I have a renewed faith in the creativity of the video gaming medium.

And now I gotta go change my draws.

The Wii and the Gamecube have both had a welcoming effect on my wallet with their respective (or shared, I guess) libraries: they don’t shame it. Every single game that I’ve ever bought on either system was fully worth the price because of one outstanding aspect or another, and I’m speaking of the typical retail drop of about $40 to $50 American. If I happen to score something at half of that or even a third, then it’s already turned out to be a good year for me. In comparison, my Playstation library is equivilent in size, but it would be much larger if I included all the games purchased for it that ended up taking the rejection train to eBay.

I’m disappointed in you, Punch-Out!!. I thought you might’ve been the disruptive element, the assassin to Nintendo’s squeaky-clean rep as king of my living room, but no! You just had to go ahead and live up to the promise of being a vast improvement upon a classic play structure without abritrarily changing a single fucking thing. Yes, nostalgic game geek, this is the game that you remember playing after school, during your afternoon recuperative sessions before questing that homework. And when I say that it is the game that you remember, the one that persists in your head rather than the not-so-intimidating reality, I mean it: characters are huge and full of amusing boist and bombast thanks to some of the richest hand-keyed animation seen in a 3-D game to date. But if all Punch-Out!! had going for it were exemplary production values then it would merely be a third of a potentially excellent game, right?

Punch-Out!! almost seems to revel in the fact that it needn’t fuck with something so accessible and pure, as while it offers three different control schemes for the player to choose from, you wouldn’t need to pick anything other than the familiar A+B+Select layout that the Wiimote “Classic” configuration mandates. Your opponents will demand everything of your thumbs in this game (especially in the Title Defense after-mode) and while the Nunchuk+Wiimote option isn’t necessarily borked, it simply isn’t as responsive. Seriously, Soda Popinski will exhibit this for you in about five seconds. That man isn’t a man at all, he’s an animal. A manimal, actually.

Also, like its forebears, the core of Punch-Out!!’s action is rooted in adapting your limited attack and defense capabilites to effectively counter your opponent. Stats and contemplation have no jurisdiction here; this is all about pattern recognition and reflexes, sort of like a poker game where your role is to suss out which hand is holding a full house of unbridled pain. Your opponents are cocky and fast, but that cockiness is central to how you expedite a good beatdown as awareness of your opponent’s tells will keep you quick to the dodge and usually set the dope up for a dizzy. However, don’t expect to pull off a sure stick-’n'-move each time simply because your opponent telegraphs his punches; the fighters might be obvious, but they are quick and also hit much harder than Little Mac. Three unsuccessful dodges usually precludes a listless make-out session with the canvas. If you need further elaboration upon this point, perhaps you would like to step into Soda Popinski’s office. He’ll hand you a bitch card then knock you out colder than a frosted glass of RC Classic.

Unsurprisingly, not all of Punch-Out!!’s appeal lies in its winking nods to the halcyon days of gaming’s wonder years. Most any developer that makes a habit of actually paying its employees and staying in business will tell you that a marquee game that mainlines unmolested nostalgia probably won’t return a decent enough profit. So, while Punch-Out!! calls upon the School of Twitch to form the foundation for play, its production values are as modern as a Wii can get (which I estimate to be about six years ago). Consider it a smart turn on developer Next Level’s part, then, to rely upon similarly traditional animation techniques to give flamboyant life to these hilarious 3-D pugilists. Recieving a thorough beating or two is something that Little Mac will become accustomed to so the idea of being entertained by your own immolation at the hands of your nemesis is fair compense for spending a round learning of your opponent’s taunts the hard way. Inversely, the extreme expressions and falldown animations resulting from dominating the opposition serves as a just reward for accplishing this. Each boxer has his own distinct personality (read: “embodies a very broad stereotype”), brought to life through fluid, outrageous motions that display an intimate understanding of several of the Twelve Principles. Of particular note is Principle number two – the entire game is based around the concept of anticipation. Each boxer’s taunts are dazzling but also easily noticable, giving you equitable opportunity to respond and satisfaction in knowing that you shut his trap. This all lends a richer character to the game, rendering its larger-than-life roster of palookas with a more potent realism than the frozen-faced, stiffly mocapped steroid marionettes that one would find in your average “photo-realistic” first-person shooter. Of course, one wonders if it’s even worth inhabiting a reality that could birth a hell-born creature of avarice like Soda Popinski, an abomination who eats men’s wills for lunch and drinks Hate straight from the tap.

I never really dwell upon the aural qualities of a game unless they happen to be exemplary. That being the case, I would like to mention that Next Level did a stunning job with the musical camouflage in this game – being that you’re going to be hearing the familiar Punch-Out!! music over and over ad infinitum, lending ethnic variation to the same song isn’t only welcome, it’s probably necessary. Thankfully, each iteration of the theme is a fun, personable accompaniment to its respective fighter’s stage and effortlessly strives to get the player to tap his/her toes throughout the fight. In particular, the peppy all-male choir in Soda Popinski’s stage provides a jaunty, optimistic counterpoint to having your very future torn from your corporeal form by a rabid, jellyrocket-shaped hurt machine in hot pants who will send you into a coma that you will not want to arouse from, lest you wake into a world where babies are rationed for sustenance and happiness is but a lie; a world where evil means survival and decent souls die the quickest; a world ruled… by Soda Popinski.

But I digress. Punch-Out!! still fucking rules, despite the looming, sucrose-addicted pinko threat that dwells within.

Plenty of positive vibes emanating from this year’s E3, but I’m holding off from posting anything pertinent until this Sunday, when everything ought just about wrapped up. However, I did want to leave you good folk with the following morsel of digitaliciousness with preamble: The fact that most gaming news portals have gone through most of today without so much as a fuckin’ sneeze about this trailer is not only astounding, but also pretty fucking revealing about the hype-driven gaming press as a whole. Bereft of any appearance of a company mascot or monochromatic high-res graphics, why would any of them deem this worthy of wasting a glance on (or for passing along to its readers, for that matter)?

If you’re a video RPGer of any type of stock (be it traditional, strategy-based or hack ‘n’ slashy) you ought to know the name Yasumi Matsuno. If you don’t, click and learn and pay specific attention to his resume. The trailer you just watched is the result of a joint development venture between him and Nintendo.

And you thought that The Last Guardian was the headline-winner of the day? You might as well be getting your news from a fucking Gamefaqs forum.

The Puzzle Kingdoms demo is out. Have you played it yet? If you haven’t, let me provide a vicarious rubric of the first five minutes for you:

You press “start”.
You’re miserable.
You go find something more meaningful to do, ie: shaving your carpet, making knish, masturbation.

Hot hopping shit, I love knish.

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix might have earned the unfortunate position as being an unworthy successor to the excellent Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, but it wasn’t anywhere near this bad. Because this is bad, in the King’s own fatherfucking English. The puzzle scheme is unintuitive and awkward. The art looks like it was created by a first-year Full Sail Photoshop student. And the story? Well, by the time you get through your first three battles you’re probably going to bid your kingdom a happy famine rather than slog through I-Don’t-Know-How-Many-Hours of monotonous torment.

I mean, the dearth of any redeeming qualities Puzzle Kingdoms is making me wonder if I even genuinely enjoyed the first game at all (which I can state with confidence that I still do – I just checked.)

Just some guy that’s about to be the unsuspecting recipient of a hearty “Fuck You”:

Maybe you should’ve gone with jams instead? Hammer pants? I mean, if I was a disenfranchised old fart, I’d probably go with either of those as the chosen metaphor for your blinkered social critique.

Chances are that you found this journal entry via stumbling haphazardly across a well-meaning tag. By extension, chances are good that you also know who Shigesato Itoi is. If you don’t, back your cursor up a few letters and mind the link.

This post, however, deals with one of Itoi’s forays into prosaic writing. This slickly irreverent excerpt is from a collection of WarioWare-portioned short stories that he had penned with famed Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Yeah, I don’t kow who that is, really.

Jinx
Having a black cat cross your path is nothing at all. After all, I own a black cat of my own.

But bad things do happen on days I don’t win the Nobel Prize. For instance, when I inserted a 10-yen coin to make a phone call, I didn’t get my coin back even though the line was busy.

Days in which I lose a leg in a car accident are often quite unlucky, too. One time a hot dog fell right out of a bun I was holding.

Rainy days aren’t much better, either. One time an umbrella I had just bought got completely wet.

Unlucky things often happen when I’m mugged at night, too. Why, just the other day, I forgot to throw out the trash.

Bad things happen when I go into a classroom and see beautiful girls all sitting at their desks. In some cases, I’ve been so elated that I wet my pants.

Even so, the very worst is when you lose your life. The day it happened to me was the same day they announced the winning lottery numbers.

Spotted on the intanits:

So grab yo’sef a pencil and a Sandvich when lunch break comes around. But leave the balaclava at home.

It’s both a subject line and a URL. Pretty convenient.

Sorry this doesn’t have anything to do with geeking out, unless you consider yourself a joke geek – which is a value that everyone would embrace, if I had my way.

Mild revelations rise to the surface of the WWW when a Digger finds it even remotely acceptable to accuse other people of being socially unfit.

Isn’t this how the Divine Comedy starts? No?

It looks like the noir tradition isn’t ending with the adventures of Kyle Hyde for the DS (and Jake Hunter certainly does not count), but the further expansion of the sleuthing adventure game catalogue for the brainiac’s handheld is bringing back a classic character for a new generation to get cozy with.

Raymond Chandler did for pulp fiction what John Wayne Gayce did for clowns, and his far-reaching influence can be felt every time a joe in a fedora gets the squeeze put on by some two-bit heavy in a cheap suit. Adventure games owe a lot to classic pulp fiction, so it seems only fitting that this medium revisits a form of storytelling that still stands firm as such a vital foundation of genre narrative and American whimsy.