Congratulations! I happened to be thinking of Mariano Rivera, so the number in my head was 42, which he (she? I don’t want to be presumptuous...) guessed exactly. Please send me a PM or email (my address is in my profile sidebar), and I’ll pass along the coupon code.
To everyone else: thanks for playing — especially Genfuyung; you were so close! — and better luck next time. (Knowing Sony and their spamming of my inbox, there will definitely be a next time.)
The few of you who caught my previous post in this vein already pretty much know what I’m going to say, but I’ll introduce my situation again for the newcomers. Sony likes to send me coupons for PSP-related purchases; they seem to think I have a PSP, which isn’t true. Last time, they mailed one to me for $5 off any PSP game from Best Buy, but this time, they went the electronic route.
I got an email a few days ago from Sony that contains a coupon code for $5 off a copy of God of War: Chains of Olympus — if you pre-order it from Amazon.com ($39.99 is the regular price). There’s an additional special offer attached to the deal: if you pre-order the game with the coupon code, you’ll get “free exclusive tracks from the God of War: Chains of Olympus soundtrack”. You won’t get them immediately; once the game ships, Amazon will send the songs to your Amazon account’s “digital locker”. All told, that doesn’t sound like a bad deal to me, but again, I don’t own a PSP, so I have no use for the coupon.
Since I tried to hold a contest for my last PSP game coupon, and that contest failed miserably, I’m not even going to bother with something as complicated this time. Here’s what you have to do:
Pick ONE number from 1 to 100, and put it in the comments below. At midnight EST, which is in about four hours, the “contest” will end, and the person who has posted the number that is closest to (or exactly) the one I have in my head will win. Guess more than once, or guess more than one number, and you will be disqualified.
Of course, we’re working on the honor system here — I’m going to take it on faith that you’ll actually make use of coupon code and aren’t simply preventing someone who genuinely wants to buy the game from getting it for five dollars cheaper. In other words, don’t be a total fuckwad. And now that we have those unpleasantries out of the way, get guessing!
As fellow c-blogger B-Radicate reported earlier, EA has extended their video game exclusivity agreement with the NFL by three years. It was originally slated to expire in 2009, but now, EA has locked up the license through 2012. Most people seem to think that this deal means that the apocalypse is imminent, but I don’t necessarily agree. Read on, friends, read on...
No, this is not what Madden NFL 09 will look like
I’ve always been a fan of EA Sports titles over 2K Sports games — I just like the way they “feel” and control. In general, however, I hate the idea of exclusivity; it stifles creativity and allows developers to rest on their laurels, year after year. (Aside: I was thinking of doing a “Good Idea, Bad Idea” on exclusivity agreements, but I realized that I couldn’t find anything good to say about them.) 2K Sports owns the baseball license, and I really didn’t like Major League Baseball 2K7 (in fact, I’m much more interested in Sony’s MLB 08: The Show this year). But I absolutely loved EA’s last baseball game, MVP Baseball 2005 on the PS2, and it’s a damn shame that they can’t make them anymore.
Now, it’s important to note something that Peter Moore mentioned in his interview with IGN: he said that it was the NFL who originally looked into having an exclusive deal with a publisher, and EA just turned out to be the highest bidder. Is that their fault? No. That’s capitalism, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Much of the blame should be placed on the sports themselves — that is, the NFL and the MLB — for offering an exclusivity deal in the first place. But EA’s not innocent, of course; what is wrong with EA is the Madden games that they’ve put out since the deal went into effect, which have all been largely lackluster titles compared to the pre-exclusivity games.
Of course, I’m at a special disadvantage as a PS3 owner; the 360 versions of Madden games have been serviceable, but the PS3 ports have been a different story altogether. The week before Madden NFL 08 came out on August 14, 2007, Best Buy was offering a deal: pre-order Madden, and get $10 off any other regularly-priced game. So I pre-ordered it and got Warhawk (which wasn’t to be released for another two weeks) for $49.99. But I saw the error of my ways (or rather, EA’s ways) after I had the game in my hands. IGN gave the 360 version an 8.7 in their review, but the PS3 version of the game was scored a full point lower, a 7.7 out of 10. I read through both reviews in their entirety, and the only difference between them was the mention of the graphical shortcomings of the PS3 version of the game. After playing the game myself a few times and being disgusted, I put it aside on my shelf, and in December, I got rid of it for a measly 650 Goozex points.
So what I’m essentially saying is this: I wouldn’t fault EA and 2K Sports as much for their respective exclusivity deals if they just made good games. Is that so much to ask? And if you have to, use the PS3 as the lead platform for development (or at least start development on the PS3 version earlier). There’s absolutely no excuse at this point for either of the versions to have any major graphical or gameplay inadequacies, and that was the case with both Madden NFL 08 and MLB 2K7. In any case, at least I have an alternative for baseball: 2K Sports’ exclusivity deal only covers third-party games, so SCEA is free to develop their own baseball video game. I eagerly anticipate MLB 08: The Show, and I definitely have some interest in Madden NFL 09, though after last year’s shenanigans, that interest is lukewarm. Make me believe again, EA...that’s all I want...
On Thursday, IGN put up this four-and-a-half-minute-long video interview with Ted Price, the President and CEO of Insomniac Games. It doesn’t reveal a whole lot more than we already know about Resistance 2, but the few of you out there who are interested in the game may find this interesting.
Price acknowledges a few failings of Resistance: Fall of Man, such as the method in which the story was told — personally, I wasn’t a fan of the female narrator (Parker, if I remember correctly) recounting Hale’s tale — and he also mentions that Insomniac “got lots of complaints” because the first game had no online co-op play. It’ll be there in the sequel; however, as is usually the case with Insomniac, they’re doing it in their own way: apparently, the online co-op in Resistance 2 will have its own story that “parallels the story in the single-player campaign,” and it will feature three classes, ŕ la Team Fortress 2 — a powerful soldier, a ranged special ops combatant, and a medic, each with their own unique qualities.
At this point, I wouldn’t say I’m psyched for this game — hell, I still have to go back and beat the original — but my interest is piqued, to be sure. Check out the video and let me know what you think!
What would you pay for the most insane home theater you could possibly imagine?
How about, oh...six million dollars?
Some of you may be familiar with IGN Gear’s “Ultimate Setup” feature (they’ve done over fifty of them), but this trumps them all, no sweat. Essentially, this guy Jeremy Kipnis, a record engineer/producer, has been engrossed in A/V equipment from a very young age, and he was inspired “to design a home theater with the absolute best picture and sound” — once he could afford it, I guess. The ridiculous room in his home in Redding, Connecticut, which is 26.5 feet wide by 33 feet long, features an 18-foot projection screen. The image that is displayed on it comes from a Sony SRX-S110 digital projector, which features an insane native resolution of 4096 × 2160 (that’s over 8.8 million pixels, more than four times the amount found in a 1080p image). Unfortunately, it doesn’t have an HDCP-compliant HDMI input, so he’s stuck feeding it 1080i video over component connections from his Sony Blu-ray player, Toshiba HD DVD player, and PS3, which the projector upscales to 2160p. But it still looks plenty spectacular, as you can see from the above image, which shows a shot from Ratatouille on Blu-ray Disc. According to the author of the article, Kipnis’ “ultimate goal is to produce a picture that’s an open window to the world.”
Of course, those numbers are fine, but what really blew me away was the audio setup in the KSS (“Kipnis Studio Standard”). What do you guys have in your own homes, 5.1-channel systems? Perhaps even 6.1 or 7.1 setups? Yeah, well, this guy went over the top, and his speaker setup delivers 8.8-channel audio via a wide variety of sound equipment, including three center speakers, eight tower speakers, and sixteen 18-inch subwoofers! I’m sure that Al Gore would want this guy dead; all together, the KSS features 11,315 watts of power!
So what’s the point of all this? Kipnis says he wants to market this kind of setup to those who can afford it (he’s hoping to be able to demo it to some of Hollywood’s top directors, like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas). It’s about advancing the state of the art, according to Kipnis; the idea is to create an immersive home theater experience using the best-of-the-best in equipment and design. For more information, you can check out the summary on CNET’s Crave blog; the original article, which appears in the Audio Video Interiors section of the February issue of Home Theater magazine; and Kipnis’ KSS website. Oh, and here’s a picture from the front facing towards the back, just for good measure:
Because I’m a science guy, and I like to do some calculations to show cool stuff, I’m gonna go for it. I started reading Destructoid sometime in August of 2006, so if we start from the middle of that month — as in, August 15, 2006 — and count to today, that’s 540 days. In other words, if we assume that I began commenting here on that day, in a week, it’ll be exactly a year and a half since I started reading the site. So...
2500 comments ÷ 540 days = 4.63 comments/day
While I don’t have some sort of graph that shows my number of comments from month to month or anything, I know that the average must’ve shot up during last summer, when I was reading Dtoid any chance I got while at work, and I also started reading lots more of the c-blogs around that time as well (I mean, they’ve only been around since what, like, last June?) Hell, the average most likely peaked in the past two months or so, as evinced by the following snapshot:
Hey, my Destructoid score (whatever that means) went up by over 1.68 million! That screencap was taken on December 2, 2007; 66 days have passed since then, so bear with me while I do some math once again:
Holy crap! Do I really comment on over twenty front-page stories and c-blogs a day? God damn. I guess when you think about it, it doesn’t seem like all that much — each day, I probably comment on ten main-page stories alone, and it obviously doesn’t take too many more c-blog comments to push that number up. Anyway, I’d like to thank all of you guys and gals here: from ReverendAnthony to RonWorkman, and from bhive01 down to WiiSucks (well, I can’t very well link to his blog, now can I?). I don’t usually comment on something unless it catches my eye in some way, and generally, that means being thought-provoking as opposed to just attention-getting — although there’s nothing wrong with the occasional LATENITELULZ™, to be sure. Then again, a quarter of those 2500 comments probably consist of me correcting people, so I suppose making mistakes in English usage also has to qualify as something that I notice and comment on across the site. Either way...I salute you all, Dtoiders, and here’s to 2500 more comments, which should be made in...
Currently Playing:(last updated 8/19/09) Madden NFL 10 (PS3)
MLB 09 The Show (PS3)
NHL 09 (PS3)
Rock Band 2 (PS3)
The defining moment of my life so far
Hey everybody, I'm Samit Sarkar, and I'm a 22-year-old lifelong gamer from New York (short answer). What's the long answer, you ask? Well, I'm from a bunch of places, actually: I was born in Calcutta, India, and I moved to the States when I was ten months old. I've lived in New York ever since (Queens until I was eight, and Long Island since then). So I figure that 20+ years of living in and around New York City is enough for me to be able to call myself a New Yorker.
I officially became a Destructoid editor in February 2008, but I've been an avid reader of the site since November 2006 (you may know me from my old nom de guerre, "BrOnXbOmBr21"). On the staff, I'm the lone editor who covers sports games, but you may see me do other things from time to time. If you ever have any questions, concerns, props, or hate mail, please see the "Contact Me" section above for ways to get them to me.
I've been into video games for as long as I can remember. In 1989, when I was three, my parents got me an NES, and I've been hooked ever since. I often tell people that I'll play video games until the day I die, and I truly believe that. So here's my gaming history (date in parentheses is when I got the console):
Nintendo Entertainment System (Christmas 1989)*
Sega Genesis (Christmas 1993)*
Sony PlayStation (Christmas 1997)*
Sony PlayStation 2 (December 27, 2000)
Sony PlayStation 3 (December 31, 2006)
*I no longer have this console _______________________________________________
I may not have a crapload of games, but I do have a rather extensive DVD collection. For the full lists, check out my collections at IGN:
As you can see, I'm a big fan of sports games, action games, shooters, and platformers. Some of my favorite games/series, in case you don't feel like going through my entire collection, are: God of War, Grand Theft Auto, Guitar Hero, Madden, and Prince of Persia. Also, though I've never played any prior games in the series at length, I plan to get into the Metal Gear Solid series in this generation.
Finally, I really think that Destructoid is the greatest place on the internet for video game-related news and things like that -- that's why I spend an inordinate amount of time on the site. It provides a unique combination of resources: news, humor, a phenomenal community, humor, a tremendous amount of knowledge pertaining to video games, and finally, humor. Also, cocks.
Oh, one more thing: I'm what people like to call a 'grammarian', and in my case, that also includes spelling. So nothing you see here, in my c-blog, or in my front page posts, should have any such errors (except for internet memes and the like, such as 'I can has c-blog?', etc.) Let me know if you spot a mistake. Also, I generally correct other people's mistakes, and since it's hard to correct someone without coming off as a dick, please don't take offense if I do it to you. It's only constructive criticism, and even if I'm brusque, I mean well.
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Destructoid is an independently-run publication forged by our love of video games and the gaming community's need of accountable enthusiast press living the dream since March 16, 2006
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