Press Start!: Augment Reality With Xbox Abortions.
What’s up, fleshbags! I hope the previous 168 or so hours have been palatable to your sensory glands. All the stimuli processed rather flowingly. What a goddamn week it’s been for the Empire! We put a bullet through the eyes of a terrorist, fist-pumped for like thirty minutes while drinking beer, and then went back to fighting like petulant high schools.
It’s cool though, it gave me a brief reprieve before remembering why I escape into comic books and video games.
This is Press Start!, or five things I dug in the world of video games this week. I went out of my way to fucking not mention either Wii 2 or PSN news, I apologize. Hit me with your own choice moments in the land of combo breakers and 1UPs.
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#1: China Gets A Handheld that’s NGP Meets Xbox 360 Abortion.
Sony can’t seem to catch a fucking break these days. No sooner do they take down Geohot, they have to begin piecing together an online network from cobbled portions of compromised sectors and uh, phoenix walls and uh other stuff Jack Bauer babbled about.
Now they got this motherfucking aberration. Meet the iReadyGo RG, the Chinese knock-off of Sony’s upcoming handheld. It’s a nearly identical copy of the NGP, except that it looks like the NGP swapped saliva with the garish buttons that adorned the Xbox 360. The most interesting shit is that ” we’ll be seeing some Android love here, and indeed, iReadyGo is currently recruiting six senior Android developers.”
Outstanding. Keep your chin up, Sony. I love you. You have a great personality.
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#2: Guardian Heroes Is Coming To XBLA. Fuck Yes.
Quick quiz: did you play Guardian Heroes back in the day? If you answered no, there’s redemption coming. If you answered yes, your swagger is immaculate. Welcome to the club. Guardian Heroes is a fucking cult classic by beloved, worshipped, and occasionally masturbated to developer Treasure. The pig came out for Sega Saturn – god rest that console’s soul – and you can currently get an original copy of it on eBay for over $100.
Or you can wait! This shit is coming to the XBLA this Fall, with optional remastered graphics. Fuck yes! As a douchebag who worshipped Treasure and my two Saturns (kid, you need a Japanese one to play X-Men vs. Street Fighter, right?!) back in the day, this is outstanding. Why the fuck did I ever sell my copy?
Now we just need NiGHTS on the downloadable tip. Please, God. Please.
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#3: Dude Snags Nintendo 3DS Augmented Reality Tat.
This is one of the most scorching boss mode. cranberryzero over at iheartchaos was fucking around with his Nintendo 3DS and its augmented reality games. Then the dude-turned-genius thought about how dope it would be to get the AR card as a fucking tattoo. So he did. The craziest part? It fucking works.
Welcome to post-humanist future wankery right here. Fucking outstanding. Bask in the glory of modifying one’s body to project a digital image. We all need lenses and modifications so we can glimmer about in a gorgeously virtual-turned-real-enough world.
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#4: Jerry Bruckheimer Working On Three Games?
Jerry Brucks announced something like four years ago that he was throwing his chips into the gaming arena. Since then, we haven’t heard a fucking peep about his little gaming extravaganza. Until this week! Departing member of the Jerry Explosion Time Video Game Contingent, Justin Leader, listed on his resume that they were working on three games. Hmm! Three games!
I’m interested to see what Bruckheimer and his band of merry men can put out in the form of a video game. All too often you hear (sometimes aptly) that movies are resembling video games far too much. It seems interesting, since the cinematic, blow-things-up expectations of so many action games were co-opted directly from the world where Bruckheimer made his name. Video games stealing from movies stealing from video games now once again stealing from movies?
Or something?
The mediums co-opting one another in a struggle, a Sisyphean engagement where the only winner can be!, uh!, us? Or not?
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#5: WoW Players Donate $800,000 To Make-A-Wish.
Let it never be said that WoW players don’t like their fucking microtransactions. And let me never get away with saying, as I am wont to do, that those WoW players are fucking retards for indulging in them. $30 or whatever for a horsie you can romp around with across Azeroth? Silly! Paying good hard money for a “pet” that runs alongside you all fucking cute like? Dumb! Dumb, dumb! Well, apparently not all that dumb.
Blizzard dropped some serious numbers across my tits this week, when they “handed out a check to the Make-A-Wish Foundation worth $800,000, collected from the sales of the Moonkin Hatchling in-game pet. Every sale was worth $5 for the foundation, which means that over 1.6 million 160,000 WoW players shelled out money for their very own mini owl-bear-laserchicken.”
Good lord, that’s a lot of microtransaction. All for a good cause though! The power of the Geek, tethered by the need to have a rumbling little douchebag at our side, shall make dreams come true. As part of World Wish Day, Blizzard invited ten Make-A-Wish kids and gave them a good romp around the facilities and dungeons that conjure the enormo-beast that is WoW.
Pretty cool Blizz, pretty cool.