OK, back to people you've heard of! Probably, at least.
For the first time, right on the front page!
Alexis Arquette!
Stephen Chow!
Colin Farrell!
Hulk Hogan!
Adam West!
So yesterday I finally managed to claw my way into the Tetris DS global top 100 with a rating of 7581. Unfortunately, now I'm too scared to go back online with it because I know I'll inevitably mess up against some 6000-rating player and drop like 500 points. So, in the Tetris-deprived interim, I'll offer a few thoughts on this latest version of the classic game.
Tetris DS is probably the best WiFi-enabled DS game at the moment. Mario Kart is great if you're playing with three friends, but that can be hard to coordinate. On the other hand, getting into a simple 1v1 Tetris match is so quick it can be dangerous—many times I'd start it up while, I dunno, waiting for a big download or something to finish, and before I noticed it'd be half an hour later. For people who aren't prone to Tetris addiction, it's a great addition to the DS's casual gaming, pick-up-and-play library. The only thing that would improve it would be if you could start an online match from anywhere instead of being limited to wi-fi hotspots.
I thought gameplay additions like the ghost piece and infinite spin would ruin things, but their effects haven't bothered me. The ghost piece actually dramatically speeds up the game. I'm still undecided on whether the hold piece belongs in a Tetris game, but I'm leaning towards yes; it finally provides some countermeasure to being dealt an endless series of those horrible Z- and S-pieces. My main complaint about how the gameplay's changed (since the 1989 Gameboy version, anyway) is that the rapidly increasing gravity makes the single player mode pretty stupid and infinite-spin-reliant after about 10 levels, but that's easily forgiven thanks to the addictive online mode.
I forget who was running the promotion, but recently I signed up for a free subscription to EGM. I guess it took effect last week, because on Friday I got an issue in the mail.
The May 2006 issue. While it was pretty hilarious1 to read about the Nintendo Revolution and the rumors over the PS3's price point (could be as much as $500!), the whole issue offered constant reminders of why blogs and the Internet have made gaming magazines pretty much obsolete. Plus I had to wade through like eight pages of ads just to get to the table of contents. Where's my Saft for print?
Then on Saturday I got the June issue. OK, I thought, I guess they're pretty much caught up. Maybe I got in on the last couple days when they were sending out the May issue, or something.
Then today I got the July issue. So now they're definitely caught up (I haven't looked inside yet, but the cover finally mentions Wii), but then two thoughts entered my mind:
1) I'm already 1/4th of the way through my subscription, and I've been getting them for three days. Would the same thing have happened if I were paying for these?
2) Am I going to get the August issue in my mailbox tomorrow? Will I already be reading reviews of next Spring's new titles by next week? Time warp publishing could be just the edge EGM needs to compete with everyone on the Web.
1 To me.
Just picked up Street Fighter Alpha Anthology after MC spent like an hour raving about it. Then:
<palidor> is that ps2
<metaly> y
<palidor> online ????????
<metaly> no :[
NOW I AM SO SAD. Seriously, Capcom, get your act together. SF2T's Xbox 360 online mode sounds great. How hard would it have been to fit just a fraction of that functionality into SFAA?
(Namco, you too. Soul Calibur online, please.)
Meanwhile, in the UK: "The word 'gay' now means 'rubbish' in modern playground-speak and need not be offensive to homosexuals."
Well, that's good to know. I'm eagerly awaiting the day it's acceptable to call someone a faggot for cutting me off without signaling. It's a nice thought to declare that the language has evolved and we're over all the loaded connotations a word can have, but it's still pretty idealistic. It just distresses me because instead of people being more conscious and informed of what they're saying, they're opting for a questionable path-of-least-resistance excuse and hoping everyone else buys it.
Somewhat less controversial examples of dictionaries making concessions:
alright - A hideous and depressingly widespread hybrid of two totally unconfusing words. Spelling it like this looks like you're typing drunk. Whenever I see this in some high-visibility ad or article, I hope that a copy editor somewhere is getting fired.
literally - Thanks to everybody propagating incorrect use of this word, many dictionary entries for this now have a secondary listing explaining that it can also mean "figuratively." How many words in the English language are their own antonym??
WALLAH! - OK, probably not in any dictionaries, but please. Your flourish is undermined by your illiteracy.
Hey, remember last fall when I made all those DS screen images based on that Eyetrack study? Yeah, I barely do either. Still, it remains one of my favorite little mini-projects, and while digging around I found out I actually made five more recently and forgot to post them. So here they are. (I'm skipping the "quiz" format this time; them game titles are just gonna hit you in the face!)
Animal Crossing Wild World
Electroplankton
Metroid Prime: Hunters
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Tetris DS
