It's not often that I get to play baseball in January, let alone in AT&T Park, which is the home of the San Francisco Giants from March until September (and often October).
Earlier this week though, I found myself sitting on a balcony near the Club Level, squinting out across the field as I played MLB 13: The Show on the Jumbotron. Bizarrely, the game was between the Chicago White Sox and Minnesota, which is what happens when you turn a Twins fan loose on MLB 13. This is how I imagine Sony wants fans to feel when they're playing their game -- like they're relaxing in an actual stadium but also controlling their team's every move. NBA 2K wants to give the impression that you're watching a game on the TV. MLB 13 wants you to feel like you have a spot behind home plate.
Although it was obvious that Nintendo had invited me in order to reveal the new multiplayer mode in Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, it certainly wasn't the thing that left a lingering impression on me. Don't get me wrong; the upcoming 3DS title does have an interesting take on part-cooperative, part-competitive multiplayer that could lend to an engaging communal experience. But the thing that really left me satisfied was a grueling, ingenious single-player boss encounter that proved to be one of the most exciting in the history of the brothers Mario.
I feel like I'd be doing the honestly entertaining multiplayer mode a disservice by simply glossing over it, so here's the short of it. The Scarescraper is a haunted tower that you and three other would be ghosthunters climb with the goal of ridding each floor of its otherworldly inhabitants. The core mechanics are immediately familiar to anyone who played Luigi's initial adventure on the GameCube -- you investigate rooms until you find a specter, flash your light to stun it, and attempt to suck it in using your Poltergeist 5000. Though players can work together to round up the ghosts in a much quicker fashion, only one person earns points from an exorcism, which is where the competitive edge comes into play. While a fun and welcome addition, I don't see the Scarescraper mode in Dark Moon being able to hold my attention across multiple playthroughs. But before I could get too bummed out over this, Nintendo let me get my hands on one of the single-player boss encounters, which completely changed my view of Dark Moon.
Honestly, I don't enjoy it when 1UP podcasts change to new names but it's happened many times before. Remember 1UP Yours? That eventually became Listen UP, which then turned into 4 Guys 1UP, and then In This Thread after that. Sheesh, what's in a name? Well, a lot really. And as much as I've enjoyed the role of host for Games, Dammit!, it's not a name that reflects what the show is about today. Of course, we'll always end up talking about video games, but we need a name that leaves a little more room for flexibility.
We want to talk about games, but we also want to talk about culture, books, movies, interviews, developers, and real stories from people working in the industry. This past year we've recorded shows about Metal Gear's 25th Anniversary, storytelling in video games, and even discussed one of the biggest cultural phenomena in Japan, Neon Genesis Evangelion.
The characters we control in video games are specimens of peak physical fitness, as capable as they are tireless. They overcome impossible odds without breaking a sweat. The acrobatics and feats of strength that they perform defy everything we understand about the human body. Odd, then, that they routinely shovel such absolute garbage down their gullets. After observing the eating habits of a random sampling of video game protagonists, we have drawn some very troubling conclusions.
Pac-Man
We're going to start off with Pac-Man because he is - somewhat surprisingly - one of the only characters that makes an attempt to eat somewhat healthy foods. Bananas and apples are a great start, and even though the cherries are of the heavily sweetened maraschino variety, I applaud the effort. Unfortunately, things go downhill from there. Consider Pac-Man's daily ghost intake. Most nutritionists would be reluctant to suggest one tenth of a ghost as part of a healthy diet, and Mr. Man has been known to chomp five entire ghosts in a single gluttonous frenzy. Not cool. Then there are the power pellets that he compulsively eats up by the dozens. Initial testing indicates that these pellets are little more than fragments of depleted uranium rods. Do you have any idea how many calories are in one of those things?
Four years ago, Ubisoft was heavily advertising its games around episodes of South Park. In the next few months, it'll likely be doing that once again, only this time it will be doing this as the publishers of the newest South Park game, The Stick of Truth. Ubisoft was among the companies today to acquire assets that formerly belonged to THQ, a company that is now all but dead following an auction that kicked off yesterday and concluded today.
THQ has been in a very poor position for some time now. Even with Jason Rubin being named president, its eventual collapse was, in many people's eyes, an inevitability following the uDraw disaster, Homefront's failure, and a number of other factors. Yet it's difficult not to be reeling today when accounting for the human factor; many former THQ employees are finding themselves out of work today, and those numbers may continue to grow as the new owners of the companies acquired through the auction evaluate their needs.
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