Subatomic Brainfreeze

Let's Complain About Street Fighter IV For The Last Time: UNLOCKING IS DUMB AND ONLINE RANKING IS A JOKE

After some thought, I've decided that for the time being, these are is my last complaints about Street Fighter IV. I had complained about the character design some time ago, but on a gameplay level they all turned out great and I really no longer have a problem with them.

Getting the characters is another thing. One of the things I hate about arcade game ports is that the goodies are always hidden behind a wall of drudgery. This problem is especially apparent with fighting games, because access to the full multiplayer game with all of the characters is usually blocked by some amount of mucking about in single player. A really painful example was Super Smash Brothers Brawl: in order to start playing the game proper, with all the characters, you had to first play through an entirely different game, which was ten hours long and rather poor. Thankfully, you aren't sentenced to anything so terrible in SF4: you just have to beat the single-player arcade mode over and over again. You aren't told (and thus must go online to figure out) who you need to beat the game with and how to unlock the last couple characters, and if you want to play as the final boss you're going to have to beat the game 24 times.

Why are we still doing this? Having to beat up the computer this many times to have access to the whole game is particularly embarassing in our current age of online-enabled consoles, where a sea of human competition (that only plays Ken) is just a few button presses away. Why force me to play a bunch of boring fights against the computer when that's available? At the very least, these characters should have been as easily unlockable by playing online as they are by playing offline. Of course, it would be best to get rid of the unlocking BS altogether and make everything immediately available: it's just that unlocks keep boring people from returning their games to Gamestop quite so quickly, so the videogame industry loves them.

Less important unlockables-- alternate colors for characters and customizable titles and avatars for online play-- are hidden in Challenge mode, which is two thirds really bad drudgery (the stunningly dull Time Attack and Survival modes, where you beat up dummy computer opponents for what feels like a thousand years) and one third really hard (the combo-practice Trial mode).

Meanwhile, online ranking systems for fighting games have always been problematic and ultimately meaningless. In theory it sounds like a good idea to see who the strongest player is, but in the end, the guy at the top of the rankings is a guy who figured out how to game the system.

The first such case I saw was in the Dead or Alive games, in the earlier days of Xbox Live. In theory, the DOA online setup was a great idea: you could set up a room with all your buddies, the first two would fight, and the winner would stay to be challenged by the rest of the room. Very arcade-style, and a setup that everybody seems to really like when it's used. But it's no good for ranked matches, and here's the reason: players would simply invite willing accomplices or dummy accounts into private rooms with them and beat up their motionless opponent over and over again. Doing this moved you up the rankings slowly and steadily with no chance of loss. The leaderboards became useless, as they were littered with people with insane, undefeated records who had obviously used this exploit.

Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (oh god that name) had a better system than usual for ranked online matches: you couldn't directly choose who you fought-- unless you count picking out people by their ping number, which was possible but unlikely-- and you couldn't see what character they were going to pick, either. This ultimately led to the most reliable online rankings possible (as these things go), until hundreds of people, yours truly included, lost their records to some weird leaderboard bug, and none of it mattered at all anymore. Street Fighter IV is not quite so strict, and in so doing illustrates why all this double-blind stuff was a good idea after all.

In SFIV, you can pick who you fight in a ranked match, which creates a big problem. If you think you're outmatched against a certain player, you never have to play him. If you know you can beat a certain other player, you can play against him over and over again for easy wins. If you're losing, you can really puss out and pull the cord out of your system, disconnecting, taking a loss on your record, and-- for some stupid, stupid reason-- keeping your ranking score intact. Getting and maintaining a high ranking has as much to do with match selection as it does your actual skill at the game itself. Obviously, it doesn't represent player skill at all at this point. Ultimately, this system will just give rise to a slightly more difficult variant on the trick I described from Dead Or Alive: the top ranker is just going to fight his own dummy account over and over again, winning every time and gaining points for nothing. As such, it's as though the ranking system doesn't really exist at all, and my record shows that I disregard it.

Despite this series of articles, though, SF4-- the core game that I have barely addressed-- is a great job on Dimps' part and I'd recommend it to anyone who's ever cared about Street Fighter or the genre at all.

Anime voice actresses cover punk: THE WORLD PAYS THE PRICE

Usually I keep posts like this to the Twitter feed, but I want to make sure everybody is aware of this most horrific of cultural juxtapositions. Evil Japanese record company Avex has, for some reason I can't even begin to comprehend--is it because anime voice actress ultrastar Aya Hirano loves Avril Lavigne and does awful faux-punk covers of her own songs?-- hired a bunch of anime voice actresses to cover a bunch of punk songs. Specifically, to cover them like they were moe anime songs. The results were really messy. You can listen to samples on the album's Amazon.jp page. They are more than, more than enough. Hell, the cover art is more than enough, but I dare you to listen anyway. Nothing is sacred: nobody knows what the hell they're singing about, and each and every track has been shot up with enough sugar to destroy the arteries of twenty men! Utterly beyond words. Mind-blowing. God, I can't get past the fact that this CD exists. Haruko Momoi covers Blondie, okay? I'm going to go ahead and Google Translate a one-star Amazon review:

Conceive how the project is a combination of WAKARAN考ETARA do this translation.
And you know what I can not flat, and from where this product will be PANKUFAN'm just a stupid punk.
A blasphemy to the song. Funny stuff funny cover.

Funny stuff indeed.

Let's Complain About Street Fighter IV: THIS ISN'T CASUAL AT ALL

Now, those of us who are deep into fighting games and have been following SF4 (I used sites like this one) more or less knew everything we were going to know about the game short of actually playing it. A lot of people hadn't seen the game to the extent that we already had, didn't know much, and weren't told much by the mainstream press, which treats arcade releases as though they don't exist. So I'm going to let you in on something I knew a long time ago:

Capcom's claims that Street Fighter IV was a "casual" or "introductory" fighting game were completely false. It's not even trying to be. SF4's design is certainly fairly easy to pick up on a superficial level and very difficult to master, but so is Virtua or Guilty Gear or any other game I could think of. More importantly, there is no real attempt made to reach out to a casual audience, which I'll get back to. It's just another fighting game, guys. Not the second coming. Not a utopian new age. A fighting game.

That's not really a bad thing: there's room in the market for an easy-mode fighting game, but it probably shouldn't be Street Fighter. If anything, this game has some of the toughest technical execution in the series: it's combined everything that was ever hard in Street Fighter and put it all in the same combo. Unlike, say, Guilty Gear, simple combos that get reasonable damage do exist. But the strongest combos really take the game out into some crazy territory: inputs regularly require inhuman speed and precision down to a sixtieth of a second. I am, I should note, loving this game. I love screwing around with the combo system and finding new things. Yes, this is hard stuff, but for many of us, that is part of the appeal.

As I said previously, nobody looked at things from the point of view of somebody who doesn't already play these games, and there's no attempt to teach. Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution had the best tutorial I've ever seen in a fighting game, and every game really ought to include something similar: if you chose to, you could learn the basics and systems of that game front to back. The tutorial didn't miss a single point. On top of that, you could go to character-specific tutorials that would explain the use of certain moves and combinations, giving the player an unusually solid basic knowledge of the character. It was a tutorial that honest-to-god taught, and it helped me tremendously back when I was learning VF. It's a shame it's not in VF5.

The trial mode, the closest this game has to a tutorial, just tells you "do this." with a list of attacks and combos. No demonstrations. No clues, no hints. They don't even tell you how to do the moves: they just put the name up on the screen and you're expected to pause the game and look it up in the command list, where you see the usual Capcom shorthand that new players may or may not know what the hell it means. People don't know how to do a fireball, here, man! You gotta think of this stuff! Even I had to go to Youtube to figure out what the hell was going on in many of the later combos, which run abruptly from basic combos to one-frame expert-level stuff about halfway through. No game that even has stuff of this level of complexity in it can call itself a "casual" game.

And even with Trial mode, it's just combos, you know? There's so much more to fighting games than just being able to rattle off a combo. Everybody thinks that Daigo parrying that Chun-Li super was by itself some kind of mechanical triumph, for example, and the truth of the matter was that a lot of people can do that. What was beautiful about it, what made the people in the room cheer, was that Daigo baited Wong into doing it. Wong got very uncharacteristically sloppy and desperate in a tight situation and walked right into the trap. It wasn't about tapping buttons, it was psychological. There are layers to this stuff.

Anyway, I consider this a really big missed opportunity for the genre. This game was a guaranteed million-seller, it's sold out everywhere-- a $60 videogame is sold out everywhere in this economy-- and it's going to get a lot of people into fighting games who weren't before. It's also going to turn away a lot of people who have already probably returned it.

I've argued before here that most people who play fighting games aren't really getting them on a fundamental level: it's like they're playing rock paper scissors and nobody told them about paper, or scissors. A lot of new SF4 players are going to bang their heads against the competition online, lose over and over again, and never get any idea what they're doing wrong: worse yet, they'll get the idea in their head that the people outsmarting them are "cheap", dishonorable players, and awful human beings in general. They'll get stuck in this thinking and they'll never get anywhere with the game. The community doesn't really help in this regard: every article that sets the issue straight, while factually true, is invariably written by some unbearable, condescending prig who regards his audience as not just mistaken, but a lesser life form, unworthy of the purifying light of his knowledge.

Not everybody is going to fish through internet forums-- helpful as they are-- to find this info. A strategy video series on the basics available for free download through the game would be a good start, but Prima is already out there charging $1 per video per character, and who knows if the videos are any good. Great, guys. Great.

In conclusion-- and I could have said this a couple paragraphs ago and been done with the post, forgive me for rambling-- Smash Brothers is a casual fighting game. The motions for the moves are all exactly the same, and they're all really easy. This is not a casual fighting game. It's got six attack buttons and six or so fancy special moves for every character and a rich, deep combo system. We shouldn't be telling people it's something it's not, though I'm sure the approach sold Capcom a whole pile of copies.

TODAY IN ABUNAI NEWS

I'd like to give credit to my buddy Carl over at Ogiue Maniax for this one: Remember the Abunai Sisters and their hilarious price of $360 after tax for a 90-minute DVD filled with CG animation of the worst sort? Above, you can see the prices that were offered to English speakers. Below, you can see the prices that were offered to Japanese speakers:

Obviously it's not a huge surprise to anybody that the people who made Abunai Sisters don't respect their customers, but it's pretty amusing to see they also discriminate by language spoken. 265 copies sold, total. Preorders are closed, sorry suckers.

Let's Complain About Street Fighter IV: THIS COLLECTOR'S EDITION SUCKS

There's been both a lot of well-deserved praise for SF4 and a lot of hyperbolic THIS IS THE SECOND COMING kind of BS that the videogame industry buys for every AAA release, so I'm going to throw in my hat and just complain about the game. First, the waste-of-money Collector's Edition, and in particular, the Studio 4°C anime that came with it.

In recent years, game developers have been trying to make back a little more of their money with widespread releases of Collector's Editions for bigger games. These don't usually ever become hard to find, so they're not really for collectors in that sense. They're for people who want some cheap goodies with their videogame. I usually skip them, but SF4's CE had a pretty reasonable free gift: an hour-long animated movie by Studio 4°C, an anime studio known for its offbeat work and high production values. Something a person might actually want, you know? So I put in a preorder.

Man, what a bad idea. Stores-- stores I go to-- all broke street on the regular edition the Friday before release, but I waited on Amazon because certainly the extras would be worth a couple days, you know? Meanwhile, half my Live friends list-- mostly fighting game nuts-- was playing SF4. Long story short, Amazon actually shipped after the street date and I only got the game around Thursday. Tiny violins. But I waited for the Collector's Edition! I waited for stuff! You already know from the title of this post how that went.

The figure is hideous, for starters. I have the 360 version so the figure is of C.Viper. In the picture on the box, you see a standard gashapon-level figure: the sculpt is mediocre and the detailing sucks, sure, but it's not completely hideous. When you open the thing, you see the way they really painted it, and it drops those two or three extra notches. The paint is just kinda splattered all over the place, with no particular concern for staying in the lines. It really looks like one of the careless jobs I see on the bootleg figures at the Chinatown mall, to give you an example. The soundtrack CD isn't complete, and more importantly, doesn't have the instant-camp-classic theme song by Japanese Usher. The hint book artwork by Udon is nice, but it's really just an extremely brief comic-book pamphlet ad for the real strat guide. And then there's a movie.

The movie... oh boy. The movie is pretty damned ugly itself. The reality of the Japanese animation industry is that you must be pandering to your demographic at all times with the kind of made-by-committee productions you see in anime all the time. It's not that anybody involved in Akikan wanted to make Akikan. (Akikan post forthcoming when I force myself to watch more of that trash) The sales of terrible magical girlfriend light novel picture books just said it was a good idea. If you want to earn the privilege of being one of the unconventional anime studios that gets to do what it wants-- a Gainax, for example-- you've got to be a grown-up and do projects that aren't necessarily any good, but do pay the bills.

Gainax really has this down to a science. The studio makes its big-budget guaranteed sales-- its Evas and its Gurren Laganns-- once a decade, turns out something a little odder and a little less sellable-- its FLCLs and its Top wo Neraes-- every couple years, and in between they pay their bills with their He is My Masters and their Mahoromatics. Kyoto Animation, on the other hand, has played it safe and made nothing but the finest in fan-pandering material in recent years, making them a rather strong independent, but also incredibly boring.

Well, I haven't seen 4°C pay their bills too many times. Their output was just too interesting; I guess this day had to come. The Street Fighter 4 anime is terrible. You might have seen the awful cutscenes in the SF4 game itself-- which look especially bad because the game's own 3D graphics, particularly the opening cutscene, outshine it in every way-- and wondered if the "proper" anime was up to a higher level of quality. Well, it's one notch up. That's about it. 

Have you seen Street Fighter IV? It's a really goofy-looking game. Eyes bug out, mouths stretch to the width of a cinder block, and for God's sake, it's about Mike Tyson fighting the Indian guy from Master of the Flying Guillotine. It is, in theory, a perfect fit for Studio 4°C: I wanted to see the kind of expressiveness I'd already gotten from the game, and I wanted to see the animation express that in a more abstract way that the videogame couldn't reach.  That the new Street Fighter anime might look like the old City Hunter opening. That was my high hope. What's really criminal about this movie is that, of all things, it's a very serious talking-heads exposition festival about Street Fighter that goes out of its way to have street fighters fighting about as little as possible.

What's especially terrible is that if you know Street Fighter, you already know the exposition: hero Ryu struggles with the evil power within him, a villainous group is trying to extract that power, et cetera. I'm pretty sure it's the story of every single Street Fighter animation that's been made since this particular cliche was added into the storyline back in SF Alpha. Other SF characters appear, but only really to talk about how Ryu is struggling with the evil power within him, or about how a villainous group is trying to extract that power.

This would have been forgivable if the fights were good, but the fights are miserable and brief, making up about five minutes of the hour-long running time. Throughout, it feels like they were just trying to get this thing out of the door: what motion there is is choppy, impacts are rarely shown or felt, random mooks are always beaten up offscreen, and the characters have the bare minimum back-and-forth before the scene ends outright. There's a particularly bad scene where a fight is set up between Ken and Crimson Viper. Viper punches Ken, he blocks... and she walks away. Really, guys? Really?

The whole thing ultimately culminates in a pretty awful battle between Ryu and final boss Seth--a huge blue dude who apparently has been able to become the CEO of a major company while huge, blue and having, instead of an abdomen, a huge mechanical orb of some kind-- on a stage, while the rest of the cast watches in the seats. I feel like somebody got bored at work and made a very quiet Zeta Gundam joke here. Ryu's masterful fighting technique has devolved into punching Seth the exact same way over and over again, so Seth beats a motionless Ryu, hangs him up, and proceeds to monologue about the nature of power. Then Ryu falls down. Then Ryu monologues about what power really is and how a guy like Seth could never understand. Then Ryu turns into a Super Saiyan and beats Seth with the biggest Kamehameha he's ever done. Yes, this actually happens. I am not making this up.

Overall, I'm going to go ahead and give 4°C's work on the SFIV animation a rating of "You got paid?" And yes, the Van Damme movie was much better than this. That scene is better than the entire 4°C movie. The real question is which will be worse: this, or the Chun-Li movie that opens on Friday. (2/28 edit: It sounds like the live-action film is, in fact, much worse than what I watched.)

The in-game bonus is a free pass to download the first pack of five alternate costumes. Fuck this, by the way. Paid download content has a time and a place: Criterion is showing people how it's done with Burnout Paradise and Bethesda's dropped some good paid content on Fallout 3 too. It's continuing support in exchange for a little money and it's supposed to make a substantial improvement to the experience. This is not that. As with Megaman 9, this is charging the player for material that had already been made (this stuff's been in the arcade version for months). I can't think of a recent 3D fighting game where the characters didn't have alternate costumes available right out of the box. Several of them, typically. Even deciding that one costume = $1 would have approached fair, but instead, the pricks put them in packs, meaning you have to buy five costumes for $5, even if you only want one of them. This is a purposely bad system, indicating about the same level of respect for the customer as the last stunt with Megaman. Thanks a lot, assholes.

(My one friend pirated Megaman 9 for the Wii and then bought all the DLC. That's one way to do things.)

(Also, the chick costumes are almost exempt from this, as they are all actually costumes I want)

So yes, Street Fighter IV is a hell of a videogame, but there's plenty more to complain about, and don't worry, I've got more!

Sup dudes, check out my PANELS

These things are starting to come up, so it's time to inform all you guys. One! My friends at NYU Poly have run a small, free anime/gaming convention for some years. This year, as with last year, they've been good enough to give me some time to run anime. Last year I ran a bunch of stuff I liked, and as a result it was just me and four or five of my friends in the room, so this year we're going to flip the situation to ULTIMATE ANIME. I won't tell you what ULTIMATE ANIME is but you should really be able to guess. This likely won't be a panel, just a showing with a misleading name.

Two! My friends at I-Con have again put me on for a bad anime panel! I-Con is a broader-focused geek-interest con, but there's a dedicated anime track and I come by every year to help with that. We discovered there that terrible anime packs rooms front to back, and so I came to run bad anime panels. The panel is still tentative, but I'm gonna be calling it MOST DANGEROUS ANIME, and, again, you should understand what that means. I-Con has seen some terrible things, and this year I intend to bring some new challengers into the mix (including a show from this season that, if you are guessing its name already, you are right) while showing off some of the old favorites. I'm sorry, guys, Gundress is just too good to keep locked up. If it's anything like last year, I might just end up an emergency panelist again. Who knows!

AOU 2009: JAPAN HAS ARCADE GAMES AND YOU DON'T

Between this and the several posts about Street Fighter IV I have to make (don't worry, one SF4 post will be about bad anime), we're going to be dipping into videogame mode for a while. I know most of you won't mind!

AOU is Japan's big arcade show. As the industry is not completely destroyed over there, manufacturers still have it in them to go out to a trade show and show off their wares. I'd love to go to AOU-- hell, I'd love to be able to play arcade games in Japan-- but in the meantime you and I are all going to have to settle for the footage this cool dude on Youtube snuck out of the place. I hope I don't blow your cover, bro! I'm going to skip the bigger games like KOFXII, because what's to say about that game at this stage that you don't already know? It's still very pretty! On the same note, the new Elevator Action has an amazing cabinet, but doesn't look to be too exciting in any other way.

This is undoubtedly my "Lead Story", as it were. Bishi Bashi is back. Any of you guys ever get to play Bishi Bashi? Imagine playing those bizarre Japanese game shows you see clips from on the internet with your friends and you're starting to understand. You have three big ol' Pop-O-Matic buttons (in the new game there's four), and like a prototype of Wario Ware, you're thrown into a minigame structured around some very strange task which is controlled, somehow, by these buttons. Or maybe I should just remind you that this entire video consists of four people competing to make the onscreen characters take a shit as many times as possible? There's a Bishi Bashi Special machine in Flushing, but it's broken. Very sad.

If you guys were worried about nobody being around to pick up the sleazy strip-mahjong mantle after Seta and Jaleco are out of the game, I guess don't be anymore, because Higurashi, of all the moe franchises, has jumped right in. The trailer implies that, in the spirit of Higurashi, the pretty girls will cut your belly open like a fucking Thanksgiving turkey if you lose and get into embarassing cosplay outfits if you win. Maybe those should both be special accessories on the cabinet. Here's the other video, where we mostly just look very closely at an face-down, ass-up figure of Rena. Otaku. Otaku, otaku.

I'm gonna talk about Daemon Bride (talked about a bit here) because there's so little on it and nobody talks about it anyway. It's ugly. I can't tell from this video whether or not the sprites are in a higher resolution than Arcana Heart, but they're certainly worse animated. Keep in mind that Arcana was already pretty cheaply animated, so this is really saying something. The developer seems to know that the sprites kinda blow, too, because we see a lot of really flashy, overdone CG effects that kinda block out the characters, because looking like this who'd want to see them? With this and Sengoku Basara X, there are two fighting games that specifically target Japanese fangirls: the first one was phoned-in and this one looks like it might be too. I wonder what this says about developer expectations! It's almost as though they already know they kinda have the wrong demographic for the genre, but they said "oh fuck it, let's slap something together and see what happens." Not much is gonna happen for chicks or for dudes with that attitude! (Daemon Bride would actually probably be fairly popular with the Hot-Topic-and-Kingdom-Hearts crowd at Chinatown Fair.)

By contrast, the new Power Instinct was around. Doesn't look gorgeous, but it does look solid. That's a lot more important.

Oh man. I think we should just segue into "cute things at AOU" here. This Hopping Road thing is adorable and you wouldn't catch me dead near it. I'm glad somebody lived the Blue Skies Manifesto so truly. So is Music Gungun, the musical gun game (Christ, why didn't I think of that) but that has Zuntata on it so you get mad hardcore gamer cred for playing it. Meanwhile, you might think that this is footage of cute gothloli cosplayers playing Death Smiles 2. Please don't be fooled. This is actually Death Smiles 2. Cave really did move into 3D. And they're just that good. In conclusion, ride a broom. America makes the Gyroxus chair, Japan makes the moe-moe witch-chan broom game. I'm not sure who was right.

Star Ocean: IT'S NOT ANIME, WE SWEAR

I don't know if you saw this story, but the gist of it is that the US version of the new Star Ocean game makes a token attempt to downplay its anime look, in order to sell to a more mainstream gamer and SF-fan market. They did this by simply removing 2D anime-styled artwork where it appeared and, in the case of the battle screens, exchanging it for angrier-looking CG portraits. Namco did this in a different way with their two releases of the (upcoming, I believe) DS game Tales of Dreams: one has anime-style art and cutscenes, and the other has CG. Both are exactly the same game, and cost $60 apiece. Just wanted to throw that out there.

Anyway, here's my take on it: Tri-Ace is about the last studio in the world that ought to be trying not to pander to anime fans. I can understand a developer trying to break out of the long rep of typecasting that it's built for itself with its games, but Tri-Ace is probably in a little too deep. For the un-initiated, Tri-Ace made their names with Tales of Phantasia (Namco would later take the reins of the franchise after the core Tri-Ace team got pissed off at them and left) and Star Ocean back on the SNES: these were JP-only releases on gigantic cartridges with fancy custom chips. They were particularly unusual in that they had large amounts of voice data on these gigantic carts. Voice data recorded, of course, by famous anime voice actors. You get where I'm going with this. The games are total otaku stuff.

Namco would work this hard in their management of the Tales series, keeping character designer Kosuke Fujishima--who still makes his living off making sure Belldandy and that guy don't have sex after, what, twenty years?-- and basically positioning the franchise as the RPG for anime fans. I played Star Ocean 2 front to back as a teenager, and despite a legendarily awful dub, voice actors were actually the first credits listed upon completing the game. Tri-Ace had creative control and the game was still pretty damn otaku! I mean come on, any RPG with a character dating system-- nevermind a character dating system that you could game by creating a certain item over and over again-- has a target audience in mind.

I don't know a thing about the new Star Ocean, but I saw an ad on TV this morning. Go ahead and watch that. If you can't, it's a Hollywood-trailer kind of thing, highlighting what this game is about. Do you know what it's about? A blank-slate hero! A princess character! A catgirl! A guy with robo-armor!

You sure this isn't anime, you guys?

(3/3/09 update: Game has a bunch of Love-Hina worthy scenes of onii-chan-no-ecchi anime cliche.)

LET'S NOT FORGET DEATH TANK

I've been very busy with this Street Fighter videogame, and you're going to be hearing quite a bit from me on it, but there was a certain very important release that has unfortunately been completely overshadowed by SF4. I'm talking, of course, about Death Tank.

Yes, Death Tank. Included as a bonus game in Saturn ports of Powerslave and Duke Nukem 3D, Death Tank and Death Tank Zwei were perhaps the greatest multiplayer Saturn experiences. The game is basically Scorched Earth, if you remember that: five tanks (multicolored boxes) on a map, aiming and shooting at one another in real time. It's not really exciting at all to talk about, but it's exciting as hell to play with all your friends huddled around the TV, screaming at it as your shot juuust misses, as two tanks have a point-blank machinegun duel to the death, or as some lucky bastard demolishes everybody else on the screen with the Death's Head. The developer knows their strong point: they've put free online multiplayer on the demo. I bought the game sight unseen, but if you haven't experienced Death Tank, then definitely at least download this demo. If you're not sold by the time it's over, you're probably not alive and have greater problems than some silly videogame.

KINOKO NASU'S AMERICAN FOOTBALL

This joke came up in one of this blog's numerous secret bases, the #colonydrop channel on Espernet. Do come by. We're hoping to pitch this project to Type-Moon and EA as a Madden spinoff for the Japanese market. We're thinking multimedia franchise.

There's a football flying in the air above me.
Floating.
This ball is destined to travel, and then fall.
But at this moment, in front of my eyes, I can see a football.
An American football. 

I draw a diagram in my mind.
You throw an American football in a spiral. Like a worm crawling in a dog's intestines.
A football thrown any other way just won't go very far.
It certainly won't get to the place it was intended to be thrown.
But this American football. This American football.

It moves with unnatural accuracy.
Obscenely.
Moist with the juices of human effort, this football tumbles end over end through the air.
Blasphemously.
It's as though the place it was going will always be the place it will go.
I think of my sister.

This American football is impossible. It just can't exist.
I want to wipe it from my eyes.
I want to scream and shove my face into a prehistoric tar pit.

It.
Is.
Terrifying.

heytheoffensivelinemenaretheMURDERbiggestguysonthefield,they'rebiggerthan
everybodyelse,andthat'swhatAPOCALYPSEmakesthemthebiggestguysonthe
fieldwhenyourPUNISHMENTarmgetshittheballisnotgoingtogowhereyouwantitto
kdkfjlaINSANITYgahdfjifyouseeadefenseteamwithdirtandmudontheirbacks
they'veRAPEhadabadday.

I wake up in my bed, bleeding.
My flaxen-haired maid is here with a bowl of Campbell's Chunky soup.
I feel like a an empty pot of meat, about to be filled.