In Third Person

A personal look into video games, the video game industry and video game culture.

The Day The Music Died (Again)

Posted by Jet
Saturday, September 26, 2009
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Image from IGN

After buying a whole new Rock Band 2 set just to replace my 5th broken drum set and my always-janky Rock Band 1 guitar, I am once again faced with another instrument setback.

My less-than-two-month-old guitar is broken. The strum bar has ceased to work.

Ugh. I've already gone through the process of RMA-ing it, but nevertheless I'm still extremely frustrated. I love the entire Rock Band series of games and actually prefer the feel of the Rock Band instruments over the Guitar Hero instruments. However, I don't want to put up with these hardware issues anymore. Do I go back to Rock Band instruments and hope someday they'll work properly or should I just try something else?

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Scribblenauts Is Racist?

Posted by Jet
Thursday, September 17, 2009
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Image from Joystiq

Over the last few hours, the video game blogosphere has been going insane over the inclusion of the word "sambo" in Scribblenauts.

Joystiq and Kotaku, just to name two outlets, have covered this topic, and I think blew it way out of proportion.

Kotaku in particular, went into a whole piece connecting the word "sambo" with the racist connotations while completely glossing over the other meanings of the word, even when they use the developers explanation in their own story.
Slaczka said that the word was included in Scribblenauts because it is an ingredient of the Ecuadorian dish Fanesca, which is listed, on Wikipedia, as including a "figleaf gourd," or "sambo".
- Kotaku

What they didn't do until hours later and until a user brought it up, was include an image of what that definition of "sambo" is. Take a look:

Image from Kotaku commenter DwarfP

I'll be damned if that doesn't look like a watermelon to me.
From Joystiq:
As for the watermelon-like appearance? "We reuse art," he said. "Fig leaf gourd looks a lot like a watermelon. It's just an alternative name in a giant list of tens of thousands of names."
I'm not ignorant to the racial connotations to the term. But I'm very disappointed in many of these blogs and news outlets that completely gloss over the reason the developers actually put "sambo" in the game. I don't think 5th Cell is wrong for putting "sambo" in the game if they intended it as the local term for fig leaf gourd. The problem is people looking for racism that isn't really there.


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Some Thoughts Before The Beatles: Rock Band Drops

Posted by Jet
Monday, September 7, 2009
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Image from Ohgizmo

As a music game enthusiast, there may not be a bigger day than 09-09-09, when The Beatles: Rock Band hits store shelves. A game based around the biggest musical act in the history of music made by the guys who make my preferred rock music game of choice is guaranteed to be "full of win". There isn't really much to be said other than it's Rock Band but with Beatles music.

As a Beatles "fan", my journey towards this game makes for a far more interesting story. Sure, I know all the hits, and I grew up in a house where I was taught from a very young age that the Beatles were the best band in the world. I never questioned it growing up.

But now I feel like I want to know more before I plunge into this game. I'm sure the game will do a decent job of starting off a person's quest into learning about the band, but I really wanted to form my own opinion about their music. So, I raided my dad's Beatles stash and ripped every album onto my computer. I've been trying to listen to albums front-to-back to try and get a sense of the full album experience.

It's really interesting to listen to this music and read the history behind each album to see where it was coming from. It's also really cool to see how they evolved musically. I'm not done my "vision quest" just yet, but my favourite album I've listened to front to back so far is Revolver. With the exception of "Love You Too", I thought every song on there was great, and does a great job of capturing the transition the group made from pop hits to more experimental and rock stuff.

Worst album? This one is easy for me. I think Beatles For Sale is awful. After reading about the making of that album, I could see why. They only had 2 weeks to record it, and almost half the songs on there are covers, and not necessarily great ones. With the exception of "Eight Days A Week", this album left a really bad taste in my mouth.

Image from Beatles.com

I feel really good being able to enlighten myself about the Beatles and form my own opinions about their music and to a point, their legacy. It's good to find great album music that never got any play on the radio. It's also a good feeling that I'm not going into this video game cold. 9-9-9 is only a few days away!

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Some Thoughts On the Batman: Arkham Asylum (Full Game)

Posted by Jet
Saturday, September 5, 2009
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Image from Game Spy

So much for not buying Batman: Arkham Asylum like I said I would. I'm glad I changed my mind at the last minute.

If critical acclaim couldn't make me buy the game, what did? Thanks to Wal-Mart, many retailers in my country were selling the game at launch for just over half price. For most people, Arkham Asylum is a fine purchase at full price. At half price? It's a steal.

A lot of my concerns about the game that popped into my head during the demo were quelled when playing the final game. It didn't get repetitive. I didn't get crazy lost. It wasn't a crappy licensed game. The experience didn't drag on too long, and only got better with time.

Take out Batman from this game and it's still awesome. I played it from front-to-back in a 3-day binge and loved every minute of it. Well, almost every minute of it. I do have minor gripes with how it ends, but up until that point it just got increasingly awesome.

By far the best moments of the game featured the Scarecrow. It would be a crime for me to spoil any more than that. They are must-experience moments for any gamer, period.

Many people have said this is game of the year material. I don't think this will win it, but I would definitely say the game is a sure-fire honourable mention and worth your time. Go buy this game!

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Smells Like Kurt Rolling In His Grave

Posted by Jet
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
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Making the rounds of video game websites and blogs is the above video from YouTube user Corporalgregg2, who recorded a few of the awkward things you can do with Kurt Cobain in Guitar Hero 5. Everything from imitating Flava Flav's trademark, "Yeah boy!" to four Kurt Cobain's performing a Megadeath song with invisible instruments.

My initial reaction is, "LOL! Look at Kurt Cobain being crazy!" However, as someone who knows a little bit about the life and death of Kurt Cobain, I can't help but feel eerily uncomfortable watching this.

Part of the reason why Kurt Cobain is no longer with us is because he hated celebrity and the commercialism his music brought to him. He wanted to be seen in a certain light, and that not happening partially lead to his death. Ever since then, the legacy of Kurt Cobain has been fairly well protected.

So it comes as a bit of a surprise to see cyber Kurt Cobain in the video singing music from Bon Jovi and Stevie Wonder with an XBOX avatar and a skeleton. When the makers of Guitar Hero pitched this idea to the estate of Kurt Cobain, did they mention that this would be possible? If so, was the estate of Kurt Cobain cool with it?

As an outsider, this almost feels like they dug up the corpse of Kurt Cobain and slapped him into their video game strictly for marketing purposes. Am I the only one feeling uncomfortable about this?

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Time For An Intervention

Posted by Jet
Sunday, August 30, 2009
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Image from Playstation Lifestyle

For the past few weeks, you've probably read a lot of my Street Fighter IV posts. Ever since I got an XBOX Live gold account in May, Street Fighter IV has become a huge part of my life. Besides dropping over 100 hours into the game and playing over 1600 online matches, I've spent a ton of time listening to Gooteck's Street Fighter Podcast, reading the Street Fighter thread over at NeoGaf, watched any tournament videos I could on YouTube, and almost dropped $200 on a Mad Catz TE Fight Stick.

Image from Size 12 Font

It's been fun to get sucked back into the universe of Ryu, Ken and the rest of the gang. The feeling was almost like I was sucked back into 1992, when fighting games first burst onto the scene, except I was now old enough to not suck at them and I could fight everyone around the world from the comfort of my living room. However, I've come to the realization that I need to take a break. The game is grabbing me unlike any game before it, and it's kind of scary.

The adrenaline rush I get from online one-on-one Street Fighter competition is doing some really weird things to me. I'm generally a cool and calm guy, but I get seriously psyched up playing this game. When I'm winning, I get cocky. I'll yell at the screen, whether I'm winning or losing. I think what really sets me off is the losing.

I'm not a sore loser. I've never rage quit. I've lost a good few hundred matches in these last few months; most of which occured against opponents I never had a chance of beating. But those losses hurt. I think part of that comes from the fact that this is the first fighting game I can actually beat strangers in. Throughout my history of playing against strangers, I've lost every single time. If I were to play BlazBlue or Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 right now, I would lose every single time. However, I don't get mad cause I know I'm not that good to begin with.

With Street Fighter IV, I've proven that I can hang to a point. I've won over 1000 matches with a winning percentage of over 70%. It feels awesome to win. But because I now have so much invested in this game, losing hurts so much more. They hurt to the point where I would yell vulgar language, pound my hand against the armrest of my chair as hard as I could, throw my controller and just be overcome with pure rage. I've had an ex-girlfriend confess to me that she was cheating on me, and the anger I felt then did not match the anger I would instantly feel losing a close match in Street Fighter IV. This feeling would hit me almost every single time I lost.

Even when I can totally rationalize why I lost, or I learned something valuable from it for the next fight, or even when I've tried to consciously calm myself down, this feeling of rage just overcomes me. I've been playing video games for almost all of my life, and never have I exuded this type of behaviour before. I don't play games to become filled with rage. It's actually freaking me out.

Which is why I've decided that I need a break from Street Fighter IV. I buried it to the bottom of my XBOX 360 games pile, where it'll sit until I feel I'm ready for it.

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Now Loading - Bookworm (iPhone)

Posted by Jet
Thursday, August 27, 2009
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Image from Casual Gamer Chick

So maybe I'm a bit late to the party on this one. This 5-year-old game from Pop Cap has probably been played by everyone and their grandma by now, and not much really needs to be said about it.

A few weeks ago, I grabbed this on sale for $0.99 on the iTunes store. To be honest, it was actually the first time I'd ever played Bookworm. I bought it because it was a great price for a game that everyone seems to like.

Now I see personally why it's so popular. It's been my go-to iPhone game for the past few weeks, and the basic premise of spelling words within the bounds of the game works really well. The interface that the iPhone or iPod Touch provides works perfectly for this style of game. While the game is fairly feature bare, it was a great pick-up for $0.99. Not sure if $3 for this is really worth it.

At this point, you either have this game cause you like it, or you don't because you don't like it. If it goes on sale again though, it may sway a few late-comers like me.


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