[source : all games beta]

Magic everywhere in this bitch! The more I see of Super Mario Galaxy 2, the more I am convinced it is the product of an excessive amount of hallucinogenics and awesomeness. I really need this game. Super now.

[source: tanooki via destructoid]

Oh shit, Super Mario Galaxy 2 features 2D gameplay! WTF, awesome. Two-dimensional. The good old days. Before pubes and polygons and raging psychosis. There’s a certain simplicity to 2D gameplay that continually draws us back. You know you still love it. For all the perks and benefits of a zillion-polygons and bonerfying graphics, a little old school Mario still makes me a fucking happy clam.

Fuck yeah, Super Mario Galaxy 2 is coming. And you better be ready with your hallucinogenic drug of choice for when this son of a bitch drops. What a trippy, engrossing, rewarding game the first Galaxy was.

I am pretty stoked about the sequel, and the trailer only increases my frothing demand. The gameplay is so sexy, so familiar, yet altered. I camped out for thirteen hours on release day for a Wii that simply fucking sits there. But if I can get a new Mario game every couple of years, it’ll be forever worth it.

Oh shit! Super Mario-Guy is droppin’ on Uranus with a squishy Yoshi grunt this May! Kapow! I’m stoked.

Via Destructoid:

Mario Galaxy 2, the long-awaited sequel to Mario Galaxy, is hitting North America on May 23.

Shazam!

I really dug the original Super Mario Galaxy. It’s a testament to the delicious allure of gameplay, and studly plumbers whose mustaches I would like to caress. Who cares if it was on the Wii, which is like the 32x of Nintendo consoles. It’s like two Gamecubes duct-taped together and asked to over-perform, with a superfluous masturbatory peripheral.

Better yet, Galaxy 2 is bringing back Yoshi, who was sadly absent from the original. What is Mario, if he doesn’t have his indentured dinosaur servant? Nothing! I mean, who else is he going to cruelly ride, demand to suck up everything around him, and throw into pits? He was lost!

I’m ready to get up on this pig this May.

Apparently some guy from Visceral Games is shocked that Dead Space Extraction isn’t selling well.

Via Destructoid:

According to a NeoGAF post from a Visceral Games employee- “It is a shame that no one bought this (Dead Space Extraction). As much as everyone made fun of Frank Gibeau’s ‘experiment’, it will actually influence the SKU plan with respect to the Wii”. So I guess we’ll be seeing less games like DSE on the Wii from here on out, but is that a bad thing?

How can anyone be surprised by the poor sales? I’d like to construct a list of things that have me saying “No shit, dude.”

1.

It’s a Wii game.

Allow me to show you the Wii demographic:

Dead Space Extraction is a Mature game on a system that is sold to people who shit their pants. Grandparents, elementary school students and me. How well do you expect a mature game to sell to this demographic? No, seriously. The real gamers are playing real video game systems, my friend.

2.

It’s a on-rails-shooter based on a well-received, but only marginally known game. Alright, I’m going to make some leaps that are probably incorrect. According to Wikipedia, Dead Space sold over a million copies. However, that’s across three platforms. But again, those are platforms that are played by more enthusiastic gamers. In other words, not those who own a Wii. Sure, some guys who own a 360/PS3 own a Wii. I do. But does the average Wii owner have any idea what Dead Space is?

Furthermore, as I said, it’s an on-the-rails-shooter. In other words, they scrapped the formula that made the original game successful. So this game is a sort of shoot-off, non-related title. So if you liked the original Dead Space? Yeah, this game isn’t like that. I’m positing they made the change because they are either fools, or they knew the Wii would catch on fire if it tried to replicate the original.

To sum it up: A title that probably isn’t known well by the core of the Wii audience, and for those who do know it, it’s a deviation from the formula that made the original so dope.

3.

It came out at the end of September. This is what we call throwing a title out to the wolves. A couple weeks before Dead Space Extraction, Halo: ODST dropped. The next couple of months following it sees Brutal Legend, Uncharted 2, Borderlands, Ratchet and Clank, Assassin’s Creed 2, Modern Warfare 2 and on and on and on. In other words, the gamers who know Dead Space probably have their plates full.

And the ones who don’t? They’re probably playing their seven-hundredth round of Wii Tennis and thinking it’s the greatest thing ever.

Ah, god bless the shitty motion controls gimmick. I thought it was going to die. I thought that maybe, somehow, people weren’t going to dig it. But now everyone is into it.

And then, somehow, I thought that maybe shitty motion controls remakes would be relegated to the Wii. Stupid Resident Evil 4 with motion controls. The Metroid Prime games re-released with motion controls. I mean, what’s worse than the stupid gimmick that is motion controls? Making some cheap cash off of rehashes with the gimmick smashed into it.

Well guess what, PS3 fans! Apparently you’re going to get to re-buy Resident Evil 5 and Littlebigplanet so you can shake your little wrist to make them uh, do stuff:

Via Kotaku:

Well, we now know what that “Resident Evil 5: Director’s Cut” stuff was all about. It’s a re-release of RE5, built to take advantage of Sony’s upcoming motion controller.

The game will be out in Spring 2010, and it’s far from the only existing PS3 title to take advantage of the new peripheral. During SCEJ’s TGS press conference, Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida revealed that the controller will also work with existing games like LittleBigPlanet, EyePet, Flower, Pain, High Velocity Bowling “and more”.

Sick! More phallus-shaking action! Christ, between jacking off compulsively and now wasting money on shitty motion-based rehashes, I’ll have the wrist of a god! Which is uh, good for nothing.

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!

I bought Scribblenauts for my girlfriend yesterday. It’s a pretty dope puzzle game, and I knew she’d like it. I watched her play it for a bit, and it seems fun enough. But then I came to a pretty big disagreement with the game over the concept of vulgarity and what constitutes it.

Caffeine: Do you think you can use a dildo in the game? Or is that vulguar?

Note how I even have to ask this.

Far Too Patient Girlfriend: I’m pretty sure that’s vulgar.

Insert some serious silence while I ponder.

Caffeine: Really? Like…really?

I again doze off into rumination.

Far Too Patient Girlfriend: It’s a dildo.

Caffeine: Yeah, exactly! I mean, it’s a device that brings pleasure. How is that vulgar?

Sorry Scribblenauts, we’re going to have to agree to disagree. Apparently you’re like everyone else in this boring Puritanical country. I mean, I should have known we’d part ways. I’m the same guy that finds it completely acceptable to discuss bowel movements and masturbation at the dinner table with my eighty-seven year-old Nana. I mean, c’mon! It’s just a beautiful scientific discovery we’ve fashioned to give women and me pleasure. It’s not vulgar, it’s beautiful.

I think the Wii is a piece of under-powered shit. I think it’s a glorified peripheral. The Wiimote hasn’t revolutionized anything, and is just a gimmick. Fuck you Nintendo. You make old-ladies cream with your amazing Wii Suffer Menopause, where you shake the control vigorously to beat the cold shakes. So when I heard that your sales are dropping:

Via Destructoid

The world is spinning out of control, people. In a recent talk with IndustryGamer, analyst Michael Pachter has said just as much, revealing that the Wii’s sales are down 50 percent year-to-year over the last five months and he expects them to continue dropping if Nintendo doesn’t start selling a new bundle or cutting the price of their system as its two competitors have done.

I DANCE A DANCE OF VICTORY! Seriously though, I’m not surprised. Every one in the god damn universe owns a Wii. Sales were bound to drop eventually. But I’m just going to focus on the potential brightside, of a world where everyone is playing a PS3 and a 360, and Nanas are doing what they’re good for: cooking pies and dying.