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I want it all…

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… and I want it now.

Man, the flow of new games right now is killing me! There are just too many of them. Trauma Center and Phoenix Wright are both calling me, I haven’t played a Castlevania game in years, so Dawn of Sorrow is looking good, and even though Trace Memory hasn’t been that well received, I still think I’d like it.

Battalion Wars and Fire Emblem for the Gamecube look like fun. I didn’t experience Ninja Gaiden when it first came out, so I’m tempted to get NG Black. Far Cry Instincts looks great as well. And that’s not even mentioning all the new sports games (Tiger Woods, The League). Oh! And Age of Empires III. Can’t forget that one. What’s a gamer to do?

That brings me to a question for all you readers. Who out there is using GameFly? I’ve been toying with the idea of giving their service a try but I’m not sure yet. I would probably go with their one-game-at-a-time deal since I have plenty of games to keep me busy as I await the next one in my queue. If you use them, what has been your experience? What plan would you recommend? If you don’t use GameFly, what about the other GameFly-like places are out there? Inquiring minds what to know! I’m tired of the weak selection of my local Blockbuster and Hollywood Video so I need a new source of game rentals.

With all the great games out there it’s impossible to play them all but I’d sure like to try.

Jack Thompson, you got served!

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Ahh, even though I mentioned his autobiography the other day, I haven’t really been keeping up on our good friend Jack. Well, things have really come to a head lately with the King Kook himself, and he refuses to eat the huge platter of crow that he has been served. Even though someone has probably already said this, someone set him up the BOMB!

So I guess I could recap with a huge reblog. (I’m glad other’s are keeping up with this. My brain hurts everytime Thompson opens his mouth.) For those who don’t know, Jack “challenged” the gaming community to make a game, based on a morally reprehensible premise he proposed. He then promised a $10k donation to a charity of Paul Eibeler (the Chairman of Take-Two Interactive). More than a few people took up the challenge and some modders made a sweet GTA mod (apparently slashdotted, PA’ed or Dugg). In true BatJack form, he claimed he was “just kidding” and he isn’t gonna pay. Excellent. Of course, the ever-charitable guys at Penny-Arcade came through and delivered the goods. They donated $10k to the ESA Foundation which will certainly help keep JT off their proverbial back. The best part of this is that they had already zinged him on his “weak” donation amount. That go a rise out of him. Sweet!

What a wild week or two it’s been. And I’m just scratching the surface. This isn’t going to end on this.

The guys at Ctrl+Alt+Delete have had their run-ins with Jackie-boy as well and they have a few things to say, too.

On a seperate but equally awesome note is that America’s National Institute on Media and the Family basically told Thompson to stop invoking their name when he makes his asinine comments. You know you’re alone in the battle when a pro-family, right-wing conservative group condemns you. You’re supposed to be on their side and they’re basically asking you to leave. That’s pretty sad. Of course, Thompson can’t leave well enough alone. You can not make this stuff up.

Oh, and there’s this, too. (a little old, but who cares)

Have I had enough of Jack? Probably not. He’ll step up to the plate and say some more ridiculous things with spurrious proof and the media will still let him on their pulpit, but hopefully more and more people are starting to see him for what he is — a bat-crazy, spittle-flying, deranged crazy person.

For now, I’m gonna go play some Resident Evil 4 and blast some zombies into oblivion. Resident Evil 4 is an excellent self-defense-against-deranged-Spaniards Simulator.

Update: This just gets crazier by the minute.

More: I want to stop, but I can’t.

Buckeye Blogging, Week #7 (4-2)

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Wow! What a Saturday to be a college football fan. The Luck of the Irish falls short as USC wins at South Bend, Meatchicken pulls off the improbable 1-second-left-in-the-game upset of Penn State, and of course the Buckeyes rolled to a 35-24 win over the Spartans of Michigan State.

I was at the Horsehoe again today and the first 40 minutes or so of the game were gut wrenching. It looked like OSU was going to give another game away with turnovers and bad plays. When Troy Smith fumbled the ball and MSU had a chance to go ahead big on us, I started getting really nervous. Sick-to-my-stomach nervous. But, oh, our Defense! Sure they gave up a lot of yards to the second best offense in the country but they clamped down when they were put in bad situations. After MSU missed their second field goal, things started looking better. And easier on my stomach.

Tedd Ginn and Santonio Holmes both had big games (finally!) and both did their best to drop everything that was kicked their way. Talk about heart-stopping moments. With 4 lost fumbles, we had a lot to worry about, but in the end, the good guys prevailed.

A cool thing happened while we were at the game. My wife was sitting next to an older gentleman who was wearing a 2002 National Championship ring. The thing was fricking huge. In passing, she mentioned what a nice ring he was wearing. Turns out, he was Michael Stafford’s (who was a senior OL, #50, who played on the 2002 OSU National Championship team) dad. It was pretty cool to see something like that up close. They don’t skimp on the jewelry for the winners. It was cool to see a piece of history like that.

go.to hell

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I currently use the WordPress plug-in WP-ShortStat (I’m thinking about trying out Mint. Is anyone using it out there?) that seems to do a better job of tracking visitors to buttonmashing.com than Statcounter, which I also use. Recently, I’ve noticed hundreds of hits from *.to addresses. They show up in the ShortStat logs but not the Statcounter logs. I figure these are hits from spammers. Weird thing is, Spam Karma isn’t reporting any comment/track back spam from these addresses. This is what a recent bit from the ShortStat report looks like:

buy-adipex.drop.to 10:14 pm
alprazolam.go.to 10:14 pm
alprazolam.go.to 10:14 pm
online-hydrocodone.drop.to 10:14 pm
buy-cialis.hey.to 10:14 pm
viagra-.get.to 10:14 pm
online-valium.get.to 10:14 pm
viagra-.get.to 10:14 pm
phentermine-.get.to 10:14 pm
hydrocodone.mysite.de 10:14 pm
online-fioricet.drop.to 10:14 pm
xanax.get.to 10:14 pm

Does anyone know what these hits would be accomplishing? If you go to one of the sites, you go to a spam search site hawking whatever the *.go.to or *.get.to is. If you go straight to go.to or get.to you get redirected to v3 Web Hosting. I imagine that’s a cheap place to get sub domains to redirect to your paid for search page. Anyway, it still doesn’t make sense to me.

Any other bloggers seeing these same kind of hits showing up? Is there any rhyme or reason to this? Or is it something I should just ignore? I’m not learned in the ways of the nefarious spammer. It’s just something that’s bothering me.

All the Zorg oldies-but-goldies.

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I haven’t really played anything new lately. I rented Burnout 4 (or Burnout Revenge, whatever it’s called. It’s Burnout 4) but I wasn’t that into it. It felt like Burnout 3, except the cars felt like dump trucks with cow-catchers attached to the front. Ramming traffic just didn’t feel right.

I have been playing some older games, though. I’ve played a bunch of Resident Evil 4 (mostly the Mercenaries mini-game), Metroid Fusion, and some Halo 2 with friends (the best way to enjoy it). I’ve also got my NES and SNES plugged in and I’ve been doing a little Metroid (the very first one) and Super Mario World. I’m getting down with the old (and not quite so old) classics. I can’t keep up with the onslaught of new games. And with the Xbox 360 on the horizon, it seems like it never ends.

So why do I bring this up? It reminded me of an article I read over at Gamers with Jobs about this same thing. From the article:

4rr0w_m4k3r owns two of the current-gen game consoles and for these consoles he owns five games that he has yet to play. Yet to even open. He owns more than twenty games that he hasn’t finished, and there are currently twice that number of games on his wish list. Games that he would pick up in an instant if he thought about it.

I’d imagine that describes a lot of us gamers. There’s just so much out there that it’s impossible to enjoy it all. But I find myself turned off even to the newest games. There’s just isn’t much out there catching my eye. A few DS games, but that’s about it.

In the end, I’ll probably end up with a couple of the next generation consoles under my TV. I’ll play a handful of the new games. But with backwards compatibility and a library of downloadable Nintendo games, what will I probably play? The oldies-but-goldies.