Relics

Game retailer GameSpot has announced that they will still be honoring preorders for Duke Nukem Forever from any time in the game's aeons-long long development history, all the way back to the beginning. So if you were one of the poor souls who said, “I need to make sure I'm able to get a copy of Duke Nukem Forever the moment it comes out! And while I'm at it, I'll upgrade my PC's RAM to 32 megabytes!”, you're in luck.

Though you'll presumably need to actually have a receipt from whenever you pre-ordered it, and I don't imagine many people hold on to 13-year-old preorders for legendary vaporware. So that's likely to be problematic, unless you're the sort of obsessive hoarder who lives in constant peril of being buried alive if the floor-to-ceiling stacks of windshield flyers, Trotskyist newspapers, Sears catalogs, and back issues of Datamation and Confederate Veteran that fill 95% of your house's internal volume ever lose structural integrity.

But if you are that guy, I wish you the best and hope the game doesn't disappoint.

New at Robot Geek

I've got some new articles up over at Robot Geek. Sadly, my work there is hamstrung by proprietor Dan O'Connor's expectation that I provide actual commentary about games instead of just making things up, but nevertheless, please to enjoy:

Chilling tales of gaming horror presents: Daikatana

Red Faction Guerrilla: Sometimes a ridiculously unfair enemy is exactly what a game needs

Square: The golden age

Read all three for:

• Lengthy apologia for gameplay mechanics everyone else hates!
• The hottest, most up-to-date industry news of the late 1990s you'll find anywhere on the web!
• Absurdly convoluted metaphors involving the First World War!
• Motorhead!
• My nerdy-even-by-the-standards-of-people-who-blog-about-video-games childhood!
• Muscular post-apocalyptic warlords clad only in tiny shorts and their unabashed confidence in their own masculinity! 

And so much more!

The one. The only. Tetris.

Japan has traditionally enjoyed a dominant position in the lucrative Discomfort-Inducing Store Display market, but now Italy is apparently throwing its hat into the ring. Sure as hell hope it's a hat, anyway.

More specifically, there are now  Tetris-themed Tampax displays advertising feminine hygiene products in Italian stores, and... OK, this is sort of awkward, because 1. My attitude towards the human body, its various activities, functions, and constituent components, and the emanations and effluvia thereof has not changed appreciably since I was about 8 years old, and  2. I write this blog with voice-recognition software and thus have to say all of this out loud. There are stacks of Tetris blocks arranged so that they only need one more properly placed piece to clear three lines, and the tampon is a long vertical Tetris piece descending towards the... well, gap.

Which is very bothersome, because if we accept the display's conceit that the tampon is somehow analogous to a Tetris block the tampon's arrival at its destination will cause several full rows of adjacent blocks to simply vanish into oblivion.

And even if we leave aside the ad's grisly suggestion that Tampax products somehow have the power to annihilate the user's lower torso, Tetris blocks seem like a remarkably unappealing thing to compare the product to. Most of the advertisements for feminine hygiene products I've seen over the years revolve around comfort and softness and freshness and women carefully avoiding any clear references to the actual product or its function as they converse while engaging in various outdoor recreations together. There's nothing wrong with trying to break from the formula, but I'm not sure “It's a tampon with the comfort and convenience of a brick” is the way to do that.

That said, I wish Tampax luck with this effort, and I'm sure that in the years to come video game-based promotions will be helping break down the taboos and awkwardness that so often surrounds items of such a personal nature. I especially look forward to seeing the “16-bit Link returning the Master Sword to that altar at the end of A Link to Past”-themed displays Trojan will no doubt be unveiling in the near future.

PLAYSTAPOCALYPSE 2011! Days 12 to 18: New releases for the week of 01-05-11

Bugger All (PlayStation Network)

This has been tearing up the PSN sales charts for the past few days. Gets kind of repetitive after a while.

Moon Diver (Xbox Live Arcade)

I actually own the PlayStation 3 version of this, which- much like a young Kal-El launched from a dying Krypton, or Keanu Reaves refusing to appear in Speed 2: Cruise Control- was released shortly before PlayStation Network was snuffed out. It's a side-scrolling action game, and it's quite good; it feels sort of like a suped-up version of classic 16-bit action games, and it pulls that off quite well.  If you enjoy action games and own a console with an online service that isn't a nonfunctional bag of ass, I recommend it.

PLAYSTAPOCALYPSE 2011!: New Releases for the Week of 04-24-11

Jack Shit  (PlayStation Network)

Been playing quite a bit of this in the last few days. Not as engaging as the gritty, aggressive-sounding name might lead you to believe.

Darkspore (PC)

A spinoff of the 2008 Electronic Arts/Maxis 2008 game Spore. Sadly, however, Darkspore is not some sort of evil mirror-universe counterpart of the original Spore, developed by an evil bearded mirror universe Will Wright. Instead, it's an action RPG in a science fiction setting that incorporates a character editor based on the Creature Creator from the original Spore.

It does, however, come equipped with evil bearded mirror universe digital rights management software intended to improve upon the controversial DRM of its predecessor. It works much like the SecuROM DRM in Spore, requiring online authentication when the game is installed and limiting a copy to a maximum of five installations. The chief difference difference is that, in this version, attempting to install the game a sixth time will awaken the pitiless machine intelligence governing the game's patented AgnonizeROM anti-piracy program, which will neutralize the potential threat to EA's intellectual property by killing you and anyone else in the vicinity with a series of increasingly painful electrical shocks. It also eliminates most of the compatibility problems SecuROM sometimes ran into with Windows Vista, which is a plus.

The Robot Geek American Staff Podcast is here

Over at Robot Geek, I'm part of the first episode of a new regular feature: The Robot Geek Podcast:: American staff edition! Join me and cohost Nick Nguyen for rambling, awkward discussion of video game topics including:
Bulletstorm!

Marvel vs. Capcom 3!

Classic PC game manuals of yesteryear!

Bewhiskered musclemen committing horrific acts of animal cruelty!

Other stuff I can't remember off the top of my head because it was recorded over a month ago!

All of it delivered in my golden G-Man-from-Half-Life-meets-Daffy-Duck-on-barbituates tones! Don't miss it!

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh E.T. Alamogordo, New Mexico wgah'nagl fhtagn: New releases for the week of 04-10-11

Magicka: Vietnam

(PC) An expansion to the action-adventure fantasy game. Like the original, you play as a wizard using his sorcerous might to battle hordes of foes, except that instead of the original's Norse myth-inspired fantasy world you're in... Vietnam.

Remember a few months ago, when I referred to Kingdom Hearts as the “Game Premise Most Likely to Have Been Originally Conceived at 3:00 AM By People Sitting In a Huge Cloud of Marijuana Smoke”? I don't think Magicka: Vietnam displaces the current title holder, but the contest is sort of the first Rocky Balboa-Apollo Creed bout of bizarre video game premises: Magicka: Vietnam doesn't win, but it gives the champion a run for his money and proves it has what it takes to go the distance.

 

World of Tanks

(PC) Massively multiplayer online team-based action game built around tank combat, featuring American, Russian, and German armored vehicles from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. I'm not into MMOs, but what I've read about it sounds pretty cool. It's just unfortunate that the game has a name that makes it sound like a place you'd find at the mall between Spencer's Gifts and one of those fancy scented soap stores I go to when I need to buy a female friend or relative a present and can't think of anything else.

Yar's Revenge

(Xbox Live Arcade) I was sort of hoping that this would be about Tasha Yar from Star Trek: The Next Generation somehow returning to have a rematch with that evil talking oil slick that killed her in the first season, but no such luck. Instead, it's a remake of an action game for the Atari 2600. More specifically, it's a remake of an action game for the Atari 2600 that was programmed by the same guy who programmed the legendary E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial for the same system. To be fair, the original Yar's Revenge was reputedly much better than E.T., though being better than a game so universally abhorred that millions of unsold copies were encased in concrete and buried in the desert like nuclear waste or the dead-but-dreaming corporeal vessel of some malevolent elder god isn't a terribly exacting standard.