I agree with CheapyD and Wombat of the CAGcast that Microsoft practically threw spokesman Major Nelson under the bus with this. He was tasked with announcing the price hike on his blog, so of course the legions of negative comments and other backlash fell squarely on his shoulders. Killing the messenger, and all that. Not cool.

To the surprise (and horror) of many, I recently reacquired an Xbox 360. However, I still stick to my guns on one thing: I will never pay for Xbox Live Gold. If I received a membership as a gift, then great; I certainly wouldn’t turn it down! I draw the line at spending my own money for simple services that are free of charge everywhere else. Regardless, I sympathize with loyal Xbox Live subscribers who are angered by this news. Even with discounted membership cards available at online retailers, it’s still a rabbit punch to the fans’ collective ball bag. If nothing else, I think that longtime Xbox Live Gold members should be exempt from this price increase as a reward for their years of loyalty towards Microsoft, not to mention the millions of dollars that flowed into the company’s coffers as a result.

Of course, the only real way to put a stop to exploitation like this is for the angry Xbox faithful to speak with their wallets…and that’s unlikely to happen. A majority will bitch about the price increase, sure, but pony up the cash anyway. In that case, your complaints are rendered moot. Put your money where your mouth is!

No one was expecting Nintendo to have an Xbox Live-like infrastructure when the Wii launched in 2006, but here we are three and a half years later…and it’s still a worthless piece of shit. While the whole Friend Code system is a mess (you need to trade unique ID numbers with friends just to play online for 99% of games), the biggest problem is that downloadable content and games cannot be recovered or transferred. This affects not only the Wii, but also the DSi (and, I’m assuming, the upcoming 3DS).

Put simply, if your Wii or DSi craps out, and you had a bunch of downloads on either system…you’re up shit’s creek without a paddle. You can’t redownload your games and other stuff for free, since there’s no centralized “account” on Nintendo’s consoles, unlike Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. I’ve heard tales that if you hassle Nintendo enough, they can recover your files for you, but you shouldn’t have to do that in the first place! Wii and DSi downloads are tied to your hardware’s unique ID number, but there’s also a record of the purchases you’ve made on Nintendo’s servers. Furthermore, if you have a Club Nintendo account, downloads are linked to it and recorded there, as well. With all of these records in place, there’s no reason why Nintendo can’t make it a much easier process for users to recover their downloads.

Once the 3DS comes along, DSi users are really screwed. To date, there’s been no indication whatsoever that downloadable content is transferable to the new console…which means you’ll have to buy all of that shit all over again just to use it on your 3DS!

C’mon, Nintendo. A few tweaks to the system firmware would solve this problem, as the servers are clearly set up for it on your end. Give the gamers what they want!

Now, this post is not meant to claim that my friend is somehow an elitist for placing one group of geeks below another; her “lower-caste” term was clearly meant as a joke, as she was just fishing for a funny term to describe the crowd. (She’s a comic book cosplay nerd herself, so she didn’t really “fit in” with most of the other patrons.) Instead, I want to examine an interesting trend that’s been growing exponentially in geek circles over the past decade: subdivision of the overall geek crowd into smaller groups (a caste system, if you will), the game of one-upmanship that accompanies this behavior, and the absolute irony of the entire process.

Heated debates between geeks is nothing new; you could trace ‘em all the way back to Star Trek versus Star Wars arguments in the late 1970s, and I’m sure there were Flash Gordon diehards who disliked John Carter of Mars even further back. However, what bound everyone together was their love of the source material, and in the end, that was all that was important. In recent years, that common bond has been eroding, and the geeks have no one to blame but themselves.

With growing frequency, geeks are cramming one another into a caste system of their own making. My friend’s joke nonwithstanding, this is a very real and serious situation: geeks in one group are demonizing the other, but not out of the good-natured rivalry seen in the past. Geek subcultures literally hate each other now, and often consider certain groups “beneath” them as far as the nerdy social strata are concerned.

This is the colossal irony I spoke of. Geeks and nerds have always complained that they’re a misunderstood and maligned social group, shunned by the rest of the world. Well, look at what they’re doing with this caste system: the exact same thing! So, not only are they maligned as a whole, they’re actively pushing some of their own peers even lower down the social scale, making the entire problem even worse. How fucked up is that?

The Internet has certainly contributed to the caste system in a big way; just as it has brought nerds together, it also drives mountainous wedges between them. Case and point: video game console flame wars, which have gotten far uglier than even the famous Sega and Nintendo rivalry in the early 1990s. Now, we’ve got entire sites and forums devoted to elevating one nerdy hobby while bashing another. All this truly accomplishes is making geeks look even worse in the eyes of everyone else!

I’ve always been of the mind that you shouldn’t hate an entire group; just specific people inside said group that personally piss you off. For example, I can’t stand all of that Twilight shit, and I think the fan fervor over it is incredibly annoying…but I have friends who are into it, and I’d never consider myself “better” than them as a result.

Having said that, if a Twilight diehard nearly knocks me down at the bookstore in their frenzy to score yet another generic young adult novel, they’re going to get an earful of rage.

I’ll make this clear right off the bat: Mega Man Legends 3 tops the list of my “most wanted games ever.” Yes, I’d even take that over a game that bridges the gap between the original Mega Man series and Mega Man X! The story in Legends was arguably the best out of all of the Mega Man series, but it’s been left without a conclusion.

For the uneducated, I give you a bit of history. Mega Man Legends was released for the PlayStation in 1997 (a year later in the US), and was the second spinoff of the original Mega Man series (the first being Mega Man X). Aside from being the first Mega Man game in 3D, Legends also was radically different than any Mega Man game that had come before it. Gone were the selectable levels, themed bosses, and weapon stealing: in their place, we had a sprawling adventure featuring huge interconnected dungeons, adaptable weapons, and a cast of interesting and eminently likable characters. Even the “bad guys” were awesome!

Instead of being a robot constructed by a benevolent scientist, our hero this time was Mega Man Volnutt, a teenaged treasure hunter exploring the underground ruins on Kattelox Island. Why “Mega Man”? Well, he was found in the ruins as a baby, and named after his adoptive sister Roll’s favorite video game hero. (“Volnutt” is his last name, kids.) Still confused? Play the game, and it’ll all make sense. Suffice it to say that there’s a lot more to Mega Man, his world, and his backstory that it seems.

The ending of Mega Man Legends (don’t worry, I won’t spoil it for you) was a massive cliffhanger, and by design, it made no sense. Fortunately, the sequel Mega Man Legends 2 came out in 2000 to address these plot threads. Unlike most sequels, however, it actually explained everything, and all of the missing pieces and questions fans had fell neatly into place. Of course, that game ended on a cliffhanger as well, but it was more of a “What will happen to our intrepid heroes next?” ending rather than a “GOD DAMN IT WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED?!” ending.

A spinoff/prequel starring the Bonne family, aptly titled The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, came out between the two main series games in 1999 (again, the US release came a year later). This game mixed overworld action with puzzle solving, as well as some light RPG elements: you could “level up” the lovable Servbots to make them more useful. While it didn’t add much to the story of Mega Man himself, it’s another game where the focus on characters really shines, and it helps explain the Bonne family’s motivations a bit more.

So, we’ve got fantastic characters, a great plot, coupled with a solid game engine…but whatever happened to a third game that could potentially wrap up the entire series? The PlayStation 2 was (and still is) hugely popular, so it would’ve seemed a natural fit for Mega Man Legends 3. But…it never happened. Here we are in the post-PS2 era, and still no sequel! You’d think the Wii or even the DS would be a perfect fit, considering the platforms’ immense popularity…especially in Japan, where Mega Man is practically a national hero!

C’mon, we get copious amounts of violent action games, FPSes in varying shades of brown and gray, and other generic bullshit, but we can’t get one last Legends game?! Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune has admitted in the past that development costs were a big stumbling block against making a new game, and that’s understandable. However, Inafune’s been rising faster up the ranks at Capcom due to hit games like Lost Planet and Dead Rising, and it’s a matter of public record that he still wants to make a Legends 3. He’s definitely got a lot more clout now. Well, get on it, Inafune-sama!

Aside from the creator’s obvious love for the series, there’s another glimmer of hope. Even though it’s been a decade since the last Legends game, Mega Man Volnutt and his pals have still remained popular. There’s been Mega Man action figures, and Roll, Data, Tron Bonne, and the Servbots have been immortalized as various figurines and statues. Tron also made a notable appearance in Marvel vs. Capcom 2, where she did battle in her walking tank, the Gustaff, with her Servbot lackeys providing support. Tron, Mega Man, and others (can’t say who without spoiling things) also appeared in Namco X Capcom. Both Legends games were ported to the PSP in Japan, and more recently, Mega Man Volnutt was a combatant in the fighting game Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. A few of the stages in that game even take place on the hangar deck of the Gesellschaft, the Bonne family’s mighty airship. (And yes, there are Servbots!) For someone who hasn’t had his own damned game in a decade, the Mega Man with the funky surname sure has some staying power.

See? The interest is there. The passion is there. And the fans have always been there. So just make the fucking game, already!

I don’t often get to engage in realtime games with opponents over an actual chessboard; instead, I play over the ‘net via Chess.com. At any given time, I’m involved in three to four games: two against friends, and one or two against strangers at or around my Elo rating (skill level). Each player has up to three days to make a move; on average, I move once per day (either during lunch, or after dinner). I also use the site’s Tactics Trainer to work on puzzles and learn new tricks.

None of this seems to be helping. I lose more games than I win, and my tactics rating fluctuates more often than New England weather. Granted, mistakes in the Tactics Trainer are generally punished more severely than correct moves are rewarded, but that’s not the point. I must be missing something, somewhere; I don’t live and breathe chess, but the fact that I play every day should at least count for something. My grasp of spatial relationships and whatnot isn’t the best, but damn it, I’m trying, though it feels like I’m swimming upstream.

There were plenty of crappy games, to be sure, but we identified them and stopped playing them; simple as that. High-quality games, on the other hand, were much more polished worked perfectly the first time. There was no developer laziness, wherein problems were fixed later. If there was a bug, they found and fixed it before the game shipped! If, heaven forbid, some game-ruining glitches did find their way into a finished product, the game was often derided for a lack of quality control, as well it should be.

The overly complicated nature of modern video game consoles has caused bugs and glitches to multiply rapidly. Newer consoles are harder to program for, so naturally, more problems are going to rear their ugly heads. Still, that’s no excuse for poor quality control. Don’t let the issues that make running programs on a personal computer such a hassle sometimes interfere with a dedicated unit like a video game console! The whole point of owning a console is that it’s not a computer. Convergence may be coming quickly, but that doesn’t mean we need to inherit the computer gaming world’s problems as well as its strengths.

In the past, we’d sometimes see the release of a “special edition” of a game many years after its initial release, often when the platform the game originally appeared on was no longer viable. These special editions were usually full-fledged remakes, complete with updated graphics, sound, and other goodies. While remakes can get out of hand as well, at least you’re still getting a lot of new content not found elsewhere.

Special editions that bundle an original game with its expansions and the like have been a staple of the computer gaming world for years, but they’ve begun to infect console games at a rapid pace. Recently, we’ve seen so-called Game of the Year editions of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, LittleBigPlanet, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, plus Star Wars: The Force Unleashed: Ultimate Sith Edition and Super Street Fighter IV, just to name a few. (The Street Fighter franchise has seriously abused the reissue market over the years. Cripes, how many versions of Street Fighter II have there been?!)

These special editions are undoubtedly a good value to gamers who never picked up the original games, but they’re a slap in the face to early adopters. I understand that this can come with the territory when it comes to high-end electronics and associated media, but the problem lately is that these special editions are coming out only a year (or less!) after the original title! It’s almost reached the saturation point. Why bother buying a hotly-anticipated title on day one, when it’s going to be reissued at a cheaper price point months down the line with additional content? Furthermore, early adopters who buy the game on day one and grab the various DLC as its released really get screwed.

For example, you buy a game for $60, plus three expansions for $5 each. Now, your total cost for that game has become $75. Eight months later, the game is reissued, including those expansions plus some new stuff, for $40. Same game, more content…for nearly half of the price! And if there’s unique stuff in the reissue, then in order to get it, you’d have to buy the game all over again! Doesn’t that piss you off?

The logical response to this is to quit buying these super-hyped games when they’re released…but we all know the gaming hobby and logic are arch enemies. Furthermore, it’s impossible to know for certain if a game will get reissued, so it’s a crapshoot either way.

We all created our own stories in one form or another as children. When playing with action figures and such, we created new adventures for our plastic heroes. The big difference between these and fanfics is that they were our childhood adventures. They were created for our personal enjoyment only when we were kids, and never designed to be shared with anyone else. When you’re an eight-year-old, it’s cool when your Optimus Prime and Darth Vader toys teamed up to take down Cobra Commander. When you’re an adult submitting novels about the characters over the Internet in a vain attempt to gain recognition from other basement dwellers…something’s wrong.

Fanfic writers are not a bunch of little kids engaging in playtime. They’re teens and adults, going off the fanboy deep end and writing godawful stories in which characters often behave nothing like their official selves. I feel this cheapens the source material, and in many cases, downright insults the original stories. The cast of Final Fantasy VII were not fucking each other, just as Archie is not fucking Mr. Weatherbee. Get over it.

As a rule, fan fiction is shit. But what happens when fanfics actually become an official part of the series they spawned from? Then where do we draw the line?

A prominent example is the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds series of anthologies. Technically, the stories within these books can be considered fanfic, as they’re all stories written by fans. But at the same time…they’re officially published by licenseholder Pocket Books, making them legitimate Star Trek tales! A few of the contributors to Strange New Worlds have even gone on to become professional writers in the field.

I think the big difference here is that there’s quality control in place for stuff like Strange New Worlds. If a story is crap, it’s going to get thrown out by an editor or their lackeys. Unfortunately, just like with webcomics, that doesn’t happen with fanfics. Anyone and everyone can post that filth on the Internet at their leisure. Entering a contest in which fan-created stories are specifically called for is one thing; writing them up because you can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality is something else entirely.

The moral of the story is this: friends don’t let friends read fanfics. Do yourself a favor, and stay the hell away from them. Your sanity will thank you for it.

There’s been a huge resurgence in the popularity of the living dead over the past five to ten years, and while we’ve gotten some excellent films, video games, and comic books out of the deal, the shambling corpses’ welcome is being worn out.

Case and point: the upcoming film Zombieland. In it, a mixed band of humans are trying to survive and hunt zombies in a post-apocalyptic near future. That sounds an awful lot like Left 4 Dead, a video game in which a mixed band of humans are trying to survive and hunt zombies in a post-apocalyptic near future. There’s also the game’s sequel, Left 4 Dead 2, in which a mixed band of humans are trying to survive and hunt zombies in a post-apocalyptic near future. In Robert Kirkman’s excellent comic book series The Walking Dead, a mixed band of humans are trying to survive and hunt zombies in a post-apocalyptic near future. Or we can look a bit further back, to the “romantic comedy with zombies” film Shaun of the Dead…where a mixed band of humans are trying to survive and hunt zombies in a post-apocalyptic near future.

I think you get the message.

While some of the zombie media out there is quality stuff, there’s still plenty of dreck, and the problem of oversaturation exists, regardless. The aforementioned Walking Dead is great, but Marvel Zombies got stupid by the second miniseries, and they just keep cranking them out with no end in sight. DC Comics’ big crossover of the moment is Blackest Night, which is also about zombies, but we’ll have to wait until the end to see how that one turns out.

Due to this excessive popularity, we’ve also got creators trying to break the zombie mold, as it were. The problem is that it often doesn’t work; while many cite the film 28 Days Later as a reinvigoration of the zombie film, there’s one colossal problem: the “zombies” in the film aren’t zombies. They were never dead, and they never rose from their graves in order to chew upon the flesh of the living. Therefore, they’re not zombies. Period. (Note: I know zombies originally came from voodoo legends, where they were not necessarily dead, but that’s not the popularized version of the zombie in modern culture, which is the definition I’m sticking with here.)

While media exposure can truly bring out some quality work in a genre, oversaturation is the surest way to kill it. Ironically, characters in zombie media always seem to have trouble disposing of the undead hordes…so perhaps oversaturation will actually do the job for them? Vampires (the wimpy, emo kind, not the dangerous kind) are beginning to eclipse zombies on the current pop culture landscape, and who knows what’ll come next. In the meantime, though, I’d like to see the dead stay in their graves for a while.

Of course, if a film was made where a slew of zombies dismembered those fruity vampires, I’d be in line opening night.

One of the greatest video game systems of all time celebrates its tenth birthday today…yet it’s been dead and buried for most of the past decade.

Yes, I’m talking about the almighty Sega Dreamcast. I was a senior in college way back in September of 1999, and I knew one person who bought a Dreamcast on launch day. Everyone else was a bunch of pathetic fools. (Or, being in college, just broke.) Regardless, we played a hell of a lot of Sonic Adventure, Jet Grind Radio, Soul Calibur, Power Stone, and other mold-breaking titles that Sega saw fit to unleash upon us. Sadly, the hugely successful launch of the PlayStation 2 a year later essentially killed the Dreamcast. The gaming masses’ dismissal of the Dreamcast at that point infuriated many a Sega fan, myself included. They never even gave the system a chance!

Aside from the phenomenal games library, look at all of the forward-thinking technology Sega crammed into the Dreamcast. For starters, it had a built-in modem, making it the only console that supported free online play out of the box until the release of the PS2 Slim in 2004; the Xbox (released in 2001) had an Ethernet port, but online play was not free. (It still isn’t!) The Dreamcast also had a web browser, support for an optional Ethernet adapter, VGA/480p output capability, multiple memory card slots in the controllers, an offset analog stick, memory cards that doubled as handheld gaming systems…the list goes on. Some games even linked up with the NeoGeo Pocket!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the Dreamcast is the most underrated video game system ever made. There was a boatload of fantastic titles produced for it, many of which are still ahead of their time today…but people practically ignored the console in favor of the PS2. That isn’t to say that the PS2 didn’t deserve the praise; far from it. (The damned thing is still going strong almost ten years after its release!) It’s just that too many fanboys had blinders on: PS2 was the only thing that existed in their field of vision after the success of the original PlayStation, and they weren’t going to give anything else a second look. Sure, Sega’s massive mistakes with the Saturn didn’t help the gaming public’s perception of their upcoming system, but plenty of blame does still lie with the consumer. The games released over the Dreamcast’s lifespan can easily go toe-to-toe with its competitors. Proof of this is the fact that many Dreamcast titles were later ported to the PS2, GameCube, and Xbox!

I maintain that if Sega had waited and released the Dreamcast alongside the PS2 in the fall of 2000, it would’ve been considerably more successful. Even if more people still wanted the PS2, that console had severe shortages. With another brand-new console sharing shelf space, what do you think they would’ve gone for, especially during the Christmas rush? Even though the Dreamcast launched only a year prior to the PS2, it was considered “old” by the time Sony’s console hit the shelves. (C’mon, even some Nintendo fanboys considered the PS2 “out of date” when the GameCube launched in 2001.) A final testament to the Dreamcast’s rabid fanbase was that Japanese developers kept releasing games years after the system’s demise!

The Dreamcast may be no more, but fortunately, it’s obtainable very easily and inexpensively. You’re doing yourself a great service if you pick one up, as there’s so many cheap, great games out there that will keep you entertained for a very long time. SEGA!