What the Star Tribune probably doesn't realize is that the grandparents are now hooked on Wii Sports bowling and the kids are getting their nature fix from Endless Ocean. I'm off to shun real life nature with a photo safari in Pokemon Snap. Take that, anonymous nature boy!

Editorial: Pause the Playstation and head to Wabasha [Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune]

Every time I hear, see, read about World of Warcraft one thing pops into my head. It's not my nearly forgotten druid character who has a name I can no longer remember, goals I don't care about and sits languishing in some Inn. It's not the hours of fun I had playing the massively multiplayer game when it first came out. It's my check book.

I haven't played WoW in at least three months, I wouldn't even think about the game if it weren't for the fact that at least once a month I scare my wife out of her skin with a terete-like outburst of profanity that would make a Vietnam Era drill sergeant blush. That damn $14.95 gets me every time. The reoccurring monthly fee shows up when I'm balancing my bank statement and I just flip out. I swear to God that this time I'm going to go online and cancel my account, but for some unknown reason I never do.

I could be, I should be doing that right now, but instead I'm writing this diatribe. How many MMO's survive purely on the lazy habits of ex-players? Why can't they be designed to cancel after so many months of non-use or at least send out an email?

OK, I'm finished ranting, you can go read something interesting now.

Your Video Games Suck is the ultimate hater wiki for gamers. The game review site is dedicated to looking at the negative side of games and making fun of them. The site only offers up nine user written articles so far, but man are they filled with hate. All entries are user submitted using the Wikipedia source, so hop on over and vent that spleen.

Your Video Games Suck [Official Site]

My brother just sent me a link to a great screed on War simulations that he found posted on Craigslist. The article was actually swiped from PointlessWasteofTime.com and was written by the same guy who wrote the now kinda famous Gamer's Manifesto.

David Wong starts out his rant on the ultimate war simulator with this beauty of an intro:

Like my Grandpa always said, there were no naked human pyramids in Starcraft.

There were no whiny anti-war Hollywood types or questionable war motives or granola-munching human shields. I'm starting to think that even Command and Conquer: Generals, a game so "realistic" it took a NASA-built Quantum supercomputer to run it, has left me woefully unprepared to fight an actual war.

What Wong wants is a real, real time strategy. One that "will give me a stress headache after an hour and an ulcer after a week. I want to identify experienced players on the street by their Thousand-Yard Stares."

What follows is a humorous and deviously insightful attack on the stupidity of real world war and real world war protestors. Read it, love it, live it.

Maybe this is old, maybe you've already seen it. Don't care, go read it again, it's that good.

Creating the Ultimate War Sim [Pointless Waste of Time]

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a nice write up on the Dear Friends: Music of Final Fantasy that played in Georgia over the weekend. The piece was actually written before the concert, but does a job of explaining both the cultural importance of the concert and why concert halls around the country are suddenly falling all over themselves to do video game performances.

The piece also has some interesting trivia, like the fact that an orchestra that wants to play the music pays $100,000. That fee includes sheet music rental, video equipment, a technical director and a conductor. The hosting site has to provide the orchestra, chorus and of course the venue, but gets to keep the entire box office receipts.

The question that lingers long after the male 20 to 30-year-old demographic has wandered from the concert hall humming bits of Final Fantasy, is whether this collision of pop culture and pops has any sort of lasting effect towards revitalizing the concert scene. Music historian Joseph Horowitz says there is no clear answer:

Final Fantasy [AJC, thanks All Games.com]

Bearman's new video game column for the LA Weekly and Village Voice is going to be a must read. In the June 24 article Pass the Paddles: The Moralgorithm, Bearman talks about NBA Live's seeming ability to look beyond the stats and apply momentum, team chemistry and flow to the virtual game of basketball.

The story bandies about ideas like the concept of Zen's mushin and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi s Flow as it looks at how a game transcends its program to combine the lesser parts into a greater whole, creating moments that in NBA Live are viewed as glitches, but in the real NBA become moments of sport's history.

A glitch? Perhaps. Over time, Batty says, the programmers have fixed most real glitches in the game. It could also be that those improbable pyrotechnics are accidentally reflecting that fundamental intangibility in real basketball. What are the flashes of mushin in sports if not human glitches momentary suspensions of reality? Maybe spontaneous supernatural power is not just a digital artifact. Afer all, wasn t Dr. J s famous floating reverse adjusted no-look layup in the 1980 finals an error of some kind, a brief, one-in-a-million window into the realm of impossibility?

Pass the Paddles: The Moralgorithm [LA Weekly]

The (Elkin-Jonesville, N.C.) Tribune has an excellent editorial up about the significance of Pac-Man s silver anniversary. The paper says the game has ushered in a video game age that is a legitimately transforming force in the most robust and diverse entertainment culture the world has ever known.

Unlike the Rubik s Cube, breakdancing, or even Michael Jackson, Pac-Man s range of influence is not restricted to simple 1980s nostalgia. The game represents the ground floor of a new medium interactive entertainment a billion-dollar enterprise now publicly traded on Wall Street. As jarring as it is to contemplate, alongside Morse s What has God wrought, and Bell s Watson, come here, Pac-Man was just as influential an American voice, even if all he said was Wakka-wakka-wakka.

Holy crap, a newspaper that get s it stop the presses.

Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, and Pac-Man [RedAssedBaboon]

Although I'm not a regular reader of the IGN mailbag (typo-ridden and grammar-lacking fanboy letters are hardly my cup of tea), I felt obligated to take a peek after reading Hatsumi's recent column.

These letters were awesomely terrible. The lead-off diatribe was a stalky 1,500 word dissertation about everything Jessica, including this doozy:

And yes, I do have an "engagement ring" for Jessica, except it comes in the shape of a .45 bullet to her right temple.

The letters that followed were of a similar quality but mercifully, shorter.

Personally I suggest everyone involved (ooh, that includes me!) take a handful of Ambien and go back to being quiet, useless blobs.

Mailbag of sweet, sweet hate!

-SM

MTV News sat down with the editor of The Gamer s Quarter to talk to him about the impetus for creating a free online zine dedicated to (gasp) New Games Journalism. It s MTV-short, but worth the read with a nice run down of the first issue and tease to the second, which just hit the website. Check out the article and The Gamer s Quarter, both deserve your time.

First-Person Shooters? OK; First-Person Gamer Mag? Hmm ... [MTV News]

I love secret shoppers, it empowers us all. 1Up/EGM had a woman go in to several game and electronic stores and play up the old I m a girl and don t know jack about games stereotype. The results run from heartening to horrifying. To summerize, though you really should go read the entire item it s a gem, GameStop rocks, EB Games are elitists, Best Buy is moronic and Toys R Us should have their games taken away from them.

Tough Customer [1Up]

The UK's Daily Mail ran a story Sunday that says a new study has proven that video games can lead to more violent behavior. You have to read through nearly the entire article before you get to this great line from one of the leaders of the research.

The findings appear in the latest issue of the Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography. Co-researcher Dr William Kronenberger, associate professor in the school's department of psychiatry, warned that more work was needed before firm conclusions could be drawn.

Unless you're with the Daily Mail, then now is a perfect time to draw conclusions.

While we will find out later today whether the Screen Actors Guild will strike it appears no one will care. I've heard it from execs and flaks, but now the Los Angles Daily News is asking just how important is vocal talent to the commercial success of a title? In other words, do you really care who does the voice for Marlon Brandon in The Godfather The Game? I'm guessing you don't which sort of means if 1,000 SAG voters decide to strike they're screwed.

Unions are sounding off on their concerns [Daily News]

FeedGarden has a sexy new look. The PSP news aggregator has expanded to include eight different gardens including PSP, Videogame and Xbox 360. Think of it as a sort of a concentrated aggregator, a place that provides a snapshop about a particular subject in an easy to read system. Or as the site s creator calls it, a lazy person s Bloglines. The site will eventually update every 15 minutes or so, but right now is running at about once an hour.

FeedGarden [Like I said...]

Are you a Pop Culturist, Uninspired, Shock Artist or Loyalist? Druidblue says that the names typically chosen in a massively multiplayer online role playing game falls into those four categories.

The Pop Culturists
"Look at how cool I am! I'm Legolas! You know, from Lord of the Rings! I'm JUST like him! (He's my favorite, you know!)"
Sample Guild War Names in this Category:
Phantom Legolas
Anuld Governatorl
Obi Wan

What s in a name? [RAB Forums]

A few years ago I was talking to Chip Lange, then vice president of EA Sports, about the pervasiveness of video games and how newspapers were covering them. He was bemoaning the fact that at the time most newspaper reporters who covered gaming did so as a side job. (While I write a monthly game column for the Rocky Mountain News, my full-time job is as a police reporter.) He pointed out that you would never see that in a paper s coverage of the music or movie industry. And then he said something that really brought it all home: He said it wouldn t be long before we had the first president in the White House who grew up playing video games.

Think about that for a second.

The Christian Science Monitor recently ran an article about the gaming industry being at a cross-roads of sorts.

We have a whole new generation of game players who are going to be the prime engine of our economy and society. These are the people who will be writing our books, interpreting history, becoming scholars and doctors. It's too late to marginalize the gamer now; the industry is imbedded in the fabric of our society.

But the games being developed haven t really kept up. Instead of trying to create games with better stories, more complex characters, moral conflicts, ESA president Doug Lowenstein points out that the industry is figuring out how to make things explode in more spectacular ways.

After I watch a good movie I think about it for days. I replay it in my mind. I ponder the moral conflicts. Why doesn t that happen after I play a game?

More than two decades ago, Trip Hawkins helped found Electronic Arts and asked the question can a computer make you cry. We know it can, now prove it.

Video-game industry mulls over the future beyond shoot-em-ups [Christian Science Monitor]

Well that didn't last too long. The Carnival of Gamers, a collection of interesting and unusual game links, was an attempt at cutting through all of the back-biting and self-promotion of blogging and instead concentrate on good writing. Cathode Tan points out that not everyone liked the idea. Someone needs a hug I think.

Try Again, Matthew [Cathode Tan]

Gametab's grand social experiment seems to have floundered a bit. Those of you who use the gaming news tabulator, and everyone who likes gaming should, probably noticed the addition of a news nexus a few weeks back.

The idea was to allow the everyday reader to post their own gaming news stories and have the readers pick which ones they like the best to create a sort of top ten list. It's a fantastic idea that both huge (1 Up) and teeny (RedAssedBaboon) sites are or have played around with.

Monday, the Gametab folks apparently decided to pull it from their site and give it a space of its own. The new site, Pikuru (the only gaming site with a worse name then Kotaku), will be 100 percent community-based news system.

I both love and hate this system. On the one hand I've long held that the point of blogging is to remove the walls between the reader and the writer, but on the other hand I still want there to be a wall. This is mostly because I have a fragile ego and like to feel special.

Go check out Pikuru and see what it's like to write for a soon to be huge site.

Pikuru [Pikuru]

Are the E3 awards handed out each year by an increasing number of publications and sites each year worth anything? The problem is two-fold. First, the awards are based on games that have not been completed, so may look better or worse than they will when they are finally released. Second, there are so many awards given out each year that it's hard to really pay attention.

I was talking to someone with a developer at the show who was bemoaning that fact. He was saying that it's gotten to the point that seemingly every mainstream game gets something so who cares? While I think that's a bit of an overstatement, it does highlight the issue of what purpose these awards serve.

Gamecloud went out and interviewed the editors for a bunch of the sites that do their own awards. Most of them seem to agree that the awards are only to show what was good at the show, not what games a person may want to run out a buy when it's released. If that's true, then why bother making the list?

E3 Awards: Do They Really Mean Anything? [Game Cloud]

I ran into CBS' William Vitka in some hallway at E3 last week, he looked as dazed and confused as I felt. And, it turns out, he was. In his latest column he bemoans the excesses of the show, slams Msoft and Sony for their love of the HD revolution that no one can afford and points out that for an industry that claims it's all grown up it sure as hell still acts like a teenager on crank.

E3 Left us Dazed and Confused [CBS News]

Sony Entertainment s Ken Kutaragi was talking smack about the Xbox 360 to Gamespot today. Besides running with the whole Xbox 1.5 name-calling, Kutaragi is talking up the PS3 s multimedia capabilities, specificially its abilitiy to store non-game content in online storage.

Users will be able to store their content in an online storage server called the 'Cell Storage.' And the Cell processor, when it's not being used, can refine the content's quality. We call it the 'aging' process. For example, users can 'age' their Standard Definition (SD) video and up-convert it to High Definition (HD) video. We have many plans [for the PS3], but this 'Cell Storage' service is something that we definitely intend to launch. By using the Cell's security feature, users will be able to rip DVDs that include copyright protection and lay it in the storage area to refine its video quality.

This is pretty interesting, but what I find more interesting is how the three big companies are positioning their various consoles for launch.

After attending all three launch announcements at E3 I came away with a pretty distinct view of where the companies were headed, at least in terms of marketing.

Sony s announcement was filled with numbers, facts, lots of video of next-gen games and left me with the impression that the console was the one being pitched to hardcore gamers.

Microsoft s soft and fuzzy announcment kicked off with a woman carrying out the 360 in a giant purse and included videos of Friends-like twenty-somethings dancing around in their apartment playing games and dancing. The end result was a console that seemed to be shaping up to be more of a multimedia device than hardcore gaming system.

Nintendo s launch with it s complete lack of facts or figures, but cool design and heavy retro tie-ins seemed to be more about creative gaming then realistic graphics and over the top competition. The end result, in my mind, was a system that will be pushed as the fun console.

So now, Sony is starting to talk up their console as a strong multimedia device, expect Msoft to go for the hardcore gamers again any day now. I fully expect Nintendo to take the high road and just stay out of this my chips are bigger than yours grudge match.

PS2 is not a game machine [Gamespot]