Press Start!, the week of E3. There was a time when E3 was a wondrous occasion. Those days are gone now, like leaves from a tree. With the advent of the Internet, everything is known weeks prior. Secrets exposed, dissected. Shit is passé before it’s even revealed. Take for example Nintendo’s Wii U. While I’ll admit that seeing any new console in motion gets me up, it would have truly blown my asshole out if they could have kept the entirety of it secret until the conference.

With that in mind, let us not spend the entirety of our fleeting brain-focus-capacities on regurgitating the quasi-reveals and appreciable moments of the Big Three at the show. Let us instead turn our ADD-addled brains towards shooting the shit about the show. Deal? Press Start!’s usual conceit is pressed pause in   lieu of some geek spit.

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You can almost smell the sizzling scent of frying flesh on this forthcoming long weekend. Or uh, tofu if you’re of the vegetarian assort! Whatever it is, hell yeah motherfuckers! Welcome to the  pretty much fucking Memorial Day edition of  Press Start! The  column that spits on the five things in the world of gaming that caught my eye this week.

The list is incomplete, based on whimsy, and structured in a way to encourage your participation. Let’s fucking dance!

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Press Start!, press select!, who gives a shit! This is the column where I blather like the droll man I am about five things that caught my eye in the world of gaming this week. Buckle up for the suck. As I type this, the PSN is reigniting its engines, and word unconfirmed by yours truly is that the United States can actually  play games online once more with their PlayStationing machinery.

There’s that! Pour a Dew out for my homies who have assuredly ended themselves, cut off from their virtual machine gunning and karate kicking.

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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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Press Start! Don’t Press Start! What the fuck do I care? It’s a goddamn glorious Friday evening here along the Eastern Seaboard of the Empire proper. Wind whispering sexy promises of summer, the night air making my balls hurt with the promise of Spring Fever and low-cut dresses on campus. Anyways, if you’re new to the rodeo: this is a weekly column where I slap together five things that I deemed noteworthy in gaming this week.

As an airheaded asshole, I encourage you to share your happenings, for they are certainly of more worth and value than my own. Grab a pop, unbuckle those tight pants, and let’s relax in the world of dual-analogs and dragons.

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#1: James Cameron Says Gaming Will Drive 3D.
Well son of a bitch. I was comfortable being able to demonize the cinema for pushing 3D bullshit onto the unwashed masses. But here comes fucking Jimmy Cameron surfing on the bodies of dead Filipino Boy Prostitutes stuffed with cash, telling me it’s video games that are going to get this fucking technical abortion installed into houses.

(That was a serious fucking run-on sentence.)

Specifically, Jimmy was talking about video games being the driving force between glasses-free 3D, spouting off that the Nintendo 3DS and other “single-viewing devices that are engaging the person to play these video games will drive a lot of investment in autostereoscopic displays for that very reason.”

So now this shit is on us, guys. All of you giggling as you’re playing your 3DS know this! You’re fucking me in the ass! And it hurts so poorly. At least, if we’re going to suffer the 3Dpocalypse, it won’t be with some goggles strapped to our skulls.

Right?

Fuck.

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#2: Massachusetts Town Upholds Coin-Op Gaming Ban.
This one hits a bit close to home. I am a resident of the Boston area. Retarded (retahded?) accent and all. I take pride in the fact that we’re generally a godless, liberal bunch around here. A bunch of dongs rubbing up against one another, weed with nary a ticket, health care for the hobos. It’s good. It’s good.

However, somehow we’ve fucking failed. At least one town has. Meet fucking Marshfield. Motherfuckers in Marshfield have banned coin-op gaming in their town for a solid 29 years. Good lord. This week, a movement to repeal this banning of shit like Donkey Kong was struck down.

Struck down!

Where are the Crypto-Vaults hidden in this shit town? Furthermore, where is this town? I have not come across it in my travels. But it frightens me. With a vote of 655-554, the law was upheld. There will be no Pac-Man for the denizens of Marshfield.

Just failure. Failure.

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#3: Sega Drops Phantasy Star Online 2 Details.
In news that may only be exciting to me, Sega dropped some details for Phantasy Star Online 2 this week. Goddamn, did I ever love the original Phantasy Star Online. Nothing made my fat, unmotivated ass glow in my senior year of high school like booting up my Dreamcast, dragging a telephone wire all the way across my room   for 56k glory, and rocking out with some PSO. A total

There’s a serious fucking lull in my online gaming right now. WoW has finally lost its glimmer, I know myself enough to know I won’t give a fuck about Rift, Diablo III and Star Wars: The Old Republic might as well be vaporware with their unpredictable release dates.

I need something!

Even if I never get my paws on this son of a bitch, it’s a nostalgia drop that brings me back to the glossy lensed days of the Dreamcast. Simple days. Full of loot drops, endless dungeon cycling, and eating enough Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers to stack on a solid thirty pounds.

Oh senior year, I miss you.

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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 20^th 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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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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This is  PRESS START!, and it’s a glorious afternoon here on the Eastern seaboard. It’s sunny out, go squeeze your love! Drink some suds. Disconnect. We’re going to do this quickly, I got myself a  barbecue  to attend! So with alacrity, we’re going to blow through some of the bullshit in the gaming world which caught my eyes this weekend. Per usual, hit me with your own observations.

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#1: Yakuza Is The Official Franchise Of Japanese Porno Babes.
Sega’s Yakuza franchise is a booming source for saucy Japanese babes to either parlay their porn careers into video game success, or now, use a video game as a launching ground for porn. Makes sense?  Erena Aihara was totally in Yakuza 4. Then recently she decided that she would use that particular opportunity to get her porn on.

That would be neat enough, but as you may know, another lady in Japanese porn, has been in the Yakuza series as well. Rio! Oh Rio. Star of such films as “Squirting Young Wife and Let’s Have Sex at School.”

You’re in  quality company, Aihara.

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#2: The Commodore 64 Fucking Lives!
Hit the fucking wayback machine! Classic gaming system the Commodore 64 lives again! It has been repurposed. Modified. Upgraded. Changed, though slightly the same. I hope to have something similar happen to me after the sparkling lights go out within my meat husk. Turn me into a robot, or a crash test dummy, or a remote controlled bomb diffuser or some shit. I must live, though my consciousness has been left to trip the light fantastic.

Though not as dope as my scenarios, the Commodore 64 has been given new life as a computer. Inside the swank keyboard is something with a little bit of thrust.

PCWorld:

The new system, which also starts at $595, is a little more modern: it’s got a Dual Core 525 Atom processor, an Nvidia Ion2 graphics chipset, 2GB of RAM (upgradeable to 4GB), a 160GB hard drive, and built-in Wi-Fi. On the left side of the keyboard there’s a slot or tray-load DVD (upgradeable to Blu-ray), and on the right side there’s a multi-format card reader, along with a USB 2.0 port. The rear features four additional USB 2.0 ports; mouse and keyboard PS/2 ports; DVI, VGA, and HDMI ports; Ethernet; and support for 6-channel HD audio. It runs Linux, but you can install Windows if you like.

It lives again. Not too shabby, though again, it’s not a human body turned into a remote controlled bomb diffusing device. What can you do.

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#3: Anonymous Throws Down With Sony.
Say what you will about their antics, Anonymous taking it to Sony this week is worth mentioning. The nameless legion decided that it was time to inter-fuck Sony’s servers for their persecution of Geohot and other hackers. The result was a deep beating of the PlayStation Network servers, leading to a number of errors and other bullshittery. Later on in the week they suspended their attacks because of it affecting dudes who just wanted to throw hadoukens and rock killstreaks.

Peoples within Sony talked some junk about the cyber-attack, describing it as nothing more that “annoyed…[their] network engineers”, and were planning to wait out the attack until Anonymous got bored. That tactic makes sense to me, though you’re probably going to draw their ire again by belittling the assault.

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This is Press Start! If you don’t know, now you know! The whacky, zany, okay completely retarded and juvenile weekly gaming column. In it!, you’ll find five things that caught my eye this week in the world of killstreaks and waggle dongle wonders.

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#1: Gamestop Buys Impulse. This Shit Is Big.
If you’re a modern minded motherfucker, you know that tangibility is for bitches. You can disagree with it, but it’s inevitable. A forthcoming facticity that can’t be stopped. Sometimes it bums me out, in the dark night as I lay next to my copy of Twilight. Kissing the book, I can tasted Edward! Yet, it’s coming.

Gamestop knows this shit as well. This week they bought Impulse, one of the monolith of PC digital distribution. What the fuck fun is a clunky ass case and game as a reward for leaving your fucking house?, when you can buy that shit online? None. With digital sales driving up and up, Gamestop needs in on that sheezy. They’re twitching, aware they’re being left behind like dinosaurs of a forgotten age. That age being like ten years ago or some shit.

They also bought start-up Spawn Labs, who are up on the streaming video game tip.

I don’t think the motherfuckers can compete with Steam. Perched atop a mountain of money and ruined childrens’ rectums, adrift in crumbs and hate Gabe Newell laughs at them. They have to try though.

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#2: Original Madden Developer Wants Some Cheddar.
Robin Antonick wants some fucking money!, and he wants it from Electronic Arts. Despite the fact that he hasn’t lodged a claim regarding it in twenty years, Antonick wants a chunk of the Madden franchise’s profits. Dude was a contracted developer hired by Trip Hawkins way back in 1986 to work on the original Madden. Apparently working on the game back in 1986 entitles the dude to some money from every iteration until then. Wait, what?

I don’t have my Lawyers Glasses on, the likes of which enable me to purvey the cosmos and inner workings of United States law, but I’m going to go out on a leaf and bet this dude loses his fucking case.

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#3: WWE All-Stars Dropped. I Need This Shit.
I don’t watch wrestling anymore, nor do I play wrestling video games. Even in spite of this shit, I need WWE All-Stars. The game dropped this week, and it has a magical set of attributes. These attributes are responsible for making it one of my most sought-after experiences. The hierarchy goes like this: orgasms, pizza, orgasms, WWE All-Stars, followed by comic books and video games. As currently constituted. Obviously. Ever since it was announced that Macho Man Randy Savage and a litany of old school dudes were going to be available in the title, it was obvious I needed to play it.

There’s few things I want to do more than tool on someone fucking bozos dome with Andre the Giant. The game is straight-up arcade ridiculousness, which is fitting of time when wrestling didn’t take itself seriously. Let me rage in the ring as Macho Man, and put a stink on John Cena, that jorts wearing asshole.

Fucking mental insanity!

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When diversions are king, video games shall be amongst those running the pack. Making sure that everyone has the appropriate tattoos. Knowing the gang symbols. The terminology. Ruling the roost, if you will. This is Press Start!, the column where I spout off five things that happened in the world of gaming in a given week. My lists are dumb. Like yours, they are rife with personal preference, ideological tendencies, and since it’s me – juvenile bullshit.

I encourage all aboard to share their own musings.

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#1: Apple App Store Gets App That ‘Cures Homosexuality’, For Like A Second.
God damn, I have to give it to Apple. I knew from the multifarious apps found on Apple’s store were fucking powerful. I knew there were a lot of apps that could do a lot of things. Find a yummy restaurant for my belly! Find movie tickets. Play Angry Birds! Read a book! However, I wasn’t aware there was an app that could cure my raging hard-on for Chris Hemsworth in chainmail.

That’s where  Exodus International steps in! They released an app that claimed to cure gayness. It was a bit of an odd mood, since the fascist pigs at Apple have pulled some less polarizing applications. Wasn’t there one that cost like a zillion dollars? The Douche App? It did nothing aside from signify you could spend a lot of money?

Anyways, a day and one enormous 152,433 online signature later, they pulled the son of a bitch.

Go figure.

I’m actually okay with the existence of the app, if it wasn’t such an odd choice in lieu of what they have pulled. I am of the opinion that if a bunch of closed-minded assholes rubbing their genitals against a withering old tome want to try and make some money off their own ignorance, let them try.

Besides, it doesn’t work. I downloaded the app – mind you, I didn’t actually use it. However, if it worked, how would they trick the sinners into using it?! It must have unactivated capabilities, right? What I did do was stick my iPhone in my crotch and had my friend call me repeatedly with the phone on vibrate while I stared at Chris Evans’ pecs in the Captain America trailer. Still felt the love. Don’t tell my girlfriend.

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#2: New Movie ‘The FP’ Where Dance-Dance Meets Post-Apocalypse  Gang Wars.
In the future, we will all be divided amongst post-apocalypse gangs. When diversions are king, our lives will be dedicated to maintaining our reps and our various crews. The flick ‘The FP’ which screened at SXSW last week perfectly captures our forthcoming sociocultural  metamorphosis. Also, the movie is fucking madness.

Gangs fight it out in fatal games of DDR, titties, and absurd montages. The trailer is what happens when you cross 1980’s bro movies with video game slop-culture. In a completely conscious, and planning manner.

God bless.

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#3: Triforce Johnson Waits In Line For Nintendo 3DS. Gets Thrown Out. Returns.
Isaiah-Triforce Johnson is either the man, or a fucking mental patient. For some reason, I feel like the two categories bleed together so simply swimmingly when it comes to geek culture. Triforce, who had the phrase legally added to his first fucking name, is a man with a plan. The plan in question is to be the first motherfucker in Manhattan to get a Nintendo 3DS. He’s taken to this plan by waiting in line inside the foyer of the Union Square Best Buy in the Big Apple.

Earlier this week, Best Buy had security throw the dude out.

But that doesn’t stop a motherfucker, does it? He returned, and has apparently smoothed the entire thing over. “There was a Chris Brown launch party the night I came out” he said, so “Best Buy needed that space for the line. It kinda looked bad, but it was just a misunderstanding.”

Godspeed Triforce, you’re almost fucking there.

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