Press Start!: Jesus Christ Bribes You, Nintendo Has A New Wii To Play With.
This is Press Start! Welcome one, welcome all. How are you on this fair weekend? I hope you’ve escaped the drudgery momentarily. Tapped out of the 9-5 machinations of our wonderful grindo-culture, for a couple of days. Sip some suds and check out the five things that I dug in gaming this week, and as usual share your own.
This week we have fucking Best Buy wanting to ruin your shopping experience, the Wii 2’s specs dribbling down your chin, a pastor bribing sinners with Nintendos, and more.
Let’s party.
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#1: Best Buy Promises To Ruin Your Gaming Experience.
I like shopping for shopping for video games at Best Buy. While I admittedly do most of my video game acquiring whilst sitting in sweaty, dank midnight release lines, whenever I go to Best Buy it’s a welcome change of pace.
Why?
Motherfuckers at Gamestop are miserable. All up in my grill, wanting to know if I want to reserve anything. If I want to buy a fucking disc protection warranty. If I want to buy a strategy guide when the entire universe of the internet can provide the sort of tips and tricks I need.
You don’t get this shit at Best Buy. Or at least you didn’t.
This week it was revealed that Best Buy wants to add all sorts of happy horseshit to their gaming section. They want to add desks and shit where “specialists” will sit and “help us” with our trade-ins, and offer us “exclusive digital content.”
Oh fuck me. Best Buy, be the one place who stays the fuck out of our way. I don’t want to reserve anything unless I say so, and I certainly don’t want to have a warranty on a disc shoved down my throat.
Best Buy: Making Amazon look like a better, and better option.
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#2: Church Bribes People With 3DS And Other Electronics.
Here’s an inventive way to get people to go to church on Sunday. Nothing can get people to abandon reason and science in favor of mystic Zombie Walkers better than materialism. I mean, I’ll be fucking goddamned (there’s a pun in there somewhere) if we don’t worship anything like we do our products. At least one church has finally realized that our lawn and our cars are our only God.
Meet pastor Eric Dykstra and The Crossing Church. They’re offering $8,000 in electronics as a bribe to drive asses into seats on Sunday. That’s right, if you attend, you’re entered into a fucking lottery to snag a Nintendo 3DS and other bullshit. Praise the lord! Dykstra breaks it down:
“It’s awkward to say ‘hey come to my church.’ It just feels weird and you don’t want to twist somebody’s arm so to kind of alleviate some of that weirdness what we’ve done is said hey if you bring your friend to church they might potentially win a 3D television, a 3DS or a 3D movie ticket package.”
Fair enough, fair enough. Motherfuckers have to be ingenuitive to get people back into the altars. Makes a road trip to Minnesota almost worth it.
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#3: Sega Attempts To Break Our Heart Again With New Sonic Game.
Sonic Generations, welcome to the fucking world! In celebration of Sonic’s 20th Anniversary, Sega has announced yet another crack at the Sonic franchise. Man, Sonic’s 20 years-old. What’s more staggering than that is that there hasn’t been a fucking console Sonic game worth playing for more than half of that. I’m throwing the fucking chips down, Sonic Adventure was the last excellent title for our hedgehog. If you think that game wasn’t excellent, I may even grant you that.
Here comes Sonic Generations though, and it’s a bit of a unique spin. They’re offering classic levels such as Green Hill Zone, but with a twist. You can play through the levels either as classic Sonic, or with a viewpoint that echoes the more modern approach.
Fuck. The modern. Approach.
The ability to whiz through Green Hill zone with sexified graphics just may be enough for me to rock this title. However, more than likely, the game is going to drop, it’s going to get reviews that shitcan it, and I’m going to bemoan the lack of a quality Sonic on my plate.
Sonic 4? Fuck that game. Come on Sonic Team, get this goddamn shit done.
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#4: Details Of the Wii 2 Begin To Leak.
The past week has been dominated by news regarding Nintendo’s Wii 2, codenamed Project Café, maybe titled “Stream”, and probably coming out in 2012. See, right there. Like fourteen different rumors jammed into one sentence.
What is almost-all-but-confirmed is this: she’s going to be more powerful than the PS3 and Xbox 360, and it’s going to feature a controller that has a touchscreen on it somewhere.
At first I launched a fanboy shitstorm that raged in the wind of my own stupidity when they announced the touchscreen. Yet, there was hope. There was one thing that turned it all around for me, and that’s the news that the controller would be sporting twin analog sticks.
Check out some ‘leaked’ mock-ups.
Nintendo, welcome back to the world of gaming. When they announced we were going to be on the touchscreen tip, I conjured up visions of some goofy aberration. A slight on the gaming gods. For all my grousing however, you could hear my Fred Astaire-esque tap dancing when it became clear the screen would be a supplementary addition. A way to manage inventory or other dope things on top of a real controller.
Now I may be able to play Mario or Zelda in a way that can incorporate tilt-controls, and a real dual-analog set-up? Okay, I’m on board.
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#5: PlayStation Network Goes Down For Days. Days!
Now that the case between Geohot and Sony has dropped, I’ve needed to cover something else adamantly. There’s been a lack of things for people to call me a dumb ass about. So now we have this. Anonymous versus Sony. Or maybe a splinter of Anonymous. Or something. Something, something, whispers in the dark.
On Wednesday of this week, the PlayStation Network went down. As of the time of writing this – Friday evening, around 11:30 – it’s still down. Not only that, but Sony has finally admitted what was a smidge of the obvious: the outage of the result of an external intrusion.
According to Patrick Seybold, PlayStation’s top Mouth Piece and Corporate Lackey:
“We are doing all we can to resolve this situation quickly, and we once again thank you for your patience. We will continue to update you promptly as we have additional information to share.”
Interesting. Yeah, I don’t really have anything to say about this. Just that whoever is capable of tackling a giant like Sony around the neck and dragging them to the ground impresses me, even if I’m not totally aligned with their ethics.
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What caught your eyes this week?