now buy as many of them as you can. Yes, they’re that good.

Those of you who have been picking up this weekly treat have probably already decided which strips are worthwhile and which aren’t. To me, the only real toss-away strips are Metal Men (apparently DiDio writes an interesting story about as well as he edits), Teen Titans, and (until last week, anyways) Caldwell’s Wonder Woman. Other than that, we’re talking straight-up comic-book masterpieces.

One of these masterpieces is Superman. The story is simple enough — Superman is having some sort of existential crisis and he travels about while trying to figure out what it all means. The execution, however, is perfect. Arcudi’s writing and Bermejo’s pencils depict Kal-El as both iconic and humanly relatable. Kudos to them.

But what I find most breathtaking about this comic are the colors. When I fold open the newspaper-style strip, my eyes explode and nearly knock the lenses out of my glasses. I don’t even know what to write…the colors of this Superman strip are just perfect. Vibrant, warm, welcoming, heavenly.

So once I realized that I was in love with the colors, I decided to contact the woman responsible: Barbara Ciardo.

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