As you undoubtedly noticed, I’ve decided to change the direction of the site for the third time in the last six months. We’re one of those news blogs now!

The idea hit me in the shower this morning: Why wait until tomorrow to discuss the World of Warcraft tournament realms when I could do so today? In fact, I realized, nothing’s stopping me from transforming my pathetic and useless existence to a pathetic and slightly useful one. So, from now until I no longer have the time to do otherwise, I’ll be posting 4-6 blog entries a day here, and as always, almost all of them will be video game-related. I might even top off each day with some sort of status report blog post not dissimilar to this one. We’ll see. It’s been less than 24 hours since I decided on this rather drastic shift in direction and I’m still experimenting with exactly how I’m going to play it. I may even get crazy and starting using my real name here.

I’ve also placed a Google AdSense unit after the first, second, and last post on every page in an attempt to make an extra $0.05 a day. Of course, I in no way encourage you click any of the advertisers’ clearly labeled links.

And finally, two new ding sound effects are now online. You’ve probably never heard of Fiesta or Secret of the Solstice, but now you can hear their level up sounds without ever having to touch them. You’re welcome.

I rather like Lord of the Rings Online, even if The DORK Club extended family and I only played it for our free month. Essentially, the game is World of Warcraft with technically superior visuals, but given the general quality of your average MMO, that’s a perfectly okay thing to be. What really sets LotRO apart from the deluge of WoW-wannabes are the time waster activities that exist outside of the game’s meat-and-potatoes leveling treadmill. From the robust musical instrument system to the dozens of types of tobacco to smoke and hundreds of titles to earn (my personal favorite: Pie-Eating Champion), should you choose to take a break from leveling up or ignore the main game entirely, Lord of the Rings Online plays like a virtual Renaissance faire of the nerdyest quality.

And while the game’s recently-announced first expansion, Mines of Moria, doesn’t immediately conjure up images of lazy afternoons spent RPing and growing virtual vegetables, I’m still sort of excited for it just the same. Everything I know about Lord of the Rings I learned from Peter Jackson, so I’m not entirely sure how Turbine plans to fit an entire expansion in the subterranean dwarven mines, but I do know that the prospect of items that level up alongside you and earn titles of their own is pretty dang rad, as the kids no doubt say. More exciting, however, are the two new playable classes, the rune-keeper and warden. Turbine hasn’t revealed anything more than their names, but based on those alone, I’m already interested, specifically in the warden. If it bears only a slight resemblance to Warcraft’s night elf hero (read: it can rain a shower of knives on its enemies) I’ll resubscribe faster than you can say “balrog raid boss.” After Blizzard has aped so many concepts from Tolkein’s work, it only seems fair for Turbine to take back the warden for ol’ J.R.R. And while they’re at it, they might as well claim moonwells too.

In the meantime, I’ll get my warden fix the only way I can: By besting superior Warcraft 3 players who underestimate the effectiveness of a single hero and a lot of moonwells. While Blizzard’s stealth nerfs have rendered the warden strat useless in larger team games, it’s still perfectly viable in one-on-one match-ups. In fact, two new Warcraft 3 replays are now online that prove exactly that.

While we’re at it, enjoy two new ding sound effects from Pirates of the Caribbean Online and Tales of Pirates. Expect to see ding sounds from other pirate-themed MMOs (Pirates of the Burning Sea and World of Pirates) just as soon as a free trial is available for either.

Ye Olde Inn Music Database is now a full order of magnitude more user friendly thanks to a newly implemented flash player. Go, enjoy the box art and shrill, streaming sound effects. After all, this is the very thing the Internet is for.

Forget it. I’ll just stick the damn thing right here too:

The Super Smash Bros. Brawl hype train rolls ever onward, as Brawl threatens to usurp Halo 3 as the most written about game I’ve never played. Still caught up in the excitement building up to launch day, I downloaded the game’s massive soundtrack last night. Clocking in at just over a gigabyte, the soundtrack includes 216 classic songs from Nintendo’s library of games, including an updated version of Mona Pizza from WarioWare Twisted, as well as songs from the Metal Gear and Sonic the Hedgehog series. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also an additional 94 original Smash Bros. songs. The entire soundtrack represents 16 hours of some of the best video game music ever recorded. Plus it’s all fully orchestrated (with the exception of the 8-bit medleys). It’s sort of unfair, really, seeing as how no other video game OST could possibly compete with such a variety of excellent music. The thought of building custom levels with custom soundtracks makes me positively giddy.

Truthfully though, I haven’t spent much time listening through the soundtrack. It’s a rather daunting task, after all. I’ve only listened to the songs from the Mario series and a few other select tracks. My only real complaint is that the Snake Eater theme doesn’t have its awesomely ridiculous (and ridiculously awesome), tree frog-eating lyrics, while half a dozen terrible Sonic the Hedgehog songs remain lyrically intact. Oh, and there’s also four different versions of the Zelda overworld theme, proving once and for all that all Zelda fans really want is the same damn thing remade over and over again.

As much as I love posting all these lengthy reviews to the index, I’ve decided to once again segregate especially long updates to their own pages, conveniently listed under the new [recent] section there on the sidebar. This should also help distinguish between SERIOUS REVIEW and INTERNET BLOG updates, although it probably won’t affect the frequency with which either appears. Welcome organization with open arms, reader.

As you’re no doubt able to tell, a fresh Super Mario Sunshine review wherein I bitch and moan about the game’s failings is now online. This review actually turned out rather smashing, if you don’t mind my saying so, which is obviously not always the case. Regardless of their final quality, however, rest assured that I spend a great deal of time working on these things. First, I play through the game, jotting down tidbits that may prove useful later. Next up, I ignore my hastily scrawled playthrough notes and write a new set of notes summing up my thoughts and feelings on the game in order to get an idea of the general shape of the review itself. Finally, I use these two sets of notes to generate an outline, which I more or less adhere to (less, more often than more) when I write the review itself.

Be sure to leave a comment insulting my terrible handwriting!

I had planned to have a second review online today to take full advantage of our return to an article structure, but as is often the case with my plans, things didn’t go so well. It turns out my old Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 3: Rebel Strike review isn’t nearly as good as I remembered it, and I certainly don’t remember the game well enough to write a new one just yet. Ah, well. Bonus points to anyone able to deduce the thematic connection between Rebel Strike and Super Mario Sunshine.

I’ve had Killer7 stuck in my head the last couple of days. I wonder why there aren’t more games like it, why the list of “art house video games” is so short. Why do so few developers take the really big risks? The answer, obviously, is that there simply aren’t enough consumers out there to justify such risks, especially early in a console cycle. The video game industry is unique in that every four to five years the entire thing resets. Console userbases shrink to zero. Hardware manufacturers’ potential – and to some extend their relationship with publishers – reboots. Just look at the GameCube’s initial burst of 3rd party support. Last generation’s loser is not necessarily this generation’s failure.

When this reset occurs, the sort of games that sell shift with it. An influx of new technology and a rush to meet launch dates hinders development while an insignificant install base cripples potential sales. Smaller niche titles don’t stand a chance simply because the numbers aren’t there to support them. They aren’t made at this point. Instead, games at the beginning of a hardware cycle tend to be licensed, part of an established franchise, or feature extremely broad appeal, often hinging their success on the desirability of next generation graphical improvements. With so few consoles in existence at this point in the game, publishers need to sell to every console owner they can.

Later in the cycle, we begin to see more original games, with a peak in quality usually hitting just before a console’s violent death at the hands of its offspring. History is filled with fantastic game lineups at the end of a console’s life. As developers master the intricacies of the hardware and the number of consoles in homes hits critical mass, publishers can begin to take larger risks and produce more interesting games. In fact, many of the games considered to be the “best” in a platform’s library are released at the end of the console’s life.

Unfortunately, this continual need to restart console cycles down through the generations is a necessity fueled by technology. The technology used to create video games simply increases too quickly not to try to keep up. If one hardware developer doesn’t, another will. Though Nintendo has certainly made its point with the Wii and DS, the need to buy a new console every four to five years keeps the market from expanding just as much as the fact that Halo is a really, really complicated game. Add exclusivity on top of that – the fact that certain games are only released for certain consoles – and it leaves many non-gamers wondering why they should even take the plunge in the first place. After all, their new piece of hardware is going to need replacing in the time it takes to get a high school diploma, and they won’t be able to play all the games that interest them on only a single console. You don’t need to buy a new TV or CD player every four years. And you don’t need a Sony TV to watch NBC, a Magnavox to watch ABC, or a Zenith to watch CBS.

The “one console future” became a gaming community in-joke prior to this generation, thanks largely to Denis Dyack. Such an idea, however, is also a publisher, developer, and consumer’s dream. Developers and publishers would no longer need to create multiple versions of the same game or worry about multiple consoles cannibalizing their software sales. Consumers wouldn’t need to buy multiple consoles or deal with determining the superior version of a multiplatform title. Of course, a one console future, even if multiple hardware manufacturers produce different versions of the same console, doesn’t benefit the hardware makers at all. Obviously, Dyack’s ideal gaming future, like so many of his half-cocked statements, lacks any sort of real world plausibility.

One thing’s for certain though: truly unique niche/art house/whatever video games cannot exist without an installbase to support them. Under the current model, such games can only exist once a platform has successfully established itself. Then the next generation begins and all the backwards compatibility in the world isn’t going to see games developed for a console sitting in 20 million closets.

Realistically, an art house video game isn’t going to make anybody wealthy even with a technologically stalled, single console market. The very nature of the beast keeps such games from becoming anything more than niche titles. It’d just be nice to see more made, is all. Gaming has so many talented development teams and so few auteurs.

Continuing in the fine tradition of reposting any worthwhile link I find at NeoGAF (LOL NEW CATEGORY NEOGAF REPOST M I RITE ROFL), I’d like to bring your attention to this video found at the recently discovered gamejew.com. Watch as the site’s namesake tracks down Shigeru Miyamoto at the GDC and performs a song he wrote for the gaming legend. Good stuff.

Yesterday the always interesting Game | Life linked to an insanely fun flash game called The Impossible Quiz. Now I just did the same. As the title suggests, players work their way through a quiz consisting of questions that often feel impossible. And though some of the questions seem to lack any sort of internal logic (which is why, I assume, the game rewards players with the ability to skip single questions as they progress through it), most of them are really very clever.

I spent a about an hour with the quiz earlier, working my way to question 55. You can find answers to questions 1-54 in the comments. Feel free to add to them. (I’M PERFETLY AWARE NOBODY WILL.)

The Terrible Crossover Fanfiction Idea Generator is great. Its concept is hardly difficult to understand. Two things, perhaps related in some way or perhaps not, forcibly bound by some sort of idea. The sheer number of possibilities buried behind this simple bit of random generation borders on embarrassing for whoever’s responsible, but that doesn’t make it any less fun.

Possible generated ideas run the gammot from inherently awesome (Your challenge is to write crossover fanfiction combining Gundamn Wing and Batman. The story should use starting a band as a plot device!) to painfully obvious (Your challenge is to write crossover fanfiction combining Nancy Drew and the National Football League. The story should use bondage as a plot device!).  Enjoy!

Tomorrow: more content ripped from weeks-old forum threads!