Great News!!

My Ghosts 'n' Goblins article got adapted into a major motion vlog post!

Angry Video Game Nerd

Could not be more proud.

This Week in Gamer PODCASTS

Picture from Deviantart

So, if you're a legit core gamer like me, you probably listen to a lot of gaming podcasts. My love for podcasts started when I was just a babygamer, playing Link to the Past on Saturday night and listening to recorded talk radio segments. My love for videogames, timeshifted audio opinions, and sitting alone in my home all came together the day podcasting was invented by (I assume) Steve Jobs.

I've been listening to a lot of different stuff recently, and you benefit!

The Blog Show

The Blog Show is great because it is a panel show featuring all of my favorite Video Games Journalist personalities from the Blog website. Popular topics on The Blog Show include "What Have I Been Playing, My Friends?," "GAMER NEWS," "The Reviews System is Broken and Here is Why," "Jokes Commenting Upon Our Long, Off-Topic Tangents," and "Was That Supposed To Be a Segue?"

The Blog Show is also great because they are very concerned about what the Average Joe Gamer knows about video games. Turns out, not much. They just wanna play Modern Warfare; they don't even care about developer-related lawsuits against Activision. That makes me feel like an insider because I do care about why Frank West isn't working on Call of Duty anymore, despite the fact that I'm probably too legit to be caught dead playing CoD at this point anyway. I was a Battlefield snob for a while, but then my cousins started playing B3 and now I only play sprite-based indie games that run in a little pop-up window.

This Week: The Gang seems to really like Torchlight 2 probably, and one guy gets really defensive about his Borderlands 2 review.

Official Podcast

The Official Podcast is great because I can get the inside scoop on really important-gamer related issues from an Official Source. Imagine: first-hand accounts of things! None of the media spin! I can decide where I stand on things before they enter the Opinion Machine and get all screwed up.

I also love The Official Podcast because I love listening to men who have totally gotten over being picked on in high school get together with female Community Managers and pretend that they didn't do drugs in college.

This Week: Everything is AWESOME back at the office. After fifty-seven episodes, they still can't find one co-worker who can even believe that they have such an amazing job, doing what they love, and getting paid for it. According to the panel, it's all been a dream come true, and there are some really awesome things coming down the pike that they CAN'T WAIT to share with me, so that all sounds real good.

Just Skypin' with Buzzy McFuzz

Just Skypin' is a show where five to seven idiots with bad microphones attempt to sync up their Skype calls in Audacity while talking over each other like they're having a real conversation. Popular topics include "What Have I Been Pl*******(garbled)*****" and "I've Been Pricing Podcast Microphones."

This Week: The guys forget to hit record like twice, so we get to hear the giggly, jokey third version of a conversation they're sick of having about how great Torchlight 2 is and how the review score system is bullshit.

Haze Fancast

Haze Fancast is my favorite podcast because it's the only podcast on the web dedicated to the popular PS3 exclusive shooter from Free Radical: HAZE. It includes tons of inside jokes for HazeHeads (that's what Haze superfans call ourselves) like the ongoing character Bob, the Mantel Propaganda PR Director, and NECTAR DISRUUUUUUUUUPTIOOONNN!!! You'd better get with the program, BRO, because we HazeHeads are nothin' but ANIMALS, and I'm the TOP DAWG! WOOF!!  I'll see all you knuckleheads at HazeCon 2013!

This Week: A sober discussion about perception and reality ensues during a discussion on the specific psychological effects of Nectar. More of your favorite Duvall quotes. Also, we're in week thirty-two of the EPIC multiplayer tourney. Believe it or not, it can be hard to get a game going sometimes, so be sure to hop on at around 3PM on Wednesdays because that's the day I get off work early.

I'll never forget the first time I heard my favorite song:

Well, that's basically every gaming podcast on iTunes, as far as I can tell. Happy listening!

Black Isle Announcement Brings Interplay Back to Relevance for Length of Time Required to Read Press Release

This is a picture of me learning this news, from my point of view.

Genuine excitement was felt throughout the videogame blogosphere this week as Interplay announced the reformation of Black Isle Studios, the logo on the front of the box of beloved PC games from the 1990s such as Fallout, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment, followed moments later by a wave of bitter resentment as the blogosphere finished reading the press release and realized that Black Isle Studios, the group of human individuals who designed and coded those games would remain fired.

“It really feels like getting the band back together," says Interplay CEO Herve Caen, leading us all to believe that significant members of the Black Isle staff, such as Chris Avellone, J.E. Sawyer, or anybody we'd ever heard of would either be returning to the company where they did such great work, or that they would have heard one thing about it before yesterday when Interplay launched a hastily put-together website and a Twitter account with no posts. Of course, because the universe punishes us for even attempting to emerge from our cynical shells and hope that something good or interesting can happen in this pathetic industry, this turned out not to be the case. To a man, none of the former Black Isle employees who have stayed in the games business knew anything about what was going on.

The toughest nut to crack for bloggers and vloggers in this story is which "band" to compare Black Isle to: Guns 'n' Roses, Van Hagar, and Smashing Pumpkins were all hilarious choices, but were all contain at least one original member, giving them more credibility than what we know about Black Isle Studios 2012. The debate rages on.

And then our attentions turned to the games, which we all agreed after our little fit were the only thing that mattered, there was another brief period of relief when we decided that, at the very least, we could look forward to new entries in classic series, and that would hold our interest for a short while. The press release stated that they would "bring to market new AAA innovative RPGs based on Interplay’s critically acclaimed intellectual properties." That sounds great! Nothing wrong with that, right? The only thing that I have to say against that is that every single game that the original Black Isle ever made has either been sold (Fallout to Bethesda. Interplay doesn't even have the MMO rights that they were clinging to for way too long) or was licensed from Wizards of the Coast in the first place (all of their other games were based on D&D).

So, we basically don't know. How can you put out a press release with less meaning than this? The VGXpert will keep on top these developments, so you don't have to wrinkle your pretty little forehead thinking about it.

REVIEW: Ghosts 'n' Goblins (NES)

CAPCOM sent me a review copy of GHOSTS 'N' GOBLINS in 1986, when I was about a year old. I'm a stickler for Videogames Journalism Ethics, so I decided not to run a full review until 1) I had learned to read, 2) blogging had been invented and 3) I had completely finished the game. Amazingly, all three of those criteria were met last month when I completed both playthroughs required to achieve the "real" ending to the game. The gulf between that time and the publication of this review can be attributed to slackerism.

I've been playing GHOSTS 'N' GOBLINS ever since I was able to sneak into my sister's room when she wasn't home and operate the NES on my own. It's probably a testament to CAPCOM's amazing arcade sense that I never felt the need to quit forever after dying countless times on the first level for most of my life. I was twenty-two years old the first time I beat the first level. It was one of those moments that just felt like magic. I wracked my brain for half an hour trying to come up with the name of someone that I knew who could possibly care about this achievement, so that I might tell them about it. Sadly, this mental exercise proved fruitless.

It's not that I'm bad at games, necessarily, but I've never really been drawn to challenge. In video games, or in life. I play RPGs that don't require much of me, Adventure games that I already know I'll be good at, and an endless line of AAA titles that have smoothed out the learning curve so well that there's really no hope of frustration. I've kind of been floating around for the last few years, afraid to really pick up anything if it's outside of my immediate comfort zone. Since I moved to Charlotte a year ago, I've been applying to crappy little jobs because I'm afraid of failing if I try anything really difficult.

I'm twenty-seven years old now and, spurred on by a smattering of recent professional failures, I decided to sit down and actually complete GHOSTS 'N' GOBLINS for the first time in my life, hopefully to simulate the feeling of actually being good at something in this dark, indifferent world.

The first thing you'll notice about GHOSTS 'N' GOBLINS is its delightfully retro 8-bit pixel art style. That seems to be the trend these days in the Indie Games Scene (of which, as a Games Journalist, I am an intrinsic part). This game has hipster cred up the wazoo, in fact. It's a sidescoller where you fight zombies. You play as a white guy with a beard and ironic heart-pattern boxers who must go out and gentrify the land of the dead to find your girlfriend with spears, knives, and fireballs (it kind of breaks down by the end there).

I will never forget the first time I watched the opening cinematic to this game over two decades ago. Arthur and his as-far-as-I-know unnamed girlfriend are having a picnic in a cemetery because they're a bunch of godless liberals with no reverence for the sanctity of life.

So, when an evil flying demon straight out of my tiny child nightmares swoops down and steals his lady friend, I'm thinking to myself, "justice has been served!" Also: "Am I too old to be shitting my pants in terror right now?" At the age of four, this is what I was lead to believe would happen if you were to spend significant time with the dead at night time with an evil castle in the background. I watched this segment countless times in my life, and it's done me no small amount of psychological damage. I could talk about it for days. But no, there's a whole game after that point.

Which is fine. I will love this game forever for one reason and one reason only:

This is one of the top five compositions in the history of music (among such giants as Mozart and the Bubble Bobble theme). I recommend you listen to it for about five hours at a time like I do. It creates a feeling that simulates the true madness that must have been required to compose it in the first place.

The Controls

If there is one aspect of the game that people have a right to complain about, it's everything about what the controller buttons do when you press them. There are two types of jumping: jumping straight up in the air, and jumping slightly to the left or right. Other sidescrolling games of this time period will generally give you a wider range of movement options, such as a running jump, variable-height jump, or after-jump controlling. These little touches can do a lot to give the player a sense of control, in that they allow the player to have the on-screen character move to the place that they need to be in, rather than a totally fixed place on either side. 

This is actually not that big of a deal in the first level, which is probably why I didn't notice it for about twenty years.

As you can see, Level One is mostly just a flat surface with a couple dual-level ladder sections where you can choose to go to a higher level for a minute, having zero effect on the actual gameplay except for one or two enemy placements. I think there's one tricky jump, but it's onto a static platform and it's no big deal.

 Uh, but then shit like this happens. Imagine being twenty-two and realizing for the first time that your favorite impossible game has shitty jumping mechanics and a LOT of mind-numbing moving platform sections that require precise timing and placement or you get sent back to like five minutes ago. It was kind of heartbreaking. Level after level, I was struck dumb by the sheer gall CAPCOM displayed creating more and more situations where Arthur had to do any jumping, at all, ever.With jumping that terrible, you'd think they'd want to hide it. But no. It's there, prettymuch on every level.

The Levels

There are levels in this game. It's not just that first level. I was as surprised as you.

And, it turns out, these levels correspond to that pre-gameplay screen that shows up every time you die! Every number represents a boss character that you have to fight.

 

I know I keep harping on this, but there really are different levels to this game. And this is proof!

Bosses

So, some of the bosses are annoyingly easy.

Sometimes they just give you two of the same boss. I didn't get a screenshot of that but it was basically the same as above except there were two of them. Uhm, actually this is super easy with Photoshop

DONE.

Some of the bosses are nightmares of twitch timing with very little strategy involved, but who nevertheless take about half a million tries to defeat because I am a terrible human being and I hate myself why am I playing this game? Why? WHY???

And at the end of the game, you have to fight all the bosses again.

Oh, I forgot to mention, there's a point in the game where I get to fulfill a childhood dream:

I get to kill this son of a bitch.

Twice. 

And, I know what you're thinking: "Not with that Axe, you're not!" And you'd be right. It turns out that, just before your final conflict with Satan (this is apparently CAPCOM's name for this flying demon, which for some reason makes me feel better, and not worse), the game non-randomly drops an Axe in your path, which you may then pick up. That's cool and all, except for the fact that THE AXE DOES NO DAMAGE AGAINST THE SATAN DEMON. THERE IS NO WAY TO LEARN THIS IN THE GAME EXCEPT TO FIGHT SATAN OVER AND OVER FOR A HALF HOUR UNTIL YOU THINK TO JUMP OVER THE AXE THAT WAS PUT RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU. There isn't really any place to learn that different weapons do damage to different enemies with differing values, because it hasn't been an issue up to this point. Apparently you're supposed to fight the dragon with the lance, and fight the Satan with the "shield," and just jump over the axe entirely. And, if you accidentally collide into this non-random item pickup that is placed right where you need to walk in order to beat the game, you have to do a huge, difficult level all over again from the beginning.

Wow.

So, eventually I did it. And I find out that the Satan Brothers are not actually the final bosses of the game, but merely a prelude to...

My battle with Astaroth, the crown prince of Hell, was short and sweet. It's the only point in the game that allows you to walk back and forth while facing the same direction. So, basically, you can spam the shield attack like crazy, dodging his own attacks pretty easily, until he dies almost immediately. I should probably feel less empty after killing this beast, but something's missing. Uhh, it's the Princess. 

When I kill Astaroth, the screen goes black and I get this text:

Not only did no one read that before it was put in a game cartridge and duplicated half a million times, but I don't think anyone wrote it. 

Oh, and then it kicks me back to the beginning of the game. Yeah, to get the "good" ending, you have to beat the game a second, slightly harder time.

So, I did that.

I had to.

There was something I needed from this game that that horrible line of partially translated text on a black background could not give me. I wouldn't call it pride, but there was something.

I'm not going to bore you with the details. I'm going to show you the ending so you don't have to play it. That's where I am in my life right now. I don't have any witty quips or whatever. There is no joy in this. I'm just done with this shit. I can move on and do something else. Focus on something else. That's all I care about right now. I spent my whole life playing this game and this is the ending. That's the joke. That's funnier than anything else I could possibly say. 

But then, the final screen hit me in a way that I didn't predict.

Challenge Again? Maybe that's exactly what I need.

Video Game Conference Happening

I heard from my friend Craig that there's some video game conference happening in LA this week. He says that  people in the "industry" (if you can even call it that. I've been turned down by like two companies for Game Designer jobs) come and set up booths and talk to each other about what is happening and what is going to happen in regards to video games and video game related products. As far as I know, Mtn DEW didn't have a Game Fuel booth there this year, so I really don't know how relevant it could be.

In seemingly unrelated news, I just noticed about twenty thousand videos posted to my Youtube feed list.

Sleeping Dogs

Unlike a bunch of idiots whose Twitter feeds I read voraciously, I know the difference between this game and another game called Watch Dogs. The difference is this game will come out within the next decade. Sleeping Dogs used to be called Driver: True Crime Hong Kong, but then it was purchased by Square-Enix and they took out all of the driving, Crime and Truth. In this game you play as some type of gangster who must either rise through the ranks of something or get revenge for something and along the way you meet a bunch of uptight people who take life way too seriously.

Transit of Venus

This is a once-in-a-lifetime game where you play as a small planet that must flee across the face of the sun from the Nazis. This game sucks though because if you didn't play it last night you can't play it again until the twenty-second century.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Finally, a game that make sense! In this game, you play as an asexual waif named Raiden who is obsessed with politics and refuses to stop playing Fruit Ninja with the world's supply of henchmen and machinery until there's some type of filibuster reform and maybe some Climate Change bill. There's some really graphic business man slaughter in this trailer so before you watch it you should probably make sure no one's around to hear you laughing maniacally. This game can only be a work of genius, because if it's not then it's just complete gibberish and I don't think I can handle that.

Medal of Honor: Warfighter

I don't think there's any commentary necessary. What could be more revealing than this trailer featuring music from the hit band Linkin Park in 2012? And could that title be any more of a slap in the face? 

ATTENTION LUNKHEADS: IF YOU CAN WATCH THE ABOVE VIDEO AND FIND IT RELEVANT TO YOUR INTERESTS, THEN THE ONLY "WARFIGHTER" IS YOU BECAUSE YOU ARE POOR, UNEDUCATED, HAVE ABHORRENT MUSICAL TASTE AND YOUR ONLY CHOICE IN LIFE WILL BE TO JOIN A BLOATED, CREAKY MILITARY AND FIGHT UNNECESSARY WARS WHERE YOU'RE MORE LIKELY TO DIE BY SUICIDE THAN ENEMY FIRE. THIS IS NOT A JOKE, I KNOW THIS IS A JOKE BLOG BUT YOU ARE BEING BRAINWASHED BY

Disregard previous. Yo, I heard there were boobs in the Ubisoft press conference. NICE!

Need That Game Fuel

I bought some Game Fuel online last week, and it finally came in! It's a 2007 yield, emblazoned with the Halo 3 marketing push. I like the 2009s, too, but I definitely think the Horde flavor is going to age better than the Alliance. I lucked out, also, because the eBay listing described the condition of the individual cans as "Acceptable or Better" but there's only two or three cans that dip below "Good." You really don't know what you're getting when you buy from auctions.

You know, it's funny. I feel like some kind of connoisseur of discontinued soda beverages. An expert on expired foodstuffs, if you will.

For instance, I think people give Crystal Pepsi a hard time. When that stuff came out, people weren't used to too much of companies coming in and sending something truly odious out into the world with no research, no focus testing, no walking up to somebody, anybody, and asking them "hey, can you try this real quick and tell me if it's unsettling in any way?"...none of that. America, as a whole, was one big test market and we did not take kindly to it. But nowadays there's all sorts of crap like that. People buy soda because it looks like it's from a different decade, even if that particular soda did not exist in that particular decade. And, instead of being horrified that every OTHER soda we buy is jacked up full of high fructose corn syrup, we get excited that just this once, for a limited time, we get a drink with some actual sugar in it.

I don't mind all that. I'm just interested in collecting double-takes in Uptown Charlotte when those Wells Fargo financial analysts realize that I'm chuggin' down a fizzydrink that hasn't been made for half a decade, dogg.

The Secret Garden of Magazines

Game Informer is probably the best source for video game magazine covers in the history of the medium. That goes without saying. Sure, sometimes they prioritize exclusivity at the expense of goodness and they slap an obviously terrible game on the cover. No one's perfect. However, their parent company, Gamestop, is doing some interesting things to get a leg up on the lowly consumer.

I read somewhere that GS is prioritizing the digital version of the magazine, which you get free when you sign up for their Powerup Rewards program. They've offered a digital magazine (think less "PDF or iOS App" and more "link in an email that sends you to a website where you read these things") for a couple years now, but these days employees are instructed to assume new Rewards customers want the digital edition instead of print, and so the question is not even posed at the time of the sale. A commenter in the linked Reddit thread informed us that the company-wide policy is to assume digital for new sign-ups, but to offer digital when a print subscriber comes in to renew, but obviously not every district manager is strictly adhering to these practices.

So, to sum up:

• Gamestop wants to lighten its burden in regards to all these printing costs!
• It offers a Digital Edition of its magazine that it really wants you to subscribe to, but you have to choose either the print version or the digital version. You know, like The Atlantic.
• It's not amazingly iPad friendly. It's basically a website. So we get to hunch over our computer desks to get our video game news like it's a BBS in 1987.
• The digital/website version of the magazine has dynamic ads even for back issues, so you'll always get current advertising when thumbing through old content (another benefit of magazines squandered)
• If you do choose the print magazine because you like pretty art strewn haphazardly across your living room, there's a chance someone could switch you over to the digital version without asking you.
• No matter how much editorial freedom GS gives the staff, it's important to remember that the magazine is, itself, obviously a huge advertisement for preorders at Gamestop, with frequent pitstops for lists like the end-of-the-year TOP FIFTY GAMES OF 2011. Seriously? Top fifty? You really couldn't have narrowed that down? The original title for this piece, I believe, was FIFTY SHORT PIECES OF AD COPY FOR GAMES THAT ARE OLD ENOUGH TO BE AVAILABLE TO PURCHASE PRE-OWNED AT YOUR LOCAL GAMESTOP!
• Also, the Rewards program you buy into to get the magazine is a huge loyalty program that locks you in to a single store chain to buy pre-owned games that Gamestop itself acquired for basically pennies on the dollar in the first place. 
• This is possibly the worst retail store in history. 
• I shop there all the time because I hate myself.
• It's a longrunning joke that I am addicted to bulleted lists, but only two people even know or care so in real life it's just annoying.

This is not a big news story, but this is not a big news blog. At long last, though, here is my point: Gamestop has created a publication that you can only get by walking into a store already knowing that it exists. You have to go in and ask specifically for the print version if you want it. There is no pathway from not knowing about the print version of GI to buying the print version of GI. What is the only area of print media that shares this business model?

That's right:

Obviously this is meant to represent those behind-the-counter racks that I'm not sure they make anymore.

The porn industry has survived this way since way before we were all born. The only way you could walk out of that corner liquor store with the new issue of ALL OF THE ASSES was if you already knew it was there before you walked in the door. 

However, I don't really believe that this illustrates some kind of new corporate greed that can be compared to shameful habits like pornography. I'm just not that lucky.

Blizzard Game of the Week

I know what you're thinking: VGX, I've been thinking about BLIZZARD a lot this week for some reason, and I would like to know which BLIZZARD game I should play right now.

Listen: you need to know you are not alone. 

Lost Vikings 2 is a great game developed by Blizzard and released by Interplay in 1997. For some reason, the Sega Saturn, PC, and Sony Playstation versions of the game were released under a different title:

While Norse by Norsewest: The Return of The Lost Vikings is, in every measurable way, a better title, I can remember being twelve years old and confused about the differences between the two titles. As far as I could tell from reading the Wikipedia article and no further research, the PS/Saturn/PC release had re-done graphics and better sound, including voice acting. I guess that's fair.

In Lost Vikings 2, you play as three vikings who seem to have stolen future technology from somebody (I skipped the opening cutscene so I really don't know) and have to use their unique talents to solve puzzles in order to talk to a witch on the other side of the level. One viking has a lightsaber and that Wife-Arm from Bionic Commando, another one has rocket boots, and the third one has a shield and some type of gastrointestinal distress.

I just played this game for about five minutes just right now and let me tell you: pretty good.

Obviously the joke in this post is that Diablo III is the only game anyone cares about this week and I'm too poor to buy it so I'm dicking around with emulators. I thought it was funny at least.