Game Curmudgeons

Ooooh sit right back and I’ll tell a tale

A tale of a sinking ship

What started in a cartridge port

In the days of 16 bit

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Sonic the Hedgehog was a god damn revolution in gaming. It was a whole new kind of platformer designed to replace the prior mascot Alex Kidd. A game where instead of collecting powerups and jumping on heads and/or swinging swords, you charged ahead at full speed, plenty deadly from the start, rolling around and impaling anything in the way like a self-propelled pinball. Instead of mushrooms, you grabbed rings, which gave both gave and saved lives. Get hit? Grab your rings, and charge forward again. Once in a while smash a monitor which lets you go even faster, saving time on the limited clock(though rarely did one hit the dreaded 10 minutes), granted a shield to prevent ring loss on the next hit, or sometimes full on invincibility(unless you get crushed, too bad then). The formula was amazingly simple, and very effective, especially considering the platforming conventions of the time, and the first time a player ran a loop, that was an instant love for a new mascot. Moar! »

It looks like the Big Daddies are out and about, so if you see a UPS package from Hidden Circle Drive that weighs about 5 pounds, don’t worry, it’s not from the Unabomber, nor does it contain anthrax. It contains friendship for everyone on your shelf! Our big daddy quickly befriended Wolverine on our dusty dusty top shelf.

Ah, cell phone games. I admit, I usually don’t like you. You control poorly and my game gear has more power and is less prone to crashing, plus it’s so much easier to install.

But damn it, when Bookworm goes mobile, I have to reconsider my opinion on the format.

Bookworm is a simple enough game. You have a set of tiles, you form words by connecting tiles, those disappear, new ones fall in from the top. Spelling big words gets bonuses, small words result in burning tiles, which will destroy one tile under them until they hit the bottom. If not used by then, game over man, game over! For a change of pace, there’s action mode, where you have constantly moving burning tiles, meaning quickly making new words with those tiles is priority. Moar! »

News time! Remember when you were trying to play Call of Duty 4 last weekend, and sat for 35 minutes wiating for a game to start? Yeah, me too. So here’s Marc Whitten to tell us all about it!

 Dear Xbox LIVE Members:

During this past holiday season you helped us break a number of Xbox LIVE records.  This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service.

As a result of this massive increase in usage we know that some of you experienced intermittent Xbox LIVE issues over the holiday break.  While the service was not completely offline at any given time, we are disappointed in our performance.  I would like to take this moment to thank you each and every one of you for your patience and understanding as our team has worked around the clock to return the service to a stable state.

At the same time we would like to offer a token of our appreciation to all of you in celebration of record success for the service.  And as a thank you for your loyalty during this holiday period, we will be offering all of our Xbox LIVE members around the world access to a full Xbox LIVE Arcade game that will be available to download free of charge.  In the coming weeks we will be sharing the specific details of this offer with you.

Thank you again for helping make Xbox LIVE everything that it is today!

Sincerely,

Marc Whitten

General Manager, Xbox LIVE

Gamertag: Notwen

And now, the game of the year awards which I’m just going to type down without much if any explanation.

• Best Farm simulation/Dungeon Crawler- Rune Factory
• Best Objections-Phoenix Wright:Trials and Tribulations
• Best obscene value for a package-The Orange Box
• Best dialog ever-Portal
• Best cube-Weighted Companion Cube, presented by Portal
• Best ending theme-Portal
• Best villain, physical-GLaDOS
• Best villain, concept or metaphor-Objectivism, as portrayed by Andrew Ryan
• Best multiplayer, realistic-Call of Duty 4
• Best multiplayer, arcade-Team Fortress 2
• Best game that took way too long to come out-Team Fortress 2
• Best “Jesus fuck, that’s not right” moments-Bioshock
• Best port of a game that was way too good already-Puzzle Quest:Challenge of the Warlords
• Best re-release license crossover co-op game-Lego Star Wars:The Complete Saga
• Best TV based game-Naruto: Rise of a Ninja
• Best crazy long RPG with an actual morality system that goes beyond “I’m a knight in shining armor” and “I eat babies”, console-Mass Effect
• Best crazy long RPG with an actual morality system that goes beyond “I’m a knight in shining armor” and “I eat babies”, PC-The Witcher

And now, the absolute worst shit of the year.

• Worst abuse of tiered systems-Hellgate:London
• Worst abuse of paid downloadable content-Ace Combat 6
• Worst community playing a game that would be fun if it wasn’t for the 10 year olds at frat boys-Halo 3
• Worst case of hype-Crysis
• Worst game that could have been good if the rail shooting segments didn’t have lots of enemies who can kill you that never enter the range your gun can fire-Power of Destruction
• Worst voice acting and dialog-Two Worlds
• Worst spiritual successor that was nothing like the game that it was based on-Enemy Territory:Quake Wars
• Worst TV based game which isn’t really a game because the only way to lose the game is to change your resolution in the options menu-CSI:Hard Evidence
• Worst game I’ve played this entire year-Monster Jam(Really, I understand how it felt to be the guy who took the tubgirl pictures now)