#August2011
Kinect Designed To Take On Lightning Strikes, Drops Onto Concrete.
There’s tough, and then there’s Kinect tough. Tough enough to sit and watch all you assholes dancing in front of it without barfing silicon chips all over you. Tough enough to stand for hours as little kids play Kinect Super Soccer! or some shit and not want to hang itself by its power cord. (Does it have a power cord?) Kinect is tough, and that’s because it was built that way.
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Press Start!: Voice Commands Are For The Bedroom, Not Video Games.
I absolutely love Chez-Its. Nothing relaxes me more than popping down on the toilet mashing a handful of Chez-Its into my gullet while checking my Tumblr on my iPhone. One of the other things I absolutely love is the use of adverbs. Hemingway fucking hates me. On top of those two pure, unadulterated loves of mine is my unremitting love for video games.
That’s why I write this column. Press Start!, the post where I run down five things that happened in the world of video games this week. I’m covered in Chez-It crumbs and ready to vomit verbose into your eye-mind-mouths.
Let’s party, guys!
Press Start!: It’s E3. Gimmicky Controllers, TVs, and Franchises.
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.
Recap: The Microsoft E3 Conference In One Post.
Let’s recap the entire Microsoft Xbox conference in one post. A potpourri of the news dropped in one tight package. Or in other words: like two cool games and fourteen Kinect-related things I don’t give a fuck about.
Hulk Hogan Is Getting His Own Kinect Game. Now It All Makes Sense.
With the passing of Macho Man last week, it’s good to see that another childhood icon of mine is carrying on. Ye old leather-skinned Hulk Hogan, whose ticker somehow refuses to quit. Hogan isn’t just still among the living, he’s also still the master of whoring his own Existence turned Brand. Thanks to him and the geniuses at Majesco, we’ll be getting a Hulk Hogan game for the Kinect.
Now the peripheral makes perfect sense.
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer Being Called To Step Down!, Sweaty Pants No!
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer is the source of one of the scariest and most amazing conferences ever. You know the one. Where he’s screaming and running around and he gets really sweaty and I’m sure the people in the audience brown-coated their panty liners a bit. Now a major hedge fund player David Einhorn wants to take this gem away from us. Einhorn thinks it’s time for Stevey to throw the deuces up and leave his position.
Microsoft Is Helping Out Young Xbox Live Hacker! Kindness!
While it’s news to me, apparently there was a scam going around Xbox Live last month. Some dude was phishing in Modern Warfare 2, and when he was caught Microsoft didn’t drop the hammer on him. They had him cozy up to their sweaty, stinking, but bizarrely comforting side.
Microsoft Buys Skype; Now We Can Wank On Xbox Live!
Microsoft has bought Skype for a ridiculously enormous amount of money. I may be the only human being alive who has never used Skype, nor has had any urge to. However, with this recent acquisition I am hoping I’ll be able to seamlessly masturbate in video messages for assholes who rip me up in Black Ops.
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.
Kinect Hacked To Create ‘Eye of Sauron’ For The Office.
Some enterprising people went ahead and created an ‘Eye of Sauron’ using Microsoft Kinect, WPF, and openni. The result is a creepy fucking eye that can track people walking by, promising death and gloom to everyone it catches within its gaze.
Hit the jump to check out the video.
