GoldbergBlog

Today it was announced that Square-Enix will release one of the best videogames ever made, Chrono Trigger, on the Nintendo DS.  I still own the original Super Nintendo cartridge which is worth more than you.  While they’re not remaking the game in 3D like they’ve done for Final Fantasy III and IV, it’s Chrono Trigger returned.  If you’ve ever played this game then this game gives you a reason to survive until the holiday season when it will be released.

Tags: brilliant, videogames by Matt
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Today was a day of guitar woes.

It started off as a pretty chill day.  After going to Piedmont Park for a friend’s birthday party, I went back home, worked on my Final Destination 4 set visit article and then kicked back with a little Rock Band, playing the guitar on solo.  Even though it’s a wired controller and not made by Red Octane (who made the controllers for the Guitar Hero games), I’ve warmed to EA’s Fender Statrocaster.  I tried to ignore the conventional wisdom that they’re more fragile than a newborn baby and you’ll have to return it to EA for a new one sooner rather than later.  I was just enjoying kicking back and strumming out some tunes.

So of course, today it started fucking out on me.  I was playing “Go With the Flow” and going through some fast notes and the game no longer registered the strumming of the guitar.  And that’s all there is to it.

But look!  There’s a silver lining!  While I’m waiting for my Stratocaster to return, I can go pick up Guitar Hero III which as a wireless guitar and which I wanted to pick up anyway!  And that guitar works with Rock Band!  Oh boy!

Oh no.  I picked up GHIII and the wireless guitar, which I remember loving when I used a friend’s over at his house, is now too small and the buttons are too far apart.  My Stratocaster has spoiled me.  But those are minor complaints.  The big complaint is the tilt sensitivity.   In GHIII, it’s a hair-trigger.  The guitar picks up that the Earth is rotating and thus activates Star Power, completely removing any strategy and timing in building up Star Power to deploy during a solo.  But in Rock Band, I have to spaz out on the thing in order to make the game kick into Overdrive.  Either way, it hurts the gameplay and it hurts my soul.

Tomorrow, GHIII goes back to Best Buy.  Aside from the defective guitar, the game, were it called anything other than “Guitar Hero” would be bashed and dismissed as an imitator of the superior previous games.  Song selection is such an important piece of these games.  The first song in the first two sets I’m even excited to play is “Bulls on Parade”.  Somehow, “Talk Dirty to Me” and “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” do absolutely nothing for me.  I’m not saying Rock Band has the market cornered on great songs, but at least the majority are worth playing.  It also has frequent download content, unlike Activision, who still haven’t figured out this whole durn online sales business.

Playing both games, it’s clear that the true sequel to Guitar Hero II isn’t Guitar Hero III but Rock Band.  And if they hadn’t made it so easily breakable, it would also have the superior guitar.

Tags: videogames by Matt
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I realize I haven’t blogged in about two weeks and that you’ve needed your fix. But I derive great pleasure from watching you squirm.

Sorry. I was hallucinating and was in a beautiful world where people gave a crap about my blog. Okay, back to reality.

Last weekend I was in New York City for the Smart People junket. Here’s what you need to know:

• Traveling First Class is awesome but not worth the price. With the exception of the hot towels and pre-flight drinks, people in coach should get the same kind of seating and comfort of the people in First Class and the people in First Class should get oral sex from hot stewards and stewardesses. Also, those little pilot wings. I miss those.

• Smart People is an awful movie.

• Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Thomas Haden Church are all really cool people because they were so excited and curious about the student in our room who was doing the junket for Carnegie Mellon University where the film was shot.

• Rich people are chumps. I get a per-diem so I don’t mind spending money since it’s the studios and it’s not like I get to keep what I don’t spend. However, if I ever paid $6.50 for a 12oz bottle of Coca-Cola, I would just keep the money, go on to the street until I found a homeless person (you don’t have to look far in New York City) and say, “Fuck you!”

• The Nintendo World store is still Mecca for Nintendo fans and a haven for black market Wiis. They have the popular console every morning. They only allow one per person, but you could just walk in, buy a system, sell it on eBay and double your investment, rinse, repeat. Do that and you’re looking at about $1,250 a week all because Nintendo doesn’t know how to run manufacturing plants.

However, while I was standing in line to buy Power Up energy drink (which thankfully did not taste disgusting) and a Mario figurine, I overheard the people behind me being retarded. They described the Super Nintendo as “so-so” and I’m surprised I had the restraint to not just turn around and pummel them in the organs. But then they kept going and said that the only good game for the Nintendo 64 was Goldeneye 007 at which point I had no choice but to turn around and shout, “Ocarina of Time!” “Oh yeah…” the guy dumbly responded. He then went back to his conversation of ignorance and said that “the mario game” for the 64 wasn’t that good. Again, I gritted my teeth and decided it wasn’t worth the energy explaining to this pile of worthless that Super Mario 64 was a revolutionary game and it basically determined how we play 3-D games today. All he’s ever determined is that people who don’t know what they’re talking about should shut the fuck up.

The Monday following my NYC-jaunt, I finally, finally, finally got an XBOX 360 and I am the happiest boy. It literally hurts when I have to pull myself away from it to do things like “work” and “eat”. My friend Carl has been so great in sending me free games and these aren’t crap games no one in their right mind would want to play. These are Gears of War, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Dead Rising, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and Guitar Hero II (sans guitar, but I’m buying the wireless one anyway when I get GHIII). He’s also sending me The Simpsons Game and a few others. I treat the guy horribly but you couldn’t really ask for a better friend–one that gives you over $200 worth of free videogames and DVDs. If you have a 360 and want to challenge me online, here’s my info in convenient gamertag form:

Tags: stupid, videogames by Matt
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So I was playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance this Saturday night because I’m such a cool, happening guy (just wait till I get my XBox 360; I’ll be spending my weekends playing Call of Duty with 12-year-olds who repeatedly call me a faggot, but the joke’s on them because I get off on having homosexual slurs hurled at me) and I reached this mission where I have to go get this airship back for a moogle. Okay, no problem. Oh, wait. One more thing: to get it, I have to fight in an area where unlike elsewhere in the game, if your characters die, they die for real (I guess they’re just knocked unconscious before or something). Good warning. But wait–I have to defeat the folks who stole the airship. So at the end of the battle, I realize I just murdered like four people for an airship. That’s unsettling.

And that’s videogame logic. It’s logic not decided so much to tell a story, but to allow for a fun game. But you just look at the world the wrong way and everything is ruined. Look at Mario: He has to go rescue the Princess from Bowser and traverse the Mushroom Kingdom to do so. Fair enough. But are all the enemies of the game part of Bowser’s army or are they just part of the natural ecosystem? Koopa Troopas are because if Bowser is King Koopa, it follows that the little turtles are his minions. But what about Goombas? Or Hammer Brothers? Or the ghosts? Yeah, all these characters will mess you up if they touch you, but in real life, so will bears, rattlesnakes, and other animals. But that doesn’t mean they’re out to get me. Do I really have to kill them all?

Of course, a lot clearly got lost in translation with Mario. Why is a plumber rescuing a princess from an giant turtle with spikes on his back? I feel like I’m missing a bit of exposition.

And yeah, a lot of people and a lot of games have gone back to try and fill in the gaps, but when you power up Super Mario Bros., you don’t get any of that. You don’t even really get what you’re going in the first place. You’re in a world full of bricks; coins are located around the world and if you get enough they give you the opportunity to come back from the dead and go back in time before you died; mushrooms make you larger and flowers make you shoot fireballs from your hands (as well as change the color of your clothes); and when you see little brown mushrooms with eyes walking towards you, you either have to jump on top of them or avoid them because if you touch them, you will leap off the screen and out of this reality. Is it just me or does anyone else think that when they decided to make this into a movie, they should have contacted David Lynch?

Tags: humor, videogames by Matt
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Dear Nintendo,

I like your products. It’d be great if you considered actually manufacturing them from time to time.

Sincerely,
Matt Goldberg

Tags: stupid, videogames by Matt
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Did you really need another reason to want Super Smash Bros. Brawl? Of course you didn’t.

Tags: videogames by Matt
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The kid is back. And he does it without the homo-erotic tension of these guys.

Tags: brilliant, videogames by Matt
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The following is a video of a young man beating DragonForce’s “Through the Fire and the Flames” on Expert in Guitar Hero III:

There are some funny things about this video:

1.) I see a bunch of dudes in what’s clearly a dorm room. Way too many guys to be populating a tiny dorm room at one time.

2.) The guy playing the song smashes on the strum button like it’s freaking teletype.

3.) I see too many backward ballcaps (More than zero is too many unless it’s during a baseball game or post-game celebration).

4.) At around 6:40, these guys start holding hands.

5.) At around 7:16, one of the guys exclaims “Jesus Christ!” and it sounds like when Mr. Slave says it on South Park.

6.) Their school is Dallas Baptist University so they’re all going to hell, not just for the hand-holding, but for playing and worshiping Satan’s music.

This kind of behavior can only lead to Bro Rape.

Tags: humor, videogames by Matt
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There are three things I pray for every night before I go to bed: the safety of my family and friends; peace on earth; and for Assassin’s Creed to live up to its potential. It looks fantastic and I think “How could this game be as bad as I’ve heard from people who have played it?” And the only rational conclusion I can come up with is that if you built the game, the of course you can play it perfectly. But if you’re new, you’re going to make tons of mistakes and what should be a game with a ton of freedom is going to end up being endlessly frustrating and prohibitive. And you can see the subtle signs of this like when producer Jade Raymond says you shouldn’t approach those guards because they look like they’re barring the way or you should walk past the guys holding crates so as not to knock them over and draw attention to yourself. But if the game has the poor hit detection that I’m hearing about, you’re going to find all the stealth is for naught because you got a little too close to guard and now you’re on the run again.

There are other possible problems. Jade mentions that if you tried to sword-murder the guy who spotted you instead of using a throwing knife, you’d be fucked because you drew the attention of too many guards. Well how does that really speak to the freedom of the game? I understand they want a reasonable level of difficulty but that’s a pretty big leap to assume that someone will just know to use the knife and that if they don’t they’re probably going to fail the mission.

Something that is clearly a problem is the fighting. It seems that they’ve opted for this clumsy one-on-one combat where you’re in a pit full of guards but they only attack you one at a time. The others stand around like morons waiting for their turn to be murdered.

Please God, let this game be good. And let us have peace on Earth. Amen.

Tags: videogames by Matt
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There is little doubt in my mind that Brütal Legend will be brilliant. Psychonauts is one of the best games ever made. I wish I had easy access to Tim Schaefer’s other games but I don’t have a DeLorean and even if I did, it would have to be equipped with a Mr. Fusion in order to generate the 1.21 gigawatts necessary to power the flux capacitor (This reminds me: isn’t about time we had a good Back to the Future videogame? You could pimp out the DeLorean, sneak around in BTTF: Part II, play the world’s easiest drinking game with Doc Brown…actually, nevermind. The game would end up sucking. No use in dragging one of the greatest film trilogies (and even Part III is acceptable) through the mud).

But no one other than hardcore gamers who were in the know bought Psychonauts. Unless a game starts with “Madden,” “Halo”, or “Grand Theft Auto”, it will have a tough time getting older gamers to open their wallets (Sure, Mario and Zelda games sell great but they’ve had about twenty years to establish a brand). Imagine if in movies, the only films that were successful were franchise flicks. Granted, these are the ones that make the most money, but they’re also the ones that cost the most. Films like Superbad and Knocked Up would be under-marketed, unnoticed, and totally flop at the box office instead of making $121 million and $148 million, respectively.

Brütal Legend is destined to financially flop because it’s clearly genre bending, very stylish, and not easy to stuff into an easy, predetermined category. And while you could argue that Jack Black will be a selling point for the game, I’d like to remind you that Black has never opened a film based solely on his presence. Yes, School of Rock did well but it had fantastic word-of-mouth and generally positive reviews. Since then, the only film he’s tried to open by himself is Nacho Libre, which granted, did do well but paled to the grosses of School of Rock and Jared Hess’ previous film, Napoleon Dynamite (it was a small indie flick; I don’t know if you heard of it). While you could point to the success of King Kong or The Holiday, he wasn’t carrying the entire film. There were enough stars or other elements (love, giant apes) to attract viewers. So calling your game Brütal Legend and saying it’s from the creator of Psychonauts and features the voice of Jack Black isn’t going to get it off shelves. It will go in the ranks of great but underplayed games, alongside Ico and Beyond Good and Evil.

And that’s the marketplace. I love that sites like 1UP, Destructoid, and GameTrailers, devote so much time and energy to so many videogames and I appreciate that. I really and truly do. But they should know as much as anyone that while the hardcore gamers are always trying to find the great games that are gonna fly under the radar, the best selling games are the ones with a pedigree. Ironically, the non-franchise titles that gain that pedigree only get it through the work of the hardcore. So why wasn’t Psychonauts a huge success? I wish I had the answer. I truly do because then, I might know how to stop Brütal Legend from sharing a similar fate.

Tags: videogames by Matt
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