2 Cents Gaming

I know what you’re thinking. “Holy crap a new post on the front page!  End Times! Korea has nukes! Armageddon!!” I know, its been quite awhile since anything has been published here, however I think its time to begin talking about what brought most of us to the table in the first place, gaming.   At this time, I will not be going into changes to the site and such, that’ll come soon enough.  What I want to talk about now is what may be the gaming industry’s only hope in this shrinking economy, sequels.  More Specifically, sequels to games released in 2007.

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Sega has announced Phantasy Star Zero, a new installment in the Phantasy Star franchise for the Nintendo DS.  Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

• It’s a new game in the Phantasy Star series which borrows heavily from PSO (judging from screenshots, there’s a PSU influence as well).

• Will have a single player story mode.

• Will support four player online play through WFC and four player local play.

• Symbol Chat is taken to the next level with the use of the DS stylus.  It’s basicly DS Pictochat, Phantasy Star style.

• The battle system will have some sort of chain type combos.

• HP/PP, map, action pallet, etc. will all appear on the bottom screen.

• Three races, fourteen classes.

• You can create your own character.

• Game will take place on Earth and it’s moon (so say translation people).

• Scheduled late winter release in Japan.

Screenshots can be found on the official Phantasy Star Zero website.

Now, before I begin, let me make this clear. I am an atheist. Personal belief, and all that. Don’t give a damn if you believe in God, Allah, Buddah, or the Staypuft Marshmallow Man, it’s all good. But I generally don’t like other Atheists, specifically, those that like to make statements to be included in the “stupidest complaint of the century” awards.

Will Wright has come out as saying, according to Kotaku, militant atheists are complaining about Spore. Why? Because the… wait, what kind of game is Spore? Er… creature building/civilization building/war game/space exploration sim thingy… well, it contains religion for you to have your little dudes worship.

Yes, let’s all get up and complain about something so completely moronic. Because, of course, in order to have an accurate civilization creation game, includiing religion would be innacurate. We never had religion in our older civilizations!

Oh, wait…

In other news, some crazy old homeless guy yelled at a park bench for an hour for “stealin his wimmen,” some whiskey soaked redneck (sorry, Wayne) claimed he was abducted by aliens, and anyone you can descibe as militant is still kind of a moron.

Via Kotaku comes this little piece of… terribly depressing news. Seems the good folks plebians at Edge, the online magazine, have bestowed their “Edge Award For Interactive Innovation” this year, and not to, let’s say, actual innovative games such as Portal or Rock Band, which were in the running, but to Halo f’ing 3. That’s right, the multiplayer game with a single player stappled on as more of an afterthought wins for “innovation.”

Edge’s reason? The online portion of the game. Apparently, all you have to do to be truly innovative in the games industry is to expand on what you’ve already done.

As a proponent of the “games as art school” of thought, this is a slap to the face to every single game company who felt like trying something new, something different with the tools they were provided with, instead the award for innovation goes to the company who plastered what’d they’d done before - admittedly, rather well, but still - over a shiny new face.

Halo 3 and its ilk have a place in the game world, of course - but they’re the summer blockbusters. They’re the ones that don’t get a look in at the award shows because, while everyone enjoys them, they’re not fare worthy of awards beyond “best explosion.”

The longer we do this, give awards such as this to games which monkey what has come before with slightly more successful results, the less movement forward we’ll have, the less likely we’ll see games like “Braid” and “Pixel Junk Eden” being made. You know, games with actual artistic merit.

G4 has screwed up.   There are many ways I can go with this after that statement, but here is one you probably weren’t expecting.  G4 has screwed up because in the mornings they are now showing what they USED to be, a channel about videogames.  Some of the fair isn’t all that great.  (old X-play, I’m looking at you)  However you can see a commitment to gaming in those old telecasts.  Now what do we get?  Cops, Japanese game shows, and a show about people upchucking (No, I’m not kidding).  I don’t know who the monkey’s are that run this channel, but frankly, I think its time to get rid of the utter bullcrap and get back to what I even wanted the damn channel for.

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And one I’m terribly dissapointed in. Rather than call me an idiot gamer, or someone incapable of rational thought in reply to my email to him, Mr. Thompson… sent me a court filling? One that doesn’t seem to address any of the points I made to him in my email.

Seriously, this guy has not only lost his mind, but he’s losing his touch! Sticking the document after the read more for those as want to read through his ever so fun “legal” rantings.

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One thinks that one has seen all the sorts of tactics that Jack Thompson could come out with, but the latest piece of the puzzle (found here, on Gamepolitics) defies anything we had seen of him before.

Before, you could look at Jack Thompson, and consider him a clown. An annoying clown, one who’s antics tended towards general insults and ad hominem attacks, with a well known penchant for harassing people he didn’t like. But the lengths he went to regarding two lawyers - Al Cardenas and Larry Kellog, themselves the type of lawyers in good standing that Thompson likes to portray himself as - is incomprehensible.

He resorts to publicly, professionally, and emotionally attacking the lawyers in question from every single angle that he can think of, with some of the lowest and most insulting messages that one could ever think of listed in the above linked testimony.

An email I sent to John Bruce. It’s the first - and the last - of it’s kind that I ever intend to send to the man.

Mr. Thompson,

it is no wonder that Judge Tunis decided that the bars recommendation of a 10 year disbarment couldn’t be considered good enough, and that only permanent disbarment would possibly do, along with having to pay out the legal fees - all of them - for your bar trial.

It’s no wonder that your behaviour merited a 169 page document from Judge Tunis, in a sector where a 100 page document is rare indeed. Every last person you injured emotionally came back to haunt you, and every last hurtful sentence uttered or typed by you over the past few years has been immortalized forever in a document which will haunt you until the very day you die.

Mr. Thompson, I’m a gamer. I never hated you for going after gaming. You annoyed the hell out of me sometimes, especially when you would get some poor sap to take you seriously. You were an annoyance, a liar, and one who liked to paint himself as being in any way credible, as being famous. But, more often than not, I pitied you. You were a clown, as I said. A sad man attempting to jump around, yelling that you, yes you, were important to the world.

But now? Now I despise you Mr. Thompson. You attempted to destroy peoples lives. You conspired - ironically, the charge you like to aim at others - to destroy the lives of those who disagreed with you, who stood in your way, who dared to even think that you, John Bruce Thompson, might be wrong. You aimed volleys at them from every angle, every single one underhanded and unjustified.

You decided that you were not only above the law as it is written, in the strictest and most legal sense, but that you were above the moral law that all good and decent people live by. Not a religious law, not a philosophical law, but a moral law that people obey simply to live with their fellow man.

I now hope, Mr. Thompson, after reading all of your bile, all of your hatred, all of your venom and underhanded tactics, that you get disbarred, and that you are ridiculed and ousted from your community as the scum that you are, and that all of your friends, all of your allies, may see you as what you are.

What you are, Mr. Thompson, doesn’t have a comparison in even the animal kingdom. Nothing that walks on four legs, or two, or crawls on its belly or swims in the sea, even comes close to acting in the same way, comparatively, that you have.

I do not wish you harm Mr. Thompson, nor do I wish harm to any who rally around you, few as they may be. However, nor do I wish you well.

In closing, reply with your rantings, as I know you will. I won’t communicate with you further, as I have no desire to sully myself by even having contact with you beyond this email.

Regards,

Mark G. Lucherini - Gamer, Successfully living a happy life despite playing “murder simulators” for years.

P.S. Before you scream harassment, an email publicly posted on a site such as JAABlog makes it just that - publicly available.

Update: Forgot to add, Thompsons email on JAABlog? Found it in a post where he wanted to announce his intent to run for president of the Florida Bar, which he claims is corrupt. He even compares his running for this office to Ronald Regans attempts to clean up the SAG back in the day.

Going to be kind of hard to run for president of a body you’re thrown out of, isn’t it?

Ok, so I may now actually want to pick up the game. Maybe not the instruments (although the new guitar looks awesome), but the new features makes this game what it should have been the first time around…

Best bits to me, from the list Kotaku has up?

“Rock Band 2 offers backwards compatibility with Rock Band downloadable content”

Which we all kinda knew… but it’s nice to have it confirmed.

“Your customized characters can now play on any instrument”

Huzzah! Finally, I can be the musical genius I always knew I was!

“World Tour is now online”

As rumoured before, no confirmed.

“No more band leaders! If you need to fire your guitarist but keep the band going, fire away!”

Even bloody better! That was kinda of an odd choice anyway in the first one. And, finally, the one I know Vash and Shan are going to be looking forward to most:

“Rock Band 2 delivers new clothing, accessories, tattoos, hairstyles, instruments and more to keep your unique rock avatar playing the full rock part.”

Hit up Kotaku for the full list, and leave your own favourite parts in the comments!

It Seems IGN has some information about Rock Band 2.

Good news is you WILL be able to use your old DLC from Rock Band 1 in Rock Band 2, so that will calm alot of nerves on that front.

Now really, anyone who thought there would not be a Rock Band 2, considering who the publisher is, was fooling themselves.  However, I think this will be a good thing, as it seems they will be adding new features such as ONLINE band world tour (thank god) and possibly new peripherals?  One thing of note was the statement saying a guitarist and singer can be one in the same now, so no more creating 2 characters to do what you were possibly only doing yourself.

Looks like Blizzard knows how to keep a tight lip on things. At this weekends Blizzard Entertainment Worldwide Invitational, They announced Diablo 3, along with unveiling three trailers for the game. Lots of cool info can be gleaned from the gameplay trailer, one of the cooler ones being you can now pick your gender for your class.

And now I will show you all the 3 trailers, courtesy of Game Videos.

In… look, this is one of those stories you never actually think you’ll write. Even high profile, actually paid journalists (cough cough) don’t think you’ll ever get to see something like book burning happening again, and yet here we are.

Admittedly, not state mandated, but Gamepolitics has a report from the Daily Press, in which a Rev. Richard Patrick blames absolutely every single form of violent entertainment for affecting, it says here, 90% of his congergation.

But as we all know, 87% of all statistics are made up, including this one.

Anyway, Rev. Patrick is quoted as saying:

We are considering having something similar to a rally where parents and children can bring CDs and video games that they consider are destructive to the mind set of our youth and have a burning… 

 Young people are being influenced by what they see and what they hear. They are being influenced by television … television and videos are telling young people a vision but something that’s not reality…

[Violent media] has a tremendous influence on young people and violence. That’s basically all they see. Most of them try to emulate what they see, when in reality, the people they see don’t even live in those communities. Some of the rappers they see on TV portraying crime don’t live in the urban areas — they live in the suburbs somewhere. It’s all a facade.

Actually advocating burning of media forms because you and your flock are too bloody cowardly to take responsability for your own actions? Oh yes, Rev, well done - you’re a right model of what a citizen should be, aren’t you? And Rev, while I’m poking you in the chest with the imaginary indignant finger of justice, where’s your proof.

I never thought that someone would recommend anything like this ever again in History, not after the actions Hitler and his regime undertook in the late 30s and early 40s. Seems people really don’t pay attention.

(Yes, I know, Godwin, but the point stands).

John Mayer, who’s apparently some sort of rock star (I don’t really listen to much I don’t already know, musicwise) who, well, doesn’t really see the point of the newly emerging rythm based video games. You know, the hugely popular ones. Said the… wait, he’s a pop star? Ok, fair enough 1UP, pop star it is. Anyway, he said:

I don’t ever want to be the kind of guy who rails against whatever progress has taken place. But Guitar Hero was devised to bring the guitar-playing experience to the masses without them having to put anything into it.

And having done both, there’s nothing like really playing guitar. I mean, what would you rather drive, a Ferrari or one of those amusement-park cars on a track?

Which goes to show even them fancy international types can completely miss the point of things. It’s not to get more out of it, John, it’s to have fun. Lemme put it another way. Would you rather sit down and read a nice, juicy textbook or the biology of flowers, or just look at the bloody things.

Tis more fun to just have the fun than to study to have the fun, as it were. And Mayer here isn’t the first to make exactly the same misguided statement, with plenty of other rock stars coming out since the release of the plastic guitar.

The question this raises, is, of course, bloody hell why? You already have the perfect delivery system for new content for a game - which would make it easy to include new clothing and instruments as well as music, dev boys. So why on earth would you need to release a sequel?

Regardless, that is the latest rumour floating around, as atested to by Eurogamer. Apparently, some sources say November as a release date. If that’s true, of course, it’ll most likely piss off the Europeans, who just had the first one released over there.

Anyway, regardless of this being a terrible and unnecessary idea, we’ll have to wait and see if it’s true.

One of Gamepolitics readers, Nevexst, managed to attend yesterdays disciplinary hearing, and provided the site with a laymans blow by blow of the events.

I was able to tag along with an actual attorney, so we drove to the courthouse, went up to the courtroom, waited outside until 2pm. Baliff opened the door and I held it open. Sadly, I even held it open for the beast himself.

So the judge came in. Judge Tunis seems like a real nice lady.

Thompson wanted to make known that he had a objection in writing. He was able to submit it to the record, but the judge said he couldn’t read it aloud. That really pissed him off, I think. He also passed around copies of the objection to various reporters and a member of the legal community known as “Mr. Mim”. He also claimed that “Mr. Mim” was not supposed to be there. So he dropped the objection into his lap and went back to his side of the court. The judge was NOT pleased.

Eventually, he made comments about the judge not being a judge(This is relating to the Loyalty Oath stuff), said the hearing was moot, and WALKED OUT.

“The court acknowledges that Mr. Thompson has voluntarily left the proceedings”

Then the Florida Bar presented it’s evidence. Lalalala, bunch of legal crap.

The Bar recommends that Thompson’s punishment should be: “Enhanced disbarment, with a reapplyment wait of 10 years”

After more legalese, the court was ajorned.

Mr Mim threw away his copy of the objection. A friend of mine who happened to be attending reached to get it at the same time a State Attorney was. We ended up getting a copy of it because the State Attorney was a nice guy.

And we went home.

End of story

Of course, I was reminded of a couple of things reading the story on Gamepolitics. One is that Mr. Thompson has not yet actually been disbarred, but it is more or less a sure thing. I would tell you to put money on it, if in fact you were of the betting persuasion.

Secondly, Thompson had previously claimed he was going to entirely boycott the trial, but he seemed oddly present.

Thirdly, he claimed he had a huge “surprise” for yesterday which was going to shake things up. The only thing he had was his objection which, regardless, he wasn’t able to read, and even if he had, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference.

So, what we have here is yet another example of the complete incompetence of John Bruce Thompson, soon to be former attorney.

In todays disciplinary hearing of Jack Thompson, the Florida Bar asked for enhanced disbarrment of the famous anti-videogame crusader, which means that he would not only be disbarred, but disallowed from re-applying to be a lawyer for 10 years. Ten long, lovely, years, where we wouldn’t have to put up with his “I’m an attorney and you’re not” crap.

Sounds heavenly, doesn’t it? Well, to us, not to Jackie, who, of course, didn’t like the news one bit, and walked out of the courtroom, claiming that Judge Dava Tunis did not have the authority to try him or to hear his case, again citing the “loyalty oath” which he’s been pursuing for so long. You know, the one which means nothing.

Hit the jump for JT’s long and rambling letter of objection, courtesy of Kotaku.

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