So I just stumbled upon this website: TweetMyGaming.com.  It keeps a constant, up-to-date feed of every video game mentioned ANYWHERE on Twitter.  And a lot of people on Twitter talk about a lot of games.

The site started on June 1, 2009, and they’re already at over 1.2 million tweets as of this writing.  There’s a feed playing on the bottom of the screen letting you know what people you’ve never heard of are saying about your favorite (and not-so-favorite) video games, and on the right side are charts tracking the most-tweeted games today, within the last week/month, or most tweeted of all time.  The Sims 3 is the all-time number one right now… but WoW is keeping up the momentum and will probably reach #1 eventually.

Just a neat find to share.  It’s interesting to see all the new technologies collaborating together, creating a whole heap of new ideas, websites, and problems… I noticed on the feed that many games aren’t getting their whole titles accepted.  Sometimes Mass Effect 2 is just credited as Mass Effect, or The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is just seen as a tweet about The Legend of Zelda.  It does mention at the top of the screen that they are “constantly improving.”  Maybe this is one of the areas?  And what about spelling errors?

After finding this site, if I was a game, I’d tweet myself just to move up the rankings.  Hope nobody’s following the feed!

I tested it out, and there seems to be about a 2 minute turnaround from Twitter to Tweet My Gaming.  Not too shabby, but I want instant gratification, and I want it now!

A few months back, I was in a gas station in the beautiful-yet-expensive Door County, Wisconsin.  It was a simple stop for gas and ice cream treats.  After bringing my dairy goodness to the counter, the lady rang it up and the register made a noise that sounded just like the “bling!” you get when Sonic the Hedgehog picks up a ring on the good ol’ Sega Genesis.  I mentioned it to the cashier, and she said that people tell her that all the time, although she had never played the game herself.

This incident led me to thinking about other sounds in games that aren’t often reproduced in real life.  If Mario’s “coin-get” sound effect played every time I hit a key on my keyboard, I’d be in heaven.  Or, if the 360 achievement “Ba-DOOP!” sounded out whenever I received a txt message on my phone, all the geeks around me would probably cheer for me and ask me where I found it.

Then, for some strange reason, I thought, “What if I was deaf?”

I wouldn’t have memories of Sonic’s rings, or Mario’s coins, or even the aural accompaniment of “achieving” something.  I wouldn’t even want to play games like Assassin’s Creed, which were rushed out the door sans subtitles due to budget and time constraints.  The latest Rock Band and Guitar Hero iterations would be constant reminders that I’m missing out on entire genres just because I have a silent problem.  News of Bionic Commando: Rearmed’s soundtrack infiltrating iTunes would only make me curious as to its quality; I would wonder if it was really interesting enough to be distributed separately.

So I did some research.  There are a LOT of organizations and websites specifically for gamers with disabilities.  DeafGamers.com, Games[CC], Action for Blind People, AudioGames.net… although there seems a lot more attention focused on the blind/partially-blind than on the hard-of-hearing.  However, sites like DeafGamers actually rate current releases for playability by the worldwide hearing-impaired community, a nice feature.

That’s not to say that there isn’t support for the hearing-impaired, however; iD software, in response to petitions and internet support, made a Doom 3 close-captioned patch available for free download so that a greater number of people can enjoy their game than ever before.  Now, that’s not just good for sales.  It’s also good for iD’s public relations and karma.

Hopefully, more developers will follow suit in the future and help open up everybody’s favorite hobby to the estimated 51 million impaired Americans, not to mention those abroad.

Now, there is plenty, plenty more that can be said on this subject, but this is just my low-research, stream-of-consciousness blog.  If there is any interest or positive feedback, however, I’d love to delve deeper into this enormous video game subculture for you, my loyal readers, and write up a feature article for the main Gamer Limit page.  Otherwise, comments are appreciated below, as always.

Viewtiful Joe sold a few hundred thousand copies.  In the grand scheme of things, that’s really not much.  For how it was marketed, and who it was marketed towards, that’s really quite impressive.

Viewtiful Joe was something that hadn’t been attempted before: a brutally difficult, 2D action game with a unique art style.  OK, so that had been tried before.  But this was different.  Joe was a GameCube exclusive.  Ah, the good old days, when Nintendo occasionally had the random game to appeal to its hardcore fans that had been with them from the beginning…  Alright, enough reminiscing.

Joe was a hardcore game, through and through.  Even if you did manage to stumble through it (dying hundreds upon hundreds of times in the process, no doubt), then you unlocked an even harder gameplay mode, ensuring that you would not see the sun again for a long, long time.

Capcom knew this.  This was a game for seriously hardcore gamers.  They catered their advertising as such.

There was not much TV advertising for the game.  It wasn’t Wii Fit.  It was not a game to be squeezed into a break in Gilmore Girls.  Video game magazines, however, ate it up.  They praised the art.  They praised the colors.  They praised the controls.  They praised the style.  Joe, more than any other game in recent memory, oozed style.  And it knew it.

The reviews were nearly unamimous: VJ was great.  Still, it was not a game for everyone.  Sheesh, I mean, look at the box:

It’s way over-the-top Japanese, and Joe looks like he *might* be flipping us off.  And “Henshin-a-go-go?”  Those aren’t even words!

Capcom, however, knew that people would want to play it.  And those people would be the kind of people that read video game magazines.

Viewtiful Joe hit the cover of many different publications (the Play and Nintendo Power covers comes to mind first), and editors/journalists literally gushed over the raw appeal of this game to their inner nerdy child.  Of course, gamers listened.

Viewtiful Joe is the first instance I can recall of being actually persuaded to buy a game just based on what I saw in a magazine.  If I had stumbled upon the game in Target without ever reading about it, I’d probably say, “Meh.”  However, because numerous magazines did a better advertising campaign than 100 commercials would have, I bought it on day one for the full price of $39.99.  The first, and only, GameCube game to create that kind of passion in me.  I played it, and yes, it was hard.  But it was also oh-so-beautiful, and I couldn’t put it down.

Capcom didn’t sell this game to me.  Video game journalists sold this game to me.  Sure, sometimes they’ll let you down.  But not this time.

The big question is: when your game is this good, why is it still so hard to sell?

A long time ago, I got enough Club Nintendo points to get this.  It now rests nicely on my shelf, collecting dust like other things that are just too pretty to play with.  However, the game was 800 points.  And Nintendo promised a special surprise to anyone that got more than 300 (Gold statues) or 600 (Platinum status) by June 30, 2009.  Well, it’s time to pay up, Nintendo.

And wouldn’t you know it, I got this is my inbox a little while back:

That calendar would be a sweet year-long reminder that I spent way too much money on Wii and DS games this year, but I’m too good for it, apparently.  Which leaves me with a downloadable Punch-Out!! Lite, or a sweet Nintendo hat which I will be forced to wear in my avatar pictures from now on.  Guess which one I picked?

It’ll be here in about September.  Don’t rush, Nintendo.  Good things come to those who wait.

Just kidding.  WHERE’S MY HAT?!  I got some “plumbing” movies to make!

Apparently, black-and-white ship outlines blowing up black-and-white asteroid outlines is a good basis for a major motion-picture blockbuster:

Asteroids.

The producer, Lornezo di Bonaventura (G.I. Joe, Transformers) apparently spilled all sorts of beans about this new project.

He used illuminating, hope-building phrases such as, “there’s going to be this big thing in space,” and, “two brothers… have to go through a seminal experience to figure out their relationship, against this huge backdrop.”  You know.  The backdrop of space.

There’s no way this movie can turn out badly.  I hope it has Johnny Depp in it!

Maybe it could look like this?

Also, this image is from a guy named Tanaka13, and you can find his cool stuff here.  Don’t say I never cited my sources, world!  The movie guys should get this guy to make the posters.  Then, even if the movie totally blows monkey chunks, at least the poster will get people to see it once.

Last, LOL-worthy point: a guy who calls himself superkong05 suggested on IGN: “Just call it ROIDS.”

What more can I say after that?

I haven’t played a “real” video game in weeks.  I don’t have the time.  I don’t have the motivation.  Changing discs is hard and takes energy of movement.

I did play Far Cry 2 for like… an hour.  But that game is just so big!

I play a lot of Arcade titles: Uno, Yahtzee, N+, 1 Vs. 100.  Simple, fast, accessible.  Instant gratification.  Don’t even have to get up off my butt and change the game in the disc tray.  It’s unhealthy, especially now that all three consoles have the remote power button.

I remember back in the original PlayStation days, people were clamoring for that in their next system:

“Give us a power button on our controllers!  We don’t want to have to get up!  Can you make a machine that changes games for us too?”

And now we have it, in the form of XBLA.  It’s on our hard drives.  It’s on our TV’s.  We no longer have to move any muscles more than our fingers and thumbs (unless we’re playing Wii Sports Resort, but that still won’t have online).  We are becoming sedentary, blobular beings, like the humans of the future in Wall-E.

But I digress.

I want to play Fallout 3.  I love Fallout 3.  But the game is so sprawling, it feels like a commitment.  I just want to play for a few minutes here, a few minutes there.  If I did that in Fallout, I’d never get anywhere.  But I can play an entire game of Uno in 20 minutes, start to finish.  Micro-games make me feel like I’m getting a lot done.

But, at the same time, they’re so ultimately unfulfilling!  Gah!

With ever-improving technology, games are able to tell stories in increasingly innovative and interesting ways.   However, unlike movies, the subject matter in games has remained largely unchanged throughout history: save the princess, rebel against the evil totalitarian government/corporation, shoot the zombies just for being different.

Games always have happy endings (or at least sequel sneak-peeks).  Movies do not always have happy endings.  They might be Requiem for a Dream or Braveheart or Titanic and have downer endings with a message that’s burned into your brain when you leave the theater.  Why?

“Games,” by definition, are fun.  Even when they tell a story, even when they are artistic, their purpose  is still to entertain.  Yes, there are arguments to be made for edutainment games, but the reason they teach your children to read so well is because the kid doesn’t feel like he’s learning; he feels like he’s playing.

The last time a game tried to have a message was the Six Days in Fallujah debacle.  A game based on a war that is still going on is not “fun,” Konami decided, despite the fact that the developers were going to incredible lengths to make sure that it would respect the memories of the fallen soldiers and be a touching tribute to the men and women still serving in the Armed Forces.  Before that, what was there?  Bioshock?  Sure, it had vestiges of Rand-ian philosophy and a unique art deco style, but what was the message?  That objectivism is fundamentally flawed as a personal philosophy?

Beating Bioshock doesn’t leave you with a sense of loss; it gives you a sense of achievement and empowerment.  Watching the end of Requiem for a Dream or The Last Kiss makes you feel like you may never be hopeful or joyous again.  Why are games denied certain kinds of endings while anything is fair game in films?  I understand that people want to feel good about completing a game, but why can’t games run the whole gamut of human emotion?  If they want to be taken seriously as an art form, they need to have a message.  Otherwise, they’ll never be anything more than just games.  And they’ll be fun, but they won’t change the world.

Just wanted to let the world know that I published my first actual Gamer Limit story at 1:33 p.m. today.  And then Joystiq posted the same story at 1:50 p.m.

In Internet time, that’s like 50 years’ difference.

And yes, we both got our story from the same source, and we even both used the same video.  But you know how whenever there’s a new news post on Yahoo! or CNN or something, and the first comment is always, always “FIRST!”  Well, that’s me this time.

Just sayin’.  Go me.

So, now that I’m a big-shot Gamer Limit writer, I figured I should stay up to date on all the news of the gaming world.

Enter Twitter.

I started up a Twitter account more to follow game industry devs than to Twit myself, but I can already see myself becoming strangely addicted to it, especially now that I got my phone to work with it too.  While I’m delivering pizzas I’m sure I’ll be sending little love notes to the world at the same time.  Don’t worry, they’ll be game-related love notes.  Follow me if you’d like here.  Within seconds of starting my account, I already had three followers.  And two of them weren’t even spamming slutty girls trying to get me to look at their naked pictures!  Score!

And he said, “Thou shalt henceforth go by thine own namesake!”  I don’t know why he talked like that.  He may have just been a cosplayer.

But anyway, I’m not The Game Llama anymore… now I’m a Gamer Limit contributor!  And as such, I must ditch the farm animal avatar (I call it a farmatar) and reveal my true self to the world.  Look out!  Like every Dragonball Z villain in history, these first few episodes were just an introduction.  I was only using 10% of my full power.  Gonna crank it up to about 50% now.

My name is Nick Simberg, and I’m an alcoholic the newest Gamer Limit writer.  Look for me to bring the same witty insights you find on my blog to the bigger main stage – you know, the one in the center of the homepage, and not smushed over into the corner.  I’ll keep blogging, but it will in all honesty probably not be as frequently.  But I’ll do my best.  I know I have an incredible, screaming fanbase that just can’t get enough of me, and I’ll try to to disappoint.

Ba-DOOP!  Achievement unlocked – Get a position at a video game website/magazine.  40 gamerscore.  Ka-ching.

Also, Nick gained a level!  Level 3 video game writer.  +3 dexterity, +1 intelligence, -2 strength.  Yeah, yeah, there’s not many muscles you can work while sitting at a computer.  Maybe +5 bed sores and +16 carpal tunnel syndrome.  Whatever.  This is gonna be huge.