You probably noticed, but I’ve been neglecting this place. Consider it yet another oscillation as I alternate between completely ignoring this site and treating it as the center of my universe. I’m not entirely sure what, if anything, I’ll do with this space “going forward,” but were I betting man, and were there options to bet on, I’d go with “sit idly by and watch the latest news post become increasingly out of date.”

At this point, I’ve been “working” in the “games industry” for six weeks, “I guess.” Basically, my day-to-day responsibilities involve a lot of forum posting, a lot of e-mailing, and a whole lot of copy-pasting the same damn thing repeatedly.

One of my primary duties, though it’s mentioned nowhere in my job description, is to act as a sort of PR liaison between the mysterious unnamed company where I work and the websites we so desperately need to cover our products. This mostly involves letting them know when new stuff gets added to our games, and explaining exactly what all this new stuff is. Because I’m not about to write a press release, instead I relay this information in e-mails that closely resemble dorkclub.com-style blog posts, often pooling information from various forum posts that aren’t quite fit for public consumption.

At no point did I expect every single site that receives these updates to just blatantly copy-paste my information word for word and post it under someone else’s name. Literally every single site that I’m in contact with, with the exception of one exceptional site that has linked to this very space in the past (HINT), simply re-posts my email and pretends they wrote it themselves, seemingly unaware that half a dozen other sites are doing the exact same thing. I wonder which one will blame one of the others of plagiarism first.

Now, we all know the “journalism” in games “journalism” is in quotation marks for a reason, idiotic publisher-press post-Gerstmanngate conspiracies aside, but I never realized so many sites are so blatant about their complete lack of ethics.

This is, unfortunately, an industry where GamesRadar, pandering mess of shame and retardation that it is, actually has relatively high standards.

The Internet is specially suited to certain things. Unnecessarily detailed manifestos on subjects of no particular importance are one of its greatest strengths. See: The six years of content buried away at this very site. Perhaps you can understand, then, why I took it upon myself to create the most comprehensive CD/DVD list for Monster Rancher 4 that the Internet had ever seen. Very few CD/DVD lists exist for the game, partially because it’s five years old and nobody cares any more, but also because not many people ever cared in the first place. Mostly, however, it’s because there’s no great effort involved in sticking a CD or DVD in the PS2’s drive and watching a polygonal monster come bounding out of it yourself, always to the delight and shock of the kindly shrine attendant. Only the most lazy have any need for a list that saves them twenty seconds of work.

Still, at no place on the whole wide Internet is there a list of which monsters are born of which M*A*S*H DVDs, most likely because I’m the only person on the planet that owns both Monster Rancher 4 and every season of M*A*S*H. If anyone were to finally right this wrong, why shouldn’t I be the one to do it? I’ve had no trouble wasting more time on more useless projects in the past. See again: The six years of content buried away at this very site.

It turns out I probably should have read my own Monster Rancher 4 review. I’ve spent the last two days trying to earn the last two breeder badges, and with them the right to train any monster that could possibly spring to life from any disc. But, no more. The game is just too damned repetitive for me to put up with any longer, even though my army of Garus are nearly ready to take the final tournament circuit by storm. I could certainly just post what I’ve already accomplished (in a .txt file only usable by dorkclub.com and gamefaqs.com, naturally), but the obsessive-compulsive completionist in me could never settle for birthing the most thorough Monster Rancher 4 CD/DVD list on the Internet if it didn’t also include the monster hidden on the Final Fantasy Chronicles version of Final Fantasy IV. Incidentally, I’ve had Scott Brust’s copy of Final Fantasy IV since 2003 when I first needed it for the Inn Music Database, though I suspect he’s had my copy of Monster Rancher 2 far longer.

Discouraged, I drowned my sorrows and ever-present sense of failure in the Internet, eventually finding solace in the screenplay for an unproduced version of the Watchmen movie written by Sam Hamm. Written in 1989, the script has recently become relevant again thanks to Zack Snyder’s upcoming Watchmen movie and 20th Century Fox’s claim to Warner Bros. that, “hey, we actually own the rights to that.” Anyway, like Monster Rancher 4, Hamm’s Watchmen script is terrible and I was unable to finish it. At least I spent the better part of a week with Monster Rancher 4, though. The Watchmen screenplay lost my attention after about twenty minutes.

And with good reason. Hamm’s version starts in 1976, where Watchmen’s cast of characters have formed a superteam of superheroes called, wait for it, the Watchmen. I’m cringing even as I type that. His script opens with a terrorist attack against the Statue of Liberty, where these Watchmen ineptly bungle the NYPD’s peaceful resolution with the statue-threatening bomb-wielders. The sequence features such cinematic gems as:

The three TERRORISTS fall into a tight cluster at the base of a long metal stairway. One of them grabs the JANITOR, holds a gun to his head.

TERRORIST I
I’M NOT JOKING!!

The COMEDIAN shrugs: okay. He lifts his rifle and fires TWO SILENCED SHOTS directly into the JANITOR’s gut. The old man’s body jerks twice and he slumps to the floor, stone dead.

The TERRORISTS stand there aghast. For an instant they’re too stunned to shoot. The COMEDIAN breaks into a dopey grin –

COMEDIAN
The joke’s on you.

– and opens fire with a look of VICIOUS PLEASURE on his face. As the saying goes . . . it’s nice to see a man who enjoys his work.

This poster child for missing the point eventually ends with Dr. Manhattan rewriting history so that he never exists. A trio of characters then find themselves in our very own version of New York circa 1986. Here, of course, they’re nothing more than characters in a book called Watchmen. Clever in that ‘makes your brain want to jump out of your skull so as to never experience such stupefying pain again’ sort of way.

David “Solid Snake” Hayter’s own take on the unfilmable comic book is leagues better, allegedly, even garnering an indifferent shrug from Alan Moore, which is his highest honor given to adaptations of his work. Zack Snyder’s movie is supposedly using Hayter’s script, in whole or in part, and Snyder himself seems hellbent on capturing the essence of the original book on film, even going so far as to film the Tales of the Black Freighter story-within-a-story as a DVD extra. Sadly, like unhealthily comprehensive Monster Rancher 4 CD/DVD lists, you just can’t find such things on the Internet.

Tomorrow: More stories of failed feature ideas disguised as content.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl has finally been loosed on the Japanese public, and with its release, all of the game’s secrets not already revealed by the Smash Bros. DOJO!! are making their way onto the Internet. The game features 41 stages, 35 playable characters, and a ridiculous number of new features, including a full-fledged story mode called The Subspace Emissary, a level editor, and online play. Oh, there’s also over 100 orchestrated pieces of classic video game music. Few games manage to cram such an enormous amount of content onto a single DVD. And how are the message boards and websites frequented by the game’s most rabid fans reacting? With anger and disappointment, of course.

The Smash Bros. “community” has exploded into a worldwide echo chamber of unobstructed idiocy. Even though the game features fourteen characters that are new to the series, including 3rd party characters Sonic the Hedgehog and Solid Snake, the average Smash Bros. fan is too pissed off to notice, lost in their own overblown sense of entitlement. Message boards have become flooded with barely legible rants decrying Masahiro Sakurai’s decision not to include their favorite obscure Nintendo character and promising him a swift but painful death should he find himself in their proximity. How dare he spend years pouring his heart and soul into a franchise he clearly loves, building a game that promises hundreds of hours of gameplay to even the most casual player. A game that doesn’t include a playable Krystal or Animal Crossing character clearly isn’t worth buying.

Most of this disgusting, knee-jerk retardation stems from the idea that a roster of 35 playable characters is somehow disappointing. While four of Melee’s more useless characters have been cut (Dr. Mario, Mewtwo, Pichu, and Roy), with the aforementioned 14 newcomers, Brawl’s final roster clocks in with ten more playable characters than Melee. Apparently, this is a bad thing. The inclusion of Fox, Falco, and Wolf, three Star Fox characters that are more or less clones of each other, have come to represent this misplaced frustration. All early impressions, however, indicate that Fox and Falco have become significantly differentiated from one another since Melee, and Wolf is similarly unique. Still, because each of the three characters uses the same final smash – calling a Landmaster into battle – the three characters have been labeled useless clones, rending the other 32 characters moot in the eyes of the Smash Bros. community.

The Smash Bros. series is the ultimate fanservice series, and Brawl is the ultimate fanservice title. It’s hard to imagine Sakurai being pleased with the mostly negative fan reaction clogging the Internet’s tubes. I wonder what fans would find more disappointing: Another content-rich sequel that outdoes its predecessor on every level or no sequel at all. If Sakurai were as spiteful and small-minded as I am, he’d no doubt take his ball and go home. Thankfully, this vocal Internet constituent is obviously a minority of the game’s final playerbase, and it’s hard to imagine Joe Blow Video Game Player (in both casual and core varieties!) being disappointed with the final product on March 9. This sort of knee-jerk stupidity is commonplace here on the Internet; if it weren’t for complaining on message boards, this would be a pretty quiet place. Still, if the whole thing were to blow up tomorrow, I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it. My site’s already gone, anyway.

Maybe Nintendo’s decision to focus on the casual gamer and leave the hardcore gamer behind entirely really is a great idea, mountains of 3rd party shovelware aside. At the very least, once the core games start ignoring the company entirely, the entire Internet could rest a little easier as misplaced fan vitriol is reduced by a third. Until the casuals discover GameFAQs, that is.

In early December, I had an interview for a job that involved dealing with gaming mods as part of its responsibilities. Had I got the job, I would have had a company blog to do with as I pleased. In a pathetic exercise in wish fulfillment, I brainstormed a few ideas I could turn into posts there, figuring that if they decided I wasn’t good enough for them (and let’s be honest with ourselves here, things were clearly pointing in that direction), I could use them as the basis for updates here.

So! A top ten list! I hear everyone on the Internet loves those. Let me clearly define my terms by reminding everyone that “top” is a random combination of objective quality, historical significance, and personal bias.

“Enough talk! Have at you!” Etc.

10. Battlefield: Galactic Conquest (Battlefield 1942)
In retrospect, covering the team-based, vehicle-heavy gameplay of a Battlefield or Tribes game with a fresh coat of Star Wars paint seems like a no-brainer. And yet, before Galactic Conquest, nobody had bothered, including LucasArts. The mod allowed players to relive famous battles from the original trilogy and Clone Wars, making for some shockingly effective fantasy fulfillment. Best of all, there were no Jedis in sight, just two teams of 32 players each, a whole mess of Star Wars vehicles, and tried-and-true Battlefield gameplay. The mod was such an obvious use of a famous license that LucasArts saw fit to royally rip it off, leading to the wildly successful Star Wars Battlefront series (and the wildly annoying Star Wars Battlefront PSP ads).

9. BTmod (The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion)
In their rush to get the game out the door within the Xbox 360’s launch window, Bethesda made one obvious oversight: An interface designed to work with a control pad and look great on a standard definition television doesn’t always measure up when ported to the PC. Some clever mod makers quickly answered the call, greatly shrinking the size of on-screen text and optimizing the game’s interface for PC players. While the list of changes doesn’t sound like much – weapon durability now shows up on the main HUD, map and inventory screens are enlarged – this short list of seemingly simple changes had a huge impact on the game, greatly reducing the time players spent fumbling through cumbersome menus. Of course, the mod was also only available on the PC, further cementing the PC version of Oblivion as the definitive version of the game, even without achievements.

8. Garry’s Mod (Half-Life 2)
When it was first released, it was hard to imagine the point of a mod that allowed users to spawn and manipulate objects and characters in the world of Half-Life 2. Sure, it was fun to crucify scientists, but outside of making funny screenshots, what was the use? Oh, how naïve we were. Garry’s Mod has become an indispensable tool for machinima makers, leading to hilarious interpretations of bad fanfiction and crazily complex virtual Rube Goldberg devices. It’s also proven itself as a welcome addition to any map maker’s arsenal, allowing mappers to enter and edit their maps from a first-person perspective. The mod’s become so successful, in fact, that it now costs $9.95 through Steam, joining the short list of mods that have gone retail.

7. Natural Selection (Half-Life)
Natural Selection managed to out Alien vs. Predator every Alien vs. Predator game, pitting heavily-armed space marines against monstrous aliens. Blending real-time strategy with a first-person shooter, Natural Selection featured the sort of bird’s-eye-view commander gameplay made popular by Battlefield 2 a full four years before EA’s behemoth hit store shelves. The mod was an Alien fanboy’s wet dream, featuring tight, claustrophobic corridors soaked with xenomorphic goo that played host to an endless online battle between the resourceful space marines and the efficiently deadly aliens. The Half-Life 2 sequel can’t come soon enough.

6. CTRaid (World of Warcraft)
Before The Burning Crusade, serious World of Warcraft raiding guilds had three requirements for new members: (1) you needed to be level 60, (2) you needed to have mostly decent gear, and (3) you needed CTRaid. The interface mod improved on Blizzard’s default raiding interface by adding ready checks, main tank targets, and built-in boss mods. Blizzard has since pilfered CTRaid’s most interesting features, reworking them into their default interface. Still, for the first couple years of its life, no World of Warcraft mod was as popular or as necessary as CTRaid.

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The movie industry has a predictable release cycle: The beginning of the year is a dumping ground for terrible movies; from Labor Day to about the middle of August, the studios release their “sure things” – vapid blockbusters designed to wrangle in viewers based on star power and the special effects; and family friendly comedies, prestige pictures, and Oscar bait saturate the release calendar between Thanksgiving and the new year. The video game industry has a release cycle that’s just as predictable. It’s simple, really: everything releases in November.

Maybe, at some point in the future, video game publishers will understand that nobody has the time to play 60 AAA titles in one month. Hell, few people have the time to play 60 games, regardless of their quality, over an entire year. The “core” gamers, as Microsoft has so eloquently named them, lament the shortening of the video game. Sure, I spent 100 hours with Oblivion just like everyone else, and more or less loved every minute of it (except around the 12 hour mark when I figured out how the leveling system works and realized that my thief, though very good at speechcraft and sneaking through the shadows, didn’t stand much of a chance against a pair of ogres). However, I see twelve, ten, and six hour games as a blessing rather than a curse. Shorter games means there’s time to play more of them, and allows developers to craft tighter, cleverer experiences. Look at Portal, arguably the best game of the year (hint: there’s no arguing about it), which clocks in at three hours at most, and proves that if a development team is talented and dedicated enough, they can compress an entire gaming experience into the length of a feature film without any major compromises.

You see, gaming is a unique medium in that nearly all its fans keep backlogs. There are simply too many good games to do otherwise. Nobody has a backlog of films to see, unless you count a Netflix queue, but at three or four hours maximum, tearing through a movie backlog isn’t a considerable feat. The way the games industry works, however, forces people to buy all their games in November and then spend the rest of the year playing through them. There’s even a site called The Backloggery that allows users to keep track of their backlogs in full social networking, Web 2.0 glory.

I don’t own any of the next gen consoles, though not for a lack of wanting. The closest I get is with my blue DS (not Lite). And despite this, I have only just now, two years after the Xbox 360 heralded the beginning of the current generation, finished working through my backlog. Or rather, finished working through as much of it as I can stand. Of course, there are still a handful of last generation games I would like to play through like God of War 2 and Contra: Shattered Soldier.

It’s no wonder the minigame collections that define the Wii’s software library are selling so well. While they are obviously more approachable because of their simplified controls and interfaces, they also don’t require the obscene time investments of more traditional genres. Developers like to bitch and moan about the rising cost of video game development, but maybe they should be spending their time cutting all the fat they pour into games instead. I’m not saying every game should be a slim Portal-esque experience – I welcome an epic RPG as much as the next guy – but either publishers need to stop dumping all their games that are worth a damn over the same four weeks at the end of the year, or they need to start allowing their developers to build more streamlined experiences, including ones that don’t involve minigames.

I’m someone who likes absurdist comedy that condenses years of human relationships into seconds, features characters that are just as likely to break into fevered dry humping fits as break into song, and toys with your expectations with a bunch of 4th-wall-breaking, self-referential postmodern nonsense. Thank God, then, for David Wain.

The balding writer/director of Wet Hot American Summer and The Ten is 38-years-old, as he so often reminds us. He lives in New York City and is desperately single. So desperate, in fact, that he’s taken to filming his (fictionalized) romantic escapades (when he’s not busy assaulting random strangers on the street) in a series of YouTube (and My Damn Channel) videos that Don’t Suck called Wainy Days. Wain is a former member of The State and one third of the comedy trio Stella, whose unmatched glory I’ve discussed here before. Wainy Days’ humor is similar to both of Wain’s earlier groups’. It’s stupid, surreal, and fits in a shot of a big, rubbery dildo whenever possible. Former members of both groups show up from time to time (obviously, as all three members of Stella were in The State) in addition to occasional celebrity guests like Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, and Rob Corddry. The episodes vary in length between three and six minutes, and I watched all 17 episodes currently available in under two hours last night.

So, watch it already, I write knowing full well that nobody will.

It’s been my experience that liveblogs are most useful for events that are either completely mundane or readily available to everyone. Thus, liveblogging the season premiere of Law & Order meets both criteria simultaneously. Why bother turning on your TV when some fool on the Internet is giving you the play-by-play?

We’ve had to wait until January because of those pesky writers and their damned strike for new Law & Order, but the generous folks at NBC have rewarded our patience with two brand new episodes, both of which feature Sam “Jack McCoy” Waterson as DA. I guess the hundred or so people that have yelled “you’ll never be DA, Jack!” to his face over the years were all wrong. Jack McCoy: 307, His Enemies: 0.

Because I don’t hate you nearly as much as I let on, I’ve hidden the actual liveblog part of this liveblog behind a shockingly convenient cut. You’re welcome, future generations.

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Live from dorkclub.com! One night only! Tune in to this very space one week from today (Wednesday, January 2) for The Official DORK Club Law & Order Season 18 Premiere Liveblog: Writer’s Strike Edition. Festivities begin at 9:00 PM PST and continue until 11:00 or until I get bored.

There may or may not be something new here before then, as family obligations continue.

Hellgate: London on the Xbox 360 is a rumor that refuses to die, and with good reason. The game is co-published by EA, who has a history of bringing previously PC-exclusive franchises such as The Sims and Command & Conquerer (and The Orange Box) to consoles. Additionally, Hellgate: London’s action-heavy, FPS gameplay would be a perfect match for Microsoft’s console, with its strong online component finding ample support through Xbox Live. And while the game isn’t particularly noteworthy on the PC, outclassed even by recent Diablo 2 wannabes such as Titan Quest, it would be unmatched in the console arena, where most people’s only experience with the loot porn genre comes from Phantasy Star Online and Baldur’s Gate spinoffs.

In their recent patch 0 datadump, featuring information regarding the much-fabled 0-day patch that will magically transform Hellgate: London into a polished AAA title, Flagship revealed that those lucky enough to pay for a Hellgate: London subscription would gain access to Xbox Live-style achievements in addition to a host of other features not worth a monthly fee. Interesting, indeed!

Finally, during my experience in the beta, I was often confused by the game’s strange interface choices. Right clicking on an item in your inventory brings up a radial menu with options to sell, equip, identify, destroy, or break down an item into its component parts. While convenient in theory, in practice this approach feels clunky in comparison to similar titles’ right click-focused interfaces. However, applied to a console controller rather than a PC’s mouse, where dragging and dropping is less logistically feasible, this radial menu makes perfect sense. In fact, it’s nearly identical to the much-hyped radial menu in the Xbox 360 version of EA’s upcoming Command & Conquer 3 expansion.

So, is Hellgate: London coming to the Xbox 360 any time soon? Probably not. But pretending it might be certainly keeps this site up to date for another day and provides lots of Google-friendly terms for the next search engine cache.

The top ten list (here a term I will use to define a “top” list with any number of ranked items) has become an Internet staple, the lowest common denominator of online content. Listing off the “best,” “greatest,” or “top,” things in a given category easily generates hits – there’s nothing a Google cache loves more – and promotes rapid, mostly unintelligible discussion. As I previously mentioned, CRACKED.com basically exists only to list things in descending order. Any video game site with “game” in its URL will gladly create an arbitrary list of stuff and bill it as a feature article to buy time while the intern transcribes the David Jaffe interview. No less than 30% of GorillaMask’s content (I’m told it’s a very popular site) is comprised of links to lists, almost always of the top ten variety; there have already been three posted so far today. A top ten list requires very little work and has the potential to reap the sort of epic rewards that can only come handed down from Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and the other Gods of Web 2.0 on high.

The problem I have with these lists, our own better-left-forgotten example included, is their general failure to define their terms. This failure of clarity is generally the reason people rant and rave over the content of these sorts of things. Normally these lists use catchall terms like “greatest” or “top” to rank items based on non-transparent criteria. Technical excellent, overall importance or influence, and personal bias are each factored into a final ranking. The real problem here is that there is a difference between “best,” “important,” and “favorite.” “Best” describes technical excellence, an undisputed, quantifiable quality; “important” measures a thing’s originality, influence, and impact; and “favorite” is largely based on personal bias, it ignores obvious flaws in favor of personal preference. Unfortunately, these terms are often used interchangeably.

Now it’s time to have my cake and eat it too. Let’s say I was going to list the five best, most important, and my five personal favorite video games from the last hardware generation, Dreamcast excluded. In this example, I’ll go against standard listing conventions and rank my items from top to bottom rather than bottom to top. See if you can spot the differences.

Because nobody cares and I don’t want to make this update any more retarded and space-filling than it already is, the reasons for these ranking will be relegated to a very special blogger’s commentary edition of the comments.

Though there is some overlap, clearly the lists are ranked based on different (and clearly labeled) criteria. GameSpy’s infamous 25 Most Overrated Games of All Time feature, despite having what appear to be clearly defined terms, still falls prey to the general murkiness of “top” lists. By lumping together games that were disappointing and overhyped with the titular overrated games, GameSpy produced a list no better than a general “greatest” list. Of course, this very same ambiguity lead to a tremendous amount of online discussion, and therefore an equally tremendous number of pageviews.

People love lists, even bad ones. They give folks a chance to quickly and efficiently express an option using numerical ranks. Lists are clean, orderly, and promote discussion. And here on the Internet, where “discussion” means poorly proofread attacks and lengthy opinionated stories leading nowhere in particular, the list is a mighty useful tool, regardless of its quality.

Now everyone sign up for a Listology account and compile lists of the “greatest” DORK Club updates.