So Bayonetta sure has ignited a shitstorm – is it sexist? Is is embarrassing? Is Leigh Alexander going to turn back into a cyborg? All we know is that we’re happy for the androgynous Japanese girls of the world – finally, they’ll be left alone by us nerds. And we’re glad something will teach the young’uns about sex – after Will Wright ignored it for so long.
A representative for Nintendo told us, “The Nintendo DSi’s camera serves many purposes – a way to show that we’ve slightly improved the product, a feature we can add to press releases, a theoretically useful piece of technology. We never thought that it could actually be used to take photographs, but it just goes to show the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Nintendo’s fans.”
In case you missed it, Seth Schiesel of the New York Times called Dragon Age: Origins “perhaps the best electronic game yet made” today (as opposed to The Beatles: Rock Band, which he called “the most important video game yet made“). We’ve been following Dragon Age as well – the dwarven metalworker-related strike, for one – but we can’t help but wonder when Schiesel will finish his piece on “when there will be a Mad Men of videogames“.
When he first heard about the Avatar Marketplace on Xbox Live, Larry laughed it off. “What kind of loser would spend money on virtual clothes for their stupid avatars? I mean, come on. This is ridiculous.” But then the peer pressure set in. “I mean, I was playing 1 vs. 100, and everyone else had all these awesome outfits. And there I was, in a stupid blue sweater. The guy next to me had a wizard hat and a Beatles shirt. I mean, how cool is that?! What if I had gotten up there on that stage? Everyone would have thought I was totally lame!”
Well, shit. Long weekend’s over, holidays are over, and we’re stuck with a long, cold winter still ahead of us. In a few hours, we’ll be back behind our desks, quietly praying for a resonance cascade, hoping for a way to make our job sound less pathetic, or maybe just avoiding Greg from HR. On the bright side, at least it’s not 2009! Fuck that year!
“I mean, he started off like he was really trying to go for it,” Rob told us later. “I think he was still trying to do some sort of weird Bob Dylan impression, too, but he was starting off like he was really going to sing the song. But then he started just mumbling the words, and when he realized that the game was deducting points for that, he started doing the mumbling louder.”
“Sure, it’s happened every year so far,” said Mark Griffin, reliability officer at Xbox Live, “But this year, we’ve attached the ethernet cables with extra duct tape. In fact, I’ve used over seven rolls of duct tape on this Xbox alone. Wait, what do these blinking red lights mean? Is that bad?”
So I was wondering, Mr. Siegel – what exactly is this “gamerscore” you have listed under “awards and achievements” on your resume? It seems like quite a large number – 24,550 as of 12/12/09, you say – but I can’t say that I can place it under any of the references I’ve seen before. I don’t know who or what this Ga-mere is – am I saying it correctly? Gah-mayre? Gay-murr? Is it a standardized test? A college competition?
