Citizen Game » bewilderment

I’d like a psychotic pocketfish

Nerfgun — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:12:17 +0000

Let me paint you a picture:

Sony wants Dreamcast games for PSN…
the PSP has already been shown running a DC emulator (albeit a slow one, but this was homebrew)…
most recent PSPs have built-in microphones…

So naturally… the first obvious application would be to run Seaman.

Portable disturbing digital pocketfish. For those important questions that arise in life, you could have access to this level of oracular weird on-the-go.

Why

Nerfgun — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:26:06 +0000

What Can This Possibly Mean

Nerfgun — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:18:20 +0000

This is the footer on the Gran Turismo 5 Prologue page.

Note the rating – E for Everyone and… “Mild Suggestive Themes”? What can that be? They suggest that you might drive quickly on a racetrack? Is that even a theme? What constitutes Mild from Medium or Spicy? These are suggestions? These are whispered furtively in your ear, eminating from the rear left speaker of your surround-sound, as you drift ’round a corner on the Eiger Nordwand in a Mitsubishi Lancer, telling you to, oh I dunno, maybe go forth and kill the unbelievers, if you have time after lunch?

I don’t get it.

A Right Way And A Wrong Way To Do These

Nerfgun — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:41:50 +0000

Forum Sightings

Nerfgun — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 02:53:15 +0000

Quick question for the geeks: just how on earth did they shoot out the shield generator (the testicular-looking thing on top) if it was, you know, generating shields? Doesn’t sound like very good engineering design to me. Probably made by the French.

Because those aren’t shield generators; they’re long range scanners of some sort…

They are certainly portrayed as shield generators in the movie (as well as the various video games). The sequence is fairly straightforward. Ackbar says concentrate all fire on that Super Star Destroyer. Shot of two A-Wings firing into the testicles destroying one. Sir, our bridge deflector shield is down. Concentrate the forward batteries, I don’t want anything to get through. Then Howard Dean says yaarrrgh and flies his A-Wing into the bridge and the thing falls out of space. Yay.

You Heard It Here First: Trains

Nerfgun — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 18:38:32 +0000

That is the hot new genre: Japan’s bizarre obsession with train games, or more accurately train sims, is making itself known. Ah, the thrill of laboriously managing and driving trains. Virtually. In the most breathtakingly boring scenario possible. There’s meal selection featured in one of these. It’s all just so hideously triple-A obsessive compulsive, I love it. Or rather, I just sort of love that it exists for me to laugh at. And it’s a competitive genre at that.

First we’ve got the very flashy Railfan (PS3), developed by Ongakukan… which seems to be largely HD video components wrapped in some kind of hideous Sega CD-esque composited nightmare of banality:

Actionlessness! Of course it probably will never come to North America.

Then, there’s EA-published Rail Simulator (PC). It features actual! 3D! graphics! and looks like the tram ride from Half Life 2, except without the plot or monsters or crowbar or anything to do other than fiddle with knobs. I don’t even know if any of these games let you crash. Or have a trestle collapse. Or build a customized Soul Train.

And for the Wii people, you get this impressive monument to specific niche dorkery:

That is the controller you use when you ~~play~~ simulate driving a train in 電車でGo! (Densha de Gō!)

It’s a thrilling time to pretend to haul cargo.