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More Doom

News   January 26, 2010 at 4:58 pm Sam Machkovech

The geeks will break the Internet tomorrow, seconds after the reveal of Apple’s Tablet iPad SexBot Fourth Horse of the Geek Apocalypse. Have you prepared? Stocked up on bottles of water, canned goods, and RSS feeds? Until then, I have 18 hours to memorialize a busy Tuesday in video games. A couple of local angles:

* Redmond game studio Zipper Interactive has spent years making online military battles for Sony’s many, many PlayStations, and today’s MAG continues the locals’ kill-streak. For a couple of years, Sony’s PR machine has shouted endlessly about this latest game’s feature: 256 online players can battle each other in a single match.

For as many years, I’ve shouted back: “Bugger off.” You ever see a comment thread on the Internet with 256 intelligent people, let alone an online video game? MAG‘s odds aren’t so good.

Moot point, though, if it doesn’t sell 256 copies.

Insider buzz has been lousy. Another big game, November’s Modern Warfare 2, soaked up millions of military-gaming players. And MAG‘s free 2009 preview proved to be ugly, sluggish, and impenetrable. Unless Zipper rebuilt the game in roughly four months, you’re in for the Metal Machine Music of military games. To be fair, I’ll give the retail version a spin. After all, I want the week to work up one more Lou Reed-related zinger.

* The Nintendo-affiliated magazine, Nintendo Power, still exists. Huh! Yesterday’s new issue unloaded a number of scoops about the company’s forthcoming 2010. A note to the publisher: If your lead-off feature about the Wii’s future devotes 10 pages to a decades-old arcade game (NBA Jam), you should grab a dictionary and double-check the word “future.”

Bad news for Redmond’s big N, as the mag was left scrambling with a long list of underwhelming Japanese imports, not to mention a lack of stuff for the treadmill-under-the-bed demographic. My prediction of Nintendo doom stands. At the least, NP gave a locally developed downloadable game, Frobot, a few pages in the spotlight, though that may have only been out of desperation.

* On shelves today: Mass Effect 2, the sequel to a sci-fi franchise that Microsoft once exclusively published. Looks solid so far, but new publishers EA released the game on PC the same day as the Xbox edition. Here’s a big duh: tens of thousands are pirating PC copies of ME2 this very second from torrent site The Pirate Bay.

Also, Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom hits the Wii today. This ain’t Wii Fit. The weird fighting game pits well-known Street Fighter characters against an obscure roster of anime characters, but no matter; the Japanese edition has drawn a crowd at downtown Seattle’s Gameworks for the past few months. If you understood any of this paragraph, drop what you’re doing and try the game immediately. TvC is a fun, childish romp in which you virtually slam dolls action figures against each other, and its mix of simplicity and depth is a rare delight on the game-starved Wii.


  • Robert Lunt

    Hi,

    Interesting article. Please note that “reveal” is a verb. Noun forms of the word are “revealing” and “revelation.”

    Keep up the good work!

  • Robert Lunt

    Hi,

    Interesting article. Please note that “reveal” is a verb. Noun forms of the word are “revealing” and “revelation.”

    Keep up the good work!

  • GrammarNerd

    Quoting from http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000934.html

    … “Reveal” as a nominalization is pretty old, in fact archaic. The OED gives us:

    [f. REVEAL v.] A revealing, revelation, disclosure.

    1629 WADSWORTH Pilgr. iii. 22 He vtterly disclaimed their superstitious reueales.
    1646 SIR T. BROWNE Pseud. Ep. 195 In nature the concealment of secret parts is the same in both sexes and the shame of their reveale equall.
    1858 BAILEY Age 41 Faith her first law, knowledge her last reveal.

  • GrammarNerd

    Quoting from http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000934.html

    … “Reveal” as a nominalization is pretty old, in fact archaic. The OED gives us:

    [f. REVEAL v.] A revealing, revelation, disclosure.

    1629 WADSWORTH Pilgr. iii. 22 He vtterly disclaimed their superstitious reueales.
    1646 SIR T. BROWNE Pseud. Ep. 195 In nature the concealment of secret parts is the same in both sexes and the shame of their reveale equall.
    1858 BAILEY Age 41 Faith her first law, knowledge her last reveal.

  • Art Carnage

    RE: “reveal” usage

    “They’re the people who write comments on any blog entry or newspaper article that involves grammar, going on sarcastically about someone else’s use of language. And the sarcasm that people apply to language is really something that they learn in seventh grade and kind of never overcome, and it’s what’s wrong with the way people think about language nowadays.”

    [...]

    “Well, I don’t think the motivation is merely to inform someone else. That can be done when it’s appropriate, and it usually isn’t. But when it’s appropriate, it can be done graciously, without sarcasm.”

    “The sarcasm comes when, oh, I don’t know, somebody writes in broad daylight and somebody says, well, could there have been narrow daylight? And it’s this adolescent way of congratulating yourself on having mastered the elements of English grammar when you were 13. And it’s kind of stupid because the things you learn at 13, while they’re the basics, are hardly the source of – should hardly be the source of enormous self-esteem.”

    “I mean, if it’s really a source of self-esteem for you that you know the correct rules for using apostrophe, maybe you should get out more.”

    - Geoff Nunberg, linguist, author, and chairman emeritus of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, Fresh Air, 2009-06-03

    English is a living language, and correct usage is determine, not by some official Language Board, but by how it is actually used. Or to put it simply, when enough people use a word “wrong”, it become right.

  • Art Carnage

    RE: “reveal” usage

    “They’re the people who write comments on any blog entry or newspaper article that involves grammar, going on sarcastically about someone else’s use of language. And the sarcasm that people apply to language is really something that they learn in seventh grade and kind of never overcome, and it’s what’s wrong with the way people think about language nowadays.”

    [...]

    “Well, I don’t think the motivation is merely to inform someone else. That can be done when it’s appropriate, and it usually isn’t. But when it’s appropriate, it can be done graciously, without sarcasm.”

    “The sarcasm comes when, oh, I don’t know, somebody writes in broad daylight and somebody says, well, could there have been narrow daylight? And it’s this adolescent way of congratulating yourself on having mastered the elements of English grammar when you were 13. And it’s kind of stupid because the things you learn at 13, while they’re the basics, are hardly the source of – should hardly be the source of enormous self-esteem.”

    “I mean, if it’s really a source of self-esteem for you that you know the correct rules for using apostrophe, maybe you should get out more.”

    - Geoff Nunberg, linguist, author, and chairman emeritus of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, Fresh Air, 2009-06-03

    English is a living language, and correct usage is determine, not by some official Language Board, but by how it is actually used. Or to put it simply, when enough people use a word “wrong”, it become right.