Press Start!: Young Girls, Seedy Motels, and Court Cases.
Welcome to Press Start! The column where I jot down five things that caught my eye in the world of gaming this week. Poor edited!, check. Zero revisions!, check. Cobbled together on a couple of wings, a prayer, and ridiculous amounts of caffeine in the early hours of the morning.
I encourage all dorks and dinks and nerds and nincompoopto contribute what they dug this week.
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#1: Grand Theft Auto Gives You Extra Points For Killing Kids!
Oh fuck son! I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto wrong for nearly ten fucking years. Longer than that if you take into account the first two top-down games. Yeah! Yeah, yeah! All these years I’ve been playing and I’ve never been aware that you get more points for killing children and old fuckers.
This nonsense stems out of a tragedy that went down last Thursday in Brazil. Wellington Menezes de Oliveira “opened up fire at a school in Rio de Janeiro killing 12 pupils and injuring 13 others, aged between 12- and 14-years-old.” Not cool, at all.
Quite obviously.
Unfortunately spinsters vomit up bullshit, seizing any opportunity to massage their own importance glands through hyperbole and sensationalism. Two days later in O Globo, one of the biggest newspapers in Brazil, ran an article which didn’t have time for things like fact checking. It claimed that Oliveira played games like Counterstrike and Grand Theft Auto where “you score more points for killing women, children and old people.”
News to me! Fucking news to me.
Remember kids, no tragedy is ever so saddening you can’t use it to churn up slop, or pen the same old tired media nonsense.
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#2) Creator of the Video Game Cartridge Passes Away.
Jerry Lawson. His name was Jerry Lawson! Lawson was the creator of the video game cartridge, and this week the good sir went and tripped the light fantastic. It never even occurred to my dumb ass that the cartridge was something forged by man. I always fancied it some sort of platonic ideal, derived from the Other Realm, where unicorns and Justice can cavort about together.
No sir, we made it. Well, Lawson and his group of pioneers over at Fairchild Semiconductor. With that cartridge, he no doubt helped craft the childhood of many a million of dorks. Like you and me. Sitting here, in this gaming column, communicating via news born out of an industry of cartridges.
More than just what they housed, the physical cartridge was a staple of my childhood. Good god damn how many times did I go blue in my face blowing in them. Stacking those sons a bitches up. Flipping them to friends at lunch.
The cartridge. Staple of a childhood baked in dorkey, roasted in the fires of nerdiness.
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#3) Sony and Geohot Settle Out of Court.
It’s finally fucking over. Geohot, the dorkiest wanna-be hard ass in the gaming community settled with Sony out of court this week. You may remember Geohot as the dude who outed the PlayStation 3’s root key. Then he wrote an awful rap telling Sony to come and get him. They obliged, sending their lawyers, Death Stars, and various underlings after his ass.
At that point, he may have fled to South America, or gone there for Spring Break. Depending on whose story you believe.
All of that is over now, as the Totally Believing In Something Kid no longer wants to deal with a court battle with An Enormous Corporation State. Go figure! How quickly one’s ideology wilts in the face of a armada of litigation or whatever other more appropriate legal word I should be using.
Well, that’s that.
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#4) Nintendo’s Next Console To Be Revealed. Soon.
My Wii doesn’t get any love. It just sits there. Begging for me to fill its gaping insides with some disc love. I tell it no, I don’t got any disc love for it. I beat Super Mario Galaxy 2 something like a year ago, and there it has sat. Too busy, I never snagged Donkey Kong Country Returns. I’ll probably pick it up again for Zelda: Skyward Sword. But eons pass between my uses. It is neglected, and I’m frustrated at how much I don’t love it.
Perchance this will change with its successor.
News rocketing out of the inter-tubings is that the next Nintendo console is going to be dropped either at this year’s E3, or prior to it. Word had been going around, but then Game Informer jumped on the buzz, and began to surf it. When those big boys get behind something, you know there’s something there.
Are you at all excited for a new Wii? Wii-2? It’s purportedly more powerful than the 360 and PS3, but fuck, shouldn’t it be? I foresee myself buying the thing, but it’s only because I have a techno fetish and I’m a hopeless consumer.
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#5) Get Your School Girl, Take Her To The Love Hotel!
There’s some shitty motel that I drive by every time I’m coming home from the movies. Every time I look at it, and I ponder the sort of filthy slamming and banging and boning and fluid-dripping that’s going on in that Den of Inequity.
Apparently there’s a Japanese video game that’s trying to take place in this same motel. Welcome the world of the PSP game, Gachitora! ~Hooligan Teacher in High School. In this game you play a thug who has taken to the world of school teaching. Our uh, protagonist Torao Kaji, takes to the good fight and invites a school girl to a local love hotel. Once there, he has her pose to work off her shyness, before uploading the clips to the internet.
Shyness! Busted! Karate chop to the humility glands! Kaji also tries to lure a student’s mom there as well. Swag! Dude is bringing a new level of female confidence to the Japanese neighborhoods. Or at least some pixelated shots of pubic poon that seem to dominate all the Japanese porn I watch.
Either way!
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What caught your eyes this week?