Via Gaming Today via WeGame.com

Okay I’ve watched this video five times in the last 12 hours.

I’ve known about Summer of Tears since we started AskANinja.com when we saw them at Comedy Cocktail, produced by the fabulous Jay Leggett and Amber J.  I loved their stuff, and they’ve been doing solid sketch stuff for a while.

But they haven’t really broken out.

It took this video, which violates a lot of the common sense rules of making a financially successful online video: it completely infringes on copyrighted works, it had to be very expensive and time intensive to shoot, and it’s probably only a one off thing.

But.

It’s funny and it will get them noticed and appreciated way beyond the circle of fans they have now.

So, if you enjoy the below, seek them out, and buy stuff from them.

Even in the demo there are long and overwrought cut-scenes, although they are interspersed during game play which makes them slightly less tedious. The combat is somewhat satisfying, but I could see getting bored with it after long stretches. Too Human’s control scheme is just different enough from about every other third-person action game I’ve played to be slightly frustrating. Using the Right Stick to swing my melee weapon around was horribly unresponsive. I was never quite in control of when and where it goes, and my natural propensity to use the right stick to control the camera was a hard habit to break. Once I got the hang of it, though, I could imagine doing some pretty slick stuff in battle.

The gear/loot system will be attractive for fans of the Diablo series. I was already checking my inventory every time I got a drop to see if it was more powerful than what I had equipped. The skill trees also offer some opportunity for customization, but you can pretty much guess what kinds of skills you’re going to get based on the class you choose.

All-in-all, I’m still on the fence on this one. I think I’ll wait for a few more reviews to roll in before making my final call; however, this could end up being like playing through Mass Effect, sans engrossing character development. I think part of the reason it looks attractive at this point is I’m hard up for fresh games to play, having resorted to finally playing through Unreal Tournament III.

First off, there were a couple more disturbed individuals who blamed their criminal behavior directly on video games. A 18/19 year-old (stories differ on his age) man in Thailand stabbed a taxi driver to death either because he could not afford to purchase GTA IV or because he was copying behavior in the game (again, the stories vary), which has led to the banning of the title in that country. Spain and Malaysia are also considering a ban in light of the crime.

It’s already been said elsewhere. Blaming the media a mentally imbalanced person consumes for their actions is alarmist bullshit. Why isn’t anyone asking if this kid’s parents were abusive? Why aren’t they held accountable? The kid played a violent video game that millions of reasonable and well-adjusted men his age have played without incident. But because this killer called out the game by name, he’s suddenly less accountable? Le sigh.

Then two arsonists in Atlanta cited GTA IV as their source for how to make molotov cocktails. And obviously, they wouldn’t have been able to firebomb cars if they hadn’t played GTA IV. Again, where the hell are the parents of these little hooligans?

On to less infurating news.

The 20th anniversary of Madden NFL was released today. I don’t really care about this franchise, since they just rehash the same game every year. Go somewhere else if you want coverage of Madden ‘09. Anywhere else, really.

The episodic adventure games based in the Homestarrunner universe debut this week. I honestly lost interest in the eponymous website a while ago, but SBEmails used to be a staple of my Mondays. The humor just isn’t as fresh these days. I’d love to see an episodic adventure game based on Zero Punctuation. Essentially you’d just go around as Yahtzee, and the puzzles would revolve around deconstructing a game for being clichéd, implementing clumsy game-mechanics and calling JRPGs stupid.

I rented and played Soul Calibur IV and Ninja Gaiden II in the past couple of weeks. I wasn’t terribly impressed with either of them. Both games are good, in their own right, but just aren’t my thing. I feel like Soul Calibur IV would require way too much of my time in order to be brilliant with any one of the characters. Ninja Gaiden II is essentially the Devil May Cry series minus all the spikey-haired heros and melodrama, which are replaced with a lot more dismemberment and gore. And tits. See Yahtzee’s review below of Ninja Gaiden II. He says it better, faster and more British than I ever could:

The Olympics are in full swing, and you know what that means! Another horrendously bad multi-platform Olympics video game tie-in that you PRAY your grandmother won’t buy you because she doesn’t know any better. I have caught Olympics fever though. It’s nice to know that no matter what time it is, no matter how many infomercials and crappy soap operas are on daytime television, somewhere, there are world class atheletes competing. And I can watch them do it.

The big video game highlight of the past two weeks has been the release of Braid. This game was completely under my radar, but is now one of the top-ten rated video games on the X360 platform on Metacritic. Which is an especially big accomplishment considering it’s a puzzle platformer released through the Live Arcade. The big controversy surrounding its release has been the $15/1200 MS Points price point. Trust me, the game is worth every penny. I played the demo, and then immediately went to GameStop to buy a MS Points Card with my store credit. It’s beautiful, it’s unique in it’s game mechanics and story line. It’s this year’s Portal. Seriously, if you love video games, even if you don’t typically enjoy this genre, you must play Braid.

That’ll wrap it up for gaming news!

Movie news right quick: Go see Wall-E if you haven’t already. It is adorableness in its most pure form. The Dark Knight is worth seeing despite mostly ho-hum ham-fisted performances, because Heath Ledger’s Joker is one of the most powerful and disturbing performances I have ever seen.

On a personal note, I have taken a job in NJ and will be moving at the end of August. Wish me luck!

What really sets the presentation apart, though, is his frame by frame, physical recreation of each item’s animation. That’s what elevates it beyond merely a source of lunchbreak entertainment and into the realm of fascination and mystery.

Here’s the video:

Yeah. I’m not sure what to think.

Original Penny Arcade Post

Orignally found via Fark.

“Finally,” I thought to myself. “The functionality I’ve always wanted from this beautiful piece of technology!”

It helped to ease the sting of being another screwed-over early adopter, having purchased my iPhone back in December. The Apple Store guy actually had the audacity to tell me a 3G iPhone wouldn’t be coming out any time in the next 6 months. I guess technically he didn’t lie to me. It was seven.

So, anyway, I decided I would wipe my iPhone entirely and start over because the iPod part of the device had been behaving strangely lately, e.g., deciding randomly not to play songs. So, I click restore, and walk away. When I come back, the wipe has errored out.

“That’s strange,” I thought. So, I tried again. Then I ran a repair on iTunes. Then I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes. I checked the Apple.com home page. No indication that they’re having any problems there. What the fuck is going on here? My iPhone is now wiped and ready to be restored but I can’t seem to get a connection to the iTunes store. Or, more specifically, the part of the iTunes store that handles iPhone activations.

So, I head over to the Apple support forums, and whadya know, the top thread is about a hundred posts in with people who can’t get their iPhones, new and old alike, activated.

Shit.

Look, as a consumer of MMOs in the past, I know that product launches can be shaky or even downright disastrous. Some companies totally miss the mark on how the volume of a million people trying to do the same thing all at once will impact their servers. I’ve often wondered how you could get so upset when the company who’s providing the service drops the ball.

Thing is, those are just games. Sure, you’re paying a monthly fee, and you expect to have access to that product when you want because you’re paying for it. But again, they’re just games.

My iPhone is my primary method of contact for all things, business and personal. I have no other phone. I have email and twitter, but I primarily access those, you guessed it, from my phone. So, unless I want to drag my laptop around with me, I have no means of contacting anyone until Apple fixes this.

This is extraordinarily frustrating, and the situation is only exacerbated by the fact that I need to leave town in about two hours to head to podunk Iowa. So, I have to drag my laptop along with me and hope the hotel I’m staying in has Internet service so I can MAYBE get my phone activated again at some point tonight.

My point is, Apple really dropped the ball on this one. They saw how this impacted their servers when the first iPhone was released, so they had every means and all the time in the world to prepare, and they STILL couldn’t get their shit together.

Unacceptable, Apple. I expect better from you.

I don’t care who you are, if you see a bunch of armed men on Segways, you do NOT resist. Can you imagine the kind of balance and dexterity it would take to drive those things AND accurately fire a small assault rifle? Jesus.

Seriously, State Legislatures, stop wasting my and other taxpayers’ money with futile lawsuits. The video game industry can self-regulate just like the music and movie industries. We have a ratings system. Those ratings are clearly marked on the box, and are no more or less vague than the movie ratings. There are even parental controls built into some of the latest generation consoles. What more do you want?

That was from a previous post I wrote back in November about the inanity of attempting to pass legislation regulating the sale of violent video games. Minnesota’s recent foray into this pointless pursuit was legislation that would have fined the underage purchasers of M or AO rated video games. Seriously? You want to fine a teenager a hundred bucks for attempting to buy Grand Theft Auto? That’s like an entire paycheck for most 16 year-olds, if they even have a job…

To illustrate my previous point, it looks like the taxpayers are getting stuck with check for the $65,000 dollars awarded to the games industry. Well done, Minnesota! Let’s write a guide to wasting taxpayer money!

1) Spend taxpayer dollars to cover court costs for unconstitutional legislation.

2) Spend taxpayer (and tuition) money to help construct a new football stadium for the worthless Minnesota Golden Gophers Football Team. The Golden Gophers finished DEAD LAST in 2007-2008 in the Big Ten, with an outstanding conference record of 0-8, and an overall record of 1-11. Their enitre recent history has been no less impressive. In  my opinion, the Metrodome is a perfectly good place to watch the Gophers lose. To boot, the new stadium is open air! So, not only do you get to watch the Gophers blow huge leads to nobody teams, you get to freeze your ass off while you do it!

3) Spend taxpayer money to help construct a brand new stadium for the Minnesota Twins. This despite fact that the Twins almost NEVER fill their current venu, the Metrodome.

/end rant

First heard about this over on Ctrl+Alt+Del. I’m very excited.

In other news, Blizzard officially announced Diablo III yesterday, which is also pretty exciting. I played the original Diablo pretty much non-stop for 6 months. I never finished Diablo II, but I was impressed with it. The Diablo formula seems pretty tried and true, and there are other games that have done well with it. My question is, what is Blizzard going to do to update the formula to make it fresh again? Point-and-click hack ‘n’ slash alone isn’t going to cut if for me these days. We’ll see.