I've just had one of those survey things from Namco-Bandai about the new Klonoa game. It's just asking which of 2 character designs I preferred. ne is the classic Klonoa design that all the cool kids know and love.

The other was this




Looks like some horrible manga inspired saturday morning cartoon crap. Why do they feel the need to make classic characters looks all edgy? Happened to Sonic years back and he still hasn't recovered. Although at least with Sonic he was always the wisecracking cool sort. klonoas just a cuddley cartoony giant cat. He's about as edgy as a satsuma.

Comment away!

Stan Bush wants it to happen. he even wrote to Mike Fahey on Kotaku to say so himself. So me, being bored, decided to make one of them highly effective Facebook groups for it. Go ahead and join and spread The Touch to people all around the world. If you approve of this awesome piece of 80s greatness appearing in Rock Band (Or Guitar Hero) then join the group, tell your friends and lets get some folks from Harmonix and Activision to join. Or Stan Bush himself!!!!

The Touch for Rock Band


Lets speed this up a couple of Octaves!

An imaginary penny for telling me where that line came from and how it relates to The Touch.



Of course, how could I forget...

Bouncy Feline Tigger has recently played Battlefield Bad Company and is said to have enjoyed the game thoroughly. When asked what his thoughts were on the near release from videogame giants EA and DICE Tigger responded by saying "The wonderful thing about Battlefield Bad Company is that destructions a wonderful thing!". It is believed that he was slapped about the chops for failing to come up with a good variation on his classic song. Critics say he's losing his touch with the youth of today and needs to do something soon to help regain their support.

Tigger Knows Best will be airing on VH1 this fall.

Number 1:

The new circuits are more rollercoaster than race track. The developers seem to have been scared of flat surfaces and felt the best thing to do is spen most of the tracks layout rolling all over the place and hitting "wicked air" off halfpipes. If nintendo wanted to make course like this why not just make a new 1080 Snowboarding game?

Numbah 2:

Not enough SNES tracks. Only 2 circuits and 1 battle level from the original Mario Kart makes me an unhappy monkey. There's quite a few Mario Kart games now so I'm sure picking out just 16 for the retro GPs is tough but why not just have 5 races per GP instead of four?.... Oh wait, it's a Nintendo game. No formula can be messed with.

Numba 3:

The weapon scaling system sucks. it sucked in Mario Kart Double Dash, It sucked in Mario Kart DS and it's worse than ever in Mario Kart Wii. I know they want the races to be close but there's better ways of doing this than giving the rubbish players a ton of first place shells and bullet bills. Hows about increasing the distance behind an opponent you can draft boost them from. Or if weapon scaling should be used make it so it only effects the boost mushrooms.

Numbeh D:

Friends codes suck. It makes no sense that you get a friend code for Mario Kart but it can check your Wii Console friends list. Why not just use the consoles friends list to begin with so you don't have to go adding everyone from you wii list to your Mario kart one.

Numero 5:

Online is good but poorly thought out. I've had about 20 races online and when searching for players I have no idea if it has found any until it brings up all the question mark bubbles. Why don't they appear as you join the race? Players shouldn't be able to vote for the same track 2 times in a row. I was in a group earlier that kept choosing Luigi Circuit and Wario Stadium. Also whats the use of seeing if my friends are playing online? They will likely be playing through the GPs for the extra characters. Surely with Wiiconnect 24 they could make it so you can see if your friends are playing single player too.

Other than all that this is a good Mario Kart. Just not the best. Better than Double Dash though.


/rant.

Now a few months back I got a job at a place I can't tell you where, because of an NDA. You see they think folks will contact me for info pertaining to products, of which I can't and will not discuss. It's annoying because I cannot tell you stuff I may or may not have seen. Even if it was awesome. Really, really awesome.

It makes me wish there was some company endorsed way that people they employ could discuss matters and future products from said non-disclosed corporation. Maybe if they had an official blog on their website that was written by a select group of folks in the industry. Obviously the big-wigs would have final say on what goes out but it would be cool if there was a place for people to get the odd tidbit of inside info.

Yes i said tidbit.

Capcom have a blog running that's been cataloging the development of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix and it's been a great thing to read. The odd shot of a character sprite has generated a load of interest in their game. Maybe other companies should think about employing an approach like this. It would also help to displell rumours about certain jobs in the industry.

When I go on forums and see folks complaining about various aspects of a game be they online issues, an exploitable bug or maybe Chun Li's thighs not being fat enough it can kinda anger me. Well not anger cos I'm so laid back my head scrapes along the floor when I walk. It's the idea that fixing something in a game is simple and devs could do it easily. A lot of times when one bug is fixed it can cause knock on issues. When a slight change is made to a game it can tear another feature apart wholey by accident.

No game is made perfect. they will all have bugs whether you notice them or not. What folks need to realise is just how many bugs a game has from it's first build to it's last and just how much work that takes for the devs to work through. A lot of bugs.

The recent troubles with xbox live is what sparked me to write my first blog entry for 4 months. The reason I haven't been writing any is obvious to those that didn't skip the first paragraph. I basically just wanted to get across that fixing a piece of software like xbox live isn't a case of switching the server off for 30 seconds and rebooting. It isn't even a case of writing a quick bit of code. It's a case of a lot of bvery talented guys working ludicrous hours (and they really do work ludicrous hours) to try to identify, repair and test every issue. According to "e" over at MS there wasn't just one issue. there was a whole cataclysm of issues with most of them having knock on effects causing other issues.

Imagine that a fully working service is a number, any number, and in order to get the service working you have to work out the correct equation to reach that number. Trouble is there's about 5 million other numbers needed to make that answer and if one get's changed it can have a massive effect on the answer. Coding is math, math at it's most insanely complex.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be annoyed that the service is down but saying they aren't doing anything about it or calling for Majornelsons head on a pike isn't gonna help. Nothing you can do will help. Just sit back and let them do their very complicated and tiring job.

They cannot tell you what has gone wrong for much the same reason I cannot tell you what I do. It's all about the NDAs. Just accept that stuff hit the fan and MS are working like crazy to fix it.

Sorry for the long read and nag. Peace out yo!

Just got an email from Capcom detailing their "megaton" announcements from this week and I couldn't help but notice that they seem to have pushed us 10 years into the future with the force of all these announcements.

This is what the E-mail said..

Street Fighter® IV Announced
Since its first arcade release in 1987, Street Fighter® has become one of the most popular fighting games of all time the world round. Now, 30 years later, fans regularly ask for an all new Street Fighter, which captures the complexity and detail of player vs. player strategy with jaw-dropping next-gen graphics. The wait is finally over. Visit Street Fighter World and, then discuss what you think about this long-awaited sequel on the Capcom Unity forums!


That makes me 35. Thanks a lot Capcom!