So yeah, I was going to write up this long blog post about what I liked and disliked about the year, but yeah... I just realized that all I really wanted to say was that 2009 was fucking amazing and meeting you guys definitely helped make it awesome. You guys are amazing and I hope that you all have a great New Year.

Hello everyone,

Edmund McMillen, co-creator of such indie games as Meat Boy, Gish and the upcoming Super Meat Boy title for Nintendo's WiiWare downloadable service, had surgery on Sunday to remove an inflamed gallbladder. Although he is currently doing well and recovering from the surgery at home, I have seen some of his Facebook updates and found out that he does not have any insurance to cover this medical emergency. He has been asking for donations for assistance to help cover the medical costs and I asked him if it was okay for me to create a post with his PayPal information in case some people in the Destructoid community would care to assist and he agreed.

http://bit.ly/D7i5b.

I had the pleasure of meeting Edmund McMillen a few weeks ago in Santa Cruz and he is genuinely a nice guy. So if you can, please show your support for Edmund and his family and donate what you can.

Thanks guys!



(Update: If you wish to make a donation straight to his email and bypass the link, it's souldescen@aol.com.)

Hey Nellie,

First, I want to congratulate you and all of the fine folks over at Cryptic Studios for the recent launch of Champions Online. I know that MMO’s generally have very long dev cycles and knowing that you worked through the grind and produced such a great game is amazing. I also want to thank you for making me one of the prison riot leaders in one of the in-game missions. Although I have already made multiple mentions of it to my friends and on this site, I cannot thank you enough for putting me in the game and I can’t shut up about being an actual in-game character. I can honestly say that is one of the coolest things that anyone has ever done for me in this industry, and I will always be grateful for that. That alone has definitely warranted a guaranteed game purchase at the end of this week.

This post is somewhat related to all of that. See, I am not going to be able to play the game for about a week or so. I’m pretty busy at work, but I have been keeping track of the game. To my surprise, a few of my friends over at EA actually found my character in-game and asked how I pulled it off. So I made a post on a few websites that I frequent and let people know that I was in the game. When I did that, it prompted one of my friends to go a Google search for my name and in-game nickname, “for the people reading this, my name is Timothy ‘7 fingers’ Erbil in the game”.

In doing so, he found out that I was actually part of an in-game bug. He apologized to me and sent me the link to the thread on the official Champions Online bulletin board that had a description of the issue….

So I am currently writing this now to thank you. Not just for putting me in the game, you went far and beyond that. Instead, what you have inadvertently done made my inclusion in the game cooler than anything else that I can think of….

You made me a fucking self-replicating god in the game…. A FUCKING SELF-REPLICATING GOD! HOLY FUCKING SHIT! I’M FUCKING AWESOME!

See, from what I can gather from the bulletin board, when people kill me… I just respawn like nothing has happened. So they just get stuck, killing me over and over again. Well, guess what bitches? YOU CAN’T FUCKING KILL ME! You want to know why? IT’S BECAUSE I’M FUCKING AWESOME!

….or it could be a bug, but I’d like to think it’s due to said awesomeness!

So Nellie, I understand that you may not be the one responsible for the load of awesome that is currently happening in the game. I’m totally cool with that, but the fact that I am in the game is because you asked and put me in there. The fact that people for one reason or another can’t kill me just makes it better than I could have ever wished for. I know this will most likely be addressed in the not too distant future, but still, this has just made it that much more memorable. So again, thank you for putting my name in the game. I’ll totally return the favor somehow, but I just wanted to congratulate you and your team for your efforts in releasing the title, I know you guys put in a lot of long hours into the game and I can't wait to play it.

Thank you again,
Timothy ‘7 fingers’ Erbil


Oh... the link to the forum thread in which I found out I was a bug can be found here:
http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?p=882914

So a few months back, one of my friends over at Cryptic asked me if I wanted to be put in Champions Online as an NPC character. Of course this made me really excited and I agreed. I didn’t really think much about it until this message popped into my Facebook page yesterday….

I was impressed to see that you showed up as Timothy "7 Fingers" Erbil in Champions Online. How did you pull that one off?”

So yeah, I haven’t gotten around to playing the game yet… my video card is dead and I’m currently using onboard video, but apparently I’m one of the leaders in a prison riot. It’s an open world mission, so people will be beating me up constantly.

So yeah, I’ll end this post with a quote from my brother when I told him the news.

It’s pretty cool though. Being put in a video game is one of the better geek honors.... maybe just short of being made into a webcomic character or being a Star Wars extra.”

So yeah, this totally made my day yesterday.

If you ever go to the Mission District in San Francisco and are just craving a milkshake or some decent diner food. There is a place on 24th street called St. Francis Fountain that is pretty amazing. Not only can you get a fine milkshake at the place, but they also sell vintage Topps movie and entertainment cards for the 70's, 80's and early 90's. One of the sticker packs that caught my eye at the place was the Video City sticker cards.



I remember my mom buying these for me when I was young, but it's been so long that I forgot about them until I saw the Turbo scratch off card included in one of the packs. The date on the packs state that these were produced in 1983, so these cards are a good 26 years old. Kinda crazy that I remember them due to the Turbo cards, but they also had some stickers with some horrible artwork for Frogger, Donkey Kong Junior and Zaxxon. Anyway, I'd figured that I'd post them so you all could see. Sorry about the quality of the pics, I took them at work with my iPhone, but they get the message across.











They had another card set that was dedicated to Donkey Kong Junior and I'll probably go back and pick up a pack of those later, but I just wanted to so you all how awesome the art was for these cards. There were some other cards that I wanted to pick up for the nostalga factor as well, ""they also had Yo MTV Raps cards, cards from the movie Dune, Garbage Pail Kids stickers and New Kids On The Block cards"

As everyone knows, the Xbox Indie Games channel has been a complete cesspool of crap over the past few months. Granted, there is some titles that come through that are genuinely rewarding and surprising, but most of it is shoveled out crap. Still, I continue to check the marketplace out once in a while in hopes that I find an awesome game that puts my faith back in that platform.

So I checked today and the first title to pop up in the new releases was a game called I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 and immediately thought that it was the worst fucking title that I have ever seen in the world. Still, I give it enough of a chance to take a look at the screen shots and it looked familiar. There used to be a freeware game put out about 8-10 years ago for PC in which it played like a dual stick shooter which was awesome for a free game. Now, I am not sure if this is the same game or not, but its pretty close.



The game is basically an arcade dual-stick shooter in which you just go around the screen, blowing the crap out of zombies, 8-bit happy face snake like creatures and other sorts of villainy. Not exactly innovative for sure, but it works and if you are a fan of these types of shooters, I think there is a lot to like with the game. There is a decent weapon selection and although the first song that plays is horrid, the background effects actually react to the music and there are some pretty neat effects that happen during gameplay. The music gets better, if not more generic after the first song plays out... but the arcade-style gameplay will definitely appeal to fans of Robotron and Smash TV. Which brings me to the reason why I decided to make a blog post about the game.

It is actually extremely well done for a community game, and its only a buck. Now granted, I have only played the game for about 30 minutes, it's still worth checking out at least the demo. I went ahead and purchased the title since I am a sucker for dual stick shooters and will probably post more about the game when it's not 1am in the morning.



But yeah, definitely give the demo a spin. I'd argue that with the time that I have spent with the game already, it's already better than some of the dual stick games that have appeared on the XBLA service. I'll try to write more when I spend some more time with the game and when I am a little more awake.