This year, New Years dinner with the family will be totally different…well at least the design on the top of the box. I saw this article done by miki800, a person I follow on tumblr.
おせち料理 – osechi ryouri – Japan’s traditional New Years feast; eaten by most people across the country – even foreigners.
Traditionally, osechi contained only vegetarian food items, owing to the kind hearted Buddhists, but over the years traditions have changed and now we have many non-traditional and regional osechi. (I have a friend who’s osechihas fried pork cutlets – very non-standard. That would be like eating hamburgers on Thanksgiving!) While many families still make their own New Years feast, some families buy their osechi ryouri from high end stores like Takashimaya or much cheaper fare from places like 7-11 or Hotto Motto.
The foods contained in the osechi are symbolic of the New Year; even the tiered bento-style box, お重箱 – ojyuuhako, is symbolic. What better way to teach the futures generations about the old ways than with a traditional item spiffed up for a new generation? (Please take note of the Mario wearing a hakama on the ojyuuhako.)
The best part of the whole package, at least for us gamers, will be the sixteen original cards that will be included with the purchase. The New Years dinner can be ordered from Takashimaya, an online and terrestrial store for buying Japanese goods. The box and cards will go on sale 9/30 for 27,000 yen. If you are in Japan and would like to eat like the Romans this New Years, head over to Takashimaya’s online store and reserve your box today!
I really enjoyed this commercial that Turn 10 did for Forza 6. The CM goes through the history of racing games on consoles.
I hate to shill an ad but in this instance I guess I’ll give myself a break.
After last year’s lackluster edition of Forza, I’d like to see the Microsoft franchise get back to the top of its game, which might be more difficult with Gran Turismo 6 making such a good show for Sony.
Even if this year’s Forza doesn’t live up to its hype, at least they produced a badass commercial to pimp the product. I’m happy with that.
USgamer has been doing these community questions lately and they have done a lot to stoke the fires in my own brain. This weeks question is: What was your first Mario game? This question got me thinking about my own relationship with the flagship franchise which I was introduced to early on but didn’t quite get hot and heavy with until a few years later.
When I was a child I didn’t own a Nintendo Entertainment System, unlike many of my peers. I was one of those poor flock of 80’s kids who had to listen to the cool stories, who had to watch the cartoons, and yet still bought Nintendo Power. I now look back with some longing; a desire to have been more of a gamer at a younger age than when I really got into it. I am sure that in the end I won because of all the time I spent outside with my friend poking rats with sticks or whatever.
When I was 7 or 8 the NES was huge and you couldn’t go anywhere at the time, as a preteen white kid in the 80’s, without hearing about Mario, Zelda, or Castlevania. I even got to touch some of these game when I went to my cousin’s house for Thanksgiving or Christmas. Occasionally, one of my creepy neighbors, the one who’s father/guy who lived upstairs/possible family member, would let me play his Nintendo. It wasn’t until I turned 10 and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System came out in America that I was able to finally become a full fledged member of the “gamer” community.
So, while Super Mario Bros. for the NES would have undoubtably been my first Mario game – officially. It really wasn’t the first Mario game that I became completely enamored with; that was Super Mario World for the SNES.
Just look at that massive map filled with eclectic worlds!
One of my fondest memories of playing Super Mario World on my SNES was that when I played it I was forced to play it on a small 8 ~ 10 inch black & white TV. Living in a 4 person household, in the midst of the Midwestern countryside, after having moved from Omaha, a much larger city, meant that there were a lot of people vying for TV time on our single 19 inch television in the family room. The only other option we had in our house was that little black & white TV, which nobody else wanted to use besides me.
It wasn’t this TV, but it wasn’t much different.
On those all too infrequent days that I was able to plug the machine into the monstrous 19 inch color display, it was like having my eyes healed by Jesus. It looked as though the whole world was given life again. The vibrancy of the green jungles of the opening levels felt insanely rich. The ghost house levels were fun while being the slightest bit scary – the right amount of scary. Each different world was weaved together so well in that game and I feel very special for the fact that I have these two experiences with that game that on other person in the world probably has had.
I remember so many Saturday afternoons spent staring at that dull screen trying to finally make it to Bowser. When I finally made it to Bowser’s castle, my parents bugging me to get ready for church, I had to get ready for church so I only had a few minutes. We always we to church on Saturday evenings. I got to the Bowser fight. I tried two or three times before my parents were going to get really upset with me. I paused the game. When we came back from church while I was waiting for the chili to be done on the stove for dinner I beat Bowser. I am not sure if the power of Christ helped me that day or not (Being that I am an atheist, I doubt it.), but that day is one of my all time greatest gaming memories.
Super Mario World was my first Mario game. It is also the greatest of all the Mario games, not only because, objectively, it is a meticulously crafted piece of video game history, but also because of all of the personal memories that are completely intertwined in my experience with that game.
I just finished playing Arkham Asylum and I am going to start working on my next review. Join me as I finish up some Riddler Trophies and play a little bit of the hard mode.
The Pokemon Company announced that they would be bringing the popular 3DS game Pokemon Suffle to mobile platforms later in the year. Android and iOS platforms will get the same addictive puzzler that came to the 3DS – no word on Windows mobile.
Pokemon Shuffle Moblie will come to mobile platforms with the same free-to-play model as the original. The 3DS game’s clean esthetics should be buoyed on Android and iOS because of their simpler payment process.
I am one of the 4.5 million downloads on the 3DS and I’m sure I’ll be within the first tens of millions of downloads on Android. I have been addicted to Pokemon Shuffle for a few months now and I am happy that this game will get out to a broader audience – it is ridiculously addictive and endlessly replayable.
Pokemon Shuffle is a match three puzzle game like Bejeweled. Yet it also has a monster catching (duh!) portion that brings it closer in line with games like Puzzle Quest and Puzzle & Dragons.
Pokemon Shuffle uses mechanics that force the player to think of ways to chain combos together in ways similar to Puzzle & Dragons. In a very chess-like way one must try to think of how moves will effect future moves. The dopamine released after watching all of the bright lights and combos really kicks in once you start chaining moves together like a pro.
I hope that this game stays true to the 3DS original and keeps the very nonstandard mobile game interface that made the original so esthetically pleasing. It also encouraged me to spend a little bit of money because I felt like I should reward good game design in the area or free-to-play.
A free-to-play game doesn’t have to be ugly and intrusive. Pokemon Shuffle on the 3DS proved that. I hope The Pokemon Company can bring some of that to the mobile phone market.
It has been a long time since I have fallen into a game like I have with Destiny. It does a lot right and it does a lot that infuriates me – with any game this is true. Esthetic design choices versus functional design choices are something that Destiny has made me think about recently. I love the way Destiny is designed, but there are parts of it that are hard to swallow.
Bungie chose to use a companion app to dispense information about their game. They aren’t the first developer to do so (Mass Effect, WOW, GTAV, etc.), but they are the first developer who has chosen to put so much information in the companion app. So much of the information is in the companion app that it makes me wonder “Are people getting enough out of this story?”
Destiny is a self-styled MOFPS (Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter). Everything from the dailies to the raids show that this game is going after that MMO status. They aren’t making MMO money yet, but if they continue putting out these expansions they might at least look like Blizzard in that regard. They are definitely going after MMO playtime; they want people coming back everyday. Bungie has done all of this while staying safely within the FPS milieu with which they are so familiar.
Bungie has chosen an artistically minimalist strategy in it’s design for Destiny. The whole menu structure is exquisite when one thinks about how most games are continually assaulting the player to visit the store, check their achievements, or even change the options – something that is extremely functional yet would throw a kink into the design of Destiny’s opening menus.
In most MMOs, the player usually is updated the moment they log onto their server. They are shown updates to the game usually in blog posts or special bulletin messages. This information is really just the first stop before moving on to official or unofficial message boards.
I was playing Destiny before the launch of House of Wolves and I picked up a Decoherent Engram, as one does when they play Destiny. I went to the Tower to decypher the engram, but the Cryptarch didn’t even recognize the engram – nothing popped up when I entered into his shop screen.
Adding an info tab or a blog would kill the clean look of the menus, yet it would make the game more informative and user friendly. I am undecided if I want the I Love Bees-ification of game design to take hold in the industry any more than it has. I’m not sure if I want to comb the internet for all of the information behind Destiny. I like playing games. So, I really just want the game to tell me what’s going on within the game. This goes doubly for all of the story information in the Grimoire! There are huge story chunks written just for the Grimoire, and a lot of the audience will never see it.
Destiny is an evolving game. I am sure that it’s design will evolve as well. That also means that my opinions on it’s design will change.
If you have ever fantasized about racing like Sonic the Hedgehog through the mean streets of Omaha, yet you are a fat video game nerd like me. A Japanese website called Coolens will be offering a set of frames so you can realize your dreams no matter how fast you move.
It really is admirable how Hidetaka Miyazaki, the director of Bloodborne and the first two games in the Souls series, has reincarnated controller splitting, TV breaking, middle finger flippin’ games. Actually, Miyazaki’s games were at the genesis of this renaissance of impossibly difficult yet supremely rewarding games that have become the darlings of the industry. Most of these games are also for non-traditional developers.
Games have been trying to be more like movies for a long time. (Maybe it’s better to say the publishers wish games were more like movies.) But it was the PS3/X-Box 360 era where games became more streamlined – shorter length, longer cut scenes, more difficulty settings, etc. The industry knew that with potentially larger audiences purchasing the games; games needed to be more accessible. The machismo associated with hard difficulties and impossible bosses became more muted. The Wii definitely helped broaden the audience, but move to make games more accessible had been happening for years and it wasn’t necessarily bad for the industry.
We got games like The Elder Scrolls IV:Oblivion, Heavy Rain, and Gears of War. All of these games were extremely cinematic and each game was accessible to a broadening group of gamers who have just as divergent familiarity with games. It wasn’t until later in the generation when we started seeing games like Demon Souls, Rouge Legacy, and Spelunky. While Rouge-likes have been gaining in popularity over the last generation, Demon Souls really blew the door open and showed the gaming industry that people like challenging difficulty.
A lot of the challenging difficulty associated with games had a lot to do with arcade culture and the need to have people insert more and more cash into the machine. I touched upon the machismo of difficulty as well. The difficulty of yesteryear was traditionally just bad game design. This caused a lot of violent outbursts at arcades which led to fights and broken machines and, in the home, it led to a lot of broken controllers and stern parental reprimanding after especially violent outbursts.
This new crop of challenging games that have sprouted through the beds of mediocre, AAA games have taught us how to appreciate good game design again. I’m not saying these games are perfect. I’m not even saying they don’t have cheap parts to them. I’m saying game design has advanced a lot in the recent years and these games are a testament to good game design. They have caused a resurgence in games that make us take a step back and think about our next move. The difference is this time when we fail again and again and scream “God Dammit,” we smile and get back to it cause in the end it’s fun.
It has taken me a few days to collect my opinions of Destiny. Destiny, being such a divisive game, is hard to critique because each player was hoping for something that this game didn’t end up delivering. Once we all can agree that Destiny didn’t deliver the “goods” we had anticipated, this is where the player base divides.
One group are those who got “butt hurt” when the game didn’t pan out the way they had expected it to. Some of these people were hoping for the next Halo. Some of them were hoping for a Call of Duty replacement. There are a million different reasons why they turned against the game. Some of these people put too much hope in these games, they yearn for these games to become the next “it” game and they want to be there when “it is happening. It pains them when these games that they invested too much into turn out to be just another game.
The other group of people are, like me, people who expected something more but have decided that we are going to keep plugging away at Destiny and continue to try to mine more fun from the game. The issue with this is that it very much is like farming. It is laborious, but, when you do find that vein of gold in the rock, you know you are going to enjoy yourself for a little while longer.
Why wouldn’t you use the app?
I think that what Destiny presents to it’s audience is very much a refinement of where we are in game design. Destiny is member of the nouveau shooter class, a class of shooter that focuses on daily online content in lieu of spending development costs on single player content. Destiny is like a race tuned Skyline GT-R; they have taken out a lot of the bloat and streamlined the product to be good at one single thing. For the car, they take out things like air conditioning, radio, seats, etc. For Destiny, which in my opinion is a detriment, they took out the story. What we were left with was a thin story that was peppered with bits of interesting plot points that, sadly, only accentuate the dearth of overall story in the game.
A dire wolf?
I think Bungie made a great shooter. They made a great game that is fun to log on and shoot stuff. Each of the different guns controls very differently. The pistol is amazing. I haven’t really chosen my favorite among the assault/SMG type guns that fill out your main guns. Your secondary gun can either be a shotgun, a sniper rifle, or a charge/fusion rifle. I’m not the biggest fan of the fusion rifle, and it doesn’t sound like the rest of the community is either. The developers have made some changed recently to these guns. I never really like sniper very much – in any game. But, in Destiny, I love the sniper rifle. The shotgun is really nice as well. Finally, you also have a heavy weapon. You can choose either a chaingun or a rocket launcher. (I don’t think there is a third. At least I haven’t seen one yet.) Also, you have grenades and some class based abilities that are on a cooldown, etc. Blah, blah, blah.
Of course, Bungie made improvements on the tried and true first person shooter, with games like Titanfall, another member of the nouveau shooter class, and COD: Advanced Warfare breathing down on them they had to. I think that Bungie, with Destiny, is falling in line with EA and their approach with Titanfall; they recognized that people who play first person shooters play online much more than they play offline and most people don’t finish single player games. The data is there. These companies who see dwindling profits year-after-year and they are in a fight with Activision, who have a huge war chest of funds – from COD, and they are moving with the times and moving these games into a much more online focused market where, these companies believe, they don’t need to focus on story as much.
I think I am going to keep with Destiny for a little while longer. I am now level 23. I have been playing Crucible matches finally and it is fun playing against other Guardians. I am still combing through the Grimoire trying to find more information about this story – and where it went.
The reason for this article is that I am on my way to 100 wins. I am at 95 to be exact. I have played a lot of Dota 2 and I am sure that this small mountain will be conquered…when is the question. And, should I stream my journey?
I don’t play Dota 2 like a lot of people. I am a slave to the in-game load-outs. I almost exclusively play with the official ones, which are insanely out of date. Lately, I have been grinding out the All-Hero Challenge.
When I get into funks, like over the last week or so, I usually end up selecting Random for a few games. I was trying to finish the Sniper challenge for the All-Hero Challenge and went on a seven or eight game losing streak with Sniper. It wasn’t until I went back to playing a few games as random heroes that I was able to end my streak.
I have also been lurking around the Dota 2 community board on Neo Gaf. It gives me some popcorn for the night while I am plugging away at work. Usually, this board is also a sanctuary for Dota 2 information without the flame. And, from a game that is well known for the amount of acid it’s community spits, that is a compliment.
I might start doing some Twitch stuff for Dota 2. The problem is that I am not knowledgeable about the subject whatsoever. Even with a year of play, I would not say that I am anywhere above novice in rank.
I’d love to get a group of five people to play with but with my night schedule it’s hard. Maybe I should try to stream it on Nico-Nico and practice my Japanese. （笑）
Well, I just thought I’d write about my latest passion, since I haven’t written in a while. Maybe we can explore together what it is about Dota 2 that keeps me coming back. Cheers.
I have been using my Wii U a lot recently. It has pushed me into finally finishing a few games that I have been meaning to beat for a while; Golden Sun, Earthbound, and Super Mario Galaxy. The Wii U also has me playing new games. I never play “new” games! I usually wait until the games are at least 20% off and even then I don’t actually play the games until 5 or 6 years later. But, one game got me back into dat new shit.
Mario Kart 8 got me to buy a full priced, sixty dollar game – my eternal resting place is experiencing a cold front, I believe. I have been having a lot of fun with MK8. Today, after getting home from work, I downloaded the Mercedes DLC pack and have been having fun with those new additions to the game – some new tires and 3 Mercedes cars. Even though I haven’t been that excited for this free content, it’s a good decision to have this kind of alliance for NIntendo. I would like to see more collaborations like this for Nintendo.
Microsoft issued a “service alert” today for many features on both the Xbox 360 and Xbox One. The affected services are integral Xbox Live “features” like “accessing all game features,” “capturing game videos,” and joining Xbox Live members online in game. As of the writing of this article, it looks like Xbox One’s apps and features are all working correctly except for the PBS app, which is most likely due to some kind of Right Wing haxxorz. It looks as though Xbox 360 users are still experiencing issues with accessing their game features.
If problems with accessing game features wasn’t bad enough, it seems that there is a problem with the Xbox 360 specifically where the console has been “getting stuck on a black screen.” Commenters, who are usually antagonistic towards big companies like Micro$oft but now acting almost saintly, tried to tell Microsoft that this wasn’t because of any kind of firmware issues but because they just hadn’t turned on their consoles in months.
Microsoft is waiting to hear back from their support teams to figure out if what the commenters said could be the root cause of “the black screen of death.” But, Microsoft did tell it’s customers to, “Hang in there!” I’m sure they have their best gurus on the issue.
Imagine walking into a store and being blind. Now image that you are not blind, but oblivious. Yesterday’s VentureBeat interview with Tony Bartel might have revealed that our modern society is becoming oblivious to everything that is happening around ourselves. You may say that this is a problem. But, I believe it is just a step in our evolution to super-humanity.
Who will I trade them with? That rabbit? Rabbits don’t have money!
Yesterday, GameStop’s president Bartel, said this to VentureBeat. “Believe it or not, only 40 percent of the people who walk into a GameStop store today know that we accept trades of games,” he said.
Now, anybody who has ever been to a GameStop and looked around the store would know that this is impossible. How can only 40% of their customers are able to see the advertising on every window and every shelf in the store? How can 60% of their customers be deaf to their plea for trade-in games at the register? We know that every cashier asks us before the transaction starts if we have any trade-in games. Therefore, this can not be the fault of GameStop, as a company, because advertising and register-monkey spiel are bleeding from every nook and cranny of that store – it must be that we have evolved our comprehension of advertising.
I suppose we can trace the origins of this phenomenon to the turn of the century, when our magazines were being weighed down by metric tons of America Online floppy disks, when our parents turned homicidal because of dinner-time telemarketing, or when webpages turned into minefields of porn advertising.
One can only assume, that either most GameStop customers have no idea what the words “trade, used, or sell” mean, they are oblivious to everything that is going on around them, or they have evolved to such a point that advertising of any kind will not go through their blinders.
There are three ways to look at this situation:
1. We, as a society, might have a problem with processing everyday information.
2. We evolved in response to our overly advertised environment.
3. We have an ever increasing number of morons in our society.
If your customers don’t know that your company accepts trade-ins, it’s not your fault GameStop. Your customers are fucking idiots…that’s all…don’t worry.
This year more than any other before. are we close to realizing the dream of millions of eSports enthusiasts out there – eSports is…getting there. After watching The International 2014 for over a week, I realized that eSports is a thing. With this years championship being telecast on ESPN – even though it was played on one of the “foreign sports” sister stations – you know the one’s that show cricket or snooker. I had a great time watching The International this year, not that I had watched it any other year, but this year was a lot of fun.
I was introduced to the players and their teams who have made Dota 2 such a captivating game to watch. I learned their play styles and I learned how they played with their teammates. I watched as Dendi tended to march ahead to his own beat. He played intelligently; usually. Of course, because of this kind of play style he got killed in situations that he probably should have not been in. I loved watching Rabbit play Slark. I can’t remember how many kills he got, but he beefed the hell out of that Slark and merc’d a metric ton of dudes. Rabbit became my favorite player. And, this is what I find fascinating about Dota 2, I ended up liking Rabbit because of that Slark game. Not because I ever heard him speak or knew anything about his personality. Not because I knew all about his story, but just because I saw one superhuman feat that made me appreciate his ability. Not only to appreciate his ability, but appreciate the amount of work that he must have to put into getting his game to that level.
At the beginning of the tournament, I was caught up in the torrent of Liquid support. But, later as I saw the uproar grow more and more nationalistic, bordering on xenophobic, did I end up looking for another team to follow. Part of the nationalistic fervor behind Dota 2 comes from the very real problems of communication and schedule, because of these two issues most of the teams tend to be from the same country, or at least from the same lingua-franca.
Towards the end of The International, I decided that Newbee was the team for me and I’d start cheering for them. They ended up winning the tournament, but I didn’t feel that great feeling of fandom when your team wins. That feeling when the team that you bleed with, the team that makes you cry like a battered lover, the team that makes you want to believe that your guys – your friends- could win win’s.
Yea! eSports!
These feelings are only feelings that a person gets when they watch sports. Dota 2 has become a sport for me. I don’t think that means that eSports has arrived. I think that I have become one of the unwashed masses that has come to Gabe Newell – that bearded, fat Jesus – and asked him to wash me and prepare me for that heaven that The International 2015 will be.
This year, New Years dinner with the family will be totally different…well at least the design on the top of the box. I saw this article done by miki800, a person I follow on tumblr.
Traditionally, osechi contained only vegetarian food items, owing to the kind hearted Buddhists, but over the years traditions have changed and now we have many non-traditional and regional osechi. (I have a friend who’s osechihas fried pork cutlets – very non-standard. That would be like eating hamburgers on Thanksgiving!) While many families still make their own New Years feast, some families buy their osechi ryouri from high end stores like Takashimaya or much cheaper fare from places like 7-11 or Hotto Motto.
The best part of the whole package, at least for us gamers, will be the sixteen original cards that will be included with the purchase. The New Years dinner can be ordered from Takashimaya, an online and terrestrial store for buying Japanese goods. The box and cards will go on sale 9/30 for 27,000 yen. If you are in Japan and would like to eat like the Romans this New Years, head over to Takashimaya’s online store and reserve your box today!
