[source : all games beta]

Magic everywhere in this bitch! The more I see of Super Mario Galaxy 2, the more I am convinced it is the product of an excessive amount of hallucinogenics and awesomeness. I really need this game. Super now.

[source: tanooki via destructoid]

Oh shit, Super Mario Galaxy 2 features 2D gameplay! WTF, awesome. Two-dimensional. The good old days. Before pubes and polygons and raging psychosis. There’s a certain simplicity to 2D gameplay that continually draws us back. You know you still love it. For all the perks and benefits of a zillion-polygons and bonerfying graphics, a little old school Mario still makes me a fucking happy clam.

Fuck yeah, Super Mario Galaxy 2 is coming. And you better be ready with your hallucinogenic drug of choice for when this son of a bitch drops. What a trippy, engrossing, rewarding game the first Galaxy was.

I am pretty stoked about the sequel, and the trailer only increases my frothing demand. The gameplay is so sexy, so familiar, yet altered. I camped out for thirteen hours on release day for a Wii that simply fucking sits there. But if I can get a new Mario game every couple of years, it’ll be forever worth it.

Oh shit! Super Mario-Guy is droppin’ on Uranus with a squishy Yoshi grunt this May! Kapow! I’m stoked.

Via Destructoid:

Mario Galaxy 2, the long-awaited sequel to Mario Galaxy, is hitting North America on May 23.

Shazam!

I really dug the original Super Mario Galaxy. It’s a testament to the delicious allure of gameplay, and studly plumbers whose mustaches I would like to caress. Who cares if it was on the Wii, which is like the 32x of Nintendo consoles. It’s like two Gamecubes duct-taped together and asked to over-perform, with a superfluous masturbatory peripheral.

Better yet, Galaxy 2 is bringing back Yoshi, who was sadly absent from the original. What is Mario, if he doesn’t have his indentured dinosaur servant? Nothing! I mean, who else is he going to cruelly ride, demand to suck up everything around him, and throw into pits? He was lost!

I’m ready to get up on this pig this May.

Pepsibones and I have had a long line of gaming together. There has been literally thousands of millions of gallons of caffeine consumed and expletives dropped in the twenty-three years we have spent on the Earth together while playing video games. We haven’t played much together since the time I gunned a controller off the wall during some bullshit goal during Super Mario Strikers a couple of years ago. I don’t get why he didn’t want to play with me. I only dented a slab of wood with fury and probably had murderous intent in my eyes. It was a bullshit goal, and he was a cheater.

That said, I bought that buttfucker Super Mario Bros Wii Fantabulous Edition for Christmas. I knew he was too stingy to buy it himself, and if I didn’t snag it during the week when he wasn’t warping childrens’ minds with his thinly-disguised anarchist panderings, we’d never get to play it together. I slapped that shit in a big fat box of shit, let him open it up, and then we were off to the giggle factory. He was drinking dirt water, and I was on my fiftieth Diet Mountain Dew of the day.

This game is fucking fantastic.

Two fucking renegade plumbers rocking out on some hallucinogenic mindfuck. Riding dinosaurs and smashing fish that for some inexplicable reason drop coins. You smash into dudes’ houses and then you take their goods. You plunder little fuckers wearing weird hats so you can go fight Godzilla, who just so happens to be the worst father ever. Meanwhile, a princess is getting assfucked and raped into a coma, covered in lizard slosh. In the middle of one gaming session, I was like…Jesus Christ, the things we take to make sense in a Mario game are insane. I imagined the board room meeting while the game was being pitched, and there was one rational dude, who was like, what the fuck is doing on!

Jesus fucking Christ, Jim, how many times do I have to explain it? This guy in the overalls throws balls of ice that freeze the red cockhead with feet, we call them goombas, and then he picks up the block of ice, throwing it into a wall. Then the guy drops a coin…I just, I just don’t get what is so hard here. Are you trying to be difficult?

It’s pure madness. There’s something elegant about the stripped down gameplay in the game that is refreshing. Listen, I’m all for the insane graphics, pretentious storytelling, overly ornate super blockbuster. I love my ear holes and eyes being fucked by awesomeness. But? But sometimes I just want to pick up a god damn turtle shell, and throw it at my dumb unsuspecting brother. The simple gameplay is doubly good too, since Pepsibones doesn’t have the dexterity to play any game that involves more than three buttons. Though, to be fair he did play and love some Fallout 3 last year. He almost shit himself with glee while fucking around with the character creator:

The gameplay and hanging out with Pepsibones harkens back to a simpler time. When I could shit my pants and not receive such a stern reprimand from my parents. When I could pick boogers and not rip out fourteen nose hairs. Everything from the music to the side-scrolling awesomosity is classic. Unevolved, to an extent. But excellent because of that. Some things aren’t broken, and they have lasted the test of time because of that. Cunnilingus, beer, and Super Mario Bros.

It isn’t without its fucking super awesome new flourishes though. There’s a couple of retarded new power-ups that will get your gaming fluids excreting. I mean, they give Mario a god damn propeller hat. Two dudes strapped in propellers, complete with absurd fart sounding propulsion that has a grown man (me) in his parents basement (I’m a failure) making wet fart sounds with his lips. And then there’s the penguin suit, and you can slide down hills without skinning your tits somehow. It’s fantastic.

The game lets you work together or fuck over one another as much as you want. The hit detection is hilarious, since even when you’re trying to help a brother out, you can inevitably fuck up the other guy you’re playing with. You bump and collide into one another, hopping on dome pieces and inadvertently pushing the other guy off a ledge. At one point dumb fucking Pepsibones accidentally ass-stomped my Luigi. The dude hits the ground with a thump, his neck clearly broken. And then Pepsibones and I laugh as Luigi’s fallen, mush-necked body slides off the screen strapped to some apparent rotating wheel.

What don’t you fucking get Jim? There’s platforms and wheels that rotate, because there’s no fucking ground. It’s simple. Simple.

At some point it always devolves into one of us throwing turtle shells up the ass of the other one. I’m just trying to rock out on Yoshi, when Mario guns a spikey carapace of doom off my little dinosaur. And then the pussy that   he is, Yoshi runs off into some pit of doom. I weep momentarily, and then shake the Wiimote, pick up Mario, and throw his dumb ass into the pit after Yoshi. The two of us die laughing, like it’s 1992 again.

Cunnilingus, beer, and Super Mario Bros. Some things never get old.

Apparently some guy from Visceral Games is shocked that Dead Space Extraction isn’t selling well.

Via Destructoid:

According to a NeoGAF post from a Visceral Games employee- “It is a shame that no one bought this (Dead Space Extraction). As much as everyone made fun of Frank Gibeau’s ‘experiment’, it will actually influence the SKU plan with respect to the Wii”. So I guess we’ll be seeing less games like DSE on the Wii from here on out, but is that a bad thing?

How can anyone be surprised by the poor sales? I’d like to construct a list of things that have me saying “No shit, dude.”

1.

It’s a Wii game.

Allow me to show you the Wii demographic:

Dead Space Extraction is a Mature game on a system that is sold to people who shit their pants. Grandparents, elementary school students and me. How well do you expect a mature game to sell to this demographic? No, seriously. The real gamers are playing real video game systems, my friend.

2.

It’s a on-rails-shooter based on a well-received, but only marginally known game. Alright, I’m going to make some leaps that are probably incorrect. According to Wikipedia, Dead Space sold over a million copies. However, that’s across three platforms. But again, those are platforms that are played by more enthusiastic gamers. In other words, not those who own a Wii. Sure, some guys who own a 360/PS3 own a Wii. I do. But does the average Wii owner have any idea what Dead Space is?

Furthermore, as I said, it’s an on-the-rails-shooter. In other words, they scrapped the formula that made the original game successful. So this game is a sort of shoot-off, non-related title. So if you liked the original Dead Space? Yeah, this game isn’t like that. I’m positing they made the change because they are either fools, or they knew the Wii would catch on fire if it tried to replicate the original.

To sum it up: A title that probably isn’t known well by the core of the Wii audience, and for those who do know it, it’s a deviation from the formula that made the original so dope.

3.

It came out at the end of September. This is what we call throwing a title out to the wolves. A couple weeks before Dead Space Extraction, Halo: ODST dropped. The next couple of months following it sees Brutal Legend, Uncharted 2, Borderlands, Ratchet and Clank, Assassin’s Creed 2, Modern Warfare 2 and on and on and on. In other words, the gamers who know Dead Space probably have their plates full.

And the ones who don’t? They’re probably playing their seven-hundredth round of Wii Tennis and thinking it’s the greatest thing ever.

Ah, god bless the shitty motion controls gimmick. I thought it was going to die. I thought that maybe, somehow, people weren’t going to dig it. But now everyone is into it.

And then, somehow, I thought that maybe shitty motion controls remakes would be relegated to the Wii. Stupid Resident Evil 4 with motion controls. The Metroid Prime games re-released with motion controls. I mean, what’s worse than the stupid gimmick that is motion controls? Making some cheap cash off of rehashes with the gimmick smashed into it.

Well guess what, PS3 fans! Apparently you’re going to get to re-buy Resident Evil 5 and Littlebigplanet so you can shake your little wrist to make them uh, do stuff:

Via Kotaku:

Well, we now know what that “Resident Evil 5: Director’s Cut” stuff was all about. It’s a re-release of RE5, built to take advantage of Sony’s upcoming motion controller.

The game will be out in Spring 2010, and it’s far from the only existing PS3 title to take advantage of the new peripheral. During SCEJ’s TGS press conference, Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida revealed that the controller will also work with existing games like LittleBigPlanet, EyePet, Flower, Pain, High Velocity Bowling “and more”.

Sick! More phallus-shaking action! Christ, between jacking off compulsively and now wasting money on shitty motion-based rehashes, I’ll have the wrist of a god! Which is uh, good for nothing.

ZOMG, controversy surrounding Scribblenauts? I lamented the lack of dildos in the game earlier in the day, but apparently there’s buzz about the word “sambo”:

Via Kotaku:

What happens when you write “sambo”? You get a watermelon.

I’m a naive sheltered white kid who was luckily raised by two very open-minded parents. And as such, I had never heard the term before.

According to Kotaku:

The word “sambo” has been used to demean and degrade Africans and African-Americans alike. “Sambo” was a common slave name in the U.S., and the late 19th century children’s book The Story of Little Black Sambo is cited as furthering the word as a slur. While the book was set in southern Indian, it did play on the blackface iconography and African-American intellectuals have been critical of the pickaninny motifs

and:

There was even a New Jersey brand of watermelon called “Sambo brand”

Weird. The Scribblenauts’ creative director Jeremiah Slaczka retorted:

Via Kotaku:

Slaczka said that the word was included in Scribblenauts because it is an ingredient of the Ecuadorian dish Fancesca, which is listed, on Wikipedia, as including a “figleaf gourd,” or “sambo.” A Google image search of the term “figleaf gourd” produces an image that looks like a watermelon. Slaczka said that it is common to use the same image for multiple words in Scribblenauts and that that is the reason a word meant to depict a figleaf gourd appears to be a watermelon.

Oh boy. I have a feeling we’re going to be hearing about this one for a few days. I don’t really understand how this could have gotten past the Scribblenauts team. Knowing people given the function of this game, the first thing a bunch of intrepid nerds were going to do was…try every single imaginable slur, curse word, and questionable noun. While I had no idea what sambo meant or the negative connotations it carried, it is hard to fathom there wasn’t a group of people or person in charge of preventing something like this from happening.

Someone’s Christmas bonus is going to get significantly lighter!

I bought Scribblenauts for my girlfriend yesterday. It’s a pretty dope puzzle game, and I knew she’d like it. I watched her play it for a bit, and it seems fun enough. But then I came to a pretty big disagreement with the game over the concept of vulgarity and what constitutes it.

Caffeine: Do you think you can use a dildo in the game? Or is that vulguar?

Note how I even have to ask this.

Far Too Patient Girlfriend: I’m pretty sure that’s vulgar.

Insert some serious silence while I ponder.

Caffeine: Really? Like…really?

I again doze off into rumination.

Far Too Patient Girlfriend: It’s a dildo.

Caffeine: Yeah, exactly! I mean, it’s a device that brings pleasure. How is that vulgar?

Sorry Scribblenauts, we’re going to have to agree to disagree. Apparently you’re like everyone else in this boring Puritanical country. I mean, I should have known we’d part ways. I’m the same guy that finds it completely acceptable to discuss bowel movements and masturbation at the dinner table with my eighty-seven year-old Nana. I mean, c’mon! It’s just a beautiful scientific discovery we’ve fashioned to give women and me pleasure. It’s not vulgar, it’s beautiful.

I think the Wii is a piece of under-powered shit. I think it’s a glorified peripheral. The Wiimote hasn’t revolutionized anything, and is just a gimmick. Fuck you Nintendo. You make old-ladies cream with your amazing Wii Suffer Menopause, where you shake the control vigorously to beat the cold shakes. So when I heard that your sales are dropping:

Via Destructoid

The world is spinning out of control, people. In a recent talk with IndustryGamer, analyst Michael Pachter has said just as much, revealing that the Wii’s sales are down 50 percent year-to-year over the last five months and he expects them to continue dropping if Nintendo doesn’t start selling a new bundle or cutting the price of their system as its two competitors have done.

I DANCE A DANCE OF VICTORY! Seriously though, I’m not surprised. Every one in the god damn universe owns a Wii. Sales were bound to drop eventually. But I’m just going to focus on the potential brightside, of a world where everyone is playing a PS3 and a 360, and Nanas are doing what they’re good for: cooking pies and dying.