Of course, this only applies to the Super-Special-Limited Edition.

BUT....you get your pick of three quality hardcore films!
1. PUT IT IN MY ASSHOLE VOL. 12
2. MIDGET GANG BANG
or
3. SCURVY GIRLS


In a recent interivew Hideo Kojima said:

"I realize it is an unusual move for a game developer to include pornography with a game title, but my development team felt that it would not only bring the consumer closer to our product, but it also presented us with many interesting challenges on how to integrate the pornography into the main storyline. Depending on which version you choose, elements of the story are effected by the porn you selected. For example, in one of the early 5 hour cutscenes, Snake is having a conversation with Otacon about recent porn they have seen. If you chose, say, Midget Gang Bang, they will have a detailed and heavily scripted conversation about Midget Gang Bang based on which scenes you watched the longest using complex, generative dialog. Also, at one point in the storyline, pornographic actors and actresses are conscripted by the enemy to assassinate the player, and those actors are selected based on which porn you chose.
Also, there are levels deep in the game where characters like Snake and Raiden have to infiltrate adult film studios on the American West Coast. The studios and their interior layout are based on the real-life studios behind whatever pornographic film you chose for your limited edition."

This decision by Konami means that the upcoming Xbox 360 title, Halo Wars, will no longer be the first title to include pornography as a significant game element, but will be beaten to the punch by almost a year.

Well that one came out of the blue. At least for me. Warlords is on XBLA today? One of my all time favorite games for the Atari 2600 that I haven't played in at least 20 years?

It's more likely than you think!


Now, admittedly I haven't played it yet. And it's possible it sucks. The last few classic Atari games redone for XBLA were kinda bad, especially Missile Command.
But, I'm holding out hope that it might capture the simple essence of what made it so great back in the day.

There's also the new full-album download for Rockband, The Cars' self-titled, first album from 1977, which also exciting since it's a legitimately solid download for anyone in the Rockband camp.

A lot of people lately have been talking about Guitar Hero World Tour and how it's going the Rockband route, and to be honest, I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, it sounds cool and being able to make songs is great. BUT, will it work with current controllers? I really don't want to pay another $200 for a Rockband clone just because of some retarded little spat between companies who don't want the controllers to be interchangeable.
ALso, since Harmonix left the Guitar Hero franchise to Activision, it has gone a little bit downhill. GH3's most glaring flaw was it's insane difficulty curve catering almost exclusively to hardcore players, and their first major extension to that is the mind-warpingly odd idea to make an entire disc of nothing but Aerosmith songs. I mean, I guess I could kind of see a GH style game that's all about one-band, but if you go with one band....WHY AEROSMITH? Seriously.

Last I played GTA4, I decided that rather than do any major missions, I'd just sort of dick around for a little bit sort of absorbing the city.

First I went on a date, which ended well. I won't get into details because a gentleman doesn't kiss and tell.
Then I decided to grab a car for Stevie, as I do enjoy the whole "find this car without any help" thing.

I decided to get back to my safehouse by way of taking the train, which wasn't very far from where I dropped off my date. The train eventually arrived in an underground station and I made my way out slowly. There was a sax player doing his thing, so I decided to toss him some money. Some other asshole took the money instead and he and two of his friends decided to come after me, presumably for a robbery.

I made a dash for the exit in the hopes of finding a cop; I didn't want to start any trouble. When I got out into the streets the three men were all over me, beating me up. So, I decided that's it.....I'm pulling out my machine gun and making an example of these clowns. Two of them charged at me from across the road and as soon as they got a few feet from me, WHAM....a cop car plowed right through them, killing them instantly. The cop got out of the car and told the third guy to freeze, but he kept coming. The cop nicely plugged him from a good distance, and then, mumbling something about donuts, he hoisted himself back into his car and drove off.
I was pretty badly hurt, so I called the paramedics. They patched me up alright, but it cost a fortune. Damn modern health care.

I decided to catch a taxi the rest of the way home, but the driver decided that driving most of the backwards would be a good idea, wrecking some other cars pretty good. I finally made it home and realized what a crazy day I had.

Thanks GTA4.

So I saw some of the "new" screens from Silent Hill 5 today and.....I'm kinda not really impressed.
Let me preface that. I am a huge, huge fan of the first 2 Silent Hill games. I consider them both to be transcendent pieces of horror gaming and they are easily part of that list of games that definitely bridge the gap between video game and art, even though I know the notion of games as art tends to drive certain people up the walls.


Did I leave the oven on?

Rare is it that a game can conjure up real, tangible fear and bind the player to the protagonist, but those games succeeded well. While the first Silent Hill was more visceral and horrific, SH2 leaned a little more towards the psychological and the philosophical with it's storyline and characters.


I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. And, gosh darnit, people like me!

Silent Hill 3, on the other hand, seemed to stray a bit. To begin with, it made, in my opinion, the huge mistake of attempting the bold task of directly continuing the wonderfully surreal and labyrinthine story of the first game. Part of the charm of the original Silent Hill is it's truly unsettling story, many elements of which remain puzzling even after the game is over. 3 kind of ruined that mystique and told a relatively ho-hum story written as an excuse to re-visit elements of the first game and bring some awkward closure to the whole thing. It wasn't a horrible game by any stretch, but it felt like it was merely going through the motions. The few brilliant moments it easily revealing what could have possibly been a fantastic game had the storyline and setting continued the original developers notion of making each SH game thematically different and using different characters.


Ever get that feeling you're being watched??

SH4 was, of course, not really made to be a Silent Hill game, but rather the theme and the weak connections to the Silent Hill universe were made late in development so that Konami could market the game as part of that series and the end result suffered for it.

Now we have the disasters of Silent Hill games in the hands of Western developers who don't really seem to understand what made SH1 and 2 such masterpieces. Now, don't get me wrong..I'm not one of those Japanophiles who assumes that everything produced within the land of the rising sun is the pinnacle of human achievement and that filthy gaijin are incapable are making decent games. It's not that.
But, let's face it....North America and Europe have a lousy track record of making their own incarnations of established Japanese series. When the first details of Silent Hill Zero came out (to be renamed Origins), you could almost hear the gnashing of jaws around the world. When leaked videos hit the internet of an awful, first-person, clumsy attempt to imitate Resident Evil 4's success, the reaction was one of disbelief from most people. Konami panicked a little bit and, of course, re-arranged some of the development team in the hopes of salvaging the game and the result was a passable, but flawed shadow of what the Silent Hill series represented. And, again, it tried to tie itself into the original storyline of SH1, clumsily trying to suggest that it's main protagonist was a major factor in the events that got the whole ball rolling.

Now we have Silent Hill 5, with it's clean, sharp, next-gen graphics and monster designs that seem more at home in a Todd McFarlane comic than in the world of Silent Hill. The game is being developed by an American company whose previous games have consisted mainly of very poor licensed titles. Why Konami went this route is unknown to me; I don't know the story behind it, but it's a little depressing.
The artistry of a truly terrifying and disturbing game is a fragile thing...and guess I have little confidence it can be done right with SH5. DISCUSS.

Ok, I'm not one of those gamers who lets nostalgia cloud my vision. There's plenty of games I pumped quarters into when I was a kid that, when I play them now, suck balls. But, as we all know, lots of old games still kick ass even now because they were well made and served their purpose and delivered good, old-school arcade action. And those games leave us with fond memories and we can't let them go. No....no...those aren't tears. I'M NOT CRYING!!

In all seriousness, one old arcade shooter I love the hell out of is Capcom's masterpiece: Forgotten Worlds

YOU CANNOT STOP ME WITH PARAMECIUM ALONE!!

DAMN STRAIGHT, MR. GENERIC BLONDE HAIR HEROIC WHITE GUY!

Forgotten Worlds is a 2-D side scrolling shooter that, when it was originally released, featured a somewhat original gimmick in that the game was controlled with a joystick and a large, disc-shaped, rotating thingy that rotated your character allowing you to shoot in 360 degrees.
The move-with-one-stick-shoot-with-the-other-thing had been used before, but not really so well in a scrolling game. Forgotten Worlds also used an interesting power-up system in that as you flew through the levels, you occasionally would run into a shop ran by a pleasant girl who would sell you heavy weaponry. This got you little satellite devices that not only incinerated your enemies, but block enemy shots too, adding a little bit a strategy to it.



The ability to buy different weapons with money you win in the game and basically create your own strategy made this is a damn addictive game in the arcades, even though you had to pump plenty of money into it to survive; it was pretty hard.

Of course, it also helped that the game made no sense and had no real story to speak of. You're fighting a generic bad guy and the bosses include a mummy, a mechanical Egyptian worm, an angry face made out of crystal, and two muscle dudes who like to jump around a lot.

INbetween levels, one of your heroes would declare some strange victory speech (in digitized sound) and move on.

Supposedly in the Japanese version there was a way to get the shopgirl naked. Not that I'd know. No, really....I wouldn't know.

When the game was ported to the Genesis, obviously the rotation was altered by basically assigning 2 buttons to rotating in different directions, and they gave you the option to auto-fire (where you gun just constantly blasts away, leaving your mind to think about more important things like aiming down the throat of that giant, evil, old man shooting things out of his mouth)
It didn't really matter, though, and it didn't hurt the game too much. The game still kicked ass, had the digitized voice, and despite removing one short level, packed all the arcadey goodness into a small, homemade package, sort of like your mom's apple pie. If it were an arcade game. Sort of.

Anyway...Forgotten Worlds is, in my opinion, one of the best shooters of the classic age of arcade games.
If you would like to play it, it is currently available on the Xbox, PS2, and PSP in the first volume of Capcom's Arcade Collection. (and that version is the arcade one with the deleted level put back in).

I JUST finished the damn Three Leaf Clover mission in GTA4, on what I think was my 4th try.

Jesus god what an annoying mission.


SPOILERS IF YOU HAVE NOT DONE THIS MISSION AND REACHED THE THIRD ISLAND YET. STOP READY SPOILER MCSPOILERY PANTS.




The cop shootout I'm ok with...it's well paced and they made it far by making you fight phases of cops rather than having to actually do battle with the entire police force just to get to the subway, which they could have done just to be dicks. But fuck the last half of the mission with a rusty nail. That was just cheap to have to make you try and get away from three times the normal amount of cop cars on the road. It took me nearly 20 minutes of driving around before I was able to lose the wanted level. Every time I got 2 feet past the wanted zone, gee what do you know, 8 cop cars from out of nowhere coming right for me on a route I can't possibly avoid them on and they hadn't shown up on my radar until a millisecond before I crossed out of the wanted zone.
I'm cool with challenging stuff, but not CHEAP stuff. And I wish gaming developers were sort of on that page. I don't want things to be easy, and there's plenty of missions I've fucked up in GTA4 so far and had to retry, but I always felt like each time it was just because I did something wrong or just needed to be more careful, whatever.
So I guess if I have an official gripe about GTA4, it's that it was bullocks to make a mission that long with no "mid point" where you could re-start. No, it's not realistic, but I don't care and I doubt most people would.
Anyway, here's a picture of a cat.