About one-and-a-half years ago at the San Diego Comic Con I met cartoonist and Nickelodeon Magazine comics editor Dave Roman at the Slave Labor Graphics booth. I ended up talking to him for quite a while on each day of the con, and it didn't take too long for the conversation to turn to games. It turns out he's a pretty big gamer as well, so big in fact that he had collaborated with some of his friends to produce an anthology of comics and fan art with the proceeds going towards Child's Play. Life Meter was the name, and he directed me to another booth where I picked up both volumes. Quality and individual taste vary, but overall I liked it a lot, and it's a fun idea.



Anyway, onto the POINT, as given away in the title: Life Meter Vol. 3 is in the works, and they are taking submissions. I promised to spread the word, and anyone who has visited our little Destructoid recently knows that the community has more than its fair share of artistically-inclined gamers. So, if you've got the time and the wherewithal, make something and send it in! The deadline for final art is May 1st.

Some more submission details, reposted from the original:

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Read over our SUBMISSION INFO:
-The book's dimensions will be 6x9 inches. Please feel free to have your art be larger but proportionately in scale.
-Deadline for FINAL ART for Book 3 is May 1st.
-We encourage people to send pitch ideas for feedback before final art.
-Comics are preferred over pinups!
-We will reject stories that are well drawn but poorly lettered or illegible. Web resolution will not be good enough for print, so make sure you read the specs.
-There's no guarantees or promises of what will make it into the book.
-Contributors who are included in the book will get 1 complimentary copy and the ability to buy more at cost.
-Just like the previous, volume, all profits for Life meter go to Child's Play.
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It'd be neat to see something in there from someone around here. Good luck!

[Life Meter Comics]

Well, we finally got Club Nintendo in North America, but there will always be reasons to remain jealous of Japan. Toymaker Banpresto is currently selling a life-sized Mr. Saturn plush, coming in at just under half a meter (4 apples) tall. I can't read Japanese at all but from what I can make out on the site (and the Google-translated link on Offworld, below) it looks like a limited edition of 500 will be on sale until the end of February. They're priced at ¥12,000, or roughly $120 US, not surprising given the limited run and the size of the thing. Seriously, look at those hands!:



I finally got to play EarthBound in the middle of last year by borrowing a friend's copy, and enjoyed it immensely. Sadly, even if I had the money I don't have the space for a gigantic Mr. Saturn in my house, but for any superfans that do, wire money to a friend in Japan as soon as possible and have them put a reservation down.

Man, I can just picture someone selling this with a complete copy of EarthBound on eBay for a bucketload of cash.

[via Offworld]

Seriously, tag 25 people? That's an incredible exponential rate of growth. I almost didn't do this either because I didn't want to push any of the videogame related blogs off of the front page, but then I realized that wouldn't be a problem and it's been pretty fun spying on everyone else.

1. I was on the Academic Team/Quiz Bowl team my junior and senior year in high school. It's basically the only extracurricular I participated in. We won the division in our league both years but couldn't make it to the final round in the playoffs. Senior/varsity was crazy, as despite being a brilliant bunch of bastards the team shrunk by about 50% by the end as members failed to meet the GPA requirement or decided to drop out. Still, fun times. I'd bone up on my literature knowledge by walking through the fiction section in the school library and simply browsing the spines so I could associate the author with the book. I also recall being the first to ring in in quite a few of our matches. We even did an exhibition match taping for the county educational channel:


It'sa me!

As you can see, I also had long hair in high school.

2. I lost two spelling bees in elementary school. Both times I was tripped up by animal names. The first time it was "oxen" (O-X-A-N) and the second time it was "caterpillar" (C-A-T-T-E-R-P-I-L-L-A-R.) I don't know why I over-thought on "oxen." Hell, I think that had even been a word on my spelling list in 3rd grade, and I sure as shit should have known it thanks to Oregon Trail. I doubt I've ever misspelled either word since.

3. I graduated college with a BS in Mathematics almost 3 years ago and my first (and only) job out of college was manning a booth at the county fair part time with my sister for about a month right after. I've been a drain on society and my parents ever since. I really don't know what I want to do with my life, and I've been too lazy to figure it out. Incidentally, I was voted "most likely to succeed" in middle school.

4. I'm a packrat from a family of packrats and I've held on to a ton of shit over the years. I need to invite Topher over so we can have a yard sale. My room is a terrible mess. I have a ton of crap from Comic Con over the past 3 years that I need to just throw away but something keeps me from doing so.

While I'm namedropping editors, I'll take this moment to say my Goodwill is almost as awesome as Dyson's.



5. I grew up listening to classic rock, and that's pretty much the music I like. My dad is a huge Beatles fan. Classic rock radio is terrible in general, though. I actually like a lot of music but I'm not a huge enough music nerd to seek things out. I was really big on Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in high school, and in the last couple of years I've concentrated on David Bowie. There seems to be a Bowie resurgence or something hanging in the collective nerd consciousness right now beyond "Labyrinth." Maybe I only notice it because I've become a bigger fan, but between Venture Bros. and Flight Of The Conchords and what have you I'm seeing a large fandom in my existing media/internet social circles.

6. One book that affected my view of the world to an unknown but significant degree is Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, which is something of a geek classic. I received it as a gift from my senior English teacher (who I TA'd for and thus became somewhat close with,) oddly enough shortly after I had been introduced to it by one of my friends (who was in that class and on Academic Team.) There's some heady mathematical content, and I myself didn't quite grasp all of it the first and only time I read through it (it's a big fucking book and I need to read it again now that I'm a bit wiser,) but it's wonderfully written. I highly recommend it. Here's one of the most clever passages in the book.

7. I don't drive. I need to learn how. I never had the impetus to learn when I turned 16, as I wasn't really into going places or hanging out with friends (the few close ones I had) outside of school. Laziness and an ability to cope with what I needed to do without having to learn have prevented me from getting around to it. In fact, I have two sisters and a brother, we're all adults now, and none of us have learned how to drive.



8. My short acting resume includes playing The Big Bad Wolf in a musical production of The Three Little Pigs in kindergarten. Somewhere there is a videotape. The acting bug never really bit me afterward, but recently I finally saw the film version of Sweeney Todd and faint stirrings have arisen. The songs are great.

9. I started gaming when I was 2 or less on my parents' Atari. Frostbite was one of my favorites. I was excited when my dad brought home an NES with Super Mario Bros., Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, and Q*Bert, but then dismayed to learn that in order to help pay for the NES he had sold the Atari and most of the games to a friend! I got over it pretty quickly, but I recall that shock. It's probably part of why I never ever sell games I get, even if I never play them. I still have a Centipede and a Donkey Kong cartridge, though, which somehow escaped the sale.

10. Things that scared me when I was young:
-I freaked out when I went on the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. I was doing OK until the part where A GHOST SITS IN THE CAR WITH YOU and then I totally lost my shit.
-I also got a tad freaked out when we saw Captain Eo on that same trip. I had the 3-D glasses off for most of it, but then I put them on right when it cut to the elephant guy and the extreme close-up was too much for me. I didn;t wear the glasses through the rest of it.
-Most embarrassing: I saw the 1986 film version of Maurice Sendak's Nutcracker and the crazy multi-headed Rat King scared me so much that I was afraid he would rise up out of a hole in the bathroom floor while I was in there alone. As a result, I would not go to the bathroom for weeks unless one of my parents watched me. This and the crazy intestinal torture I forced myself through probably explains a lot about who I am today.



I'm a boring motherfucker.

As someone who hasn't taken the plunge on an Xbox 360 yet, I've been occasionally checking the official Braid website for news on the PC version. It had been scheduled for the holiday season but was moved back to February or March so as not to get lost in the blockbuster insanity that was Q4 2008.

Anyway, checking the official blog the other day informed me that creator Jonathan Blow started a contest this past week. The prize is one copy of Braid on Xbox Live Arcade to the first 20 people who correctly identify from what games the 10 screenshots he posted were taken. Apparently if less than 20 people manage to identify all of them he'll pick winners from those who got the next highest score and so on until they've all been given away, so give it your best shot. No word on whether anyone has managed to identify them all yet.



I got #1, 2, 5, and 7 I believe (still a bit iffy on 5.) Most of the shots are pretty difficult--if you don't know right away what game it's from, you're going to have a hard time guessing. Except for #1. Everyone here should know #1. He mentions something about doing another contest after the PC version comes out.

Please refrain from posting answers in the comments. Have fun!

Giveaway: Free copies of Braid (Xbox 360) [Official Braid blog]

The rumor just came out that the DSi will be arriving in North America in less than 4 months, fitting neatly into the window that Satoru Iwata hinted at just before the system launched in Japan. Somehow I missed this comment and had held the earlier statement by President Meat in the back of my mind, and all this time I'd been prepared to see new hardware on these shores in October at the earliest.

Now I'm caught with my pants down and I'm freaking out.

Not really, but please, feel free to entertain that mental image if it excites you. I'll wait.

Back? I'll continue. One thing this news means is that the days of the GBA cartridge slot in the bottom of the DS are numbered, and it's not as high a number as I'd thought. Many gamers aren't happy with this and have ruled out purchasing the DSi as a replacement for their current Lite or original models any time soon. I'm one of them, but not being able to play my GBA games on the toilet is only part of the story. I'd miss the Rumble Pak.

While I'm sure I'm not the only one, it's likely that many of you wouldn't miss the Rumble Pak for the simple reason that you probably don't own one or more than a few of the games that use it. You're missing out, dammit, and here are a few reasons why:

Metroid Prime Pinball



For those like me who actually have a Rumble Pak, you probably obtained it bundled with Metroid Prime Pinball. It's also quite probable that this game proceeded to shack up in the slot in the top of your DS for several months, as Pinball is one of the finest pick-up-and-play games ever. It wisely enough also serves as the perfect showcase for the Rumble Pak. A number of actions in the game result in force feedback, the most common being just about every time Samus collides with something on the table. What this does is give you the feeling that you're holding an actual pinball table in your hands: You have both hands on the DS in sort of the same way you hold them against a full sized machine and action plays out in the space between them, both visually on the screens and physically from the Rumble Pak. I don't feel I've ever felt force feedback in any other game that so closely mimics the real experience, and a big part of that has to do with that synergy brought on by the positioning of the elements on the DS.



To get a better idea, contrast this with how rumble works in Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection for Wii: the left hand holds the nunchuk, right hand holds the Wii remote, only the remote has rumble capability, and the field of play is a screen that's likely several feet away. It's a great game, but I play with the rumble off and don't miss it at all, whereas Metroid Prime Pinball loses quite a bit if I don't have the Rumble Pak in.

It's a bit of a shame there aren't many pinball games for the DS.

Picross DS



You wouldn't expect a grid-based puzzle game to bother at all with rumble. I didn't. And I sure as hell didn't expect that it would enhance the experience in any way. Picross DS, in addition to being another unforeseen addiction of a game, proved to be a pleasant surprise on both counts.



On a basic level, the Rumble Pak turns solving a puzzle into mathematical bubblewrap. Every "punching" or marking of a square is punctuated with a satisfying little kick. The best moments come when a puzzle has a high number in one of the rows or columns, signifying that you must punch out a bunch of continuous squares in that row or column. These moments are especially great if you are female and have the DS in your lap.*



Picross DS doesn't call it a day there, however. The puzzles are grouped together in different themes (animals, vehicles, flowers, and so on.) In addition to dictating what the solution to each puzzle will resemble, each theme comes with a skin for the puzzle board that changes it into a different material (water, metal, wood, grass, etc.), and when you punch out a square the Rumble Pak actually reacts differently depending on the material. Granted, a large part of the difference in perception is likely due to the distinct animation cues, but the vibration ties in perfectly with these, and the difference between the quick thunk of chipping away at stone versus the constant whirr of mowing away a grass tile is clear by feel alone. It adds a level of character that helps keep a game that doesn't change much throughout the whole experience from becoming too repetitive.** Much like Metroid Prime Pinball, I really do feel like I'm missing something if I don't have the Rumble Pak in the slot for this one.

*I'd imagine. And I do.
**I wish the Rumble Pak could do the same for my sentence structure.

Space Invaders Extreme



One of the complaints about the Rumble Pak when it first came out was the level of noise that comes out of the thing when it's doing its job. For some reason it's a noisy little gadget, much louder than vibration functions typically are in console controllers. But what has the potential to be an annoyance in most games turns out to be an asset to the experience of Space Invaders Extreme.



Like Rez before it, Space Invaders Extreme's sound design replaces traditional shot and explosion sound effects with musical tones, marrying the player's action in the game to the soundtrack. Extreme also borrows the techno music and rave-inspired visuals from Rez, along with the use of vibration to provide the physical kick one feels from the beat in a club. Unlike Rez however, vibration on the DS adds one more element: more noise, or more accurately another instrument. Whether by intention or simply a bit of good luck the emphasis on rhythm in Space Invaders Extreme's design takes advantage of the Rumble Pak's volume and turns it into part of the experience.

Or maybe I just need to turn the volume up.


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It's kind of strange that some of the best uses of force feedback I've come across have been for a handheld system. Then again, perhaps it isn't so strange. I alluded to the uniqueness of handheld games being, well, experiences held in your hands, and maybe simple proximity strengthens the connection between vibration and what happens on the screen. Too bad the picture is looking quite grim for the chance of any future DS releases making good use of the Rumble Pak.

I participated in a Secret Santa event on another videogame message board for the second time this past Christmas, and decided to make the little guy above as part of my gift. Glue, cardboard, some scrap mat board my sister had left over, glitter glue, paint, marker, colored pencil, etc. I made the box and lid, and the hat came from a cheap stuffed animal. But what was in the box?



I had the ghost mushroom ball in the gift box, and sent the others along in another parcel in the shipping box. My giftee was pleased. I think he's using the Chozo to hold condoms now.

As for the gifts I received, one of them was The Chipmunk Adventure on DVD, chosen right off my Amazon wishlist. I finally got around to watching it last week and oh my God I felt like I was 3 again. It was the first movie I ever saw in a theater, and probably that I ever saw period. I don't think there's any single thing that takes me back as vividly as this movie, not even a videogame (although there is a fake videogame in the movie that I've always wanted to play.) Anyway, it had been somewhere around 7-10 years since I'd last seen it on TV on the Disney Channel, and I'd forgotten a few things, most notably a song the Chipettes sing to a bunch of snakes they need to get past to recover their stolen dolls...



Um, wow. I was a bit taken aback. It's a catchy song, but I never picked up on the lyrics when I watched it before.* I thought to myself that this would never, ever fly in a cartoon made today, but then I remembered Bratz. So much for that theory! What probably wouldn't make the cut is a mildly un-PC depiction of some unnamed South Pacific/Amazonian tribe that captures the Chipmunks, leading to the famous "Wooly Bully" sequence.

In a move that can only be called "fucking wonderful," the DVD comes with the soundtrack. If you haven't seen this movie or heard the songs from it and you are Chad Concelmo, please, by all means, do it. And show it to the children in your family, too.

*No wonder my generation is so fucked up, our first crushes were Jeanette and Gadget.

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So hey, hi there, I'm going to make a sincere attempt to write more this year. After starting at the end of 2007 and then making the front page I kind of.... stopped, with a few BS updates throughout 2008. I have no good excuse for this, and resolved to pick it back up after meeting a few Dtoiders at Comic Con and seeing just how awesome everyone is in person. Then I failed. Then Y0jimb0 wrote a lamentation about people failing and complaining that everyone was failing. Then something happened last week, and there was some more failure. Then Necros wrote an impassioned battlecry to combat the failure. And so it goes.

Point being, I now feel sufficiently guilty about being one of the people who sort of dropped out of things after a short period of fervent activity. It's like I was playing an RPG, then put it down at some point, and the longer I was away the harder I felt it was to come back and do anything. Or maybe I was just lazy. I've gotten a lot out of this place and it's fun to participate. There seemed to be a number of people who actually enjoyed what I wrote and I feel like a douche for leaving them hanging. Anyway, this is getting to be too much of a sappy-explanatory-compliment-fishing-whatever post, but I just wanted to say I'm going to really try to pick up where I left off a year ago. Destructoid's been good to me. Also, cocks.