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??

—————
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.

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.