The Legend of Zelda

I originally submitted this to GameFAQs under my alt account "timebombtown", but it got rejected three times. Rather than let this work go to waste, I altered it a little and submitted it to HG; it got accepted within a few minutes of its submission.

EDIT: On another note, my Kingdom Hearts review broke 1000 hits!

Shinobi: Tourney Edition

I've been wanting to update my old Shinobi review for months, and Janus selecting it for the next tourney round presented me with a perfect opportunity to do so.

Come what the judges may say, I'm satisfied with this revision.

Nick Evil's Zelda III review has been removed from GameFAQs. What a crime!

New Ghostbusters II

This is going to be the last NES game I'll be reviewing for a while; I'm going to focus on Genesis games for the rest of year.

My review of World Series Baseball for the Sega Genesis is up.

I've never reviewed a sports game before, so I didn't feel too comfortable writing this up. I'm kind of amazed that I managed to write 1,000 words for this; I was expecting to only get up to 800.

I have decided to take a hiatus from review-writing this weekend to work on my OHRPGCE project. Actually, I've been having a bit of "reviewers' block" since last week. I figure instead of struggling with it, why not just take a break from reviews to do something else?

I haven't worked on Battle Heart since... wow, it's been a while since I've touched it. I want to at least create one town before the end of this month.

During a debate in a forum thread, an interesting thought entered my mind. It had something to do with competition in the game industry or what we perceive as competition.

During discussions about the console wars, we usually see phrases like "competition is good for the industry" getting thrown around. A general perception is that any of the "big three" dropping out of the console race would be bad for the industry, because that means less competition; the question is: does it?

I have to disagree. I might be wrong, but I don't think it would be the end of the world if Sony or Nintendo had to drop out of the next-gen console war. Would it devastate people? Yes. Would it mark the end of competition in the world of gaming? No.

First we need to ask one question: why are there only three competing console manufacturers in the industry? The answer is simple: saturation. I would bet $100 that there are tons of companies who want a slice of the home console pie; the problem is, the market is crowded. As they say: "Two's company, three's a crowd." (Cheesy, I know, but it does sum up the game market perfectly.)

My theory is this: if either the 360, PS3, or Wii were to die, something else would eventually arrive and take their place. I've noticed one thing about the game industry over the years: its face is different every decade. The pre-crash era was dominated by Atari, Mattel, and Coleco; the 90s was Sega versus Nintendo versus Sony; the 2000s (so far) has been Nintendo versus Microsoft versus Sony. Competitors have come and gone across the years: Atari, Mattel, Coleco, Sega, NEC, Panasonic, and Philips. Some of these were major players in the hardware biz, others played bit parts. Regardless, their machines fell out of favor; what happened after that? They got replaced. Atari was replaced by Nintendo, Sega was replaced by Microsoft, and someday one or more of the "big three" will be replaced by someone else.

I wouldn't be surprised if, a decade from now, one of the current console manufacturers was no longer in the hardware business. I wouldn't feel sad either. The passing of one of the triumvirate will allow new faces to enter the market. In that sense, the death of a competitor will actually yield new competitors; these new competitors will bring ideas to the table that wouldn't have surfaced during the era of the "big three" regime, and the industry will be saved from stagnation.

If you think about it from that perspective, people who give others guilt trips for not supporting all three consoles could actually be working against competition. If all three companies are equally successful, none of the "big three" will ever die. If none of the big three ever dies, there will never be new faces in the hardware business. Pretty heavy, isn't it?

The following was posted by a GameSpot user named "meimnobody" in the comments section of a Wii article:

Ahem do kids make up most of the peopel playing tetris? Nope it's adults.

E doesn't mean kids you stupid ignorant piece of white trash who dares to insult monkeys by associating himself with them.

Silicon Knights, Rare were Nintendo second parties directed by Nintendo you sack of garbage.

M rated games do not make you an adult for playing them. God of War bah it sold less then most Nintendo titles which bought mostly by adults. While God of War was bought mostly for kids by ignorant parents.

I see far more kids gushing over M rated games then anything else because their testicles haven't dropped.

The ratio of M rated titles on Nintendo consoles is much higher then others.

Join the ranks of Sony and Microsoft eh? Funny how no one would want to do that if they have a brain. You mean join the ranks of companies known for lying, selling crap hardware with incredibly high failure rates, the lowest profits of any console hardware maker in the case of Microsoft 12 billion loss. Lowest game sales when compared to past Nintendo consoles. \

Funny how people gush over GTA selling 14 million on several consoles and pc when Nintendo has sold dozens of titles beating that for only one piece of hardware.

The only childish games one finds in abundance are on the xbox and ps2. Sorry you have your head so far up your butt you cannot see that.

Sony has dozens of kid franchises that sony developed that failed. Nintendo doesn't have a kids franchise they developed. Even Mircosoft is having Rare make a cartoon aimed at five year olds so they can attract millions of dollars of game sales to flag up their division.

Most people who do indeed play E rated games are adults. It's because adults are concerned with gameplay something lacking in 99% of M rated titles.

Nintendo hasn't made a M rated title because they consider them to be crap and 99% of the time M rated titles are garbage. They aren't best sellers by far. Only GTA, Halo, Doom have sold millions of game copies.

A few posts back, this guy also claimed that Kirby was played mostly by adults and that the superiority of HD imagery is a myth.

This dude has to be the biggest Wiitard yet!

My Gremlins 2 is up!

Click here for my to-be-reviewed list.

That was fun!