I haven’t written about indie music in quite a while, and all the video game news commentary is making me kind of bored when reading my own blog. There was a time when this thing was a perfect representation of my ego, where I could write about something that pissed me off at 4 AM, forget about it while I slept until noon. When I woke up from those sessions, I’d shake off my hangover, and laugh at whatever the Hell 4 AM me was talking about. Now 4 AM me bores me.

While Elroy Jetson wearing a swastika tattoo on his boy tit and the fat chick doing the splits is a good start to bringing things back around, I still need to bump all this Microsoft fanboy crap off the page. Partly because the PS3 and Wii are both great systems, which I don’t feel like giving equal time to, but also because I’m bored with gaming news’ crusty and beefy ass. So lets get this train back on track to Whoville, shall we?

To me, music is a great way to tell where a generations’ mind is. Right now, youth music directly contradicts the attitudes of doom and gloom coming from yesterday’s heavy hitters, such as Green Day (God rest their souls at the bottom of Lake Springfield). Our superheroes are Deadpool, Flash and Hugh Jackman, whereas the early nineties grunge movement had the Crow, the Darkness and Robert Smith. I’d say we’re not so much concerned about war and genocide, or poverty and the repercussions thereof, so much as tomorrow’s US Americans really just want to alternate between having sex and watching cartoons forever. Hell, sometimes we watch cartoons have sex.

In other words, half hearted political activist films like Biodome shall not come of generation Y, unless Loose Change counts. This is a time for the Zuckers and Wayans and Brooks of the world to thrive.

First off is a band from my old stomping grounds, the 92630 area code. Young, beautiful and boasting a hip and groovy noise that sounds more garage than studio, its:

The Broken Remotes. Their lyrics are emotional nonsense put together to be catchy and mock melodramatic at the same time. Most of their tracks tend to be up beat crowd pleasers, made to be jammed to either in the privacy of the car, or the safety and anonymity of a live crowd of my fellow sexy/sweaty twenty somethings. These kids are good times, check them out.

On the flipside of all that great indie stuff, here’s what I listen to when I’m doing something nefarious:

Dr. Steel. I really haven’t done a lot of background on who the Hell this is, but the theme seems to be some weird mix of electronic rock/steam-punk child nostalgia. There’s no one sound in his music that is completely intelligible, and it often floats back and forth completely schizophrenically between speed metal and elegantly remixed music box quality audio. All I know for sure? The sonuvabitch does a mean Inspector Gadget remix.

Despite all this delicious insanity and upbeat indie pop, once in a while, I just need to throw a bone to those idiotic angry assholes of the 70s and 80s who would be honored to be called idiotic angry assholes.

I present to you 2004’s Punk Rock Orchestra. It was largely ignored at the time of its release because people realized punk sucked twenty years ago, and only die hard Sex Pistols fans gave enough of a crap to buy it, making it one of the only bombs the music industry has ever known as they didn’t make enough money back to cover the cost of hiring an orchestra. However, perhaps it was just before its time, as this is slowly growing in popularity thanks to the IM and torrent culture. Personal favorite song on the CD: Schwarzenegger Uber Alles by the Dead Kennedys. Its always fun to listen to skinheads vent pure emotion backed up by a full church choir and classical strings section, no matter what the message was supposed to be before lyrics like "his world is run by robot police/they hunt latinos and P.O.P.’s."

So, there we go. I think that, since my relationship with the Mouse is safely at an end for now, I’m gonna bring back the scary guy again. I’ll probably keep the Dharma Bum moniker, since I missed it, but its just a shame to let a beautiful blog format go unused. And I think it fits me, or at least one of my personalities.

I’ve often wondered to myself, "Self, how can a Village People song be gayed up? Further, I mean." Well, Finland figured it out, right after their dance lessons.

Professor Farnsworth wrote:

While both versions of Bioshock are great, the PC version features exactly all of the problems that drove me towards console gaming. Constant crashes, your dreaded DRM issues, its difficult and time consuming to install, it wasn’t optimized for all operating systems and graphics cards… The list goes on, just do a search for Bioshock on Digg to see the full list of grievances.

PC gamers are kind of used to running into issues like that and seem to have the patience of a Buddha in dealing with all of it, but having played both versions (for free!), I’d definitely say go for the 360 version if you’re going to buy the console anyway. In fact, no matter what game it is, if its cross platform for the PC and consoles, I’d almost always go with the console version. Why? That would be the triple D’s:

Developer tools, developer tools, developer tools.

When a game developer is creating a game for the PC, they have to take into consideration that no two gaming rigs are going to be exactly alike. All of our computer have different graphics cards capable of different tool tricks, different sound drivers, different processors with various amounts of power and perceived power, different amounts of hard drive space, different amounts of physical memory or RAM, different operating systems, different drivers – the list goes on and on and on.

Add into the fact that turning a profit on PC games is very difficult due to the ease of software piracy, and the low install base of people who are dedicated PC gamers, and its understandable why most companies don’t take the time to make sure their game is going to be okay running just as well on a rig that has, say, Windows Vista with dual celeron processors and a nVidia 700 graphics card, as it will on, say, a rig that has Windows XP with a single 3.5 GHZ intel processor with a Voodoo Xtreme graphics card, or, God help us all, any kind of system that runs fricking Linux with a Windows emulator. The time invested is not worth the financial return, so, cross platform games that end up on PCs don’t turn out as well as games built exclusively for them – not that exclusive PC titles are all roses, either, as the above problems plague them, too, but when a game turns up on consoles and PCs, they’re usually limited in content to the best the console is capable of producing, not what computers are capable of.

Consoles don’t have these issues because they’re all identical. When you buy a PS3 or a Wii or a 360, you’re buying a gaming rig that not only doesn’t pose the above challenges to game developers, but they come with personalized toolkits to make developing for the machines easier. Microsoft did this better than Sony or Nintendo this console cycle because their console is essentially a pack of developer tools stemming from Direct X, but game makers still get by very nicely on Sony and Nintendo’s packs since, again, its still easier to develop for just one system with one set of specifications than it is for the multitude and variety of personal computers floating around out there.

The downside to owning a console instead of a gaming rig is that the console can only go so far. The 360 and the Wii are on five year cycles, the PS3 is hoping to stick around for about eight – and then you have to buy another console if you want to get in on the latest and greatest that the world has to offer in terms of videogame content. That’s between $300 and $600 every 5-8 years just on something that resembles a large brick that has to sit next to your television. A smart shopper can probably keep a gaming rig up to date for far less money, but not every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants to pop in for a game of Unreal 3 is going to memorize tomes of PC World Magazine just to stay up to date on what kind of disc format is the future of everything forever until next week, when something better is announced. As anyone who has ever seen an ITT Tech commercial knows, computer technology is a constantly shifting industry, and while its almost possible to constantly stay on the forward cusp, investing in a console keeps you frozen in time.

With the fine tuning of the console controller over the past decade, I don’t think that there’s a lot of room left to debate whether the mouse and keyboard is better than a controller. I personally think it depends on what you’re used to, and how well the game developer has implemented and balanced their own controls. Shadowrun, a multiplayer shooter where people on PC can play against people on the 360, has pretty much proven that the field is fairly even these days.

To sum up the pros and cons, in my humble opinion:

Consoles:
+ Games are more stable and play more smoothly
– Games will never look much better than they did at the start of the console’s cycle

PC:
+ Excellent graphics, developers have more freedom to test the boundaries of their skills and your PC
– Games often come loaded with glitches due to difficult development cycle

Personally, I prefer to pick up and go. I’d rather play a game that works every time that I play it than one that superheats my disc drive and melts my computer.

But there we go, I’ve now expressed my feelings on the age old debate of consoles versus personal gaming computers. I am now complete.

In the words of Captain Murphy of Sealab, "And there go my nipples again." The format war seems like its heading towards a big game over, depending on how quickly this technology can spread and how easy it is to produce.

To put things in perspective of how big a deal this is, 1000 gigabytes is enough storage space to hold an audio recording of every conversation you’ll ever have in your life four times – and Disney’s PhotoPass servers, which hold literally hundreds of millions of high quality digital photographs from theme parks, stores and hotels from all over the world, hold only four terabytes.

The future is only two or three years away.

Because you rented Men Alone 2: The KY Connnection.

You see this?

That means "Not Welcome."

New Doritos marketing campaign.

Life is so damn good.

Sword fighting on Mt. Vesuvius while it blows Pompeii to Hell, huge Braveheart-like battles with tubby Scottish dudes waving swords the size of a large child, beheading the crap out of feudal Japan, having fierce melee combat in rooms full of hanging stuff (chains, beef carcasses, electrical wiring)… The Highlander franchise continues to be awesome for people who hated I <3 Huckabees.

It shouldn’t be hard getting the franchise staples involved in this – Adrian Paul hasn’t eaten in three weeks, and Christopher Lambert cries himself to sleep every night ever since he found out that he settled for Rhona Mitra when he could’ve had Angelina Jolie in his Beowulf movie. What would probably move about fifty thousand more copies of this game? Sean. Filking. Connery. The old man is retired, but he put in a weekend doing voice work for From Russia With Love about two years ago, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind resurrecting Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez one last time if he could buy a nice big bottle of very old Scotch with the paycheck.

And come on, he can’t go out on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

I completed Bioshock last night, and I’ve got to say, that, despite all the high scores its getting in magazines and on well respected websites, and all the hype that had built up behind it over the past year… I still wasn’t ready for how amazing this game is, and how it forces you to become emotionally invested in it. It isn’t a good game because it has realistic water effects or a deep and interesting combat system, but because, like a great book or a classic film, it forces you to examine your own humanity, and how fragile it is.

There are many nuanced examples of how the game does this, but the most glaring occurs when you capture a little sister. You’re given the choice of destroying her, or saving her. Its hard to explain how having a six year old girl in your arms and her life in your hands makes you feel, knowing that you can prove yourself a monster or a man with a touch of a button. This single aspect of the game is as manipulative as it is genius, and sets the tone for every encounter and interaction I had in Rapture.

The poor deranged souls infesting the under water city have lost their minds, their beauty, their everything. Killing them is merciful, and atones for all their sins, which in many ways, they aren’t even responsible for. They were mothers, businessmen, dancers, actors, scientists, doctors – the best and the brightest the world had to offer. The entire society’s addiction to what they thought was a harmless drug that granted them instant personal happiness turned them all into murderous, hideous psychopaths. Despite all the horrors that occurred at their hands against each other, the game still stirs sympathy for these citizens of a godless Eden. They were all good and noble humans who became slaves to their body chemistry, not monsters driven to destroy without purpose.

Even the game’s main antagonist, Andrew Ryan, proves himself a hero. At first seeming like a paranoid objectivist spook, his genius becomes more and more apparent as the game goes on, and his honorable intentions and magnificent accomplishments render him even more heroic than the character you play. His claims that the culture he built around Ayn Rand’s writings on the Virtue of Selfishness failed due to the society’s weakest members. This seems arrogant at the time, but, two thirds of the way through the game, you may come to agree with him, and perhaps even admire his heroism more than his lack of tact.

Overall, Bioshock is a brilliant and beautiful game. It is a sweeping and moving experience throughout, and is never, ever tedious or boring.

PERCHIWAHDSISABA ABBAHAHAHAAA?! WTF? GRUBMASHAERDSTER! AGAHDSADSFJ! WOTSODAWOTOTDOWOAH?!!!!!

UNICORN NEEDED!

Two games are coming out next week for the PS3 that have had a little trouble getting off the ground, despite being aerial combat simulators. Both of them were supposed to be ready in 2006, both of them have had huge cuts made to their staff, and both have been hyped to heights that, unfortunately, they can’t possibly reach. The killing blow for either of them becoming a break out hit?

They’re essentially the same game.

With Madden NFL 08 surrounded by controversy due to EA working harder on the 360 version than the PS3 version, August has been a very slow month for Sony. Fortunately, two of its biggest games are going to arrive at the ass end of the month, Lair and Warhawk.

Way back in the day, before the PS3 launch and slightly after I figured out people would pay me for bitching about videogames, our very own Joe Crowe suggested that I review Lair. It was, at the time, expected to be a launch title. It seemed like a really cool concept for a videogame, and he’d liked the early screen shots.

You are a dragon rider, fighting for your nation against a horde of rebels and barbaric indiginous people, raining down fire and razor sharp talons on the ground and air forces of your enemies. As time goes on, the main character feels his heart strings being plucked, and calls his allegiance into question.

Due to any number of mystery factors, the game was delayed nearly a year.

Factor 5, the developer, was previously famous for doing a lot of Star Wars themed ship to ship combat games for the Nintendo 64 and GameCube, and those games were no doubt pushing the boundaries of what could be included in a game for those systems considering their capabilities. They defected from Nintendo to Sony, citing that they were very disappointed that Nintendo didn’t turn up the notch on the processor and graphics power of the Wii.

They may now be cursing themselves for making the move. It is speculated, and I stress speculated, that the difficulty in programming for Sony’s console is what delayed Lair so heavily, as it was supposed to be a killer app (a game released during a console’s initial launch specifically to help boost hardware AND software sales, a la Halo or a new Mario game). If this is true, its very unfortunate, both for Sony and for Factor 5.

While Lair’s development cycle was merely unfortunate, Warhawk is something of a Greek tragedy. The original Warhawk came out nearly a decade ago for the original Playstation, and inspired a special controller that used both motion sensitive controls and had a rumble feature. While the motion sensitive controls are now standard, the rumble feature has been removed from the PS3’s controller schematic to cut costs on production. This is a very minor annoyance when you take into consideration that, while Lair will have a somewhat deep storyline, Warhawk is only multiplayer.

Last year, a full single player campaign was finished and ready to be implemented into the game. The developer, Incognito, later released a quiet trickle of information that they had cut the single player campaign out completely, and were scrapping development. Whether this was the fault of the developer or the fault of, again, developing for Sony’s console, was never really found. Just a bunch of vague, diplomatic answers that implicated no one.

Eventually, the Sony community got their torches and pitchforks, prompting Incognito to admit that the game was moving towards an exclusively multiplayer type of play. This was either a bold or desperate move, as no exclusively multiplayer game has ever sold well on a console – unless it was a fighting game like Tekken.

Rumors started flying left and right about the nature of Warhawk. There was much rejoicing when a Digg article implicated that Warhawk would be a Playstation Store exclusive, meaning there would be no disc to buy or worry about, you’d simply download the game onto your console’s hard drive. This also meant that the game couldn’t be more than $20, which would be reasonable considering the lack of single player. This later proved to be false, and fans were disappointed to learn that they, indeed, would be buying an entire $60 disc.

So, on the 28th, we have a game about a flying dragon roasting enemies from high above and a game about an experimental jet fighter bombing enemies from high above. To add insult to their injuries, their controls are exactly the same. Pitch and yaw are managed by tilting the control, while firing and activating special events are held on the buttons.

These two companies could not possibly have chosen a worse month to come out with their long delayed games, as they’re now competing with eachother, instead of the 360 titles. I hope I’m proven wrong because I really respect both developers, but I think that Warhawk is going to completely flop due to steadily waning interest since the single player campaign was cut, and Lair will have only modest success, not worthy of the effort Factor 5 had to put into the game. The relatively small PS3 install base may also hurt.

A year long delay is absolutely nothing to sneeze at in terms of production costs, and positive press is really hard to keep a hold of in the gaming industry considering all the yellow journalism. It will be very interesting keeping an eye on the numbers, since, regardless of the games’ quality, PS3 owners don’t really have anything else to buy this month. Not only that, I could be completely wrong about both titles simply because Sony fanboys have been waiting for these games so long, they committed to buying them last November.

I wish all the best for Factor 5 and Incognito. They certainly put their time in and deserve credit for all their hard work, whether or not it would have been easier working on other consoles.