Hey, has anyone seen Cesar? He hasn’t been around lately.

Having taken my queue from this gem and taken up the challenge, I thought I would make up a couple of my own:

Let’s see: my Friday Random Ten - gonna spend the weekend painting and packing edition:

1. Tori Amos - In the Springtime of His Voodoo

2. The Lemonheads - Hate Your Friends
3. Camper Van Beethoven - James River
4. U2 - Until the End of the World
5. Low Fidelity All-Stars - Will I Get Out of Jail?
6. Grant Lee Buffalo - SuperSloMotion
7. Machines of Loving Grace - Perfect Tan (Bikini Atoll)
8. One Dove - Sirens
9. Gorillaz - 5/4
10. Bis - How Can We Be Strange

Jeezus. That’s all over the map! Sort of like how I’m feeling today!

For all of your PSP owners: Patapon is out this week and it’s getting great reviews. I almost had a chance to play it but a quiet cafe isn’t exactly the appropriate place to take someone up on their offer, and it was a little too cold to go out on the sidewalk and play.

The upcoming Monster Lab for the Wii could be fun–although I suspect that the “customize” part is a little over-stated.

Games for the PlayStation 2 are still being pumped out, despite the fact that it’s replacement is over a year old. Mana Khemia looks like a pretty standard JRPG for those of you who like them — it’s coming out at the end of March.

Another RPG is Soma Bringer for the DS. There’s no release date yet, but it looks like it’s just about done being ported. The nice thing about this is that it’s real-time, and co-op, which the DS needs more of.

…That’s it for this week!

Even before this AP article started making the rounds in online wire services, I had been aware that Michigan libraries had been toying with the suggestion to start offering video games to its members as my mother-in-law sits on the board of the Lansing area library district.

As you might expect, the decision to bring kids into the library with something that isn’t exactly synonymous with “peace and quiet” is a bit controversial to the library boards, who probably see it as waving bags of pure, cut cocaine in order to get people in your doors. These are the same people who object to having free public access to the internet.

As the M-I-L pointed out, libraries are about more than books: it’s about making sure that people in your community have access to content and services, and having a safe community space. Having a back room where kids can jam to Rock Band means that kids who can’t afford $150 on a video game (plus extra if they want a 2nd guitar) can still get together with friends and play it — in a space that’s safe and adult-supervised, at that.

Why this is controversial is beyond me. It’s not like the library is going to offer every game ever made, nor are they going to put the collected works of Jane Austen out by the curb to make way for the collected works of Namco-Bandai. And there is a point to waving the pure, cut cocaine in order to get people into your doors when you’re a library: once people are comfortable going into a library for one thing, they’ll start to use the library for other things, and that means patronage. But there’s really just such a thin layer of prejudice around the people who believe that the library should be Books And Books Only: one could pick up a Phillipa Gregory book just as easily as one could pick up Chaucer at a library, and I seriously doubt the former has any “nutritional value” as a way to spend one’s evening any more than WarioWare does.

Nintendo may charge for Wii online capabilities

Nintendo has always been resistant to online play, but we had hoped that they would have relaxed a bit by now. According to Hexus.gaming:

Takashi Aoyama, group manager for Nintendo’s network administrations group confirmed the scheme at the Game Developer Conference and said that the system will be a way of “collecting fees for some services [that] will allow us to adapt flexibly.”

You can’t really blame Nintendo for bellying up to the same cash trough that XBL is for Microsoft, but I’m still not eager to have Nintendo take a giant poop on me. At least with XBox Live, you’re paying for a very well-developed multiplayer environment: Achievements, anonymous pick-up games, friends and messaging. The Wii’s “friend code” and “system code” system is a total pain in the ass and if I’m paying for online gaming, I never want to have to get a friend’s code for that particular game ever again. The good news is that the Wii is probably going to continue on a per-console basis, rather than a per-user basis, but Nintendo is getting a little over-confident. The Wii is wildly popular and fun, but they need to recognize its weaknesses, of which online gaming is a huge achille’s heel. It’s been out for over a year now without a good system for online playing released, and they’re talking about charging us? Please.

Rockstar exclusivity?

Is Rockstar games entering into a contract to produce future games exclusively on the PS3? It sounds like Sony has been throwing large unmarked wads of hints their way. This is currently still in “rumor” mode, having been mentioned in Sony’s fan mag Play. Will Take 2 cede the ability to market future GTA games to XBox owners, and future Table Tennis games to Wii owners? Particularly considering the PS3’s sales haven’t exactly been gangbusters and a rumored Trojan Horse?

HD-DVD is dead. Long live Blu-Ray, just not on the XBox

Microsoft has officially abandoned the HD-DVD player for the XBox prompting retailers to launch fire sales for people who haven’t heard. Early reports suggest Microsoft won’t be immediately jumping into King Claudius’s bed, and is not currently saying if it will offer a Blu-Ray drive for to replace it. It’s just a matter of time, of course, but it’s important to give HD-DVD owners time to grieve and watch Transformers one last time.

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Note: In case my near-daily countdown hasn’t been enough, I might as well say that we’re closing in on closing. The next couple of weeks may have some light posting and slow moderation, please be patient. I hope to be “back in the saddle” sometime around March 10th.

In case y’all haven’t seen this:

Hat tip: Feministing

Chit-chat about gaming for a minute — I am still gaming despite the fact that I haven’t been talking about it much. Obviously, with the upcoming move I haven’t been doing it a lot but I’ve been trying to get a little time in every day.

I’ve been playing Psychonauts on GameTap, which is a game I’ve sorely neglected (it was released during a period when I wasn’t playing games on the PC as much), and I might be able to give y’all some content about it later. It’s fun, but there are some really obnoxious game mechanics. I’ve been bumping my butt through the third part of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn and I’m interested in how the Apostle Sanaki appears to be in the same boat as Queen Elincia: they are both young woman in a position of executive power struggling to maintain their roles while a bunch of (I’ll go ahead and say it: “old men”) attempt to wrest it away from them. I’ve never much cared for the story content of the Fire Emblem series because it just seemed to get in the way of the tactics, but this one is turning out pretty good.

I’ve also played the occasional pick-up game of Carcassonne on XBL. We downloaded Rez HD which is a really interesting, fun game and was the impetus for last week’s poll. For those who answered “What?” to last week’s poll, Inverting the Y-Axis control means that for a game that uses a flying mechanic, pulling down on the control stick will cause you to climb, whereas pushing forward on the control will cause you to drop. This mechanic was first used in the original Microsoft Flight Simulator to mimic the pitch control of the yoke in a cockpit. It’s how I think spatially, so whenever I have a flying game (Rez, Descent, Quidditch World Cup), I’m sure to invert my Y-Axis control.

I realize it’s been at least a month since I’ve last picked up my DS. I started to play Rune Factory and just couldn’t get into it. I had to go back to Philly so I was playing it while I was taking the regional rail back and forth and the conductor was asking me what I was playing and I replied “the most stupid, pointless, boring game I’ve ever played.” I may create a blog post comparing a bunch of “work” games if I can get a little time together.

What have y’all been playing?

Let’s play with the iTunes store… you can do this without spending any money but remember a 30-second clip might not be the “meat” of the song.

Recommend us some music. I’ll name some tracks, you go off an either listen or buy (if you’re feeling brave) and then recommend stuff back. If you list a song, it has to be in the iTunes store so that we can check it out!

Most recent song you purchased: (alternately: If you recently purchased a whole album, the best track from that album:) Walking on Air by Soundpool.

Music to get you through a Friday afternoon: The Visit, by Throwing Muses.

Best song recently recommended to you by a friend: (Recently can be relative here) Shake Our Tree, by The Rosebuds (thanks, Hungry Ghost!).

Guitar Hero/Rock Band song you weren’t content to just have in the game: Cult of Personality by Living Colour.

Music to get it on to: Babe, You Turn Me On, by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds.

Song that makes you feel that spring is just around the corner: O the Deed by The Nethers.

Best use of iTunes to buy one song you’re ashamed to admit you like but at least you didn’t have to buy the whole album: The Goonies R Good Enough by Cyndi Lauper.

…In graph form! Via Joystiq, we have a handy-dandy piechart showing the breakdown of male v. female v. unidentified on the PlayStation Network. Hardcore!

Wow! Looks like the girl gamer is in fact a statistically quantifiable set of data, which appears to shock the commenters at Joystiq. I wonder how Sony can capitalize on this burgeoning number? I wonder how it was able to market a whole four to upwards of eight percent of its consoles to the sandwich- and baby-making class. It must be because they’ve featured women so prominently in their advertising: (more…)

In an article captioned Why search our souls when video games make such an easy scapegoat?, MSNBC finally gives mainstream voice to what gamers have been saying all along: Jack Thompson is a self-promoting blowhord climbing the media ladder on the corpses of those killed by maniacs, using an easy scapegoat to prevent us from asking hard questions about why the U.S. has such a problem with people going on killing sprees.

While the video game connection remains tenuous at best, what seems far more pertinent are initial reports that Kazmierczak previously had been placed in a psychiatric treatment center and had recently stopped taking antidepressant medication.

Not long ago on another forum, I had been engaging with other posters regarding the ESRB and how certain ratings are considered “appropriate” for kids whereas others are not. One poster pointed out that he would much rather have his kid play BioShock, which is 100% fantasy, rather than Burnout: Paradise, because he’ll be handing his kid the keys to the family car in a couple of years and he’d be much more worried about the kid emulating a racing game than a “murder simulator” (as Thompson calls them).

I felt that, while there was a very important point in that statement, I suspect that the ESRB cannot base its ratings system on simply “how likely are kids going to emulate this game” because it’s a silly premise. People who have trouble differentiating reality from fantasy are not going to be “triggered” by any one thing and will just as likely shoot up a school because someone else shot up a school and they’re seeing wall-to-wall coverage of it on television as they are to pretend that Call of Duty is a how-to manual. Games do have suggestive powers, and the Armed Forces have been banking on that when they create thinly-veiled recruitment shooters. But I seriously doubt that video games have the power to make a stable person mentally ill anymore than they could convince a pacifist to join the army, and I suspect that mental illness will “find and out” whether its through video games, television, or because the neighbor’s dog is talking to them.

What bothers me about Jack Thompson is that he never talks about the need to identify and properly treat mental illness, which tips his hand a bit. He’s about as committed to stopping school violence as the anti-choice groups are to saving babies.