Danger Dance

At some point during a conversation I was having with a thirty-something father of two, this was said:

You know that guy who writes all those games, Tom Clancy? Man! That guy must be rich.

Apparently, the gentleman hadn’t heard that Tom Clancy actually writes novels and did not, in fact, program Splinter Cell. He was so sure of himself, if I hadn’t known any better I might have believed him. Luckily, I’m not a barely functional retard, a fact that has proven to be fairly useful in my day-to-day life. One thing my brain can do that maybe our very own Tard Clancy couldn’t is realize that putting a fork in an electrical socket is not a good idea, at least after the third or fourth time. However, he is a far bigger man than I am, so he could probably handled the voltage surging through his body, where as I would instantaneously disintegrate. His shear size also explains why I’m saying all of this on the Internet and not to his face.

If I said all of this directly to him and he pummeled me with his gargantuan fists, who would be the moron there? You’re probably think that I would be the moron, but I’d have to disagree. After I show up to court with my face looking like an oozing bruised fruit and sue him, forcing his kids into welfare dependency, I think that would officially making him the moron. Again.

I guess, the real losers here are, as usual, the kids. Whatever happens, their dad is still a moron.

If the thought ever crosses your mind that a game might not be that great now but it could get better as it goes along, feel free to punch yourself and any loved ones that agree squarely in the face. Don’t worry. You have our permission. Why are we warning you about this kind of destructive thought pattern? Because it leads to terrifyingly long reviews.

Kane and Lynch is a third-person action game based around the simple concept that making a good game is probably too much work. I didn’t read that on the box or see it in a commercial, but it’s pretty easy to figure that out from playing the game. Don’t take this as an indication that you shouldn’t buy Kane and Lynch. By all means, buy a copy. If you enjoy games that are not that good this is probably a great purchase.
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Nintendo has been pigeonholed recently as a bastion for casual gamers, so in an effort to appeal more to hardcore players they’ve taken aim at the media’s current golden boy: the environment.

Greenpeace, some sort of hippie social club as far as we can tell, rated Nintendo a zero in their Guide to Greener Electronics. Do you know how many companies have ever been rated a zero? Just one: Nintendo. Greenpeace spots a company a .5 rating just for not dumping toxic waste on them when they check the company’s website. A zero rating is like Nintendo looking the environment straight in the eyes, then grabbing its own crotch with one hand and throwing a middle-finger in the air with the other.

It requires either real courage or suicidal tendencies to take on the Earth’s entire ecosystem. First, it’s pretty popular right now and has a lot of very high profile friends, like Al Gore and that huge growth that used to be George Lucas’ neck. Second, the environment has been playing the victim card pretty heavily these days and people love a good victim. They sympathize with someone doing worse than them because when inevitable something bad happens in their life they can always comfort themselves by saying, “At least I’m not the environment. Then I’d be in real trouble. That dude is totally screwed.” Third, the environment is pretty big, as in it’s everywhere all the time. It’s also hard to take on anything that has a 65% chance of still being around long after you’re dead.

The good news is that teenagers love a rebel and lots of teenagers also happen to be hardcore gamers. When you’re bad-ass enough to take on the environment it’s a pretty easy sell to that crowd. Hell, they’ll love you if you eat dog poop on TV, which actually would be a lot less work than punching the ecosystem in its soft spot. Someone at Nintendo should probably get on that right away.

[via Gamasutra]

It’s not that we don’t take our job as the defenders of America’s gaming borders seriously. On the contrary, there isn’t anything we take more seriously in the world, except maybe the AIDS epidemic in Africa, but that’s only because we’re such nice goddamn guys. We spend most of our thought and energy worrying about one or the other. If I’m thinking about securing gaming borders, David is shedding a tear over the AIDS stricken kids he saw on Oprah last week, and when David is thinking about crappy games trying to illegally enter our borders, I’m shooting dice with homeless guys trying to raise money for AIDS victims in Africa. Always being on full alert could make anyone tired, even the staff of Danger Dance, or Double-D as we’re known in the underground hip-hop community and most strip clubs. So, we have to take a break and relax every now and again.

Well, we were only gone for a few days and we had to come back to crap like “Innov8“, an educational videogame. Apparently, IBM tried to slip this one by us thinking we wouldn’t catch on. Fat chance, douche bags. We’re on you like fat on your lead programmer’s ass.

IBM has been developing this particular educational videogame for quite sometime now and it’s “designed to teach graduate students a combination of business and IT skills”. What kind of exhilarating missions can you hope to complete “playing” this “game”? How about:

The first scenario involves improving operations at a call center, where workers are taking too long to solve problems and have poor documentation.

This sounds suspiciously like the plot of a Japanese rhythm game or, more worryingly, work, which is the antithesis of fun; the entire point of videogames. In fact, if IBM hadn’t said they had made a “game” based on this scenario I might have been tempted to solve it using a spreadsheet and a Visio diagram. I don’t know of any videogames I could play using parts of Microsoft Office, at least not any that a sane person would consider fun. That’s why Danger Dance is going to stand firm against “Innov8″. We’ll use all our might, which basically consists of complaining on the Internet and flexing our muscles in our respective bathroom mirrors, to combat this gaming atrocity from ever taking hold inside these borders. Not on our watch, Paco.

In Japan over 4 million people have pre-ordered an attachment that allows the Nintendo DS to receive TV signals. What does Japan call the more than 4 million people who are excited about watching TV on a 3-inch screen? In America we’d call them retards, but in Japan? They probably just call them Japanese.

All 4 million people could fit into an average downtown Tokyo apartment building, since, due to population density, they stack people like they’re crossing the Middle Passage over there. It could serve as a good experiment to test the effects of bombarding DS TV beams on humans, as everyone in the building simultaneously tunes in their DS to the nation’s most popular sadistic game show, “Super Crotch Violence Happy Hour!” Over a period of time, it would be interesting to observe what kind of horrible things would go wrong with them, besides, obviously, whatever God’s already inflicted.

[via Joystiq]