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Sasuke: Ninja Warrior

So am I the last person on earth to find out about Sasuke/Ninja Warrior? I guess you can catch it on G4 late at night (Must. Set. TiVo). However, you can find plenty of highlights (including the new impossible 2007 course) on the YouTubes.

What's amazing to me is that I feel like I'm watching people play a videogame in real life. I know that sounds so cliche, but it's just so damn true. Just look at it, if that's not a platforming side-scroller, complete with a boss stage, I don't know what is.

Spoiler alert: If you watch the show, this footage may not have aired yet. It's of one of the only people to have ever completed the 4th stage.

Evidently there are very few people (less than 1%) who've ever finished the course.

Also: There's a lady's mode as well, called Kunoichi.

Seriously, why don't we have theme parks where I live where I can pay to go play on these things? I'd die of exhaustion, but holy cow, does this look like fun real life gaming.

GameJew Takes on Education

My favorite internet star of the moment, GameJew (AKA Jonathan Mann), takes on education in the latest episode: GameJew Episode 7. He visits a videogame class at a technical college, then talks to a professor of interface design at an arts school, and finally ends by driving around a videogame bus to teach kids how to play co-operatively.

There's a wealth of interesting insights here - like the fact that the kids value winning over challenge, something that a lot of hardcore gamers may not understant, since one common critique that can lower a review score is that the game is "too easy."

The 3D interfaces designed by the teacher Jonathan interviews are also beautiful and inspire new possibilities for videogame controls.

GameJew is one of the smartest, funniest, most creative commentators on the culture of videogames today, and I urge anyone interested in that to check out his work. It's not always perfect, but I would argue that it never fails to engage.

Ms. Spartan in DOA4

I hadn't heard this anywhere before, so in the off chance that you weren't aware of it . . .

Link a la 1up.com

Apparently the Halo 2 playable fighter in DOA4 is a girl Spartan. Giving DOA's usual propensity for skimpy costumes and advanced mammary physics, I was pleasantly surprised to see her fully armored, without armor boob-slots and still helmeted. According to the article, Spartan-458 isn't a throw-away character. 55 unique moves of her own, taller than most the other characters and speedy to boot, she should be some good fun for you dual-wielding DOA/Halo fans.

-matt

Colossi and the Banned Ad

I've had a chance to play Shadow of Colossus and I'm finding it very difficult to contain my hyperbole. Let's just assume that I've said every possible, positive thing about the game that I could while using a bare minimum of qualifying statements just to appear as though my assessment were objective.

Which, of course, it is not. A primary indicator of which is that Ico may very well be my favorite game in all of eternity. Every instance that I've had to write of Ico's virtues I have taken on with exuberance. Not just any run-of-the-mill exuberance, mind you, but with unadulterated, Viking exuberance. You know, when they got blitzed on mead and charged naked and screaming into battle in the hopes of dying for Odin so as to join their kin in Valhalla.

So, it's from that place that I am approaching Shadow of the Colossus. I find the story arc, beauty and the overwhelming contrasts of scale to be just as enthralling as they were in Ico, but in a different emotional context. In Ico, the sense was of being lost and vulnerable, yet determined to overcome. In Shadow of the Colossus, this determination of the main character takes center stage and the environment isn't a strange puzzle to stumble through, but a knowable to be foreceably conquered.

It also doesn't hurt that the colossi fucking rock. While I've been told the all-boss-battle gameplay metaphor has been used in the past, I'm certain its never been done like this. Each Colossus is a "level" with a sort of Zelda-like overworld in between. Someone's probably pointed that out already.

Also, there's this. I'm no longer in cahoots with the rest of the intraweb the way I used ta be, so you nerds have probably already seen this and passed it to the AllYourBase bin. Apparently it's a Euro-PS2 price-drop commercial that was banned. Thanks Fira :) - sorry for the delayed response.

I'll Defend Yu

After trying to be productive for the better part of the morning, I found myself without much to do. Boredom set in. And naturally, my thoughts turned towards the stack of games I'd gathered in the past month; free time proved to be a precious commodity during the weeks of E3 preparation and I often chose to spend it socially rather than with a controller in-hand. Yet this afternoon, rather than peel the plastic off Enthusia or Devil May Cry 3, or return to Guild Wars to level, I somehow got the urge to robotically run through the streets of '80s era Hong Kong in Yu Suzuki's flawed epic Shenmue II for the Xbox. I know. I'm completely insane.

Right trigger to run? Come on. Required d-pad assisted turning that make Resident Evil's oft-ridiculed controls feel fluid? Yup, it's in there. It's almost as if the developer went out of its way to make playing the game as frustrating as possible. And don't even get me started on the dialogue or voice acting. If I hadn't already had an early save game on my Xbox, I would've returned to the subtitled Dreamcast version. The Japanese vocal track is far superior to the laughable localization most are familiar with.

The gameplay, too, is heavily flawed. I'm quite fond of the fact that Ryo Hazuki, our main character, has to work a job to afford life on the road. Or rather, I'm fond of the idea. In practice, the work segments are a bit too repetitious and often too dependant on luck rather than skill. I don't expect work to be fun, even in a videogame, but I would like the ability to excel and earn more money in turn. Shenmue, unfortunately, doesn't often allow for that sort of thing. And can it get tedious...

Shopping for the national pastime.

My local home opener is April 11th this year. It’s a day game at one of these recently erected but old-styled urban ballparks – for some reason the park is in a distant suburb, but we can overlook that. You’d think I already have my tickets, that I’ve anxiously awaited the event since sometime late last year. But I haven’t paid much attention to baseball in more than twenty years.

What Could Happen in the Next Hour?

Let's talk about something fun for Friday. While on tour with Dealership, we watched a lot of DVDs to pass the time during those 12-hour-drives across this vast nation. We discovered that movies are slightly less desirable for road trips, because they require sustained focus. TV shows, however - bitesized, snappily written bits fo fluff - are, like trail mix, perfect fodder for consuming on the go. "Freaks and Geeks" was awesome, and "The Simple Life" was painfully hilarious, but the one that we got really addicted to was "24".

You probably know the premise of the show: events take place in real time, over the course of twenty-four hours of a single day. Sounds somewhat unsustainable - after all, the show takes place in LA, and wouldn't you waste at least half an episode every time a character had to drive somewhere?

But this is fantasy LA, and besides, something bad always happens before the character reaches the destination, in part because the action can never slow down. Which leads to a very interesting type of show - a show that must be open-ended and flexible, that must maintain pacing, that must weave together several threads in a way that makes sense at the end - in short, a modular show, put together in blocks of well-balanced plot-bits.

Future of Tech TV

Last month when the purchase was announced I was out on a back porch in San Francisco with Adam Sessler. He said he didn't know what would happen, but he was hopeful that the quality of TechTv could be maintained, and that the people who worked there could keep doing what they had been doing.

But now things are looking a bit bleaker. Sure, TechTV had its flaws, but compared to G4's non-stop prattling it seemed a paragon of intellectual commentary on videogame and technology culture. The rumour is that the entire SF office will be closed down and relocated to LA. Damn you, Comcast.

And you want Disney, too? Is there no end to this devouring cable monster?

I'm giving up on TV. Except as a vehicle upon which to play games and watch DVDs.

And what are you all doing this weekend?

32-1? That was a hockey match?

There's nothing like watching your opponent rack up children's league basketball scores in a hockey match to put you in your place. Based upon six months of fairly in-depth experience with Xbox Live I've isolated three things about networked gaming I believe to be true.

There are no old, bold pilots.

When do you retire a game, even one of your all-time favorites? With a narrative game, that's a relatively easy decision: at the end of the game. Or one of the several possible endings of the game. Or when you've played through the game on the highest difficulty setting. Or when you've loved, lost and just flat given up on ever "winning". Okay, perhaps it's not such an obvious decision; but worse yet is determining when to quit playing a "sandbox" or non-narrative game, or a game with an online gaming competitive feature.