I like Halo. You may not like Halo. But I think any decent human being with a penchant for nerdery can agree the commercial below is amazing. It’s painful to watch, because it makes what I find to be a laughable universe into something utterly gorgeous. Watch this trailer, see District 9, and contemplate how awesome a Peter Jackson-produced Halo movie could have actually been. Check it out after the jump.

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The Dreamcast has turned ten! Wait? What? Holy good god shit. Where did the last decade go? Wasn’t I just hooking up my Dreamcast and playing Tony Hawk on it for fifteen hours straight? I turn around for like, four seconds, to grab another Pepsi and a decade passes?

Jesus Christ, I must have gray hairs on my balls.

I was pretty stoked on the Dreamcast. To the point that I ended up getting a Japanese one for Christmas of ’98. Way to go parents, and you wonder why I’m a freeloading asshole, totally enabling me and shit.

I remember that Christmas morning, unwrapping the fuck out of my presents to see them sitting there for me: a Dreamcast, and a copy of Sonic Adventure. Language barriers? Get thee to a nunnery, I don’t want to hear about any language barriers!

Isn’t Sonic a universal language? The golden little hoops symbols of light, which we, as idealized innocent little creatures chase endlessly? Isn’t that what life really is, honestly?

Naw, probably not, huh. Kick a hooker and buy some crack!

Anyways.

I can’t roll off the countless hours my friends and I sat in front of Sonic Adventure, rocking the shit out of Dr. Robotnik. It was like that douchebag’s skull was designed for a spiky hedgehog to dance upon it. A Christmas break spent plowing through level after level. Mowing down shitty fast food and playing Primus and Dream Theater too loud. Life was good.

We even played through all the bullshit levels. With Amy Rose and Big the Cat and shit. I’m not sure why cracked out member of SONIC TEAM thought to himself or herself, “Let’s put a fishing game into Sonic”, but they should kick themselves squarely. But we had to. Why? We needed to get Super Sonic, fucking duh!

So there we were. Navigating shitty Amy Rose levels in Japanese, just so we could get to go all Super Saiyan and shit. Of course we did, of course we were victorious.

Sonic Adventure wasn’t the only game that got heavy rotation on my Dreamcast. I shit you not; I probably played my Dreamcast twice as much as I’ve played my Wii or my Gamecube.

Jesus Christ did I burn through hours in Phantasy Star Online. An online RPG, made by Sega, running through my 56k modem. Brilliant. I can still remember the phone wire running awkwardly across my entire room, underneath my beef geek legs and beanbag (not the nut sac variety, for once) and into the console. I think it actually ran better than Battle.net, which isn’t saying much for the time. It was addictive as fuck, and it’s yet another reason I put on like sixty pounds my senior year of high school. If you can think of a better way of spending the month of February than blasting Helloween and swinging swords through dragons and shit, I’m soliciting recommendations.

I’ve got like…at least fifty or so Februaries to go, I could use the tips.

And then there was the Great American Tony Hawk Challenge in the summer of 2000. In the summer of 2000, teenage boredom combined with raw adolescent competition to give way to the biggest measuring of E-Peens I’ve been a part of. Every friend I knew somehow had come across a Dreamcast, and a copy of Tony Hawk.

As an aside, do you remember when Tony Hawk was a must-have? That shit used to be tight. I remember just falling slowly out of love with the series, but goddamn did those first few games hook me.

For reasons I can’t even remember, the challenge was simple: If you can get the highest score on the first level in Tony Hawk, you’re a superior human being. I’m not really sure why it was the first level. It was just understood by all of us. God dammit, it has to be the first level! It’s obvious! You fool!

It was a raging competition that had been born out of the fires of our Crazy Taxi obsession. My dreams were filled with power sliding for hours while picking up douchebags to go to the Gap and shit. That was just the training ground for this electronic cock-measuring extravaganza. Crazy chaining combos, as my friends and I one-upped one another. You better not fucking restart your turn while I’m browsing Square Gamer! I will fucking stab you!

Who won? I have no idea. At some point, it eventually faded into the white noise of life. Left behind in turn for some other obsession. A new game, a new something. We probably picked up drinking, which cut seriously into our gaming time. For…like a week. And then it was gaming again. Losing the brain cells we probably forgot what we were playing and opted for something else.

So I ain’t got nothing but love for the Dreamcast. An underappreciated little system that was shelved too early in lieu of the titanic Playstation 2. But I’m going to remember it forever as the home of Crazy Taxi, Sonic Adventure, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Seaman, Sega Marine Fishing, Tony Hawk, Soulcalibur, Dead or Alive, Phantasy Star Online and on and on and on.

Happy tenth birthday Dreamcast, you beautiful piece of shit.

Simply put, Michael Jackson refuses to die. Here he is, sneaking into Final Fantasy XIII. What’s that you said, that’s not MJ? Well, okay. According the the “truth”,

Via Kotaku:

It’s already been confirmed that Sazh was a father – details were scant, however. Here is a first look at his son, who is named “Dodge” and also has an afro.

Sorry guys, can’t trick me. This is Michael Jackson if I’ve ever seen him. Looking all human again. Michael Jackson is like Jean Grey or some shit, reviving from the ashes. Actually, he probably just equipped a Final Attack+Phoenix materia before he passed. Welcome back, little man!

A new 2D Sonic game in HD coming in 2010. Are you excited? Don’t be a dullard!

Sonic games have blown hard for the last ten years, the original Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast being the last one I gave a fuck about. Sonic Unleashed was supposed to be super-tight, but then somehow ended up featuring night levels where you galloped about as some stupid fucking Werehog. No, I’m not making that up.

So I’ve thrown in my hat with this franchise. It’s left me saddened as my TOTALLY EXTREME BLAST-PROCESSING friend has broken my heart over and over. This has the potential to be ballin’, but I’d bet Yuji Naka’s testicles it’s going to let us down.

Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn Fucking. Well, I suppose it was only a matter of time for that search to yield our website. You’ve upped the ante, Boner-In-Hand-Nerd. Bravo.

Pepsibones and I talk about these website searches, and he was like:

It’s great that people find our site using these search terms…but it’d be nice if they actually came back.

So, if you want guys, I can start commissioning pictures of these search terms, so it’s not a total loss.

By that I mean Pepsibones, four Rockstar energy drinks, and MS Paint.

It’ll be glorious.

You know what I do late at night? I lay down, turn my PS3 on, and I watch some hi-definition porn off of a USB stick. Or, I stream internet porn through my PS3. In hi-definition. So obviously, hi-definition porn and PS3 were a match made in Heaven. Sploogey gooey Heaven. Right? FUCK YES, says Steven Hirsch the owner of porn empire Vivid Entertainment:

Via Destructoid:

Steven Hirsch, founder of the world’s biggest porn film distributor, Vivid Entertainment, has called on Sony to provide HD pornography on the PlayStation Network, declaring that the PS3 has “real potential” as a conduit through which wank material can pour into the homes of lonely young men. He’s got a point.

“We hope that Sony will allow adult movies to be downloaded worldwide,” claims Hirsch. “It’s too early to say to what extent this could help our business, but it certainly has real potential.

“As long as proper age verification is in place there is no reason why consumers should not be allowed to view adult movies on any device that they desire.”

It makes so much sense, it’s probably not going to happen. OF COURSE, it’s already on the Japanese PSN. But here in North America, home of the Puritans and Magical Book Worshippers, nudity is totally OMFG no.

C’mon Obamanites, drop down your Macbook and latte and join me in a YES WE CAN, for boners and boobs on our PS3s. Change we can believe in.

That awful scent wafting off of the guy wearing the Stratovarius shirt at the next convention you go to may stink of something different. No, that’s not unwashed ass you smell, it may in fact be death. Muwahaha!

The H1N1 flu, aka as Mrs. Piggy’s Strand of Expiration apparently showed up at PAX last weekend:

Via Kotaku:

The official PAX Twitter account wrote today “Just heard of our first test-confirmed swine flu case at the show. PLEASE if you feel symptoms (fever, etc) go to the doctor.” That’s potentially alarming news for the approximately 60,000-plus estimated attendees of this year’s. We contacted Penny Arcade reps to get more details on the reports of Swine Flu.

The Nerd Community’s equivalent of the Bubonic Plague may have just struck. Take some theraflu, see your doctor, and spend a couple days in your dungeon of choice.

It’s a common fear of mine that my comic book store of choice, Webhead, is a bad year away from folding. The owner Dean, who is a good lad of mine, told me recently that they wouldn’t even be capable of staying open without their business selling shit online.

I was floored. I knew things were bad, but not that bad.

Then I came across this great article by Christopher Butcher that was linked from another blog I frequent, The Beat. Here’s an excerpt:

Things aren’t stable, behind the scenes (and sometimes spilling onto message boards and websites) people are very worried. Fans, Retailers, Publishers. Distributors. But the thing that to me is the most disconcerting and heralds the biggest change? Diamond Comics Distributors drastically raising their order minimums.

I can’t imagine that this is going to do anything but make life more difficult for the struggling comic book store. It’s a lengthy article, but it’s worth checking out if a Wednesday trip down the comic book store means the same thing to you as it does to me.

Check out the article here.

OMFG, FFXIII is Japanese dated, right? Well guess what, “International Gamers”, Square Enix boss Yoichi Wada has a release date for you:

Via Destructoid:

“In the past, it’s taken a year or half a year to release our games abroad, but this time we are aiming for an international release this Spring”

Uhh…Spring? I wasn’t happy with this, so I raised my hand.

Uh, you’re like, fucking around, right? Spring? Like, sometime between March 20 and like uh…June something? Fuck, my elementary school education is lost in a pile of pills and caffeine. Seriously though, when?

And he responded,

Sometime in Spring. It may even be Australian spring. How do you like me now, addicted gamer bitch?

He then flipped me off, grabbed his crotch, and left the stage.

Spring. Well fuck. I’m starting graduate school in January, so if I may make a suggestion: Either during Spring Break in March, or at the beginning of May.

December mother fucking 17, 2009.

The date that lucky Japanese motherfuckers will be able to play Final Fantasy XIII. Good god damn, this game isn’t fake. I’m running around my room screaming “YES, YES!” while my Nana weeps upstairs unknowing and confused as to what’s going on down here.

The release date gives all of us unwashed English-speaking gamers…three months to learn Japanese. Or else we’ll be waiting you know, the usual FORTY FIVE YEARS it takes Square to localize a game. God forbid they localize is as they go and release it simultaneously. I don’t know if this makes me excited, or saddened, knowing that the game is in fact real, and people not named Ian Drinkwater will be playing it.