Chris

It's called GameCrazy. It's in San Diego. There are other ones all over the place, though. I think the closest one to Berkeley is in Oakland.

I'm not sure, Kingz, if your indie stuff was in response to part of Jake's post or to my post, but either way I guess my response would be the same: again, don't confuse a small part of the indie scene with the general reason behind the existence of indie stuff. Honestly, doing that (and this could go for Jake or Kingz) is just as unfair and judgmental as you are accusing indie scenesters of being.

What are you talking about?? How are you supposed to distill well-honed character development, settings as diverse as they are in this game (and what game has levels this diverse in design terms?), and this brand of off-beat humor into an easy-to-describe pitch? The stuff that makes this game appeal to people is totally different than the stuff that makes something like Jak and Daxter appeal to people. I've tried explaining Psychonauts to people who have never heard of it before, and it's fucking hard. I work at a games store, so believe me, I get plenty of practice trying. I leave the game on our interactive displays to try and get people to notice it, but they usually just say "that looks weird" or something and then go fucking play Medal of Honor: There Are a Fucking Trillion of These Games, which we are required to display permanently on one of our consoles in the store. I am not giving the public too much credit. I personally see what the public buys, and I take their money and give them the games they want, and the games they want are fucking shit. They buy every fucking movie-based game that is released, they buy every fucking Medal of Honor game, they buy every fucking game released for the PSP, regardless of how unplayable they are and how badly they get panned, they buy the same old shit. You complain about Psychonauts being derivative, and about us giving the public too much credit?! That's just fucking classic. If you even knew how badly people want carbon-copy derivative shit, there's no way you could keep a straight face while saying that. I know how badly people want it, because I spend at least eight hours a day giving it to them as a requirement of my job. How would you explain Psychonauts concisely and actually retain the spirit of the game, anyway? You can't just say "It's like a late-90s [by the way, late-90s? Where'd you get that from? This is like the platformers of this generation, like Jak and Ratchet etc. much more than like Mario 64] platformer with an interesting base concept." That's like calling Half-Life "Like an early-90s first person shooter with an interesting base concept." The funny thing is that neither of those games even DO have an interesting base concept, at least to me. Well I guess Psychonauts sort of does, in that you're a pre-teen at a psychic summer camp, but I hardly find that the really appealing part of the game. The thing that makes both games so good is the subtlety and craftsmanship of the games as they unfold. That's what sets them apart from other games in their genre, and any number of reviews of EITHER game will quite easily state the same. Even PlayStation magazines, whose audiences are deluged with quality platformers, singled Psychonauts out as a fresh and original take on the genre. And your point about "Doom 3 getting better reviews" is ludicrous. I don't even know what you're trying to imply there. That any old game gets great reviews? If that's what you're saying, you can be easily disproved by simply going to any site that compounds review scores and looking at the mediocre averages most games get. If you're saying that any game that's sufficiently hyped up and anticipated gets great reviews, well, hardly fucking anybody knows about Psychonauts so I guess that's not helping it. In conclusion, I guess the only way you could have arrived at your thoughts about Psychonauts and the public is to not actually know anything about the public.

Nice post, Jake. A lot of interesting points that I'll hopefully come back and actually respond to. I really don't think the "indie scene" bit was thought through, though. You seem far more willing to overlook the retarded bits of mainstream pop culture than you do the retarded bits of indie culture, and they both have their fair share of completely retarded bits. I mean I guess that's fine; everyone is going to have their biases, but I think you're confusing the hardcore indie scenesters with indie culture as a whole. You might argue that those things are inseparable, but if you're really unwilling to distinguish a scene or culture from its most retarded and hardcore constituents, then honestly pop culture would be the most worthless and aggravating thing of all time.

First post!

PAPER FUCKING MARIO 2. That game was amazing, good lord.

:shifty:

I wasn't

Where did you get the number 12%?

It is immediately disqualified from QOTM consideration for egregious apostrophe misuse.

Nintendogs is great!

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

What's so amazing about it? It only even exists so that women can spit some screaming little hungry bastard out from between her legs. I mean I guess you're just trying to be deliberately contrary or something, but I don't see how someone couldn't at least understand why people would find the creation of life to be something vaguely impressive...

Showing its age??

The other day, some jackass kids came into our store and saw our display of N64 games (we also carry NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Gear, GameBoy, etc.) and said "Whoa, they still carry these old-fashioned games! Ha, ha! Those are so old!" and the other kid goes "Yeah, those are probably like from before when we were born! Ha ha ha!" and they had this really snide and horrible tone and I wanted to punch them in the faces.

There's far worse on TV

Speaking of Sands of Time and Warrior Within, a couple came in and traded both games in. I asked them what they thought of the games and they said they enjoyed both of them. When I asked which they preferred, the woman said "Oh the second one, definitely" and the man said "Yeah, we liked the cutting off heads."

YOU MUST HAVE BEEN PLAYING VIDEO GAMES

The other day at work (a retailer called GameCrazy), two separate people came in and asked for Psychonauts strategy guides (of course, we didn't have any) since they were stuck. On the same day. It was amazing. That was literally the only time I've ever heard a customer ask about Psychonauts in any way. I've certainly never managed to sell a copy, that's for sure. Anyway, I helped them both out myself and one came back the next day to thank me. It made me feel warm and fuzzy.

I have Canvas Curse, and it's great. My previous post was about Meteos, though, if that wasn't clear.

Apparently people can break a million points by using Dawndus in Deluge mode. This seems insane to me. I can't break about 190,000, and by the time I do that everything is moving way too fast already.

A skirt? More like a full-on fancy hoop dress. Oh man that's hilarious.

I've moved this to the "Post Your Reviews" forum. And yeah, Meteos is great. Whenever anyone posts that enthusiastically about anything that isn't Psychonauts, our forum members seem to cry "spam!"

I really like that whenever GameSpot posts a news item about any kind of award or award show, they use the "YOU'RE WINNER!" screenshot for the post thumbnail.

Quite possibly the only other person I know who doesn't love Chappelle's Show.