… Chad Wardenn! Straight from the suburbs, baby, he’s slightly darker skinned than most of the other people at his school, so show the man’s ghettofabulous speech patterns some respeck. Fairly warned says I: he curses so frequently, even I am slightly offended, and I’m basically Caligula with bigger tits.

Some choice quotes:

"Everyone knows that girls can’t do sh*t except suck d***." – on Final Fantasy XII-2 (It’s funny because it’s true!)

"True games have some fiddy cent in the background. Some Lil’ John. Not f*ckin’ p***y ass Mad World." – on Tears for Fears comeback’s marketing

"Halo 3. Know what I’m sayin? They better rename that shit to GAYLO 3." – on how gay people play Halo

"Mexican ass n**** that just jumped over the border to fix people’s toilets." – in regards to Mario, of the Mario Bros. "Hello, ma’am, I’m here to clean your pipes, of piranha plants.

Now that I’m somewhere beautiful, I often watch the sunrise and ponder philosophy. What will be left of me and my impact on society in twenty years? Will my generation be looked upon with admiration and nostalgia for having pioneered various social issues and having physically grappled with some of the most oppressive societies known to history? Or will it be looked at as a bunch of fucktards who catapulted Will & Grace to mass popularity and mostly died for no reason in the middle east? Well, thankfully, we now have "It’s Always Sunny" on FX, and a completely ineffective legislative branch stuck kneep deep in a quagmire of patriotism questioning mung, so the latter is, thankfully, more unlikely. Then again, there’s no stopping the Jack train.

There are multiple marks against we children of the eighties. Limp Bizkit. Myspace. The Clinton impeachment. The emo movement. Europe, the continent. But perhaps our gravest sin is the platitude of industrial pop bands who rhymed the word "school" and "fool" in the lyrics. I think 1 Plus 1 is the top offender with their cover of Joan Jett’s poignant crowing of "Hello, Daddy/Hello, Mom/I’m a ch-ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb!" The bastardization of a song that many of us were conceived to is absolutely unacceptable.

The eighties and nineties also gave rise to stand up comedy, especially that which analyzed the differences between black people and white people. This forged the way for the sitcom era, some good, some bad, some awesome, but mostly horrible. I personally apologize for being partly responsible. When I outgrew Nickelodeon, I watched shitty HBO stand up specials re-airing on Comedy Central in a heavily censored form.

There are some nice things we’ve done, mostly in making the internet a big deal. But still, sitting on the side of a mountain, watching the sun rise over Glacier National Park, I must defiantly throw down my breakfast beer and wonder what the future brings. Because if eep op orp ah ah doesn’t mean shit soon, the cartoons have been lying to us all along.

Mercedes. At any cost.

The NPD Group just released their numbers for August, and its probably the most interesting month in the past two years. My friends at work and I were talking about this quick blurb of information for hours yesterday:

Looking at it like this is confusing as Hell. For example, the first thing I thought after coming across the NPD’s numbers a few years ago: are there really 40 million people still playing their Playstation 2? Well, no, absolutely not. That’s the total number of consoles sold since the PS2 came out seven years ago. Most gamers have either traded their systems in to a store, let their consoles break and go without repair, packed it into the garage to collect dust, or gave it to a friend. The PS2 is still selling well because now that it’s run its course, it and its games are all cheap as Hell to buy, and the underclass around the world can now afford it.

That’s what’s fun about these numbers every month. If you break them down and look at what spurred what, as compared to the NPD Group’s numbers for July, things make more sense. The Wii, for example, is just an amazing juggernaut of success. Its numbers improve every month, seemingly for no reason. A new Metroid first person shooter came out last month, but that alone didn’t sell 400,000 consoles, so what did? Brand identity? Having a reputation for family friendly, interactive games that get your butt up off the couch? Or maybe just word of mouth? No matter what it was, its pretty indisputable that Nintendo has won the console war for the next several years, and perhaps Sony’s strategy of building an expensive, electronics fortress wasn’t such a great idea, while Microsoft’s strategy of sticking close to the hardcore fanbase really limited their audience and interest in their system.

Speaking of my favorite console, the 360’s numbers jumped 100,000 units this month. Ha-ooh! Ha-ooh! Ha-ooh!

It’s the console that’s been out for two years, so all the newness hype is pretty much dead. Yet its had sort of an easy time batting the PS3 down in the numbers department. For July, industry analyst Michael Pachter predicted the PS3 would outsell the X-Box 360 by 100,000 units due to a $100 price drop for one of Sony’s hardware models, but without a system selling game coming out with that price drop, and the already high $600 price point to come down from, the 360 still beat the PS3 by 30,000 units, despite no change in the Microsoft strategy. In the last month, the 360 had just a $50 price drop, bringing their core system down to about $250, and combined with games like Bioshock and a few other top tier titles, the numbers jumped over 100,000 units for August.

I’d say that the consoles are pretty much stuck where they are. The Wii won, the 360 is going to hold steady in second place, and the PS3 is going to die a slow, expensive death. Metal Gear Solid 4, the most expensive videogame ever made with a budget somewhere over or near $100,000,000, is coming out exclusively for the PS3 sometime next year. That’s not good news for Hideo Kojima – to make his studio’s money back on the game, they need to sell a copy to every PS3 owner, twice. Considering that the largest market for his franchise is in America, and the greatest density of PS3s is in Japan, I’d say he’s going to be screwed.

To get to the top of the pile, you need to pick two of these: Be the first on the market, be the best, be the cheapest. Nintendo went for the cheapest, Sony went for the best, and Microsoft went for being the first on the market. The problem for Sony is that, while who is the cheapest and who was the first is indisputable, whoo is the best is highly debatable. Public perception obviously says that the Nintendo Wii is the best console, despite far less powerful hardware. Which just goes to prove, in business, it’s not what’s inside that matters, it’s how people see you.

Just as I was getting completely disgusted with Japanese games, I got a one two punch from two titles from the land of Hattori Hanzo swords. Project Sylpheed, the space combat game I wrote about earlier, was a beautiful and challenging (STUPIDLY DIFFICULT) experience, and I really liked it. What I liked even more:

Earth Defense Force 2017. Compared to most modern games, EDF’17 is a Sci Fi channel original movie, but it captures That Old Feeling. It doesn’t need a moving plot or amazing graphics. Its a budget title and its fun to play – and that’s good enough. As a lone soldier, you fight giant ants, giant red ants, giant spiders, giant robots, flying giant robots, giant robot dinosaurs, giant robot dinosaurs with laser canons for arms, and huge giant space ships. It’s like Starship Troopers (the movie) snuck up on Independence Day and butt raped it, then Independence Day had a miraculous butt baby who it raised with its life partner, Godzilla, then they sold the baby to H.G. Wells, who kept it in a cage for days at a time, starving it, and only released it to kill and devour ninjas.

Earth Defense Force 2017. Its a pretty good game.

My only criticism is that sometimes there’s too much on the screen. The enemies tend to bleed or explode, and its hard to see past all the guts and bombs going off constantly. This also causes a lot of slow down when things are going particularly well, and the game just froze up and died on me on the last stage because of this. I can forgive this occurence because there were about two hundred flying spaceships coming straight for me while my friends were launching rockets at them behind me and an army of about five hundred giant ants were charging towards me like something out of Samurai Jack.

I’ll be in my bunk.

Lair for the PS3 is unplayable, and while multiplayer enthusiasts are going crazy over Warhawk, people who aren’t interested in that sort of play aren’t buying the game. The 360’s Two Worlds is a half decent game with a half decent premise, but it has been crippled by a terrible english translation from the original finnish, a near total lack of explanation of gameplay, and poor camera controls. Stranglehold, a cross platform release, is a lot of fun to play, but the experience is too short to pay $60 for. I’m going through Blue Dragon right now, the X-Box 360’s number one selling title in Japan, and I’ve already come to the conclusion that this game absolutely does not appeal to western gamers who weren’t Japedophiles to begin with. Except for Bioshock, August and September were rough months for The Industry.

Also somewhat fresh out of Japan, Project Sylpheed, a really fun space combat game in the same vein as the classic X-Wing and TIE Fighter titles that borrows heavily from Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, while mixing in the same tired old Japanese political issues that are in every other form of exported Japanese media (WMDs are bad, OK, I get it, already). Its a really beautiful game, offers a great presentation and upgrade system, and most importantly, again, its fun to play.

I did expect Lair to fail, so that doesn’t bother me so much. The biggest disappointment for me, personally, was Two Worlds. The voice acting is so groan inducing, I just can’t play this game. You’ll read other reviews complaining about it, but really, you don’t catch the weight of how terrible it is until you experience it for yourself. Hearing your character say, in the voice of a horrible actor, "Maychance," in a very flippant way, just may cause you to grind every tooth in your mouth into a fine white powder with just one single whip of the lower jaw. I can forgive the game its odd difficulty curve and frame rate issues, but I refuse to get trapped in a Frederick County Community College production of O-edipus for 100 hours. Don’t buy this game.

WARNING, graphic and messed up images to follow, but I can’t help but want to share them. You have been warned.

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About a year and a half ago, I sent my resume and some samples of photography and photoshop work to every corner of the Earth. Its a fairly competitive field, so the jobs only trickled in here and there, but referrals were really great for business and getting my name out there. Every few weeks, I still get a job to do some touch ups for wedding photographs or a model’s headshots. The most twisted job I’ve had so far was just some unethical photojournalism – blurring out less than politically correct picket signs so that a local paper could give the gathering a positive spin. Its tedious work to make things like that look natural, because altering a photograph is fairly obvious to an eye that is looking for it. This morning, I opened up my gmail and got a few surprise photographs and a request.

My first thought: "Who would harpoon a bitch?"

Hmmmm… That woman has some sizable biceps…

Yep. That’s how they’re gonna find me some day. Oh, well. I scrolled down a bit and read:

"hello
i am wondering if you make this look more natural, i am a transvestite and can not afford a female model to pose for my fetihs photography so i have to use myself and i am wondering if you can help me out, i was referred to by (Client’s name whose 1991 gay wedding photos I removed red eye from) and i am willing to pay a rate similar to what he did, if i like your work i have over eighty galleries for you to continue on for my website what do you think??

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Thanks and have a great day!
(Dude’s name), Manager in Charge of Personnel and Recruitment
Ocean City, MD"

While I don’t want to disclose his (her?) identity, his e-mail address was from walmart.com.

Oh, Lordy, the day is starting off right when I get an offer to go halvsies on a faux female faux murder porn website. Mom would be so proud.