Press Start: Kinect Can See Your Balls. And Its Laughing.

I build my column with a (puerile) brick. Then add another brick. Brick by brick I manufacture juvenile columns where the news in gaming goes. What’s up friends. Enemies. Catty Tumblr fighters. This is Press Start!, the column where shit that was the happenin’ in gaming in the previous week gets noted. Blathered about.

I encourage, nay demand!, that you spit your own happenings into the comments box’s mouth.

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#1: Steve Jobs Dies.
Alright so it’s not really directly gaming related, though I think we can concede that it’s sizable in importance whether or not you want to dismiss the prowess of Sir Jobs and his legion of automatons. Secondly, the iPad and mobile gaming powered by his fetishsized and masturbated devices is continuing to increase its share of the gaming market. Little by little these previously niche avenues are taking a bite of the gaming Apple. Oh shit!, cheesy metaphor ahoy.

It’ll be an interesting endeavor to see where gaming is in say – five years. While there will always be zealous console gamers like me who demand subwoofer 5.1 plasma action that rattles their balls and ovaries while simultaneously fingering their mushy retina-stems, more and more will continue to become casual. iPad flick-flick gaming! Playing the Farms and the whatever-hotness I’m not aware of.

Jobs was icon, at the very least. May he rest with those ninja stars he loved so much in an info-stream in the Wunder-Land.

#2: Dude Puts Up Billboard To Win DOTA 2 Beta Key.
Steve Addison dreams fucking big. For that there’s a bag of miniature Butterfingers and slow clap waiting for him in my dungeon. Come hurr boy, and claim your prize. Step over the bones and skulls – ornamental, I swear! – and don’t jump as the door swings shut! Your eyes will adjust.

—What was I saying? Oh yeah! Addison wanted to win a beta key so bad for DOTA that when he entered a contest that asked  for submissions of you “holding a sign that reads ‘Dota 2’ and your ‘PlayDotA.com Username’ in any creative fashion,” dude took out a fucking billboard.

A billboard.

Normally the fucking billboard would run to the tune of $3,000 in dollar bills, but when he explained his situation to a dude at Clear Channel they slashed the price. Corporo-Fascists, you don’t trick me. This empty gesture meaning to ingratiate yourselves into our arteries with capitalistic ringworm!

–What was I saying? Oh yeah! Addison, you’re boss.

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#3: Sony’s “For Michael” Ad Is Bonehead Bliss.
Sony’s newest ad is a bunch of characters from famous franchises jacking off the gamer “Michael” – ostensibly a proxy for making you feel fucking awesome about your gaming habits. It’s got Ezio and Solid Snake and others tipping glasses of mead in Michael/your honor, and it’s easy to get swept up in it.

It’s a bit overwrought, and trite, and damn it I still felt a good part of me getting swept up in the reverie! Fuck yeah, cheers to me!

Then I started getting really bitter about my own deferral of existence into virtual worlds. My exercising of ennui through gunshots hammered out by polygons, my sense of achievement dependent on whether or not I can memorized the mechanical machinations of a particular pattern of a boss.

A single fist-pump, followed by a single tear.

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#4: New Games Get The Old School Cartridge Treatment.
If your father spurted creati-juice into your Mom more than twenty years-ago, there’s a good chance that you have yourself some serious nostalgia for the days of gaming on your Nintendo Entertainment System. I can’t help but look back on the days prior to pubes, making priorities, and dealing with the ever-closing window of my existence with a honey-sheen, and a big part of that time was rocking out on the original object of my love.

72 Pins recognizes this, and have created a series of gorgeously purposeless Nintendo cartridges based off of newer games. It’s a brilliant move, combining the favored work of the more recent generations with the undying affection for the golden days. Bop on over to their website to at least dig on the mash-up and if you’re feeling frivolous purchase a totem.

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#5: If You’re Short, Kinect Will Fuck You.
Kinect is a self-aware douchebag of villainy and hatred. Or something like that. I don’t really know what I’m typing anymore. There was a patent filed by Microsoft last year that devised a way to regulate parental controls based off of how tall the person in the room is. Man, I love italics today.

It seems sensible enough, unless you’re a short adult or a particularly tall youth. With all the hormones in the beef today it seems relatively soon we’ll see 6’6 13 year-olds with enormous dongs and pimples out the wazoo. As a future teacher this worries me. Mad Cow Roid Raging football players who are 6’8 and willing to snap my brittle by thinly insulated with fat bones because I can’t handle their lack of “You’re/Your” mastery.

This Kinect bullshit always seems a hop, nay, a skip away from something out of 1984. Some disembodied voice commanding me to pull off my calisthenics before it summons the Fitness Summit to my apartment to tase me.

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I’m out. The madness is ended. What caught your eyes in gaming this week?