This is not the site to go to if you want to be sad all day.

As regards the strip, I was convinced we'd have our Ikaruga yesterday, so that I could spend today extolling it. Because I primarily game on the PC - regardless of what it might have seemed lately - and I rarely get a chance to play a good scrolling shooter on my platform of choice, because they don't make them. When a Star Monkey or a XOP or whatever presents itself, I commit my whole being - but really, how often is that.

Ikaruga is like the son I never had, if I even wanted a son and could possibly conceive of my being a father. IGN has a few movies you should investigate, if you hate aliens as much as I do. The third movie they have over there most properly shows off what I think of as the main game mechanic - if there's an official name for it, I don't know it, but for the purposes of our discussion we will refer to it as "polarity." As is common in this genre, while you're killing thousands aliens or robots or whatever you are also navigating clouds of enemy fire, usually glowy balls or somesuch. In Ikaruga, such balls are either white or black, there's probably a pun there but I'm scrupulously avoiding it, and you can choose to be immune to one or the other variety of ball. Some of these scenes have an almost platform feel to the gameplay, avoiding waves of alternately colored balls as you maneuver around large mechanisms that could not possibly serve any useful purpose. You might note that those movies are on IGN's GameCube site - Ikaruga will be arriving stateside on that platform in January, but we were like, fuck that noise. Any excuse to get out the Dreamcast and dust off the DC-X.

Regardless.

The latest patch for the Battlefield demo was very much appreciated, and I would like to thank Europe. It was good not so much for any play issues they might have resolved, if any - I wasn't having problems with the "game," as such. My only trouble was that the quality of the networking fluctuated so much from server to server that, initially, I thought that part was just fucked and I'd have to put up with it in order to get the rest of the good stuff, like hitting a man with a jeep when the jeep is going as fast as it can. I was prepared to do that, too - that's how good the rest of it is. I'd eat the apple and the worm and simply try to cultivate in myself a taste for worm. The main thing this patch does for me is make it easy to determine who is running a good server out there, and who is just some shitpie running a server on the same machine he's playing on. This explains why so many of the servers out there, far more than statistics would decree, are private - because it can be difficult to find a game that plays okay. New icons show not only if the server is dedicated to the game, but also if it's running well under current load. Hallelujah. Battlefield 1942 is the first game since Tribes 2 to actually feel like a proper successor to Tribes, and I have endless enthusiasm for it. When you're on foot pinned down by enemy armor, and one of your planes sails out the sky like the word of God and drops a bomb like some twisted stork, well, it's the sort of thing a man could write a poem about.

You rarely see any coverage of it, but Dynasty Tactics is out today - and I mean out out, not "shipping" out. Again, friends, I will direct you to IGN - and Tactics fans, you may want to sit down before you watch this. I mean, units of different types is one thing, very exciting, but larger scale tactics that rely on precise placement of different forces... You couldn't see it, but I paused a moment to hold my head in my hands. What the hell am I going to do? This sort of game appeals to my most basic need, to arrange objects in a manner that maximizes harmony and minimizes discord. They don't even have to dress it up like a game if they don't want to, and I'll still buy it. It's like Tetris. I don't even think of Tetris as a game. I do that kind of shit in line at the Grocery store, arranging the candy, magazines and gum until I am satisfied they epitomize their natural virtue.

I do hope everyone took the time to look over the LoD's Henry Jenkins interview, as it was highly enjoyable, and the sort of thing that should rightly be called "Gaming Journalism." It came in not one, not two, but three parts, and deals with the way gaming is perceived by the larger culture as well as other fancy stuff.

(CW)TB out.

clarence carter clarence carter clarence carter

I mean, what the damnity damn hell!

(CW)TB

I love Kristopher Straub, I really do. Long after I thought parodies of Apple's Switch Ads might have worn out their welcome, he goes and makes the best one.

(CW)TB

Because I love you so desperately, I have scanned a bit of the Dynasty Tactics manual for you reading pleasure. Now, understand that this is one column of four printed in the manual, and this isn't even all of them. These diagrams should make the case for this game with more eloquence than I could manage myself.

(CW)TB

I think Ikaruga is Japanese for "Mind Fuck". For those of you unfamiliar with the concept behind the game I will cover it briefly for you here. Ikaruga is a top down shooter in which all the enemies you will fight are divided into two groups, black or white. Your ship also has two sides to it, black and white and you can flip between these sides at anytime. When your ship is black you can absorb black shots which charge your mega shot meter, you deal more damage against white enemies and white shots will fuck your shit up. The same is true for your ship when it is in white mode only backwards. Get it? Good. The screen is almost always full of enemy fire of both colors and only through skillful use of your own ships alignment will you be able to navigate through them safely. There is also a pretty cool combo system. Destroy 3 enemies of the same color in rapid succession and that kicks off a combo. Continue destroying groups of three enemies of the same color to keep your combo going. You can chain together pretty large combos in this manner and rack up some serious points. While Ikaruga doesn't have multiple weapon upgrades its innovative use of this black and white system more than makes up for it. The level of strategy required to pass some of these levels is light-years beyond your average shooter. Ikaruga may also be one of the best looking games on the Dreamcast. The levels themselves are not content to sit motionless below you as in many other top down shooters. The scenery behind your ship will twist and dive through vertigo inducing 3D backgrounds even as the action stays fixed on a 2D plane. In the arcade Ikaruga would have been played on a monitor that was taller than it is wide. The home version gives you the option to play in either a vertical mode in which there are large black bars on the sides of your screen. Or a horizontal one in which the image is rotated clockwise and the game plays like a side scrolling shooter. Both are cool and since I can't read Japanese anyway the fact that it was on its side in the horizontal mode wasn't much of a distraction. Speaking of Japanese you won't have any trouble playing Ikargua if you don't speak it. The main menu options are all in English and translations of the story are easy to find online. If you have a Dreamcast Ikaruga is a must have. If you don't have a Dreamcast go buy one, it's that fucking good. Keep in mind it is an IMPORT TITLE and you will need something like DC-X to play it on a US Dreamcast. Thanks to VGD as always for the hook up.

Thanks to my contact at Nintendo, I'm also playing a bit of Animal Crossing with Kara. We each have our own town going and it's pretty cool. Kara being the hardcore Sims addict that she is has taken much more of a liking to it than I have, but I can't deny a certain amount of joy in finding just the right lamp to accent my new wallpaper. Last night I caught her in my town stealing some of my pears. She evidently had plans to take them back to her town and start some kind of pear orchard. She could then sell the extremely rare fruit for hundreds of Bells and live like a queen on her tropical island. She is out of town this week and I have devised a similar plan involving her precious oranges. Soon I will be the orange king and I will rule my town with an iron fist! I get a lot of mail from guys asking how they can turn their girls onto gaming. Animal crossing is a great game to play together. Think of it like a gateway game. It's easy to picture a girl moving on from animal crossing to a game like Pikmin or even Zelda. Baby steps my friends, baby steps. I will put some more time into it this week and check back in Friday with a more detailed report.

To those of you who mailed me about the Club PA gift for this month not working please try it again. I had some problems getting it uploaded but the link you have should be working now. There will also be another Club PA gift coming out towards the end of the month so keep an eye out for that.

-Gabe out