Gotta love typos!  Check out this image from the Xbox Marketplace website:

Focus here:

What a deal.

It’ll probably be fixed by release on Wednesday, or maybe it’s just trying to be like the Australian version of Mass Effect on Games on Demand?  That was 6,000 points… this might be the next step for Microsoft price gouging!

So… I wrote a review for a little indie game called Beat Hazard a while back… and now I’m on the box!  Booyah.  Check it out here.  GL’s in the description too!  Suck it, world.

How many other guys (or websites or magazines, for that matter) get a plug right in the Xbox Live Marketplace game description?  I can’t think of any, honestly.  Go Gamer Limit.  I’ll be here all week.

I don’t have wireless internet.  The only way I can  download new PSP games is through my computer.  But have you ever tried using your PC to download PSP games?

It.  Sucks.

Using the Xbox Live Marketplace to queue up some downloads for the next time you log your system onto Xbox Live is easy.  True, it’s no iTunes, but the only REAL complaint I can find is that it’s SUCH a hassle to find the “Redeem Code” link.  It should be at the top of the screen under one of the drop-down menus; that’s just how it should be, especially with all the Twitter giveaways and such requiring fast log-ons and redemptions.

Using the PSN’s marketplace, however, is just… dumb.  There’s no “view all games” option.  There’s no way to easily sort out PSP, PS3, PS2, and PSN games.  There’s no quick download links.  Finally, the only games easily accessible on the service AT ALL are the games that just came out this week.  Where’s the backlog?  Come on, Sony.

After a lot of digging (why does this have to be found instead of just presented to us?!), I managed to find Media Go.

Media Go is a downloadable program that acts as an iTunes for the PlayStation Network.  FINALLY.  Something that doesn’t completely eat cow poop.  After finding a few new games I wanted (still no “view all games” button!), I downloaded them to my PC using a relatively easy “add funds” process.

Then discovered that I had to upgrade my PSP firmware.  Oh joy.

More digging, found out how to upgrade with my PC.  Lots of ridiculous folder creation on my memory stick.  Lucky my battery was charged, I might have had this delayed until tomorrow.

Finally (finally!) I managed to get everything moved over to my PSP.  Now I have Prinny, Jumping Flash, WTF: Work Time Fun, and the Half-Minute Hero demo.  Oh, and “Still Alive” for Rock Band: Unplugged. 

And all that, in only two hours!  Still can’t play games while I download files…

Now that the PSPgo is out, and people will actually use your download service, Sony, isn’t it time to make it a little more user friendly?  Just a little?  PSN’s been out for quite awhile.  Time for it to get with the times.

So, you’ve probably bought Trials HD on XBLA by now, right?  No?

Downloaded the free trial?  No?

Heard of it, at least?  Read my review?

You must have done that last one.

Anyway, the game gets ridiculously hard in the end stages, but crashing is always fun, especially if you’re just trying to entertain some friends with your motorcycle “skills.”

Pressing the Y button does a bailout, but did you know that it does even more?

Look at this video:

Totally useless if you’re actually trying to get a gold medal.

Totally awesome if you dig the terrifically realistic physics engine and want to inflict more pain on Motorcycle Man.  I just gave him that name.  What?  Wanna fight about it?

Now I have a reason to bailout!  Finally!  I was wondering why they even included it as an option…

There are a lot of “meh” games in the XBLA Indie Games section, but they aren’t all complete doodie.  Some of them have boring gameplay but awesome features, like the soundtrack.

Like this:

It’s from I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1, from the same guy that made The Dishwasher.  He did the game, and the music.  The entire thing, from the gameplay to the controls to the zombie content to the song, is a self-parody of the whole genre, with lyrics in the background to drive the point home.

It’s only a dollar.  It knows what it is and is unashamed.  It’s A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1

That is all.

No, it’s not the world’s weirdest game show.

I was just hanging out on Xbox Live, playing me some Trials HD, when Steve Kelso (another writer here at Gamer Limit who has a strange, almost fanatical obsession with my llama persona) pops on, too.

“Steve wants you to join an XBOX Live Party.”

Ok, why not?

I’ve been an Xbox Live Gold member for over a year and a half, and I had never talked to anyone online that I didn’t know personally in real life.  Not even once!  Yes, I know people make friends online, and fall in love, and get married in WoW, but not me.  Talking to people I can’t see just seems so… foreign.

But I chat with Steve and the rest of the GL-ers on the forums and in the IRC chat, so I figured, “Why not?”

And it was just awesome.

Where I live, I don’t have loads of friends that share my interests (video games).  I play Halo 3 with one person, and before I moved here, I had a Madden/NFL Street buddy.  But that’s been pretty much it for the past several years.

Even though (according to the Internet) half of the people in America are gamers, it’s hard to find people that are “real” gamers.  You know, the ones you can toss retro news tidbits back and forth with, or get excited about upcoming releases that are under a lot of “normal” people’s radars.  I want to use weird words like Memory Stick Pro Duo, UMD, Blu-Ray, E3, PSN, and XBLA without having to stop and explain what they mean every five seconds.  It’s nice to not be talked down to because I would generally rather play video games then football (although, on a beautiful day like today, football may be exactly what the doctor ordered).

Still.  Chatting with like-minded gamer types like Kelso made me realize just how much I miss my geek friends.  He even saw that I was playing Trials HD so he downloaded the demo too so we could compare notes.  His first thought was the same as mine, “It’s just an Excitebike clone!”  Gamers with experience have the same thoughts!  Spooky.

Anyway, it was a blasty blast chatting about the past, the present, and the future of games with Kelso.  He was even a genuinely nice and interesting guy (believe it or not!) and was pretty surprised that I had a PSP, let alone a launch day one.  It’s fun surprising new friends with weird quirks like being a PSP owner.  Sad that that is a quirk, especially for Sony, who thinks they actually have a foothold in the handheld marketplace.  But I digress…

If anyone else wants to wax nerdosophical with me on XBL, my gamer tag is SeeNick Route.  We can play some hardcore games like Uno.

The video game industry thrives on rumors.

The video game journalism industry lives on pre-judgments.

Even the hint of a new IP/major sequel causes chaos amongst gamers and journalists.  “Metal Gear Rising?! Project Natal?!  Half-Life 2: Episode 3?!  Holy crap on a cracker!  Gotta write about this in my blog!”

The hype machine keeps the wheels of the industry turning even during the traditionally slow summer months.  Slow trickles of screenshots cause nerdgasms across the world.  A ten-second Modern Warfare 2 trailer inspires pages upon pages of analysis.  One misspelled word on a David Jaffe Tweet causes panic.

When TMNT: Turtles in Time was first hinted as an XBLA remake, people with fond memories of the game and the franchise pooped their pants with excitement.  “Oh, it’ll be 3D?  Online multiplayer?  More modes?!  COWABUNGA!”  Then it came out to this.  What happened?

We knew that the whole game was only a half-hour long.  We knew it was just a remake with “enhanced” (read: lifeless) graphics.  We hoped that the online multiplayer options would increase our enjoyment of this sitcom-length, $10 fun time.  But no.

Perhaps we expected too much?  When Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was re-released on Live Arcade (with no graphical enhancements!), it was still praised as a innovator of the genre, although gameplay quirks such as not being able to change direction mid-air painfully revealed just how far adventure games had come.  TMNT: TiT (worst acronym EVAR!) is a product of an older generation.  The gameplay is old, and there is little reason to play it over and over except for the achievements.

But come on.  There  was no reason to play the original Turtles in Timeon SNES over and over and over, but we did anyway.  There weren’t even achievements to reach for.  There was no survival mode.  There was no four-player co-op.  We just had a 20 minute game, and we were happy.

I found the original cartridge for sale a few months ago – only $19.99 at a pawn shop, what a steal!  Yet, when I pay 800 Microsfot points ($10) for the re-make, it almost feels too expensive.  Maybe my expectations have changed.  Maybe I want a remake to be more than just a remake.  Maybe remakes, in general, are holding the entire industry back.  Maybe they glorify an age when a game could be 20 minutes long and still feel like $50 worth.

By focusing on our past so much, are we ignoring the future?  Is every Final Fantasy VII remake keeping Final Fantasy XIV from being even better than it could be?  Than it should be?  Yes, remakes make money.  Nostalgia sells.  But at what cost?

At what cost?

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!

On Monday nights, the 1 Vs. 100 Beta has a “video game trivia” half-hour at 10:00 p.m. my time.  As soon as I remembered this, I literally leaped off my computer onto my 360, about 12 minutes too late.  I came into the game at Question 14 and was immediately seated with three other nerds – I mean players.  They had about 30,000 points each and I had to start with zero.

By Question 37, the end of the game, I have 90,000 points and the next closest benchmate has 80,000.  I also had the opportunity to increase my all-time longest correct answer streak to 17, up from my previous best of 12.  I’m such a video game geek, it’s ridiculous.

I’m sure the people I was competing with don’t spend their free time cruising video game news sites, or writing video game blogs… for all I know, they don’t even play video games besides 1 Vs. 100.  But this was my event.  Michael Phelps has swimming; The Game Llama has video game trivia.  If there was a Scene It! for video games, I would buy two copies and go out of my way to make sure I get every single achievement point.

The funny part is, I knew things about games I haven’t even played just because I spend so much time in this digital world we’ve created.  I haven’t played Prototype or Infamous or 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, but I knew enough about them from perusing game magazines and websites to keep my multiplier streak going.  It’s interesting how much knowledge we absorb when we don’t even realize we’re interested.

Blogging about games everyday, I sometimes feel at a loss for topics.  Sure, there’s new news every day, but I don’t – I can’t – care about ALL of it.  But I follow over a dozen different game news sites, and many of them just repeat each other with new phraseology.  I subscribe to a few game magazines (I wish I could afford you too, Retro Gamer!), and I try to keep up with this fast-paced, blink-and-you’ll-miss-something-important way of life I have chosen for myself.  I subconsciously suck every little juicy tidbit of new game info out of the vacuum of the Internet and store it in the back of my mind in a dusty cardboard box, ready to be opened whenever the next trivia question pops up on the screen.  Everyone needs to be an expert at something.  This is what I’ve got.

So, as we all know, the new Battlefield 1943 on XBLA is pretty cool.  But for $15, it only “ships” with three maps.   The fourth and last map, Coral Sea, will be unlocked once the gaming community kills each other 43 million times.  That’s pretty cool.  Instead of sending out a complete game or charging for DLC, EA is forcing gamers to work for it.  Props to EA for bringing back the good old days of unlockable content.  43 million kills sounds like a lot, but the game was so popular that players earned about 5 million on the first day alone.  It’s not going to take that long after all.

I hope EA doesn’t stop there.  I hope that other games start to follow suit.  Instead of charging $10 for three more maps (Bungie), maybe distribute them for free to the people who helped get a billion matches played on your game?  But there’s no money in that.  But you gotta wonder: if there wasn’t a fourth map to be unlocked, could Battlefield 1943 have been a $10 title instead of $15, ensuring that even more people buy it?  They could have included it later with another map or two in a “Classic map pack” of even more re-imagined maps from the original 1942.

Once the 43 million kills are achieved and the fourth map is played to death, will this game still be popular?  Or will people go back to their Halo 3 and Call of Duty?  Are more maps coming?  It’s the “in” game right now, but will it have the staying power of its big-budget brethren?  Here’s hoping.  Without players, there’s not much reason to play a multiplayer-only game… (Shadowrun, anyone?)