Jeff Gerstmann is Still Alive

Be sure to catch X-Play on G4 tomorrow (Thursday). Barring some sort of horrific car accident or other catastrophic happening, I’ll be appearing on the show!

If you don’t get G4, I believe they plan to post it on the show’s website sometime tomorrow, as well, just like last time. Either way, don’t miss it.

This is a lesson I learned quite some time ago, but figured I’d give it another shot and see if anything had changed. So I pre-ordered games from Amazon. Today, I got this:

We wanted to let you know that there is an unexpected delay with your video game order (Order# [removed]) you placed on [removed]. Unfortunately, we are unable to ship the product(s) as soon as we expected and need to provide you with a new estimate of when they may be delivered:
   “Army of Two” [Video Game]
    Estimated arrival date: 03/10/2008 - 03/11/2008

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this delay.

I received a similar e-mail for Bully, which I canceled yesterday after finding it at a Best Buy. This seems to happen almost every single time I hear about someone pre-ordering a game from Amazon.

So the lesson, once again, don’t pre-order games from Amazon unless you don’t mind waiting a week or so to get your order. As for me, I guess I’ll go pick it up at Best Buy, which has easily become my favorite place to buy games because it’s generally hassle-free, with no people begging you to pre-order stuff, and they usually have enough copies in stock on the day of release, nice and easy. Like it should be.

I decided to give Amazon another shot because I was thinking of ordering GTA4 from them, since I have an Amazon Prime membership that gets me very cheap shipping, but forget it. I’ll just have to pay for shipping via Best Buy or GameStop or something this time. No way I’m willing to wait a full week for GTA.

It’s not out yet, but Criterion has posted a list of fixes coming to Burnout Paradise on both the 360 and PS3.

I ran into a few of these issues over the 104 hours I played the game, but the only major one was having the game hang when it tried to connect to the game servers to match up with other players. That got frustrating after awhile. This one also looks interesting:

“Enhanced 360 streaming performance stops instances where the game seems to pause for a second or so.”

I’m not sure I ever really ran into that one, but I’ve bumped into a couple of spots where the frame rate would hitch up for a bit. I don’t know if that’s what this is referring to or not.

I’m still around 40 events short from my Elite license, but I haven’t played the game in at least a week, probably more like two weeks. After that patch hits, I’ll probably jump back in and try to finish it out, but I keep getting wrapped up in other games.

While I’m writing, I should mention that we recorded another podcast tonight, Ryan’ll probably edit and post it tomorrow. There’s something else that’s been keeping me pretty busy lately, too, but we can talk more about that later.

This is supposed to be a pretty busy week for me, so naturally I woke up this morning with a sore throat that’s rapidly spinning out into some kind of sinus thing. Perfect!

Anyway, this week is a pretty good one for new releases, and expect things to pick up from here as we make our way to the end of the first quarter of the year. I’m excited for Bully, even though I played it back when it first came to the PS2. It’s just a neat game, and I’m looking forward to playing through it again.

I’m also weirdly excited about Army of Two. Though I haven’t seen much of it lately, it always looked promising, and like it had a weird sense of humor to it. I’m hoping that’ll come across in the full game, and that it wasn’t something that was created specifically for the trailers.

This week is the week for new baseball games, if that’s your thing, and God of War PSP is also due out, too.

So yesterday I went out shopping for some new wireless hardware. Though I wanted an access point, I ended up going with a router. Up until now I’ve preferred that my devices all have real, assigned IPs. Now they’re all internal, router IPs. Weird, but it works just the same, and port forwarding has become much easier to set up than it was the last time I tried it.

I ended up getting a D-Link DIR-655 because I wanted something that’d support 802.11n. Then, of course, I realized that I wanted to use my DS (it didn’t work with my last wireless device), and the DS only supports WEP encryption. The N specification doesn’t allow for WEP, so I’m forced to run it at slower G speeds, at least until I get bored of playing DS games online and decide to switch it. I’m surprised to see there are people out there playing stuff like Ultimate Mortal Kombat and Clubhouse Games this far past release.

While I was out buying stuff, I stopped by the local CompUSA. In case you hadn’t heard, they’re shutting down most, if not all of their retail stores. Yesterday was the last day that the one near me was open, so I figured I’d check there, just in case they still had any decent wireless gear left. They didn’t, but they had a few Xbox 360 games at 90% off. I picked up FlatOut: UC, March Madness 07, College Hoops 07, and NCAA Football 07 all for around six bucks apiece. Not bad, though I later discovered that I already owned a copy of March Madness 07. Oh well. FlatOut seems OK.

Oh, and of course, no game-related talk would be complete without mentioning that Smash Bros. is out in less than a week. The official release date is on a Sunday, which probably means most retailers will have copies no later than Friday. Anyone want to take some bets on how many street date breaks we’ll see before the weekend?

There’s something almost soothing and purposeful about waking up and discovering you are having some kind of computer trouble. Apparently, after working for months in its current location, my wireless access point has decided that it’s done functioning properly. If I move it, it seems to work, but only intermittently. Wonderful. That makes it more than a simple configuration error, I’d bet. This also means I can’t get anything other than my desktop PC online unless I want to start running cables all over the place. I broke free from the cabled lifestyle some time ago, and I’m not willing to go back. Not now, not ever, you hear me?!

So goodbye to the ol’ WG602v3. It’s served me (mostly) well, but I’m not about to start playing some Wi-Fi form of “jiggle the handle” just to stay online. I’m going to run out and get something new. I’ve been meaning to get something that will work with my DS, anyway, so it’s not all bad.

Considering I’ve managed to get my PC to stop locking up so often, I guess it was only a matter of time before something else went awry, anyway.

Before you all run away to spend your weekend passed out in a gutter-oh, wait, that’s just me. Well, anyway, GameTap asked me and a handful of other people that played Street Fighter IV at GDC last week to convey a few thoughts on the game. I happily did so, and you can now read the article for yourself. In case you’re wondering how the match in the photo played out, Alex got beat up. Jared didn’t do a lot of losing that night.

Just noticed this (click for a full-size image) and wanted to say thanks to all of you for making the Arrow Pointing Down podcast the #2 video-game-related podcast on iTunes today. We have some exciting and dangerous ideas kicking around for the future, so stay tuned!

Someone needs to come up with an internet-friendly equivalent to “stay tuned.”

Stay bookmarked! No.
Stay down with RSS! Nah.

OK, well, I don’t have anything good enough to replace that. But that’s beside the point.

Also, while I have you here, do yourself a favor and go over to Street Carnage to listen to Bobby Brown reciting every number and letter he can think of after busting into someone’s studio space and demanding to drop hot rhymes over their beats. Just listen to the one marked “Brown Bomber” if you’re in a hurry. I’ve been wandering around the house, often in my underwear, shouting “BROWN BOMBER! A, B, C, D, E, F, G!” for a couple of days now.

So I just ordered one of these. It’s the Wii FreeLoader from Datel, the same crazy brits that gave you the Action Replay. No idea if it works or not, but it claims to boot any GameCube or Wii disc in your Wii, regardless of region. That might have come in handy back when I sort of wanted to import Smash Bros., but considering there’s plenty of weird stuff out for the Wii in Japan, it seems like a useful thing to own.

Anyway, they’re selling it for $20, after shipping it came out to around $28. Now I just need to order a random Japanese Wii game from NCS to see if it actually works… anyone got any suggestions?

Simple Wii Series Vol. 5: The Block Kuzushi is sounding pretty tempting right about now.

Details are in on Mario Kart Wii’s communication methods, which will allow online players to “communicate” with each other. If you haven’t heard about this already, take a wild guess about what sort of chat you’d like to see. Then think about, given Nintendo’s track record for totally awesome-and-by-awesome-I-mean-backwards online decisions, what it’ll actually be.

Chances are you just thought of two very different things, but even your imagination might be a little further ahead of Nintendo’s plans. Mario Kart Wii will allow for text chat, which is already a step back from the console standard. Now let’s take another 10 steps back as Nintendo has stated you won’t even be able to enter your own text. Instead it’ll be a collection of pre-set words or phrases that you can send before matches in the game’s online lobby.

Yep. That sounds exactly right for the company that brought you the friend code.

I certainly understand and respect Nintendo’s desire to keep a tight control on its games by not letting any 11-year-old racist/homophobe with a USB headset strap on and force his singing voice onto the other players, but at some point you err so far on that side of safety that you’re releasing products that, features-wise, are so behind that curve that they make me think of Dreamcast games.

Except that Phantasy Star Online had full text chat to go along with the symbol chat and auto-translated text that this makes me think of.

Ultimately, I can’t get too frustrated by this, because it’s totally expected at this point. This is just Nintendo being Nintendo. They don’t need voice chat to make money on the Wii. And even though some people will complain up a storm, they’ll all buy the game anyway. Nintendo wins regardless. Also, I can’t really say that I’m too interested in mascot-based kart racing games at this point, so it could have Morse code chat for all I care.

But this is the same mentality that keeps Nintendo from delivering a fully-featured massively-multiplayer Animal Crossing game. And that’s when I get a little depressed about the company’s unwavering stance.

I have to admit, I’m not really a big enough God of War fan to warrant having Kratos on my PSP, but this new red PSP, which Sony just announced as part of a $200 bundle shipping in June, looks great. I do need to pick up a new PSP Slimmie at some point–it’s sort of tricky to get video and screens of PSP games without one–and if I can hold out until June, this will be the one I get. It’ll come with God of War PSP, Superbad on UMD, and a voucher you can use to get Syphon: Filter: Combat Ops from the PlayStation Store. Not a bad deal at all.

On top of that announcement, Sony also announced plans to put together a Metal Gear Solid 4 bundle for the PlayStation 3, timed to the launch of the game. It’ll be an 80GB PS3 with a rumble-ready DualShock 3 and a copy of MGS4 for $500. The official Sony blog sticks to a “late Q2″ time frame for the launch of the game. But most of the news blogs out there have pinned it down to June 12. Apparently that date was specifically mentioned at a PlayStation-centric retailer meeting called Destination PlayStation. But that’s a Thursday, and games rarely hit on Thursdays.

Putting together a bundle for MGS4 sounds like a good idea to me. You often see it mentioned as one of those “I’m waiting for Game X before buying a PS3″ posts on message boards. Might as well make it easy and more tempting, but throwing in some sort of special bundle-only bonus related to MGS4 would certainly sweeten the deal. Heck, if it included a camo PS3, I’d probably go nuts and buy another PS3, just for the hardware.

The last bit of Sony kit is the DualShock 3, or as Sony likes to write it, the DUALSHOCK 3. Stop yelling at me about your controller, jeez! There’s another disparity between release info here, with Sony’s official statement listing April 2008, but everyone else nailing it down to April 15. Either way, it’s going to sell for $54.95. I’d write a bit here about how controllers have become a little too expensive over the last few years, but I imported a Dual…sorry…DUALSHOCK 3 a few months ago and paid a little bit more than that. So I’m already part of the problem.

At GDC last week, I heard more than a few people speculating and making educated guesses about how 2008 is going to be Sony’s year, the year they take it all back from Microsoft and make you forget about how your PS3 sat under a fairly thick layer of dust through most of 2007. Announcements like this, even if you think that’s a bit much to pay for a controller, certainly don’t hurt.