[via .tiff]

If you didn’t play Ocarina Of Time, you’re going to Hell. It’s in the bible. But that’s okay, HAIL SATAN.

I absconded to New York this past weekend for the second time in three weeks or so. This is me yawning with a greatness. ‘Twas a good time. My Significant Other and I were fitted into a hotel room suite replete with a kitchen, refridgerator and other fancy stuff. It was fantastic, even if I felt bad at living in such luxury. I’m the guy who feels bad when someone calls him “sir” or carries his bags for him. I want to be like, “Dude, no seriously. I’m a 27 year-old schmuck who lives with his parents and you probably are busting your ass for ungrateful people. Let me carry my own bag.”

As I said though, it was enjoyable. My girlfriend, being infinitely more successful than myself despite being 4.5 years my younger, is a tough one to corral for a day alone. Her schedule is voluminous and her drive remarkable, and I’m just a guy reading books. So being able to get away with her, even to the noise and din of New York City was great.

I tried my best to not hyperventilate over all the school work I wasn’t getting done while I was there. When I closed my eyes I saw syllabuses not being completed. I could hear the crackle of pages not being turned. Grad school. It’s turning out to be a real son of a bitch.

Monday Morning Commute. Every Monday I’m going to detail the various things I’m either currently or will be watching, reading, playing, and listening to in the next seven days. It’s Monday. You’ve got a long week of school, work, or compulsive masturbation to get through. Tell me the arts that you’re indulging in, to stave off suicide.

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[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.

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.

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.

Ah, Trish Stratus. I had forgotten about you. I had forgotten about all the hot summer nights I sat in front of the TV with a raging boner as you fought other WWF “divas” and strutted about all scandalous. It seems absurd now, but my hormonal teenage body couldn’t handle your generic bleach-blond hair and fake boobs. But then I grew up, and you slid, slid so far away from my mind. And now you’re back, with your own Wii game?

Via Destructoid:

Fitness model and former WWE actor Trish Stratus has teamed up with Frima Studio to develop a new yoga game for the Wii called Stratusphere. The game will make use of the Wii balance board and other Wii accessories in order to make it so you can do awesome things to yourself.

What is going on with this world?! And then Trish, I saw what you’ve done to yourself! Brown hair? Glasses? You know how to play us, Stratus! You’ve gone from cajoling the yokels and the teenage kids of the world with your fake boobs and your blond hair to manipulating us nerds with your sexy glasses and business suit! You’re vile! You’re evil! I love you. Again.

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.