Okay, now that that’s out of the way…

Day one of the Con is behind me, and my feet are nearly destroyed. All day was spent either walking or standing in line, with only a few points where I got to sit down. But it’s been a blast, and I’m still struck by what a large presence gaming has at the show this year. For example, you can’t go anywhere on the floor without seeing people carrying the Little Big Planet tote bags Sony is apparently handing out – everywhere I look, a canvas ragdoll is staring back at me. At Comic-Con. Weird.

Well after about 6 hours on the road, I finally made it to San Diego and settled into the place I'm staying, a bed and breakfast a couple miles north of the Convention Center.

Yeah that's right: bed and breakfast. Hey, when you're trying to find a room on the cheap for Comic-Con, you gotta think outside the box, people. Every other typical hotel room in the vicinity was either booked months ago or was charging $200+ a night. My spot is $130, plus they make breakfast for me. Suck it.

So anyway, after I dropped all my stuff off I decided I'd walk to the Convention Center. Random impressions:

You can find all of the above and more at Heartless Doll, a new pop culture blog with a female perspective and a healthy chunk of gaming content. We're both Village Voice Media, so the doll crew is like a bunch of digital little sisters. Which is kind of a gross comparison given the first paragraph, I guess, so just wipe that from your memory bank, mmmkay?

Bonnie Ruberg (of Heroine Sheik excellence) gets the party started right and/or quickly with a list of The Ten Most Ridiculous Undergarments Worn by Women in Video Games.

You know the drill.

Hardware (Last Month):

Nintendo DS 783,000 (452,600)
Nintendo Wii 666,700 (675,100)
Sony PlayStation 3 405,500 (208,700)
Sony PSP 337,400 (182,300)
Microsoft Xbox 360 219,800 (186,600)
Sony Playstation 2 188,800 (132,700)

And the software:

Platform - Title - Units
PS3 - Metal Gear Solid 4 - 774,600
DS - Guitar Hero On Tour - 422,300
360 - Ninja Gaiden II - 372,700
WII - Wii Fit - 372,700
WII - Wii Play - 359,100
360 - Battlefield: Bad Company - 346,800
WII - Mario Kart - 322,400
WII - Lego Indiana Jones - 294,500
DS - Lego Indiana Jones - 267,800
PS2 - Lego Indiana Jones - 260,300

Right off the bat: this is going to be a bit of a short one, for two reasons. First, I have a ton of shit going on early this week, namely a 3-hour polygraph examination on Tuesday (part of a draconian job application process)… the anticipation of which having pretty much made me catatonic with anxiety.

But then I have a ton of (more enjoyable) shit going on later in the week: a little thing called Comic-Con 2008! More on that after the numbers talk.

Click on through!

This is my review of Battlefield: Bad Company. Battlefield: Bad Company is a game published by Electronic Arts for the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Battlefield: Bad Company is also a first-person shooter. That means: in Battlefield: Bad Company you shoot, and the shooting is performed from a first-person perspective.

(Okay, let’s see here: tools, word count… 52. Dammit.)

Umm… let’s see, what else to say about Battlefield: Bad Company. Well, the back of the package brags the game “brings the battlefield to life with spectacular visual effects.” That sounds awesome. The screenshots on this box do indeed look pretty good.

(Tools… Word Count… 94? Balls.)

Before the release of Rock Band for Wii, we planned an epic online confrontation between the geographically disparate members of the Joystick Division staff. This was overtaken by two events: first, it turned out that the game doesn't support online play, which is brutal; second, Chris Ward's copy of the game was eaten by crazed weasels.

Yet in crisis there is opportunity. While we reconstructed Ward's copy using state-of-the-art nanotechnology, I invited a host of people over -- specifically, casual gamers who had never played Rock band on any console before -- with the intention of answering a different question. Is this the kind of Friday night game your non-gamer friends are going to enjoy when you stock the liquor cabinet with absinthe, pack the fridge with barley wine and fill the bathtub with Mystery Punch?

Above is a little video of the second level of Mega Man 9 (announced for PSN, WiiWare, and XBLA), and it makes me almost giddy.

For those who haven't followed the MM9 info, Capcom has made a bold choice: make it so loyal to the series, so faithful to the classic gameplay that they even go as far as using 8-bit graphics and sounds. And indeed: aside from the lack of flicker and slowdown, the game could easily pass for something Capcom made and shelved 15 or 20 years ago, only to dust off now.

I love it. What a courageous move in this day and age of more 3D, more high-res, and more pyrotechnics! And watching the video (namely the trouble the player has in navigating a perfectly old-school pair of enemy-guarded platforms), it's obvious the gameplay makes no concessions for any modern concept of what a game's difficulty should be, either.

After playing through and loving No More Heroes, which is thick with pixelated visual flourishes and tinny, 8-bit musical fanfares, I wondered if someday we might see games using a prior generation's technical shortcomings as just another tool of artistic expression. Like Rodriguez and Tarantino digitally adding scratches, grain and missing reels to Grindhouse or even Spielberg shooting Schindler's List in black-and-white, would game developers someday add things like flicker, slowdown, limited frames of animation, horrendous Engrish or even pop-up to a game to better express themselves?

Capcom - with Mega Man 9 - seems to say yes.

Well, Penny Arcade has made a nice visual shorthand guide for anyone who isn't self-loathing enough to suffer through all three of the Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony E3 conferences. Click on the strip for the normal-sized version on their site.

(If you're unclear, from left to right that's Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.)

More than anything, I really want to love Nintendo. I don't mean on the level of getting a Triforce tattoo and setting up a Shigeru Miyamoto shrine or anything -- I just like the idea that a video game company can be successful and innovative and kinda weird at the same time. My DS is going to almost singlehandedly preserve my sanity during a 16-hour round trip via train to Chicago later this week (at least after I'm done reading The Crying of Lot 49 and Carl Wilson's 33 1/3 book about Celine Dion), and every time I wonder if my Wii was worth buying I remember the sparse but highly entertaining times I've had with Resident Evil 4, Super Mario Galaxy and No More Heroes. They're two of the most well-thought-out and compelling video game platforms in ages -- and sometimes, I think it'd be nice if Nintendo actually remembered that.

Among the relatively mundane 360 news coming out today (new dashboard, Mii - er, I mean Avatar support, a modest $50 price drop) comes one surprising tidbit nobody saw coming: Final Fantasy XIII - one of the handful of games named as a reason to own a PS3 - has been announced for the Microsoft console. Not exclusively, mind you - that would be the true megaton announcement - but it is coming, and according to Square-Enix, at about the same time as the PS3 version.

Wow.

Wander over to a gaming messageboard right now and you'll see packs of wild, freerange fanboys snapping and snarling at each other over the news - in either sadistic delight if they're Xbox kooks, or pure rage as Sony zombies. Entertaining reading all around!

So if tonight when you're trying to sleep you hear some sort of strange, wet smacking sound outside, don't be alarmed - it's just some Sony fanboy throwing himself off a tall building. Maybe this guy.

As far as July 2008 goes, there were three big things I've been really looking forward to:

1) The Dark Knight opens (I'll be there for the first midnight showing, tickets already bought, Final Fantasy Tactics A2 set aside to pass the time in line),

2) Comic-Con (which I'll be covering for Joystick Division, more details on that next week), and finally

3) Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution.

Well I'm still waiting on the first two, but Civilization Revolution did finally come out this week for the 360, PS3, and even the Nintendo DS. (Has anyone played the DS version? How is it?) I've only played the demo so far but can't wait to dig into the full game, sitting in front of me as I type. I'm curious to see how this supposedly streamlined, console-friendly interpretation of the series holds up.

But most of all, I'm excited to continue my eternal campaign against the English, my lifelong (virtual) enemies thanks to the very first game of Civilization I ever played.

Welcome to a new feature we're going to try and play with once in a while, "Player Vs. Player" - Joystick Division's equivalent of point-counterpoint. Why not just call it "point-counterpoint" then? Well, um... to justify our existence as working writers?

This time, Gary Hodges and Nate Patrin discuss the controversial Metal Gear Solid 4. Gary has banished the game from his house to wander the Earth for all eternity, while Nate has a somewhat kinder view.

Both, though, agree that any and all problems with the cutscenes would be easily forgivable if they looked like this:

Click through to read the two most verbose members of the Joystick Division team talk MGS4 (as well as Brock Samson in hushed, reverent tones).

Presumably, this means Akuma will be in SFIV - no big surprise there. But it also seems to suggest another character from Street Fighter lore - one long thought dead - might make an appearance.

I can't tell you how big a SF fan I am. I can't tell you how obsessed I was with it back in the day. I can tell you how my high school career suffered as a result: greatly. Akuma definitely executed a shun goku satsu on my GPA.