Platformers.net

I just finished MadWorld for the Wii and this is my review. I got a copy early because I’m paid by Sega to make a positive review(not of the game, but of Sega, so wait for it).

This Manhunt clone is everything that is wrong with gaming today. It’s the copy of a game that was only known for it’s shock value(surprise surprise, so is this title [ it even has a controversy section on it's wikipedia page for the love of clowns ]), and it’s just a fucking deathmatch with no story. And the Sega/Platinum Games combo really weren’t juicing the day they decided which console they should make their next game on caused the game suffers from Underpoweredtendoitis.

The game is crippled like a dirty leper on the Wii. This title is much better suited on a console where people actually buy third party games and *gasp* even buy gory games. Like the 360, or PSP. And less importantly, the game only outputs at 480p and NEEDS proper physics. The gore and blood physics is this game are prerendered. They’re fucking bitmaps (I can see this pixels).

It’s cool of Sega to publish these games and similar adult oriented games like Condemned, House of the Dead and -insert name of other game so this list looks more credible-. They have to stop looking at the numbers. Sure the Wii is the most popular current generation home console, but serious games ain’t selling for shit on it. Unless they rename MadWorld to Mad Pet World Surprise : Carnival Caper.

Rating: 3.0/10.0 

I stole this review from someone without giving said someone credit.

Fallout 3 is disappointing and it is disappointing for this reason: I wanted to do a retard strength run so I gave myself 10 Strength, endurance, and agility, and 1 everything else except Luck where the remaining points were dumped.  Because this basically means you can just run up to someone shooting you with a gun and cave their skull in, Fallout 1 and 2 compensated by making your character actually retarded,  resulting in hilarious dialog that generally always ended up with you accidentally starting a fight because you’re an idiot.  Idiot speech is not in Fallout 3, though, so this is exactly like a normal playthrough except now I can kill people by touching them.

1/10.

And call me in the morning (lame medical jokes from the nineties are in).

Strauss Zelnick is the worstest capitalist. He refused to sell Take Two Interactive (TTWO) two Electronic Arts (ERTS) for ~Two Billion dollars back in the day (I made 8,000$ on that, woot). And now their once 25$ stock is now worth 9$. Their majority shareholders must be clawing at their calendar (because that’s the only known method of time travel).

Here’s an even better look at this here story, their stock was going up and down like an eleven year old’s hand with an obvious declining path, what looks like from 20$ to 15$. It’s saving grace was this new old property, Grand Theft Auto 4, that would finally be released and print money for them for a while. But look at that, because of economic factors and whatever other monads, even with a released GTA4, TTWO’s stock price is lower than it’s trend. It’s as if Grand Theft Auto 4, a game that people say cost several hundreds of millions to produce, never fucking came out. Their time travel worked.

Sandwich Police believe the hacker used a virus to attack Craig Mayon’s computer and implant a key logger that monitored any keystrokes he entered. With technology similar to what is known as a sniffer, a device that tracks computer information, the hacker was able to record Mayon’s security code and password as he typed them, and used that information to make withdrawals from town bank accounts.

The money was then transferred to four accounts - three in Florida and one in Georgia.

Sandwich Police Chief Michael J. Muster said yesterday that Mayon discovered the breach two weeks ago, and notified police detectives. Sandwich Investigators were able to determine that the scheme netted close to $50,000.

So there was this fox. She was like 17 or something. She had this fucking baby and she wished it away. Crazy shit, fucking David Bowie shows up and you can totally see his dong but it’s cool cause it’s the 1960’s or something. And at some point some pink puppet pulls off his own head. Crazy shit man. Crazy.

Lots of empty space, I have to put something here or else it look kinda retarded.

So, I have a story to tell here, about a man named M.S. Naschle and a decade-long scientific hoax. But before this story can make any sense, I need to explain about something called the journal system.

Most branches of science are organized around a set of scientific “Journals”. When it’s said that a scientific work is “published”, what we mean is that it was published in a journal. People with scientific papers submit them to the journals; the journals forward the papers to usually-anonymous referees, who comment on the papers and decide to accept or reject the paper; and then the journals bind together the papers they’ve accepted into regular issues and distribute them to university libraries, labs etc. Historically, journals provide an invaluable service; they provide not just a central mechanism for peer review, but also a way for academic institutions to get hold of the current state and entire history of some science or other by just ordering the bound volume back issues of the relevant journals.

The problem here though is that this system is largely based on the assumption of pre-1990 technology. In a world where the Internet exists, collating and distributing large bound volumes is no longer the most efficient way to distribute large sets of 3-page papers. In physics and mathematics, for example, since like 1992 basically every single paper that is written is published to something called the Arxiv, which is a “pre-print” archive operated by Cornell and the NSF; the idea is that when you submit a paper to a journal you also upload a copy to the Arxiv website, and the Arxiv immediately publishes a PDF, free to the world. Things uploaded to the Arxiv become available literally months before things submitted to some journals, and the Arxiv, which contains a huge cross-journal database of author histories and citation graphs, is more convenient to use than basically any journal ever could be. In a world where the Arxiv exists, the only function journals serve anymore is basically as a form of peer review; you use the Arxiv to get your idea out, and then the acceptance of your idea is tested by whether you can get it into a journal.

But, here’s the thing: Journals are expensive. The average university must subscribe to dozens and dozens of journals to stay current on the different branches of science; a single journal can cost thousands of dollars to subscribe to. Historically, again, this seems justifiable, when you consider that the journals have relatively small audiences but must ship really large amounts of paper to each recipient. But it makes less sense when you consider modern print-on-demand technology; consider that people these days generally prefer to use the journals’ online archives rather than walk to the library to use the big bound volumes; and consider that a university site license for the electronic forms of journals only is often not much less expensive than a subscription which includes paper copies. So the journals are charging lots of money for information that’s basically free to transmit.

Okay, but at least the money is going to pay for valuable content, right? Well, not exactly; the journals don’t pay the people who write their content. In fact, the people who submit papers to journals often must pay relatively steep “page fees”, in addition to signing away the copyright to their own work. So journals connect authors with readers, and charge both for the privilege. But the journals do provide the valuable service of peer review, right? Surely that justifies the money? Well, not that either really; the peer reviewers / referees aren’t paid, generally, and even editors often participate more for prestige than for the money they receive.

So we’ve got a system where a central authority connects three parties: authors, readers, and referees; they charge the first two a great deal of money for the privilege, and get the third to do difficult work for free. What the journals contribute is… well, basically nothing except a prestigious name; the Arxiv could add a formal peer review system using the existing referees (who’ve already established they’ll work for free) and you could throw the whole system out. The journals continue to exist because they already exist, because they are institutions and nobody’s figured out how to transition to something else. The whole thing kind of fascinates me since it acts as an extremely pure and extremely small-scale example of market failure.

Out of all the journal operators, the worst offender by far is Elsevier. Elsevier is a Dutch publishing company that’s been in operation since 1580 and a backbone of the journal system since 1880; they operate hundreds and hundreds of journals crossing every single branch of science, some of which are absolutely critical. The idea that maybe the journal system could be improved has been clear for some time, and most journals have been at least trying to adapt to modern technology and circumstances, open up their journals, and help rather than burden institutions and authors; Elsevier has remained in most ways steadfastly stuck in the 1880s. Since among all the journals Elsevier’s prices are highest (Want to read a random paper from Physical Letters A from 1983? Well, that’s an Elsevier journal, so unless you have site access through some institution that’ll be $31 to download the PDF…) and their recalcitrance to change has been the greatest, Elsevier usually bears the brunt of whatever backlash there currently is against the journal system; they’ve actually had to deal with a handful of minor revolts in recent years, including about five incidents where the entire editorial board of one of their journals, most recently the incredibly prestigious Topology, has unanimously resigned in protest of Elsevier’s pricing and policies.

But, well, nobody ever said institutions were nice. At least if something is an Elsevier journal, it’s guaranteed to be of quality, right?

Here’s where things start getting fun.

About a month ago, the N-Category Cafe, a blog run by a bunch of college professors which mostly posts incredibly technical articles about Category Theory and which is about as respectable as it’s conceivably possible for a blog to get, suddenly started taking a close look at an Elsevier journal called Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, a subscription to which costs $4520.

It turns out to consist almost entirely of gibberish.

http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/11/the_case_of_m_s_el_naschie.html

This journal is by most standard metrics “respectible”; it’s published by Elsevier, it has good rankings in things like citation scales and “impact factor”, and it’s widely subscribed to. Oddly, though, this doesn’t mean that anyone reads it. The trick is, Elsevier has a lot of journals– again, hundreds and hundreds. And most of them are very expensive. But Elsevier gives a sharp discount if rather than just subscribing to a few of their journals, you subscribe to all of them– or rather, you subscribe to a “journal bundle”. Most institutions do exactly this; subscribe to the Lancet and Phys Letters A, or whatever, and get a bunch of other Elsevier stuff along with it. One of the things you get along with it is a little journal called Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. And somehow, this journal has been getting by for over a decade without any of its many subscribers actually attempting to read it.

Chaos, Solitons and Fractals is edited by a man named M. S. El Naschie, and what called attention to the problems with the journal in the first place is that apparently this man has published three hundred and twenty two papers written by himself in the journal he edits since 1994, apparently with no peer review of any kind:

For example, El Naschie has five sole-authored papers in the most recent issue, which will appear in December. Here they are:

1. M.S. El Naschie, Fuzzy multi-instanton knots in the fabric of space–time and Dirac’s vacuum fluctuation, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Volume 38, Issue 5, December 2008, Pages 1260-1268.

2. M.S. El Naschie, An energy balance Eigenvalue equation for determining super strings dimensional hierarchy and coupling constants, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Volume 38, Issue 5, December 2008, Pages 1283-1285.

3. M.S. El Naschie, Anomalies free E-infinity from von Neumann’s continuous geometry, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Volume 38, Issue 5, December 2008, Pages 1318-1322.

4. M.S. El Naschie, Eliminating gauge anomalies via a “point-less” fractal Yang–Mills theory, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Volume 38, Issue 5, December 2008, Pages 1332-1335.

5. M.S. El Naschie, Fuzzy knot theory interpretation of Yang–Mills instantons and Witten’s 5-Brane model, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Volume 38, Issue 5, December 2008, Pages 1349-1354.

Together with the rate at which El Naschie is publishing these papers in his own journal, the bizarre blend of fashionable buzzwords in their titles instantly made me suspicious. To see if my suspicions were correct, I examined some.

Let’s look at just one: ‘Anomalies free E-infinity from von Neumann’s continuous geometry’.

This paper consists of undisciplined numerology larded with impressive buzzwords. It starts with a reference to von Neumann’s continuous geometries and the work of Alain Connes, but it makes no use of these ideas. ‘E-infinity’ is apparently the name of Naschie’s ‘theory’, but he doesn’t describe this theory. In short, the title and abstract have little to do with the actual content of the paper.

As for the content, let me quote a bit, so you can see for yourself:

It may be a rather well known fact, at least for all round educated mathematicians, that there are 17 and only 17 distinct types of wallpaper patterns in terms of their symmetry groups…

The paper goes on to claim to demonstrate various ways that both wallpaper patterns, and various constants from physics, can be related in various convoluted ways to the number 686. It is not explained why the number 686 is important. Most of the ways of reaching this number 686 jam together math words in a way that the math professors who run the n-category cafe are unable to determine what any of it even means. In other contexts we call this Gematria.

The comments go on to add some color:

I had a look by random at three papers, and I felt really lucky: if you have the opportunity to ‘read’ the following two
articles,

El Naschie, On dimensions of Cantor set related system, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Vol 3, no. 6 (1993)

and

El Naschie, Dimension and Cantor spectra, Chaos Solitons and Fractals, Vol. 4, no. 11 (1994)

you will see that, up to a small bunch of lines, they are exactly the same (I mean word for word). Of course this method of writing is quite efficient to reach the 300’s of published papers…

I think the good people at Math Reviews must have had a clue about El Naschie for quite a while. Randomly picking reviews, I mostly find either just a summary taken from the paper, or the text { This paper will not be reviewed. }

The first real review I found was amusing. It is for the paper “A note on quantum gravity and Cantorian spacetime”, MR1428296 (98b:83036) (no prizes awarded for guessing which journal). The review is t[w]o short paragraphs. The second paragraph says: “This paper seems to the reviewer to contain no mathematics.”

In addition to Naschie’s self-published papers, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals seems to mostly publish stuff by a small group of Naschie fans who have been working on Naschie’s “E-Infinity” theory. (Again, none of the math professors who have looked at this can even figure out what “E-Infinity” theory is– it seems to just be a random batch of buzzwords that connects to, apparently, everything.) This little group of E-infinity specialists all cite each other, constantly, producing the illusion of a healthy research program and gaming the numbers that are sometimes used to measure the quality of a scientific paper– both Naschie and CS&F have very high scores in things like citation rankings because the little incestuous circle of E-infinity people citing each other has had the same effect as a “search engine optimization” specialist creating hundreds of dummy sites that link each other to increase someone’s Google ranking.

CS&F has also published papers by creationists and crankery claiming the LHC will destroy the earth– in fact once I started reading the blog coverage of all this I realized I personally actually in the past have run across creationists claiming Intelligent Design is a respected theory because a paper about it was published “in a major journal”, the journal given being Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. At the time I basically just went “what the hell do fractals have to do with evolution?” and assumed the journal was some fly by night operation that publishes anything you send them. This turned out to be true, but what I didn’t realize at the time was that the journal is published by the largest and most respected journal publishing house in the world! Oddly, CS&F also occasionally prints real, serious papers about mathematics and fractals; I can only assume that the people submitting the papers don’t bother reading or researching the journal beyond just looking at the name and the Elsevier stamp.

The rabbit hole just gets deeper and deeper from here. Highlights include posts from a group which claims to have been writing letters to Elsevier trying to highlight the problems with CS&F for at least a year, with no response from Elsevier; the N-Category Cafe blog being attacked by a wave of very vitriolic pro-Naschle comments which, based on IP addresses, there is reason to believe they were actually posted by Naschle himself under various assumed names; and a “Legal Advisor” claiming to be named Joan Morris writing letters to the N-Category Cafe and UC Riverside (where one of the N-Category Cafe authors works) demanding the blog posts about Naschle be taken down. And then, finally a week ago:

http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/11/the_case_of_m_s_el_naschie_con.html

Yesterday an Elsevier spokesperson informed [journalist Richard Poynder] that El Naschie’s retirement will be announced in the first issue of Chaos, Solitons & Fractals in 2009.

YouTube, Exchequer Krunch here. I am about to review Chrono Trigger DS.

Briefly, Chrono Trigger DS is something I would like to coin as an Enhanced Port. Trade mark that. Enhanced Port (TM). That’s better. An Enhanced Port (TM) of Chrono Trigger for the SNES from way back in 1996 or something. But it’s also an Enhanced Port (TM) of the same game on the PSX from some other year when SquareSoft decided to add some animu type movies to it.

And all who are nostagic will go out and get it because they’ve played it before and they need to reexperience the brilliance that was Chrono Trigger. But no, you can’t because stores don’t have it in stock. I went to one WalMart on release day, at 8PM and upon quickly glancing I did not spot the game. I was severly disappointed. So disappointed that after looking for the game, I didn’t even feel like getting some takeout afterward.

Final Thoughts: Chrono Trigger DS left me depressed and hungry.

Hi, I’m EPI and welcome to my wonderful article. Today we will be discussing why you are here reading this website today: videogames. But, I suppose it would seem to many that it is quite a broad topic. And with that I suppose I would agree. And I would imagine some of you would say it is a vast universe of topics. Okay, starting to agree less. Anyways, I just did an image seach for “video games” and this was the result.

As you can see here, what I assume is a Muslim woman finally got her Dell laptop and is playing a videogame. Neckbeard stands by, carefully observing and taking notes of the phenomena.

In any case, many would call videogames as “the latest entertainment media.” Which, in turn, churned out an almost new type of media altogether. That being People Who Are Extremely Opinionated About Video Games™. Now this, of course, runs a very deep canyon of genres as well! There are, of course, your dime a dozen gaming review sites. There are your gaming blogs. And those that fall under the “other” catagory. This is not even scratching the surface.

Of course, I’m not here to discuss anything “gaming politics” related or anything resembling something found on that site. And I will concede that this kind of media-observing-media is by no means anything absolutly new. Except, of course, it is happening on the internet. And, I suppose in a way, this IS new. How? Well, I guess i’ll explain.

Once upon a time, before my time and likely yours, if you wanted to know if a movie/book/restaurant/hotel/ escort service/brand of pickle/drug dealer/ketsup/hitman/bag of charcoal/waterfall/mayonaise was worth the money, chances you could open a newspaper and there would be something there to give you an opinion by someone who is very opinionated on the subject matter. Or, if that failed, there would be a magazine devoted entirely to telling you to buy/not to buy this thing or service.

But, how is this different than the internet? How is some person in a magazine or newspaper going to have a more valid opinion than asking random people on my buddy list if I should have a sandwich or do a bunch of meth?

I’ll be very honest with you. It isn’t. A videogame magazine probably couldn’t tell you any better than a respectable review site. But, therein lies the problem (and a previous point)…

There sure are a whole fucking lot of videogame review sites.

In a newspaper, if your column sucked chances are you got axed. If your magazine isn’t selling you go under and you’re off the shelves. This is not the case on the internet, apparently. As there are legions upon legions of these sites. Some are more reputable than others. But, it’s nearly impossible to tell them apart. Because, holy shit, all of them, come hell or high water, are going to continue to write their opinions about videogames on their very own videogame review site. A site that will continue going on taking the same news from other sites, refrying it and reposting it until the absolute end of the world. Sense be damned.

I suppose the next logical step would be to review these review sites. But, I’ll say right now that I am not the person to do this. But, there’s a chance that someone out there either is doing this or has already done it. And there’s a chance that his site got a 7.8/10 on another site.

And this concludes this wonderful amazing article.

Thanks for reading!

So after everybody assuming that the Large Hadron Collider shutdown last month meant no new physics discoveries until spring at least, we now out of fucking nowhere have two (2!) completely unrelated non-LHC scientific experiments finding almost exactly the sort of “something not right” that nobody in particle physics has managed to score in ten years– within two days of each other.

Short version:

• PAMELA is a European Space Agency satellite that counts the different kinds of particles passing through space near earth. They’ve found more positrons passing through space than astronomers would have predicted.

• CDF is one of the two detectors at Tevatron– the LHC’s immediate predecessor to the “most powerful particle accelerator in the world” title. CDF finally got enough data to show that they’re finding more muons than physicists would have predicted, and the muons are showing up in a really weird place.

This is interesting because both of these seem to be explainable by the existence of a new particle type or types, which would be sort of the holy grail of experimental physics right now– people have spent the last 30 years desperately trying to find any holes in the “Standard Model” of particle physics and basically failing. Even better, both of these results (with varying degrees of plausibility) have some reason to believe that the new particle they point to is in fact the particle responsible for “dark matter”.

To go into a little more detail: These days when you go out looking for particles, it’s usually not possible to detect the particles directly (generally because most particles that interest physicists these days only exist for fractions of an instant before decomposing), so instead what you have to do is look for things that whatever particle you’re actually interested in eventually decays into– interesting particle A decays into less interesting particles B and C, which decay into recognizable sprays of boring but long-lived particles D through F. Modern particle physics is tested by building detectors to count particles D through F and then checking whether the theoretical models come up with approximately the same counts that the detectors did.

This is basically what both the CDF and PAMELA results above are about– with the difference being that with PAMELA they’re counting particles coming from deep space, whereas with CDF they’re counting particles coming from collisions inside Tevatron. In both cases, they’re seeing an excess of some simple particle where they don’t expect to. In both cases, this could very possibly just be experimental noise– both the things found in excess here have difficult aspects to accurately detecting them, and these results are going to need to be closely checked before they’re taken too seriously. (The obvious question with the CDF result is whether the same results can be seen by D0, which is the other detector sitting next to CDF on the Tevatron ring.) But either result could mean something is happening to produce those particles that physicists don’t know about. In the case of PAMELA, there’s a good candidate for where the extra particles come from; CDF is a bit more puzzling.

In the case of PAMELA, most people who are taking bets on what the extra positrons mean are hoping that what we’re actually seeing is the faint glow of dying dark matter. Dark matter research, these days, has basically come to the consensus that dark matter is some kind of special “WIMP” particle that’s immune to the electromagnetic or strong forces– so that it passes right through normal matter, and light passes right through it– but which still interacts with normal matter via gravity. This conclusion was partly reached because several leading alternate explanations for dark matter were shown to be insufficient to explain all the dark matter that exists, and partially because of smoking gun data like the bullet cluster observation, where astronomers caught a photo where two galaxies collided and you could actually see the dark matter (mapped via gravitational lensing) separating out from the galaxies they’d previously been clumped inside of. We’ve never seen a particle that behaves the way the “WIMP” would have to, but maybe it’s just really heavy, too heavy for any of the particle accelerators we’ve built to have found it.

There’s maybe a way to detect dark matter without a particle accelerator, though: dark matter doesn’t interact with normal matter, but maybe it interacts with itself. Maybe it’s possible for dark matter particles to collide with each other, and maybe when that happens they annihilate and release energy. And if this “dark matter annihilation” is occurring, then it would look very much like the positrons-from-nowhere that PAMELA is seeing– the positron excess is consistent with the idea of some kind of floating particle scattered everywhere throughout space destroying itself and leaving positron debris, and the mass of the particle that this debris would  probably have come from is right in the range where WIMP models tend to put their new particle.

In fact, several people who’ve made dark matter particle models have already come forward to show that the PAMELA data neatly meets their pet suggestion for what the dark matter particle is. And by “come forward” I mean “published papers, before the PAMELA results even came out.” There’s a weird little subplot here where the PAMELA data actually “leaked” several months ago– and by “leaked” I mean “the PAMELA people presented their data at a conference”. After the conference everyone who’d seen the PAMELA talk promptly went home, looked over the pictures of the PAMELA powerpoint slides that they’d taken on their cell phone cameras, and posted papers on arxiv.org about the consequences of the PAMELA results. Then the PAMELA people got all pissy that people had, you know, done things with the information they gave them, rather than waiting around for the PAMELA people to finish getting their paper into print. Whatever. Anyway, this is where things get tricky.

The PAMELA result I’m talking about here was published last thursday; then the CDF results came out on friday. Everybody knew the PAMELA results were coming. The CDF results on the other hand were a complete surprise– although CDF had been working on a version of the results since at least July and it’s probable a good number of people inside CDF knew this was coming. I’m still not sure why the CDF people decided to publish the day after PAMELA did, but the two results have basically nothing to do with each other. When the guy who writes resonaances was asked about this, he said:

…from the experimental point of view there is only one connection between PAMELA and CDF: both see an excess in a leptonic final state. Otherwise, the two signal are completely different, in particular, the energy scale is different. It is very likely that two anomalies are not linked in a simple manner, but models that explain both appear more sexy to theorists.

So, here’s the punchline: As mentioned, after the early PAMELA reports more than one group with a dark matter theory wrote a paper about how whatever it was they were already working on totally fit the PAMELA results. One of these groups published a paper a few months ago about the “SuperUnified Theory of Dark Matter”, which fit the PAMELA data but not very cleanly; it predicted something about “lepton jets” that would happen as a result of the existence of the dark matter particle, and suggested that the LHC look for these lepton jets. I think normally clutter like this would be seen as a flaw; except, it turns out that these “lepton jets” would show up something very like the same weird muon excess that CDF now turns out to have been seeing already. In fact, this makes the ’superunified’ dark matter theory the only paper currently in the wild with an explanation of muon sprays of the particular weird type that CDF saw.

So: Two potentially groundbreaking unrelated results announced in physics over the course of two days, and one published theory turns out to have predicted both of them as being a consequence of dark matter. That could just be a coincidence, but if so it would be a really weird one. Actually more likely than it being a coincidence is that one of the ’superunified’ authors just heard some kind of rumor from somebody in CDF that they might publish something about a muon excess– these big group experiments leak like sieves– and tweaked their paper to fit. One of the authors is already publicly claiming he had no idea CDF had been seeing this; the other hasn’t said anything either way yet.

More on this stuff if you care:

Papers:

CDF’s new findings
PAMELA’s new findings

The “superunified” theory, which explains PAMELA and maybe CDF
The “minimal dark matter” theory, which is an example of something that explains PAMELA but not CDF

Blog posts:

Tomasso Dorigo, who works for CDF, on the muon thing

The Resonaances guy, who works for the LHC’s parent organization, on the CDF muon thing

Resonaances guy on the PAMELA thing

Peter Woit’s roundup on these subjects, including an elaborate soap-opera bit in which Woit discovers that a draft of CDF’s as-far-as-anyone-knows-totally-surprising results have apparently been sitting by accident in a google-indexed public web directory since July

An abbreviated WAW today, as I spent most of Tuesday wandering around Manhattan in the pouring rain and I think somewhere outside the Citigroup tower I was able to pinpoint the exact moment I contracted pneumonia.

So if you’re concerned about not seeing Disney Faries: Tinker Bell, Singstar Country, Rubik’s Puzzle World, Six Flags Theme Park, High School Musical Three, MySims Kingdom or Scene It Office Smash, I assure you they came out this week, and they’re all crap.

And then there’s this crap:

All Star Cheer Squad (wii)

ASCS has me excited for two reasons. One, there’s this:

And secondly, Nintendo has created a situation where it’s become fiscally feasable to sell videogames to cheerleaders, and I like anything that further justifies my seething hatred for Nintendo and all it stands for. It’s sort of like being excited when hearing that the Dallas Cowboys signed Roy Williams simply because you know it’ll piss off TO and make everyone involved look like even bigger assholes than they already are.

Bella Sara (DS)

Research reveals this to be a Nintendogs-clone based on the popular girls’s equine ccg Bella Sara, which leads us to the question– what the fuck is Bella Sara?

Oh, that’s Bella Sara.

Not wishing to do too much research into Bella Sera and wind up with Chris Hansen knocking on my door, I’m left to wonder exactly what differentiates a girl’s collectible card game from something like Magic the Gathering. I mean, we can assume that your horses don’t actually fight each other, because a game centered around unicorns impaling nightmares would be something that’d have appeared on my radar well before now.

Fallout 3 (360, PS3)

aaaah, there we go.

I’m not going to be the most unbiased opinion on the merits of Fallout 3, seeing as how I’ve already ordered the CE despite, you know– not possessing a working 360 console– But do you really need an unbiased opinion to tell you you need to be playing this game, right now, despite whatever laws of physical reality and your own local police jurisdiction may unfairly impose?

Okay, so at worse it’s going to be Oblivion with a Mad Max skin. I don’t think there’s any real reason to think it’ll work out that way, but that’s your baseline. Bethesda doesn’t make bad games, and provided you’re willing to pretend Brotherhood of Steel was never produced, there’s never been a bad Fallout game. And really, even if it’s not a hundred percent faithful to the Fallout universe or ethos, isn’t it about time we had a western RPG that broke free of high fantasy?

Y’know, one not already made by Bioware.

What I’m saying here is that, at worse, you’re still looking at what’s probably going to be the best WRPG of the year. If it can live up to it’s promise, then it’s going to be very, very special.

Guitar Hero World Tour (Everything)

Guitar games are like Madden games to me at this point– I can’t play them worth a damn, I like seeing other people play them, I’m sorta baffled as to why people keep buying incremental updates every six months.

Imagine Party Babyz (Wii)

You have to admire the breadth of vision with Ubisoft’s Imagine series– not only is it a full-on assault against good gaming, but it also actively reinforces gender roles by convincing young girls that their proscribe career paths involve babysitting, tending house and little else.

Now we have Party Babyz, in which Ubisoft makes the argument that babies should be used as personal combatants in frenetic party games. I can’t say I’m disappointed with this development, as the next obvious step is Imagine: Baby Cockfights, where you strap kitchen knives to infant foreheads and the the little runtlings scoot about until one baby is left crawling.

Little Red Riding Hood’s Zombie BBQ (DS)

Now here’s the sort of stereotype-shattering title that only hardcore gaming can deliver:

Yeah, it’s a good thing no one at NOW owns a DS, otherwise we’d be fucked. Still, there’s nothing about this game that’s convinced me I can’t not buy it.

Motorstorm: Pacific Rift

As much as I’ve enjoyed the antics of lolSony over the past two years, I gotta admit to indulging in more than a bit of fanboy jealousy over the Motorstorm franchise. It’s simple, well-constructed arcade rally action, something that Sega just can’t get right anymore and Codemaster’s Colin McRae games simply aren’t interested in doing. Plus, it looks simply fucking stunning in HD, one of the few titles that you can point to as being unquestionably PS3-like as far as graphics are concerned.

Pacific Rift looks particularly neat, as it’s taking Motorstorm’s formula and adding evolving track design that features paths that can be each be exploited in thier own way by Motorstorm’s varied vehicle classes. I want to play this, and am annoyed at the utter lack of an analogous title on the 360, especially with with no recent news on the horizon of the Rallisport followup Turn 10 is supposedly working on.

Moto GP ‘08 (PS3,PS2,360)

The annoying thing about Moto GP ‘08 is imagining how cool a bike racer by Capcom would be if it were played out like a traditional Capcom game instead of a sim racer. You could have Isabella from Dead Rising show up on her Harley, instigate bike-mounted knife fights, have The Tyrant appear as a boss battle atop a pocketbike– It’d be like Mario Kart, but with tits and evisceration. Y’know, pretty much the best game ever.

Ninjatown (DS)

Sorry, Random Child’s Play kid. You’re never going to get a copy of Lego Batman because Shawn Smith is an asshole who made a tower defense game about chibi ninjas and took all my money.

Neverland Card Battles (PSP)

Yeah. I don’t know either, man.

Out of the Chute (Wii, PS2)

For some reason I keep mixing up Crave the shitty budget-title developer with Cave shooters, the guys who keep making shumps for the Dreamcast. I think this is mainly due to the Cave brain squishy I picked up from the last Atlanta E3, and for whatever reason the company has managed to insinuate itself in my head as a quality developer, and I’m shocked whenever I remember they make stuff like The Bible Game or Hard Rock Casino or this blight upon our hobby.

PopStar Guitar (Wii)

Wait. Grips? Why does the Gamestop listing mention gri–

Hahahahahahaha holy shit

NEXT WEEK~!

NARUTO: ULTIMATE NINJA STORM is MOCKED AND DERIDED
I attempt to summon interest in GEARS OF WAR 2
BRATZ KIDZ: SLUMBER PARTY threatens to bring SEXUAL DEVIANCY charges against me!

You saw it coming - Microsoft plans Avatar Store
If it’s possible to miss the point more than Microsoft with their Mii-Toos, also known as Avatars, the XBox 360 manufacturer is determined to find out.  Dubbed simply Avatar Store, people will be paying real life monies for virtual bling.  Said bling can even be video game IP, making you a walking advertisement.  It will be just like shopping at Hot Topic, but even more pointless.

Sega passing on PS2 version of Sonic Unleashed in Japan
While Sonic Unleashed is getting released on every console you can sit in front of in America and Europe, Sega is skipping on the Playstation 2 version in Japan.  Why?  They’ve yet to offer an explanation for this.  PS2s, and PS2 games, still continue to sell well there, so it can’t be much of a financial gamble.  The game shares assets with the Wii version, so if you’re printing one, development of the other can’t be that big a deal.  Very curious.

Importing a DSi?  Expect to pay a premium.
The DSi is available for pre-order on sites like Play-Asia and Yes-Asia, both sites selling for a $100 premium over the MSRP.  The DSi retails for 18,900 yen (just over $200), while import sites are charging $299 on the dot.  If you’re planning to import, you’re taking a heavy hit, in addition to news that software and perhaps the download service will be region-locked.  Perhaps there would be no need to import of NOA weren’t delaying the release until a vague 2009 date.  What’s the problem, it taking a while to translate those one-word menus?