61 Frames Per Second

I jumped on the current-gen bandwagon a little late; last February, to be specific, when my freelance writing skills suddenly and unexpectedly became profitable.  In order to stay relevant, I had to upgrade; so I picked up an XBox 360 and a Wii roughly around the same time of the year.  The Wii was something I always wanted but could never find, while the 360 always filled me with justifiable anxiety.  Undoubtedly, 2007 was the Year of the Red Ring of Death, and the talk of XBoxes expiring in mass quantities kept me far, far away from Microsoft's machine.  But by early 2008, I assumed all of the problems had been worked out.  Surely, after all of that mess, a newly-purchased 360 would be free of console cancer.  Right?  Right?

You'll never guess what happened last night.

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Festivities are already underway for the computer mouse, which turns 40 on December 9th. It’s a happy time for the little pointing device, so we all need to forget, just for a little while, all those spreadsheet cells we’ve had to click on with it. And please, whatever you do, do not bring up all the occasions you were forced to penetrate its ball-hole with a Q-tip. We’re in polite company here.

No, let’s talk about the best times: the times the mouse was a game controller. A humble game controller, and possibly the best one ever made. Let’s walk down memory lane, and think about some of the greatest moments in the history of mouse-based gaming.

1987: Maniac Mansion, one of the earliest graphical adventure games designed to be more about clicking than text parsing, began the era of LucasArt’s genre dominance. Starting here the mouse spent about a decade in the SCUMM engine, clicking on all manner of slimy, horrible things.

1990: The SNES Mouse brings it pointy, clicky goodness to Mario Paint. This version of the mouse spent it formative years as a fly swatter, and today it enjoys a retirement as one of YouTube’s most popular composers.

1992: Dune II ensures that real-time strategy will forever be mouse-based. Or at least until somebody actually manages to crack the control scheme on console—there’s certainly enough people trying.

1994: Marathon becomes the first-person shooter that popularizes mouselook as the de-facto standard for gun pointing and neck moving. This innovation remains the most accurate and enjoyable form of control in the genre; it took nearly a decade (and the work of Bungie, again) before console’s little thumbsticks even came close.

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My, what a difference a month makes.This time last month I was just about ready to proclaim LittleBigPlanet the late great hope for 21st century video games. Upon completing the on-disc single-player game, there was nothing left to do but explore the multi-player and user-generated options. This is where the game was truly supposed to shine, the "fun" that the advertising keeps referring to.

The good news is that local multi-player is pretty great. Most of the pre-made stages include optional challenges that require teamwork and cooperation and being able to turn to your friend and discuss strategies and enact them instantly is smooth and delightful. Playing online, however, is a tremendous crap shoot. There's no way to really communicate, so play goes from cooperative to competitive instantaneously, which becomes a problem when players share respawn points. If two players attempt to cross a bridge and both fail, they return to the continue gate with two "lives" lost and the game ends twice as quickly. Four players and you've got a recipe for instantaneous game over.

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This is a lie: “Sonic is all about speed. Without it, he is not Sonic. So we needed to put absolute priority on the sense of speed.” – Yoshihisa Hashimoto, Project Lead, Game Director, and Lead Game Designer on Sonic Unleashed

This is also a lie: “Yes, I think this will be the game Sonic fans have been waiting for. Sonic will be reborn in the state he always should have existed in with a new control scheme, fresh new gameplay elements, all while simultaneously returning to Sonic’s roots.” – Yoshihisa Hashimoto

Yes, Sega has pulled quite the switcheroo with Sonic Unleashed. The very first screens and video that leaked last spring showed only the gorgeous 2D/3D platforming levels in Sonic Unleashed and, since then, Sega has placed all emphasis on these portions in their promotion. It’s classic Sonic play in 3D! It’s a return to Sonic’s roots! It’s what people want in their Sonic games! Even just two months ago, when I sat down to demo the game, I was allowed to watch and play a number of Unleashed’s platforming levels. But only a portion of one werehog brawler level was shown and I wasn’t allowed to play that. Wasn’t ready, they said. Based on what I played then, Unleashed really was the perfect 3D Sonic. It was fast, gorgeous, and you actually had to play the game; pressing right to sprint through Unleashed’s pan-continental levels wasn’t enough to win.

Well, I finally sat down with the finished version of Sonic Unleashed last night. Turns out Yoshihisa Hashimoto is big liar. He lies to people. He obscures the truth behind honeyed words. He is not a nice man.

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I love video game music. I already post the occasional remix here on 61FPS but I also love listening and watching enthusiasts play classic game tunes straight. I am a science buff and enjoy digging up all manner of interesting and often esoteric facts and scientific oddities. Finally, YouTube is a strange and wonderful place. Add these seemingly unrelated statements together and you get...

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This cake?

A dude named Will made it for his daughter's birthday.

It's exactly like the cake your parents made you for your birthday, right?

Oh, what's that? Your parents never made you a cake like this for your birthday?

Do you know why?

Because they hate your guts.

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The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time hit ten years of age last month, and I am so proud of it. The day I got the game, I skipped half a day of school, brought it home and forgot school even existed until my mother made me go back there the next morning. Once in class, I couldn't stop talking about Link's first 3D adventure. I bounced off the walls so hard that the teacher sent me out.

Why this story is magical: I was eighteen at the time and attending grade 13, a "preparation" year for college. And I had been exiled to the hallway for disturbing the class like an eight-year-old with a pocket full of fart bombs.

Ocarina of Time hasn't aged well in ten years. If I encountered a hermit scratching moss from behind his ears and blinking at the sunglight for the first time in two decades, I'd direct him in his video game education thusly: skip Ocarina of Time and go straight for Twilight Princess or even Majora's Mask. Link's first N64 outing was lacking in swordplay, no thanks to a barren overworld bristling with a few fences and peahats, maybe a leever or two.

But if this hermit told me some manner of centipede god had told him to emerge into the world strictly to study game history, I'd tell him, "Oh shit dude, Ocarina of Time all the way." Ocarina of Time is a pioneer. Bare fields were a small tradeoff for playing the Zelda series' classic puzzles in 3D for the first time. Light a torch with a lantern? Yeah, if you're a sissy. Light a torch by shooting an arrow through a living flame and sparking the cold sconce on the other side of a pit? Awesome.

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Jason Nelson may not be Jon Blow, but I’ve got to hand it to the man: this is a fun little platformer. i made this. you play this. we are enemies. is, in the words of its creator, “an artwork/game/digital poem/world of scribbles and ideas from back of my brain, way-way back in a storage room for contextual whims.” What it is, in practice, is a collage-based platformer built on surreal deconstructions of well trafficked web magazines, blogs, and search engine portals. imt.ypt. wae. (go ahead and steal that name, dance punk band of fifteen year-olds!) scratches a couple of my recent itches, namely forays into surrealist game design and games that hook you by making you uncomfortable (in this case through scattered imagery and discordant sound.) Is it one of the greatest achievements of mankind? Certainly not. Is it an artistic success?

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The 2008 Blip Festival is only two days away, so today we're taking a look at the man considered to be responsible for the whole NYC chiptune scene, Jeremiah Johnson, aka Nullsleep. We've featured him here back on July 4th, but with Blip Festival just days away and a brand-new Nullsleep EP released just this past week, it seemed the time was ripe for a second look.

Without further ado, please enjoy "Salvation for a Broken Heart" from the just-released Unconditional Acceleration EP:

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I've always been a regular reader of video game publications, especially in my younger days; when you're living in the late 1980s and stuck in school for 8 hours a day, there's no sweeter escape than cracking open a fresh issue of Nintendo Power and poring over the pages.  But the state of print is much different than it was during my analog-based childhood.  Magazines are folding, newspaper sales are plummeting, and, frankly, the Internet is to blame--although it hasn't really done much aside from making our lives easier.  Print is now competing with the impossible task of remaining relevant in an age where waiting weeks for information is a laughable prospect.  And since the Internet has essentially stolen print's fire, it's going to have to do something drastic to stay afloat.

GameSpite: Year One may be the perfect example of where video game publications should be headed.  For those of you not familiar with GameSpite, it's a web site--run by 1UP scribe Jeremy Parish--that features digital "issues" of content written by a staff of hungry writers.  What appeals most to me is that GameSpite's content is stuff you're not going to find in print, or even on major web sites; most articles are in-depth discussions of games well outside of their 2-week release window.  And GameSpite: Year One is a compilation of this content in book form--split into two volumes, what with how many danged words there are.

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Most of you out there are probably playing Chrono Trigger DS--or at least you should be. I have to admit that I'm a total hypocrite, though; if I do play through Chrono Trigger again, it's not going to be for a while.  Listen, when you suffer through hours upon hours of Chrono's abysmal PSX port to unlock some pretty pedestrian bonus content, you need to take a little break.  I'll be at the five year mark around springtime, so please look forward to my coverage of Chrono Trigger DS in April 2009.

Believe it or not, there are versions of Chrono far worse than the PSX port, which was like playing a beloved RPG while immersed in quicksand. Our industrious friends in China actually produced their own pirate Famicom version of the game, as they've done in the past with many other games that have no business being on an 8-bit platform.  Maybe this video will show you why:



Diagnosis: adorable--in a "broken toy on a thrift store shelf" sort of way.

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Overworld examines how one game or series establishes a unique sense of place.

I’ve never been to Japan. But having played the Yakuza franchise, I can say that…I still have no semblance of what it’s like to be in Japan. But I do have a strong sense of a picture of an urban Japan, of what the leaders at Amusement Vision feel the cities must be like for a haunted, violent criminal. It’s an affecting place, one the hangs an ever-present melancholy over the game.

It’s not so much a visual thing, though the graphics do combine technology-limited photorealism with broad splashes of the anime aesthetic for a look that is recognizably Japanese. It’s also not just about the meaningless street violence, of which there is plenty—that exists more for the sake of story progression, though it naturally colors the experience of the environment as well.

But it’s more about the little things, what Yakuza will and will not let you do as you interact with the world, that gives its urban Japan its lonely, oppressive feel. Let’s look at what you can do: you can eat, partially to heal up, but mostly for the experience of eating while facing an empty chair. You can drink, for seemingly no reason, again with experience (and a chatty bartender) being the sole incentive. You can play video games, in an arcade, alone. You can watch videos, some of them dirty, in a small room alone. You can pay a young lady to be your friend. You can be paid to be somebody else’s friend.

Now let’s look at what you pointedly can’t do: talk to most of the people on the streets. Of the ones that will talk to you, most will fight you; there’s no avoiding this, other than to avoid these people entirely.

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I have often had elaborate fantasies involving my Nintendo DS and professional massage therapy—who hasn’t right? And that’s okay, it’s fine, it’s not like that makes you some kind of weirdo or anything. But it’s not a dream that I expected to get the, shall we say, Nintendo Seal of Approval.

Apparently, I was wrong.

Quarter to Three forum poster Bahimiron has provided photographic evidence of the Nintendo DS spa, a seemingly officially endorsed traveling mall version of all your dreams come true. And it gets better: check out the descriptions of the various, ahem, products on display. If you can read it not in a deep throaty voice and not to imaginary porn music, you have more willpower than I do.

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When it comes to shooters I'm a pretty picky gamer. I don't like First-Person Shooters in general but I do like some Third-Person Shooters. Jak 2 and 3 along with the Ratchet and Clank series come to mind, though they are mostly shooter/adventure hybrids. The under appreciated game I'm featuring today is also a Third-Person Shooter, one that comes much closer to the feel of an FPS than the aforementioned games. Indeed, if you have played Metal Arms: Glitch in the System then pat yourself on the back. You are one of a handful of people that took a chance on an unknown title from an unknown studio and struck solid gold.

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If sharks learn to walk on land, the human race is going to have a problem. Similarly, if Mega Man's Hard Hats/Metools/Mettaurs start to think about effective attack patterns beyond duck-shoot-duck-shoot, our future robot childen are going to have problems.



I tried to come up with a song to express Mega Man's frustration here, but I haven't gotten beyond, "The Hat Came Back."

The Mega Man Robot Club
Mega Man 9 Bosses Look Like Mega Man 9 Bosses
My Last Mega Man 9 Post, I Swear

The Playstation 3's killer app, LittleBigPlanet, didn't sell a hojillion copies and save the pandas like it was supposed to. Quick! Everybody blame something!

The target that shall recieve my baleful glare is LittleBigPlanet's irrelevant commercial. "Oh shit you guys, you're going to have so much fun with this goddamn game. Fun! Yeah! Fuck yes, fun."

What, precisely, makes LittleBigPlanet a vacation on Free Cotton Candy and Sex Island? "Oh," says the commercial, "We're sure you'll figure it out."



Guess what! I didn't figure it out.

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Let’s just get this out of the way right now. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is freaking great. It is the best game that Naughty Dog has ever made and it is an absolute delight to play. The stories in games like Gears of War 2 are often forgiven for being like “b-movies”, but Uncharted actually is a b-movie, a bitchin’ pulp adventure full of likable stereotypes, absurd feats of physical prowess, physics defying escapes from death, and more one-liners than you can shake a number of different sticks at. Its character animation is astounding, its shooting tight, and its environments are linear but convincingly natural. It is awesome. So awesome. Bionic Commando awesome.

It didn’t sell that great though. It sold well, but not nearly what it deserved and there has been some question as to whether it would receive a sequel or go the way of Sony’s other first-party titles from 2007. (Rest in peace Lair and Heavenly Sword. May your makers learn their lessons. Particularly you, Ninja Theory. Next time you make a game that has Andy Serkis yelling about his “holy genitals”, you can expect a very stern phone call from the proper authorities.)

But, lo, Nathan Drake has returned. Behold the trailer delights.

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In honor of the first Half-Life's 10th anniversary, I've been thinking of replaying the original over my long-awaited Christmas break.  But now, I may hold off a bit longer after seeing the trailer for the Black Mesa: Source mod and nearly pooping myself.  I just gave you fair warning.



If you've been anticipating this mod as much as I have, then you'll know that seeing this much content is pretty big news. I'm no programming genius, but I imagine it takes quite a bit of work to remake an entire game--and a pretty big one, at that--in an entirely new and more powerful engine.  The Source engine may be beginning to show its age a bit, but there's no denying this is a major step up from Valve's previous attempt to give Half-Life a minor graphical upgrade with their own Half-Life: Source.  For now, this entire production is fan-made and free, but it wouldn't be too strange for Valve to pull another Willy Wonka (as they did with the Portal team) and invite the Black Mesa: Source folks onto their team.  As of now, this thing legitimately looks like it's worth money.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go chug a bottle of NyQuil. When I wake up months from now, I should be greeted by both Black Mesa: Source and the Policenauts fan translation. Cheers!  (Tell my friends and family it was an accident.)

Related Links:

Now At Your Local Dollar Store: Half-Life
Entitled PC Gamers Whine about Rights
GOG is Great

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To the internet-list aficionado, the end of the calendar year is the time of greatest bounty. You like lists, chances are you like pop culture, and nothing gets the pop junkie going like ranking all the crap that came out in the past twelve months. Top ten movies, top ten books, top ten celebrity nip-slips, top ten Billy Mays products, and, yeah, top ten games of the year. We are no stranger to the list here at 61FPS, as you well know from reading our scintillating, thought provoking top tens, and you can imagine how we’re gearing up to deliver all sorts of meaningless judgments on the year known broadly as 2008 (4706, 4705, or 4645 to the Chinese. They seem to be confused.) Over the past few weeks, Derrick and I have had a number of conversations about our mutual contenders, but these dialogues have always ended in a conundrum: what counts as a videogame? Derrick’s smitten with Wii Fit, but is it anything more than a Nintendo-upped Sweatin’ to the Oldies that comes with a snazzy scale? We’re both fans of the Korg DS-10, but, even though you play it on a videogame system, it is an actual musical instrument, not a new sequel-ready game franchise. Does an instrument go on a top ten games list?

My personal definition of a videogame has been a work of interactive digital media wherein you follow a set of rules to achieve a goal. Wii Fit, Korg DS-10, and the many other games like them belong in the broader videogame discussion at this point and this is making me re-evaluate just what a game is.

Leave it to Shigeru Miyamoto to lay down the single best definition of videogame I’ve heard to date.

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I spent the Thanksgiving holiday not shopping, not overeating, not doing much of anything outside of that most traditional holiday pursuit: catching up with family. Not the extended fam, just the nuclear, and even then we weren’t all around. Sometimes work and obligation gets in the way and not everyone can make it home, just the way it goes. It was just me and the parents. And Chrono Trigger, obviously. A true homecoming, really; early winter playthroughs of Chrono Trigger have been, for me, as much a tradition as seeing loved ones during the season but I’d fallen out of rhythm over the past three years. Excited as I was to play the game again, I was going in with some trepidation. Not over the two new dungeons, the new ending, or the re-written dialogue. (The script, by the way, saw far more significant changes than was previously reported. The re-write isn’t bad by any means, but some of the charm of Ted Woolsey’s original is lost.) No, I was worried about the incorporation of the PS1 version’s animated cutscenes. I skipped the earlier re-release because the thought of slowdown in Chrono Trigger is nauseating, but getting to avoid the cutscenes was an added bonus. Nothing against the anime stuff, it’s fine that it exists, but the game’s story simply doesn’t need those scenes. Not to mention how they break the game’s seamless presentation.

So it was a nice surprise when I saw this screen.

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A while back, I blogged about how my personal problems with Sonic the Hedgehog were keeping me from enjoying his supposedly "good" games.  I didn't have time to play much over my admittedly short and action-packed Thanksgiving break, but I was able to test out my Sonic Hatred Hypothesis on what's supposed to be one of the best installments the series has seen in years: Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood.  This game held quite a bit of promise for the simple reason that it was an RPG that Sonic Team didn't touch with their dirty, dirty hands.  And 1UP.com's review even gave it an A!

But still, that fundamental hatred for Sonic and His Shitty Friends goes a long, looong way.

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That most wonderful time of the year is here, my lo-fi friends! The annual Blip Festival is almost upon us! In just three scant days, chiptune artists and afficianados from around the world will decend upon New York City as they have for the past two years and celebrate all that is good and futzwithable about video game hardware reappropriated for video and audio bliss. I'm excited. Can you tell I'm excited?

Four nights of live music performances (I know, it's hard to qualify them as "live" when most of the music is reliant on preprogrammed patterns on game cards, but it's still great), video shows, workshops and general camaraderie. To get you prepped for the rockin', we're here to shed some light on some of what you can expect from this year's performances.

First up is the man known as noteNdo, who's been with Blip Festival from the very beginning.

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I love my morning feed of press releases as much as the next guy (read: not very much, but at least it’s not as depressing as real news), but this morning I seriously considered never, ever looking at it again. And not because it was boring, because that I can take. No, this morning it was actually cruel to me.

The release in question had a title that contained the words “New Online Game – Dungeon Keeper Online.” In a perfect world that phrase would be...well, less redundant, but also sacrosanct, the sort of words that would come down a mountain embossed in a pillar of bronze. The ensuing party would last for days.

But just before popping the champagne, it occurred to me to actually, you know, read the release. And, of course, this was not the return of Peter Molyneux’s beloved good-to-be-bad strategy game that left me cackling into the wee hours of 1997. This despite its name, and despite "themes, characters and other game content" that will be coming from that game. No, this Dungeon Keeper is by NetDragon, a company you’ve never heard of because it primarily makes those inscrutable grindfest MMOs for Asia. Oh, and by the way, Asia is the only place you’ll be able to play Dungeon Keeper Online.

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I was pretty much ready to leave this alone after its brief mention last week, but then the internet had to go and spark my curiosity. MTV Multiplayer's Stephen Totilo wrote last week that Nintendo of America's executive vice president of sales and marketing Cammie Dunaway told him that the Nintendo logo had been gray in America for "a couple of years."

Now, maybe it's just my past in high school model congress and an inherent desire to prove people wrong, but this inspired me to do some research. Thankfully, I didn't have to go much farther than my game shelf. The most recent games in my collection to feature the classic red Nintendo logo are August 2007's Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for Wii and and October 2007's Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol and The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for the DS, but a quick search on several popular online retailers' websites confirmed that the red logo was featured as late on North American packaging as November 11th, 2007's Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for Wii and November 19th, 2007's Mario Party DS.

That's not "a couple of years." That's one year, almost exactly, from when Ms. Dunaway's statement was made.

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What are you thankful for this year? If your answer isn't "Mega Man 9" and "Bitchin' guitars," I don't want to talk to you anymore.

At this point in your life, you've no doubt heard Mega Man 2's "Doctor Wily Stage One" remixed on every instrument from the jew's harp to some dog's armpit. It's high time we start running Mega Man 9's fantastic soundtrack into the ground. Let this Freddie fellow lead the revolution with this lovely seven minute compilation/remix of every tune in the game.

Be wary of last boss spoilers if you're like me and haven't bested Wily yet. Ugh, the shame.



Related Links:

The Mega Man Robot Club
Mega Man 9 Bosses Look Like Mega Man Bosses
For Love of the Game: Rockman 7 FC

This is an adequate time to be a Street Fighter fan. Thanks to the the launch of Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix and Street Fighter IV on the horizon, we have been given a reason to keep breathing throughout the day.

Even better, we can go to our local comic retailer and exchange tuppence and a ha'penny for the very competent Street Fighter comic books by Udon. Purists can even help themselves to translated Street Fighter manga, full of bristling hairdos and hoarse oaths.

Ah, but life wasn't always so beautiful. There was a time when developers were scared to let US-bound video games and Japanese culture touch each other, so American comic book companies were commissioned to break out their Crayolas and scribble some cash-in magic. Bad things happened, Malibu's Street Fighter comic being among the worst.

Fans of The Simpsons might recall Marge Simpson's declaration that everything must be paired up: a woman for every man, a salt shaker for every pepper shaker and a dog for every cat. Malibu noticed that in the Street Fighter games, Chun Li wasn't paired with a man and they decided that must change immediately. So we have golden flashbacks where Ryu and Chun Li recall the love and laughter of their salad days. Of course, the narrative outside of the flashbacks are serious business. Things have changed, harumph harumph. Times are darker.

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I recently gave up on Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World a scant four hours into my experience for one reason alone: the game was literally stabbing me in the brain with its narrative.  It's not that DotNW's story was exceptionally bad; actually, it was delightfully mediocre, which is really all I can ask for from a JRPG these days.  The biggest problem, you see, is that DotNW's stopped to show me its accursed story about every 5 seconds, like an attention-starved child waving a macaroni art project in my face.

"Yes, I see. Very nice. Daddy's trying to play his game now."

Listen up, JRPG developers: the stories you're trying to tell?  They aren't necessarily worth telling.  In fact, I can really only name two RPGs in the past decade that've had stories which ranked far above "serviceable:"  Final Fantasy XII, and Mother 3--note that the latter of these two was written by an actual writer.  I may come off as kind of snobbish with this post, though I think that just comes with age; there was a point in my life when I thought RPG plots were totally tubular, but that was back when I was in high school.  Turning into a cranky old man has given me the benefit of perspective; through experiencing a number of excellent narratives (across various media), I've obtained standards that I can't quite drop.  (Also, I need some way to justify my expensive BA.)

The problem of lousy narrative is a pretty big hurdle for JRPG developers, but I've taken the liberty of coming up with some easy-to-follow and unsolicited solutions.

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Above is a video of de_vangogh, a custom Counter-Strike level made by famed CS mapmaker Nipper. It’s a rather interesting bit of work—look at the way the under-saturated, oil paint-like textures complement the use of Starry Night as a skybox. Crazy!

Don’t misunderstand me; I don’t want to play Counter-Strike in a Van Gogh painting, because that doesn’t make any sense. I’m not even really saying that I want games to approach visual styles more vigorously, because all evidence says that things are getting better and better in that department. But looking at this it occurs to me that there aren’t any games that really look like this, which reminds me that despite all of the jumps in graphical fidelity, we still haven’t seen everything yet.

After playing about a half-dozen gritty photo-real games in a row, it’s nice to have reassurances like this, and to then go look the comic book stylings of Super Turbo HD Remix or the sketch anime of Valkyria Chronicles to have it further reinforced.

Where are the post-impressionist games? They’re coming, you can count on it. In the meantime, I’m going to sit here and dream one of my favorite dreams—that Square Enix finally gets around to remaking Final Fantasy VI in the painterly style of Yoshitaka Amano's concept art (there's a great example after the jump), with its bleak beauty and hand-drawn artifice the perfect foil to that game’s story of fragility and loss.

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Okay, okay; I know I just wrote a 1500-word feature on this subject, but I wouldn't be an unscrupulous freelance writer if I didn't milk an idea until it was crying, chapped, and swollen.  Please see my 9000 posts about Mother 3 for more on this.

So now that my credibility has safely been disposed of, it's time to move onto more important topics: namely, Thanksgiving. For nearly all of us, this holiday signifies a wanted or unwanted family reunion; and with this gathering comes sitting around for extended periods of time while stuffed full of food. Obviously, this situation is perfect for the playing of video games. We are fortunate that the industry is kind enough to schedule their most important releases of the year around this period of maximum immobility.

Since the purpose of this post is to share our Thanksgiving-related gaming memories (as if you couldn't tell), I'm going to go ahead and start with my own.  Thanksgiving of 2004 marked two memorable events: the recent release of Metal Gear Solid 3, and also one of my brief flirtations with food poisoning--in this case, it was a post-Thanksgiving Taco Bell menu item.  Yes, I was young and stupid.

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We here in the United States celebrate our nation's Thanksgiving tomorrow, one of the great national holidays where just about every office is closed as we gather with family and friends to eat, drink, be merry, and prepare ourselves for the brutal holiday shopping season that starts the very next day. Sony, who usually update their Playstation Store on Thursdays, saw fit to treat us to this week's updates a couple of days early to save us the trouble of fighting tryptophan-induced grogginess, and oh the treats they have in store!

First, of course, is the weekly free costume for LittleBigPlanet's Sackboy, a turkeyface. Hilarious, yes? No? Hmm, well maybe these next few items will give you something to be thankful for...

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