Mark Felps

Why do you care if other people make secondary regional accounts? Seriously, did a secondary regional account molest you as a child? Did a secondary regional account kill yore pa?

I made my Japanese account the day I got my 360, and while it's mostly been useless (thanks to the region-locked Love Football), it's certainly not hurting anyone.

Maybe you should find something to do with yourself other than half-assed attempts at policing what other people do with an online service.

The new look must be in preparation for the upcoming Uwe Boll film, where Bomberman becomes a cybernetic organism who lives only to destroy brightly colored blocks which contain naked Hungarian prostitutes.

It's future-proofed right up until the moment that MS announces their next console, which I'm betting will be under four years at this point. Then it will look like what it is, an aging console with an out-of-date non-standard video playback mechanism.

And that assumes they don't screw the hog technologically, like they did with the PS2.

It should fill the need until something better comes along, at least. What I'd like to see, is a sequel to the poorly remembered Blue Stinger on the Dreamcast. A little more action-oriented than Resident Evil (and more bullets), but with humor and scare you out of your pants moments to spare.

Nothing quite compares to gunning down zombie monsters while listening to Japanese Christmas jingles in the background.

To all the PS3 fanboys shrieking about how the controller isn't a big deal, and that Sony planned it all along:

Sony bought and paid for this beatdown. They're the ones who introduced old technology as if it were something impressive, and did it on the heels of actual innovation by a competitor. No one made Sony highlight half-assed motion technology on the heels of the Wiimote, inviting unfavorable comparison.

You want to yell at someone, try Sony on for size.

Magic mushrooms, natch.

I genuninely didn't roll my eyes, chuckle, or snicker. Maybe I raised an eyebrow, but more at the daring of the developers to create a game so far outside the norm. That willingness also got me interested in the game. I can think of several other games that were viewed as wacky and strange that turned out to be brilliant, with Katamari Damacy leaping most immediately to mind.

I think a closer comparison can be made with the PS2 RPG series Shadow Hearts Covenant, which was originally described to me as a game where you search for gay porn to buy dresses for your magic doll. It was also one of the most interesting RPGs released for the PS2, largely eschewing the anemic storylines one finds in the typical Square-Enix products.

I've always found that one of the biggest problems of the XBox line was a lack of games that didn't fit the standard mold. Largely that's because of market share. If you have a 100 million buyers, you can manage to stay alive selling to smaller markets. But it's that kind of diversity that is the only real strength of the PS family, and the primary weakness of the XBox and XBox360.

So, when I hear that a company is doing some unusual on the 360, something that doesn't fit the steroetype of racer/shooter/sports game, it cheers me that maybe this generation at microsoft won't be exclusively about making the middle-class 18-24 demographic happy, that maybe MS and their developers are serious about expanding the market. To do that, you have to be willing to try something new, even if it raises a few eyebrows.

Honestly, if you'd never played a Nintendo game in your life, and someone told you about a game that featured an Italian plumber who could throw fireballs, eat magic mushrooms, and had a buddy who swallowed people whole and then spit them out as eggs, it would be hard to believe they were describing one of the most sucessful video game series in history.

I wouldn't suggest that you praise a game you haven't played. I think what I'm looking for is the benefit of the doubt. A willingness to keep an open mind when something strange comes to town. It's the stuff outside the norm that hides the gold, after all.

No, what you said was that it was "better than nothing", which is certainly expressing an opinion regarding perceived quality.

As for "whackiness", it's not so much that it's wacky as that it's different from what you're used to. That's the problem. Any time a developer steps a little outside the box of "they killed my people, I'm the chosen one, this time it's personal", games get described as wacky or unusual.

All this, mind you, about a game you haven't played.

I love it when the same media mavens gripe and complain about how all games are the same and the industry is moribund, and then crap on anything different.

Want to know the problem with the videogame industry? It's you, my friend.

I know one of the mothers whose daughter is a statistic in this report. She is a great lady and a great mother, who happened to have a 27" television. Her daughter was trying to reach the power button (on the top of the set), stumbled, and pulled the TV down on herself. It cracked her skull open. Her mother was just around the corner, in the kitchen when it happened. It took all of thirty seconds to change their lives forever.

We're not talking minor hospitalization here, but a nearly fatal injury. While the daughter survived, she spent multiple years in and out of hosiptals for minor brain and nerve damage. She had at least four surgeries to correct the damage to her eyes caused by the deformation of her skull when the 27" TV crushed it. She still has emotional issues caused by the brain damage.

The mother spent multiple years in emotional agony, beating herself up for letting it happen to her daughter.

If you have a kid, do yourself a favor and secure your TV set. Even if it's an LCD or a DLP. Even a 60 pound weight falling from three to four feet is heavy enough to seriously injure a child.