When Sin and Punishment first saw Japanese release back in 2000, the Nintendo 64 was more or less dead in the eyes of most western gamers, myself included. We had our Playstations, Dreamcasts, and the impending release of the Playstation 2 to keep us busy. The game never left Japan’s shores, though it would have been a publisher’s dream localization project had it been for any other console: full English voice acting, only a handful of menus in need of translation, and as a Treasure developed title, it was guaranteed to sell to at least a few thousand raving fans. Though the game interested me quite a bit, I had no idea how to play a Japanese cart on a very US Nintendo 64, and the prospect of shelling out $80 for the game when Final Fantasy VIII was only $20 did a lot to steer me away from it.

However, I was recently pointed towards complete, sealed copies of the game selling for a mere $40 on eBay. A quick trip to Google taught me that I could either take a hacksaw to my N64 in order to remove the two plastic tabs preventing Japanese games from fitting into the console, or find myself a nice region free GameShark (which neither GameStop or EB Games sells!) to bypass the console’s state of the art region lockout technology.

That was several weeks ago, and as of yesterday I had both Sin and Punishment and a GameShark on hand. As my first import video game, I don’t think I could have picked a better candidate. As I said before, all of the game’s lines are spoken in English, and there are really only three menu options which need managing. Having lost my import cherry, I can’t help but feel like the world of importing has lost all its wonder and mystique. I just ordered the stuff off eBay. And it was pretty cheap. Is that all I’ve been shying away from all this time?

The game itself is (I seem to use those four words often) quite good. It’s you’re standard on the rails, third person Space Harrier-esque shooter. It’s also a lot longer than your typical Treasure fare, though the added game length comes mostly from the game’s numerous cutscenes. Even though everything’s in English, the game’s narrative still doesn’t make a lot of sense. There’s demons/genetically mutated monsters/things, lots of references to “blood,” and a trio of ridiculously ugly super hero kids. And the final boss is the Earth itself. (OMG SPOILERZ!) But if you’re importing a Treasure game for its story, you’re far enough off the mark to be considered pretty far off the mark. The game’s final level is pretty lackluster, as it suddenly shifts the gameplay to something resembling a side scrolling platformer. Still, it’s a small flaw from a developer known for some much more serious crimes against gaming, and the aircraft carrier level alone is worth the price of admission and stands as one of the coolest stages I’ve ever seen in a video game.

So.

I imported my first game. The game was Sin and Punishment. It is fun.

So! I tried uploading photos of my trip and ended up getting my IP banned by wedge’s hosting company. This is what happens when you forget your login. I can only imagine what it looked like on their side of things. Random IP address starts trying to log in unsuccessfully through the FTP port for half an hour using a half dozen different incorrect passwords — it’s like I was Adrian Lamo, the Helpful Hacker. I would have banned me too. However, being banned turned out to be solvable by whining/crying to the correct people. This does not help me remember my password, though.

In conclusion: I missed you guys, but you get no photos. For now.
Also: Bots are spamming one of my old updates.

(vector_black drives the Fuchikoma)

Today was my last day at OfficeMax. Though I won’t miss the place, I’ll certainly miss the people. The people who work there. The customers can go to hell.

Hector, whose super secret Internet handle is Hector, and who is an OfficeMax lifer and the coolest guy in the world, said something today which I will now try to reproduce in my best written Hector impression. “Hey, you know,” Hector said, “you wouldn’t really think about retail as being stressful, you know. But, hey, I’ve worked a lot of jobs, you know, and after eight hours here I just want to sit down in my chair and go to sleep, you know. And not just because I’m on my feet for eight hours. It’s those customers, man. They treat you like dirt, you know.” And I do know. Most customers are harmless (and helpless) but the 10% or so who seem to visit our store only to act like jackasses really ruin it for everyone else. It used to bother me a lot more in the beginning. Whenever some grouchy old woman would yell at me or some middle-aged man decked out entirely in Gap clothing who still referred to himself as a hippie would directly insult me I would take it personally. Then I learned you just got to insult them first.

Working retail you quickly learn to distinguish the bad customers from the good ones from miles away. Surprisingly enough, age has a lot to do with it. I can’t remember a single high school or college student who wasn�t completely friendly. I can remember dozens and dozens of middle-aged to super fucking old people who were rude, insulting, and assholes of the highest degree. This is really the opposite of how things should function if THE MEDIA is to be believed.

Give them the chance and the customers will walk all over you. That’s why it’s essential to let them know that you’re in control from the start.

Whenever I’d get the “do you work here?” I’d usually respond with a simple “yes” and then continue with whatever I was doing beforehand. I answered their question; they shouldn’t need any more of me. By the time they had to clarify their position with an “excuse me” or a “can I ask you a few questions?” I was in complete control.

There’s also a no more satisfying feeling in the world than selling some jackass a ridiculously expensive piece of shit. Want to treat me like ass? Fine, go ahead, but you’re walking out of here with a $300 printer that’s worse than that $99 one you were just looking at. And in case you wondering, no, we don’t sell the ink it takes here. But if you ask, I’ll be more than happy to tell you that we do. By the way, you’ll need an extra USB cable if you plan on hooking it up. I’ll be sure to remind you of this after you drive home, find yourself USB-less, and are forced to return to our store. I seemed to have forgotten to give you your mail-in rebate form too. Oops.

All of our printers, phones, PDAs, digital cameras, and furniture have these little white pulltags nearby. These cards’ primary purpose is to relieve customers of the trouble of carrying that pound and a half printer up to the register themselves and to have one of us do it instead. However, they also display any information relevant to the product (print speeds, widths, feature sets) in easily readable lists. And in case you’re wondering, the number of pulltags available for a certain product does not in any way correspond to the number of those items we have in stock. How someone would even arrive at that conclusion in the first place is beyond me.

Most of the time that I spent helping customers I spent reading the information on the pulltags to them. What’s the difference between these two printers? I’d remove two of the cards, read the two lists to them, and then ask if there was anything else I could help them with. If there wasn’t, I found something less stupid to occupy my time with. Often times customers seemed upset that I just read everything they could possibly want to know about a product from little white cards which had sat directly in front of them for the past ten minutes. I’d get a lot of the “can I speak to someone who knows more about /someone from this department?” Such a question has a multitude of perfectly acceptable responses such as we don�t have departments,” “I know more about this product than anyone else here,” and “maybe you could just read the information on the little cards rather than wasting my time, you clueless bitch.” Sadly, I never got to use the third option.

Which reminds me, RETAIL EMPLOYEES ARE NOT TECH SUPPORT. Especially when we didn’t sell you whatever you’re too stupid to use. I’d always have to answer calls (“Electronics, line one”) from random people who decided that they should call the local office supply store for all their tech support needs. They should be talking to people in India who’re getting paid to deal with them, not me. At first I would actually try and help them to the best of my ability. Then I realized it just wasn’t worth the effort. If they were having a problem with their CD-ROM drive, for example, I would ask them, “did you buy the drive from us?” If the answer was no, I’d tell them to call the manufacturer. If the answer was yes, I’d tell them to call the manufacturer.

Then there were all the people who had decided they were computer experts. People would tell me how they were setting up a network in their home and therefore needed lots of USB cables. Sometimes I could convince them that they were wrong. Other times I let them buy six USB cables and thoroughly enjoyed selling them six ethernet cables a few hours later. People would spout random computer terms to demonstrate just how much they knew. I’d hear people say things like, “my computer has megabytes,” “I need floppy zip disks,” or “do you have Internet modems?” (are there any other kind?). Also fun were the responses I’d get to questions like “does your computer have a free USB port?” “what operating system are you running?” and “is the drive a DVD reader or writer?” These types of questions always got the same answers, such as “I have a Dell,” or “my computer is three years old.” I know! Let’s try and be less helpful!

Right. So I’m done now. That update was all over the place. Tense shifts for fun and profit, as they say. This takes WEWATC~1.doc to page 313.

Also, no replays tonight. Ha! Take that!

Finally back in Michigan — tired, jet-lagged. All the usual things.

I’ve already said basically what I did in the previous Tokyo data squirts. Akihabara, Shinjuku, Daiba, Harajuku, CC Lemon… good stuff. Hokkaido was nice, and gave us a chance to avoid Tokyo’s record high temperatures for a few days. One thing I didn’t mention was that over the course of two weeks in Japan, I ate an insane amount of French toast.

Total CC Lemon drinks purchased: 13

(vector_black came back, the very next day)

This is cool, just not $200 cool.

Rather than announce every time I upload any replays here on the index page, and rather than upload them in large batches, I’ll simply start uploading a single replay a day until the baglog runs dry. Spending two and a half hours watching and then writing about Warcraft 3 replays every time I have some to upload isn’t exactly how I want to spend my time. Besides, as PopcornChicken so eloquently put it, dorkclub.com is more than just replays.

I just pre-ordered Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 using Gamestop.com’s 1DDOOMHL code which gives you free overnight delivery on both games if you order them together. I had already pre-ordered Half-Life 2 quite some time ago. Though I’m not a fan of the first game (read: I don’t even like the thing), Half-Life 2 looks far too impressive to pass up. Besides, if the combat pacing even remotely resembles what’s been shown in their “gameplay” videos, it should be a pleasant enough experience, free of the strict scripting and ridiculous A.I. that plagued the first game.

Doom 3, on the other hand, I’m not too sure about. Though I respect John Carmack more so than any other western game maker, his company seems unable to produce any truly amazing works of interactive entertainment, Quake notwithstanding. I figure at best I’ll get a System Shocky, Quake-esque survival horror game with plenty of arcadey run-and-gun action and a decent multiplayer mode to boot. At worse I’ll get Quake 2. Either way, it’ll still be better than the original Half-Life.

P.S. Six new Warcaft 3 replays are online, including two PopcornChicken crafted especially for his fans.

Harajuku: high school girls, gaijin, panda girls, phonecams, and the ocassional gothic lolita. Engrish. There’s also part of a propeller bolted to a concrete post.

Interesting to note is the near total absence of obesity in people of all age groups around here. Even the overweight otaku are svelte and slender by American overweight otaku standards.

CC Lemon drinks purchased: 2

Games have grown progressively more complex as processor speeds increase and games becomes less and less confined by the technology responsible for them, but the ways we communicate through online games haven’t changed since their creation. I’m playing the type of team-based, open-ended FPS game which didn’t exist before Tribes and I’m playing fast-paced, micromanagement-heavy RTS games online, but I’m still using my mouse and keyboard – the same devices I’m using to play the damn game – to communicate with friends and foes. That’s downright barbaric. The fact that an online multiplayer game, be it for console or PC, can ship today without any form of voice support is absurd. It’s like shipping an online multiplayer game in 1998 without any keyboard support.

The simple fact of that matter is there is no good reason for any developer to ship any online multiplayer game without any form of voice support. Most people own a microphone of some kind, or at the very least know someone who does, and on the console side of things you can’t walk two steps without tripping over a dozen different poorly made, but no less existing, microphones. The option to use voice support should always be present, unless you’re trying to do some artsy thing with your text-only communication. But it should be exactly that, entirely optional. And it shouldn’t work to replace good ol’ keyboard communication, but to enhance and compliment it. Voice support should be integrated into a game’s design.

Take your standard Tribes-inspired FPS for example. Such games are several orders of magnitude more complex than your Quake variety deathmatches. There are massive maps that are miles in width and vehicles, inventories, and character classes to manage. It all requires tremendous teamwork if you want to be successful, but very often you’re too busy playing the game to communicate with your allies and devise a cohesive strategy. With voice support, you could quickly and efficiently outline long-term plans and even easily change them on the fly. Recon would suddenly become valuable, with information easily relayed to teammates, and players would no longer need to worry about walking over one another’s toes. Suddenly those communication dishes in Tribes become much more valuable, worth protecting even.

But then you could take it step further. Let’s say that any enemies in the area could actually overhear things said through voice chat. They’d have to get pretty close, a distance determined to be balance friendly, and they could effectively learn all of your carefully laid plans. A whole new spying class, whether equipment exists to support it or now, suddenly springs into being. Additionally, players are suddenly able to provide reliable, false information to their enemies, adding another layer of strategy to the game.

And keyboard communication? Keep it. But unlike voice chat it would be uninterceptable by enemy ears (or eyes). It could serve as a secure line, perfect for players on recon or deep within an enemy’s lair.

Similar methods could easily work in MMORPGs, wherein only players near the speaker would actually hear what he or she was saying, preventing you from listening to two hundred asshats talk about each other’s moms. But there will always be people who set out only to ruin an experience for others, setting up their microphone right next to their radio as it blares La Vida Loca into a dozen foreign homes. Voice rights should ALWAYS be ignorable on a player to player basis, and should always be removable by either admin action or a player voting system.

Still, despite the few who put Star Whores Vol. 3 in their VCR and play its hypnotic sci-fi lullaby for the rest of us, voice support ultimately offers more good than bad. It should be more readily used and it should be included as part of the game. Official Roger Wilco support doesn’t cut it. There are just too many good reasons for developers to continue ignoring voice support. I shouldn’t have to be on the phone with my ally while I’m trying to play a game.

Back before dorkclub.com was the huge media empire it is today, we used to produce an update consisting only of the Super Sentence (Guaranteed to Generate Web Traffic) about once every two weeks as a means of generating those coveted hits. For the uniformed, the Super Sentence was a single, massive sentence nearly a page in length containing the most searched for words on this Internet of ours. Well, folks, times have changed but the Super Sentence has not� until today. So, without further ado, I present to you the Super Sentence (Guaranteed to Generate Web Traffic) Nude Version BETA5.3278M667G:

Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears free hardcore XXX thong bikini photos, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Pamela Anderson, Mandy Moore, Liv Tyler, communist fascist socialist Hitler, Brad Pitt, Michael Jackson, the Jewish novelist Pete Jackson, Samuel L. Jackson, barely legal Jenna Jameson, Ron Jeremy, Shaft, Shaq, Carmen Electra, l337 Jesus, Banpresto faye, Harry Potter, Frank Sinatra trying to sing John Lennon Beatles songs, Spider Man (Spider-Man) 2: The Game, and Osama Bin Laden (but not Saddam Hussein) all work for God, the Bible, Morpheus, Kazaa, Napster, Hotline, Sony, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, Family Guy, Adult Swim, Dragonball Z, Playboy, CNN, Nintendo, The Big O hentai dickgirls bondage anime manga, Squaresoft, Squre-Enix, Peter Jennings, Bungie, Blizzard, Lucas Arts Star Wars Trek, and ESPN nude naked stripping Ally McBeal college girl preteen high school football virgin cheerleaders developing Korean, Japanese, English, goat, and sheep Ragnarok pc video games for the Macintosh imac ipod ibooks with cheats and hacks but without servebots, pikmin, Digimon, minicons, or Pokemon, free mp3 beer rape incest beastiality movies on the GBA Game Boy Advance SP Color DS PSP N-Gage, Internet privacy, The Official Ninja Homepage: REAL Ultimate Power, Beast Wars Transformers GI Joe action Gundam Wing model kits, Charlton Heston celebrity celebrities Black Hawk Down Divx DVD, NRA, Chrono Break World of Warcraft, Diablo 2, Starcraft, Wolfenstein, Everquest, Ultima Online, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Asheron’s Call, DOOM 3, Half-Life 2, Fable, Halo PC 2, eTrade, eBay, eHarmony, Castlevania Sega Super Nintendo SNES Genesis Master System roms, Chrono Crono Trigger Cross Break, and other MMORPG alpha beta tests including Secret Sword of Legend of Mana Seiken Densetsu RPG clich� list and enjoy sexy sexual sex with hot amateur redhead ebony lesbian teens while using their gay porn gambling casino gun XBox emulators which enlarge your penis enlargement even better than George Bush, Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, John Kerry, John Edwards Crossing Over, Vietnam, Christina Aguilera, World War Two, WW2, or The Taliban of free erotic midget money smoking hemp marijuana weed crack cocaine ecstasy anthrax because they are neither homosexual Gamecube N64 pornography nor The Lord of The Rings Reloaded Revolutions on a PS2 Playstation PS3 emulator warez playing Metal Gear Solid and Super Smash Brothers: Melee for Dreamcast online XBox Live stuffed with an Islamic Megaman X maverick essay under spring break college girls gone wild but it is all for not because there is no N’SYNC, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, O Town, Dream, Eden’s Crush, From Justin to Kelly, Jessica Simpson, Ja Rule, whatever the kids listen to now, GTA3 Grand Theft Auto 3 Vice City San Andreas FAQ, or even a Final Fantasy X XI XII walkthrough in The Matrix exclusive contest review previews of Tomb Raider Lara Croft The Sims Hot Date Living Large House Party Expansion interview nude patch codes.

Three new user submitted Warcraft 3 replays are online too.

Tomorrow: I wish I could think of something not stupid to write.

The plan was simple: trick Warcraft3’s automated matching system into cramming as many of us into a single FFA game as possible and then maintain a game as long as possible. Two nights ago we succeeded, PopcornChicken and two others ended up in the same game, their fourth opponent dropping, while Piyonugget, ShootMe, and I found ourselves in a game of our own. Interestingly, we were unable to defeat our single opponent, who bested us time and time again despite our superior numbers. However, after we explained our plan and he realized that he had seen a replay of the infamous Tower Strat, a strategy which we pioneered, he agreed to leave the game so that we could continue in peace. To say that he was awesome would be understatement. Unfortunately, ShootMe dropped during the night and both Piyonugget and I dropped after spending close to 21 hours in the game, at almost exactly the same time which PopcornChicken was dropped from his own game. We were unable to save a replay of our own antics, but the last remaining member of the other game was able to save a replay after 24 hours and 22 minutes spent in game. Though the final fourteen hours consist almost entirely of units sitting idly at their posts, I think it’s safe to say we now hold the record for longest ladder game of Warcraft 3. You can find the replay, which weighs in at 2.23 MB over on the replay page. In case you’re suddenly motivated to repeat our actions, feel free to, but don’t bother sending me the replay. Because of the size of the things, and the sheer amount of time it takes to view them (a three hour minimum for our replay), posting them is essentially an impossibility.

Now that the universal burst of nostalgia brought about by the release of Mega Man Anniversary Collection has ceased, I figured it would be the perfect time for yet another Mega Man-related update.

Despite Capcom’s best attempts to run the series into the ground, the Mega Man series and its multitude of spin-offs are still obscenely popular and somehow continue to turn a profit. Capcom has no reason to stop releasing poorly designed rehashes of previous Mega Man games as long as its making money, but if a development team actually invested the time and love into a Mega Man game which the series so deserves, they could produce something truly wonderful, the Blue Bomber’s answer to Symphony of the Night, a celebration of the series’ past and a look towards its inevitable future.

I’m not going to bother looking up release dates, but I’ve always sort of assumed the Mega Man series and the Metroid series have fed off one another over the years. Both Mega Man and Samus exist in (somewhat) non-linear, platform-heavy worlds and, assuming the consumption to be completely one sided, Mega Man’s slide ability and Mega Buster have always bore a striking resemblance to Samus’ morph ball and charge beam, respectively. With a significant stretch of the imagination, their respective functions are largely similar. That Mega Man is deserving of a Castlevania-esque Metroid makeover should come as no surprise to anyone.

The ground work has already been laid. The non-linear, eight stage approach of your traditional Mega Man game could easily be applied to a more open-ended, free-roaming Metroid style adventure. I’m not suggesting that the Mega Man series should whole-heartedly rip-off Castlevania and Metroid, though if Capcom ever revitalized the Mega Man series in such a way I’m certain it would have no hesitations about doing so, but merely adapt to fit to the mold laid out by these series using its own gameplay conventions. No doubt such a Mega Man game would be vastly more action-oriented and focused than a Metroid or Castlevania outing, the majority of gameplay focusing on platform-heavy level navigation and gunning down hordes of cute robots. Bosses could yield new weapons, as per usual, with every enemy in the game sporting weaknesses to specific weapons, thus encouraging switching back and forth between the various weapons rather than using the Mega Buster for everything but boss fights. Additionally, Rush could tag along, always on the screen mirroring Mega Man’s movements. His traditional flight, aquatic, and springy super jump forms serving as means of accessing new areas, after the required powerup has been obtained, obviously. Such a game could even borrow heavily from the Mega Man X series with its health powerups, permanent energy tanks, and armor upgrades. Hell, let’s include some wall jumping too.

In fact, such a game should include elements from all the myriad Mega Man series. Let’s see Mega Man face off against an assortment of bosses from each of the game’s series or even take control of a Net Navi and jump onto the ‘net. He could wield Zero’s sword, control a servebot army, and fight every single one of the series’ ice-themed robot bosses in a battle royal. I would play this. I would play this and I would enjoy this.

Unfortunately, Capcom has already tried to merge Metroid with Mega Man and the result was the terrible Mega Man Zero. It’s already spawned two terrible sequels.

Mega Man is a classic gaming series that should receive the same respect as Mario, Final Fantasy, and Metal Gear, but unlike those series’ respective developers, Capcom has not treated Mega Man with the respect it deserves, instead producing mindless sequel after mindless sequel (notice I didn’t include Sonic in my original list). It’s a shame too, because the first games in the series really were quite good. There have been a few decent entries since the original four, but they seem more like rare flukes rather than the payoff of hard work. Maybe someday (in the year 200X) Capcom will treat Mega Man with the respect he deserves, but in the mean time, we’ll just have to settle for the games we can cook up in our minds.

Note: With this update WEWATCH~1.doc, the Microsoft Word document which houses most (but not all) of this site’s updates has spilled past the 300 page mark. I’ll let you know when I hit 400.