And then there are “fans”.
More than meets the eye
I went with a couple buddies to see the Transformers this afternoon — WOW!
I’m sure I was in the majority of kids who grew up in the eighties, fearing the worst. Michael Bay making a movie about one of my favorite childhood memories? Transformers weren’t simply a cartoon and a bunch of toys — they were my life for a long time. I spent countless hours assembling my Constructicons into Devastator so he could wreak havoc on GI Joe’s HQ (what I lacked in actual Transformer toys, I made up with imagination. And GI Joes). This was not a flash in the pan! This was important stuff, not to be trifled with by someone who thought Ben Affleck would make a great star opposite Bruce Willis. I half-expected the movie to stink like so much garbage.
On the other hand, I am a total sucker for summer blockbusters where a whole bunch of stuff gets blown up. I’m not ashamed to admit I like most of Armageddon or Independence Day. But I was nervous.
Well, I am nervous no more! Transformers was seven kinds of awesome. It has its cheesy moments, sure, and I could have done without some of the characters, but the first time the phrase “more than meets the eye” was uttered, the theater was electric. Chills, I tell you. It was non-stop trash-kicking from there on out. I didn’t even care Megatron wasn’t a gun! It was everything the ten-year-old in me could have hoped for.
Huge thumb, way up!
The countdown begins (T-minus 14 days)
Do you know how hard it is not to type, “Are you ready for some football?!” everytime you get excited about a new football game? Ahh crap. It’s impossible.
Anyway, I can’t contain my excitement any more about this game. I saw the videos earlier, Xbox just released a trailer on the Xbox Live Marketplace, and I’m about ready to blow. Two weeks and counting! I was listening to the 1UP Yours pod-cast last night, and they said NCAA 2008 is looking awesome. They said the graphics are finally looking “next gen” and the amount of new animations and other details is staggering. They said the Dynasty mode (the reason most of us play it) is engrossing yet again.
The college football season officially begins when NCAA 200x comes out. This place is going to be NCAA-central (at least from where I stand) for the next few weeks. I will be eating, drinking, and sleeping NCAA 2008 Dynasty mode. The North Royalton University Bears will rule the college football landscape forever! (unfortunately, only Dark Reyule will get that last reference)
Excuse our dust
I’m currently upgrading all the WordPress sites I host to the newest version (2.2.1). I’m also working on a visual upgrade to the site as a whole. Please bear with the state of the site for the time being. I’m trying to do this at a non-peak buttonmashing.com time (as if there ever was one! It’s a non-stop party around here!) so hopefully this won’t affect many of you, but I just wanted you to know.
Knowing is half the battle, afterall.
Diamond in the rough
I just checked my save game stats, and I’ve already put in north of 25 hours of gameplay. Thing is, this has come in bite-size chunks. I don’t sit down and play Pokemon for long stretches of time but I still seem to have logged quite a bit of time already. Most of my Pokemon are in the 20-25 level range and I can’t fall asleep until I’ve leveled at least one of them.
I haven’t even touched the WiFi portion of the game, but that’s on tap. I’d really like to battle with some buttonmashers, so level up your Pokemons and get ready! I won’t have time to get online until sometime next week, but when I do — look out for my Monferno and my Luxio. They both pack quite the punch.
You get to drink from… the FIRE HOSE!!
From the Why-Didn’t-Someone-Think-of-This-Earler? Department, there will be a new Firefighter game for the Wii, titled “Real Heroes: Firefighter” by Epicenter Studios.
Let the Wii puns commence in full force once again.
(Via Games Are Fun)
It’s a sickness. Help me!
Recently, the medical community confirmed what most of us already knew — playing video games can be addicting. Anyone who has grinded for a few more gold pieces, played that stupid helicopter flash game for one more level or dropped yet another quarter into the Galaga machine can attest to it. We didn’t need some egghead with an M.D. to tell us that.
Clearly, the people that make up the AMA have never played Desktop Tower Defense. All those “addictions” they talk about pale in comparison to what Desktop Tower Defense will do to your soul. Hopefully everyone by now has played DTD, but the newest version came out recently and it’s better than ever. When I first saw a link to the game a few weeks ago, I played it for a few minutes and went about my merry way. It was a fun little game, but I was at lunch at the time and I didn’t have time to really delve into it.
Well I decided this evening to “delve into it” and have wasted the last four five and a half hours playing the game. And all I can think about while I’m writing this is, “finish the fricken blog post already, dude! I have a great idea for a new tower layout!” That’s not right! I should not be having this conversation with myself. I wonder if there’s a DTD Anonymous?
So yeah. Are games addicting? When they’re as fun as DTD, yes. Horrifingly so. If you play this game for more than five minutes and don’t like it, you have a defective gaming gene.
Update: I made a Group called “buttonmashing.com” on the DTD site, where you can compare your score to other sickos players. So if you play a few games today, add your score to our little “group.” I’d like to see how afflicted much fun you guys are having.
(On a side note, James Lileks has a great piece about this so-called addiction, which is worth a read)
It’s about fricken time
First off, thanks to Glen at tBftSG pointing me to the new HD videos of NCAA 2008.
I watched the tutorial video in particular and learned that EA has FINALLY put in a “sim to complete” feature into the game. I cannot stress how important this is.
It’s called the “Skip Ahead” feature and it may supplant sliced bread as the greatest thing ever. Using it, you can skip to the either the next possesion, the next quarter or the end of the game. EA calls it the Super Sim feature. Sounds awesome. I call it the “What took you so fricken long feature?” We have been clamoring for this feature for years and they’re finally getting around to putting it into the game. It’s about time.
But it gets even better. You can watch the simulation “real time” and jump in and take over the play calling at any point. You can even resume playing (from what I can tell) at any time during the simulation. This is most excellent.
It simply cements further my belief that EA has a laundry list of “features” that they could put into the game, and they spin the wheel and add a few new features each year, stringing us along every year while we lap up the newest greatest thing. It’s frustrating to be sure, but what can you do?
I skipped out on NCAA 2007 but I’m not skipping out on 2008.
There’s a new guy in town
When I first started this site I never envisioned it growing larger than just me blogging. I actually resisted the idea of another blogger for a long time. Then as time went on, I noticed that I just simply can’t keep up with everything. Along with that, there are huge gaps in the amount of titles I can actually play. So I mulled over the idea of adding another blogger and decided to ask Nat if he’d join me. I was pretty excited when he joined the team a little while ago.
Recently I ran into a high school buddy of mine on MySpace (it’s not all bad, yo!). He and I were huge gamers back in the day and we fell out of touch for a while. After a little back and forth via email, we got together on Live for some Gears of War and had a blast. I told him about the site and made an offer to him, that if he was interested, I’d love to have him write for the site as well. He agreed and he’ll also be joining the buttonmashing.com team. He’ll go by the name Dark Reyule and he’ll be giving us some excellent content.
So now, as far as the site goes, here’s how I see things: I’ll be handling the majority of the day-to-day blogging and site stuff. Nat will throw in his two cents, blogging-wise, along with some more in-depth analysis and editorial content. He’ll also be our resident Sony expert. Dark Reyule will be our 360 guru, blogging about the goings-on with the 360, and will be providing us with his in depth reviews of games he’s been playing. We’ll have two of his reviews up soon one the site.
So in the period of a couple months, we’ve tripled in size and will hopefully be bringing some consistently good content.
What is hardcore?
Bill Harris looks at what “hardcore” really is.