Geek on Stun

Purses, Fanny Packs, Khakis

Ah, summer! It's the perfect time for playing our video games outside, avoiding eye contact with pretty girls, drinking iced coffee beverages with soy milk. You know, THE GOOD LIFE. Other good life things we enjoy include ultra expensive PlayStation Yoshida Porter bags and Beams accessories.

Clockwise from top left: expensive Beams T, expensive Beams T, expensive Beams T, expensive Porter waist bag, expensive PSP carrying case, expensive PSP neck strap

Remember the original PS Pictogram line from earlier this year? Well, it's back and more costly than ever! And in cool summer khaki! A few new items are introduced in the Summer 2005 collection, like this $36 strap. That's reasonable to US because "Porter" is stitched onto the label, see?

Scare off girls quickly!

The one thing we do like quite a bit, outside of the fine Beams wear, is the waist bag. Sadly, these things are better known as "fanny packs" in our country and can invite charlie horses on the thigh meat if worn in public.

Holds a ton of PSP games for when some good PSP games come out!

Look, if you don't like fashion, it's time to BAIL OUT. It's only going to get worse for you. But if you do like a little overpriced style in your life and are annoyed by all that disposable income taking up space, Play-Asia is selling the outrageously priced PS Pictogram PSP case right now. Go on! You've earned it.

Girl Week Continues

Before you accuse us of intentionally shopping for panties online, we were just minding our business, perusing the Bandai LaLaBit Market looking for some Dragon Ball cosplay or Naruto purse to laugh at, when we spied these.

Obviously for ADULT woman gamers who are into cute underwear and care about clever, arcade accurate packaging.

We won't go into the finer details of what followed mentally, because it may read like a bad Penthouse Forum stream of consciousness submission. So we'll just say we thought that those tasteful Space Invaders underthings, by mi-ke-ra, are well designed and that we greatly appreciate the care that went into the cocktail cabinet-like packaging.

More fashion and purses tomorrow!

Video Games For Girls

If you were thinking about writing yet another tired Web editorial bemoaning the lack of good video game titles for girls (aka women), you can shut down Blogger now. Until some good ironing or dish washing games ship, Electronic Arts' Madden NFL 06 will fill the feminine game void.

Only a cock shows up to the barber in his PROFESSIONAL SPORTS UNIFORM.

When the football bit becomes too boring, and you realize you just spent another fifty dollars on THIS years Madden, little girls (and soon-to-be-disowned little boys) can squeeze some more value out with the new NFL dolls. Take your Baby Huey-esque doll-man to the salon and get his hair done! In cornrows! Then go home to your Madden For Girls™ Dream Mansion and buy furniture! Update your date book with a scheduled cathartic cry session with Mom! Have your toes done!

We hope one of the "features" is that the console shuts down when a user combines the fresh-faced white guy with the cornrow hairstyle, but not before spinning the disc at unsafe rotational speeds, kicking it off the spindle, then scratching the disc surface so horrendously as to never make it playable ever again by someone with such horrible ideas.

T!

We agree with Beams: T-shirts are art for every day life. They're also great marketing. Sony, who are VERY GOOD at marketing things, recently updated the PlayStation T-Shirts Gallery with some gorgeous new fine wearables.

Dig Dug and Rally X


Taiko no Tetsujin and Bubble Bobble

Look, we're not trying to be the next Preshrunk or anything, we just like t-shirts, for fucks sake!

Okay, okay. T-shirts might not be your thing. You might be the sort who prefers puffy poet shirts and black leather dusters. At least we can agree on something.

This is how you market Red Dead Revolver.

Up The Creek

We scoured the internet for something interesting to comment on yesterday, but our schtick well had run dry. We were tempted to post about Capcom's new promotional campaign for it's action game set in ancient Japan, Sengoku Basara, but soon realized that would be a bad idea. Serously, look at this crap...

A Sengoku Basara promotional bamboo rice paddle? FUCK YOU, CAPCOM. We need better material than that. We can't be bothered with this sort of non-news.

We suppose there's a chance someone out there could be motivated to recreate this scene at a cosplay event. Probably not, but you never know if someone will want to round out their Digital Entertainment Lifestyle with something like the above.

We're so glad we didn't write something up about this worthless promo. We'd have felt like we were cheating our readers out of their time.

(Please never complain to us again that we just published a t-shirt as something we consider post-worthy, okay? Rice paddles are the bleak alternative.)

Getchu Getchu

It's the best commercial we've seen in over three days. It's for Ape Escape 3 (nee Sarugetchu 3) and you can get it right here.

Why we like it so much:

Our best bet is that this sort of thing makes Japanese school girls moist.

The ass work is very tasteful.

Wow! When we die, we hope to come back as a lanky Japanese man, so inconceivably comfortable with his sexuality that he can dance on a rainbow in a silk cowboy shirt with his feather vested buddy and everyone will be like "That's cool".

We Love Katamari PVC

Reasons why we hate Namco Hometek, the withered North American arm of Namco Limited, are many. They continue to publish things like Tekken and Death by Degrees, which we hate, and fail to give us any pre-order incentive to buy crap software like Pac-Pix, which we only slightly dislike.

Another reason we'll hate them is that they'll fail to provide us with a Prince of Cosmos strap with a beautiful red LED on top. Japanese geeks get it, so why not us? :(

We're not big into pre-ordering games from our local Digital Entertainment Lifestyle shop, but can be easily swayed to do so. All that's needed, NAMCO, is to toss in some chintzy plastic swill that will set you back a penny or two, and you'll have our money. Don't be fools!

You Had Us At The Pig Man Riding A Bicycle

"Liveblogging" seems to get a lot of attention and internet backslapping, so we decided to do some of our own to up our credibility and/or readership. Today we'll "liveblog" the Nonono Puzzle Chai-Rian commercial. This is just an experiment, please bear with us.

Before the ad starts: We love fried pork cutlets. They are our dietary Achilles heel and must always be ordered when we patronize our local noodle cafe. When we see a anthropomorphic piggy biking with a plateful rotating hypnotically in hand, we are forced to write something unfunny about it.

0:01: Haha! We like you, pig-man! Please come to our apartment and feed us fried pork.

0:03: Oooh! Whatever that brown sauce is that reads no makes us weak. What is that delicious syllable anyway?

0:05: That's a real smart tune. We'd LOVE to get that for our mobile phone! Haha.

0:08 - 0:09: Haha. Spin piggy! Spin for our amusement!

0:10: Hmm. That looks kind of boring. Where did the pork go?

0:11: Right! This is a video game! Okay, we are still moderately interested because it looks like fried pork is the reward for doing something with the puzzle game bit.

0:12: Bleh. This game looks really dull. No wonder Famitsu gave it a shit score. Maybe we shouldn't import this one.

0:15: Commercial ends with Mt. Fuji scale pork dinner. We're hungry, but still desire those washboard abs the ladies love so much.

Not really from the commercial at all because it's awfully short: If we had our choice of alien invaders, this would be our ideal.

Hmph. Well, we don't think we'll pick this one up. We like cooking games and all, but this doesn't really seem like something we'll enjoy outside of watching steam rise from our successfully microwaved cuts of meat.

Final score, even though we didn't really start this off as a review: 4/10

Oy Vey Uwe

Everyone hates Uwe Boll EXCEPT US. We absolutely love Hollywood's delusional pariah.

Uwe's back in the "news" (read: video game Web sites, message boards, blog comments) as he may be directing a film based on the PC shooter series Postal. If you don't know Boll's work, he's notable for being German and making video game-cum-cinema trash House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark. His current project, Bloodrayne, will be shat into theatres... oh, eventually, we suppose. Who cares really?

Why do we like Uwe so much? Because he brings out the best in internet dummies who get e-angry about his specialty: turning brain-dead games into brain-dead movies. That's good comedy. These folks are getting upset over a potential film based on Postal, a license not even Uwe could possibly dumb down.

Wait, you're pissy about the integrity of Bloodrayne? Shut the fuck up. The game should offend you more than the big screen adaptation.

Take your thinking caps off.

Look, we adored Sega's House of the Dead but Uwe's movie take was quite on par IQ-wise. While we enjoyed shooting zombies and demon frogs, we weren't remotely bothered by the celluloid abortion Boll performed. Some video games are just plain dumb. We can admit that.

All Uwe's doing is taking low brow content and reworking it quite appropriately, so whining about it only makes you look the fool. When Uwe Boll starts tackling something with a bit more literary meat, we'll be concerned. But we won't be freaking the fuck out when Far Cry: The Movie stains screens in 2006.

We just don't care! Neither should you.

Polygraph

You might think that because our only creative outlet is writing this godawful tripe pure gaming gold, we don't appreciate the finer things in life, like art and literature and shit. Nothing could be further from the truth. We LOVE art (but we almost always hate artists). We just prefer our art to be somehow related to Dragon Quest.

We also have a passing interest in camo. That passing interest turns to blinding lust when in the creative hands of the artist Nyon-Nyon.

You damn Japanese kids! You don't know how good you got it!

That hyper-genius camouflage pattern was infused with Dragon Quest slimes for a commoner's pencil case. A pencil case! It's so quaint. We love art for the masses! Here are more mind scrambling Nyon-Nyon visuals because we love to do the work for you.

We'll take the POW imagery any way we can get it.

Even though it's Atari, it's still BRILLIANT.

We don't get New Year's cards like that. We need to hang with a higher caliber of artist.

You might now be thinking, "What are you? Some kind of 'art-fag'? Why were you looking up AHT?!". First, we take issue with your use of that derogatory term. Second, we were just looking for some t-shirts from For All Game Freaks and decided to learn more, you fucking caveman. Here are some good Nyon-Nyon (by way of Polygraph, by way of Editmode) tees.

"Game Boy Meets Game Girl" requires no explanation for those with taste.

"My First Computer" will be ripped off by us. Sorry. :(

More ultra high quality artwork can be seen at the Polygraph Web site along with much Goonies related gear and an obsessive calculator collection. Go culture yourself.

Fap Fap Fap Watch

Chronic masturbators take note. You've been given a reason to sink three hundred pounds (that's, like, four hundred American dollars) into a Gizmondo: Pocket Ping Pong 2005.

UKers can now jerk it on-the-go to ultra-low polygon count models of girls in bikinis who will play table tennis with you.

This is the best the Gizmondo marketing team could do on short notice/lack of tolerance for writing for idiotic products.

If you liked Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball, you'll...

We figured there was no point continuing that qualifying sentence as it applies to no one.

Unifive Lust

We checked our bank account today and found that our balance was somewhere around $180. That's pretty scary. We maybe should have skipped picking up The Minish Cap yesterday, but we had to take a flight recently and must remain entertained at ALL times. We're willing to sacrifice some meals and let our co-workers buy us feminine coffee drinks in order to indulge in the latest Zelda saving adventure.

Before we deteriorate into "blog" territory, we'll get back to the "satirical" "industry" stuff we're "known" for.

Here's some stuff we don't need, and can't afford, but will buy regardless.

Mario The Mouse

It's GOT to be the least ergonomic mouse ever put before a nerd, but we can't refuse the Banpresto industrial design wizards. Look at that crap! It's like clickable heaven in your sweaty palm. Nat'l Console Support is taking pre-orders now.

Mario Bros. The Wristwatch

As digital entertainment LIFESTYLE takes over, it's important to look the part. If people are to take you seriously, you need a wristwatch with a pixelated crab on it. You're smart enough to know that, we're sure.

Famicom The Keychains

Hey! We have keys! We could really use a plastic bitmappy Excitebike fellow to help us identify which keys are ours. Plus, think of when we set these down on the table at our favorite coffee serving establishment. We'll ooze D.E.L.!

We've got some online gameplaying and breakdancing with our multicultural crew to take care. We'll be back ASAP.

We Love Box Art

It's quite possibly the most amazing artwork we've ever seen. We're ready to fall in love all over again.

We always thought the Namco building would be inflatable. Wackier, maybe.

Your Final Fight Wish Has Come True!

If you're reading this and have ever played Final Fight, then we have a bone to pick with you. Apparently, you've been wishing for an "updated, gritty, and adult" makeover for the Final Fight series. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Thanks to YOU, Capcom's Studio 8 is releasing Final Fight: Streetwise. It's Final Fight, but now it's "gritty". THANKS! Thanks for making sure rubbish like "street cred" and "respect" are now core components of the Final Fight experience. We greatly appreciate all your efforts to remove the charming, colorful, and unique visual design from our favorite arcade brawler to give us more brown, boring bullshit.

We want to be a character in this game and punch this prick.

Why is this tainting the good name of Final Fight? Where is the Mad Gear gang? Why doesn't this look anything like the game we remember? Please help us understand Mr. Joe Willis, game designer in question!

Besides some of the characters from the original game using original moves, we also use basic Final Fight design sensibilities, like great big arrows pointing you in the general direction of the main path & goal points.

Great big arrows? That's all you got? At least you can fight underwater now! Oh wait, that's just the video game equivalent of the sickening green film overlay that some people still think passes for EDGY.

1900

Final Fight was not about gritty urban boredom. Every other game being published in 2005 already has that covered. It was a fantastical, over-the-top candy colored urban drama, that didn't require much explanation: busty woman in red dress kidnapped, knock shit out of everyone between you and busty woman.

Those barrels are going to regret being placed there.

Please just let us hurricane kick crooked cops in a flaming orange gi, okay? Let us spin round-and-round, burly fists flying maniacally as shirtless mayor Mike Haggar. Let us take shiny pipes to the heads of high heeled hookers and Molotov cocktail tossing thugs sporting tiger pants. That's all we want. Do you hate video games so much, Capcom, as to deny us our true wish? A sequel to Final Fight that isn't insulting?

Welcome To The Gender Confusion Era

We were really excited about Senko no Ronde earlier this year. It promised groundbreaking gameplay, combining shoot-em-up (née "shmup") conventions with gigantic robot fighting. But now we're forced to HATE IT.

Why? Because of G.rev's deceptive cute-tactics! Look at this new Arcadia Magazine cover.

Cute right? Right. Except now you're automatically a little more gay, because that's a (cartoon) 16 year old BOY on the right. We weren't happy to discover this, after seeing the character art bent over, in hot pants, wearing ballet slippers in virtually every single picture provided by G.rev to date.

Gah! There it is again! Now we're forced to openly mock G.rev forever to cover up the homoerotic shame that we've experienced by merely looking at character art.