Squid of Man

Hyperactive poster The Brett, an EB employee, has ventured bravely into the companies vast, omnipotent database and come out not only unscathed, but clutching a torn, ragged parchment, upon which was hastily scribbled the Australian pricing for the Wiimote.

The EB system is notorious for "placeholder" pricing, but these prices are too exact, and too close to home, to not be the real deal:

- The basic Wiimote will set you back $69.95
- The nunchuk attachment is $29.95
- The classic shell is another $29.95
- A bundle, which features a standard Wiimote and a copy of Wii Play, will cost $79.95.

Those prices are...well, a bit bloody steep. Considering a ton of games will need both Wiimote AND nunchuck, that's $100. Which is fucking expensive when you consider this isn't the fancy-dan version of a standard controller like the Wavebird or wireless 360 pad: you HAVE to buy this, it's the only option.

And if you can't find your old Gamecube pads, tacking on the Classic Controller means you're throwing down $130. Which is...well, it's a lot of money for a controller.

I'm not angry, Nintendo. I'm just disappointed.

Say what you will about Microsoft and their plans for interstellar domination (in particular, J Allard’s vision of a utopian, agrarian community of the stars), they’re starting to get the hang of this video game lark.

Case in point: X06 has been surprisingly awesome.

It’s been so long since we had such a deluge of genuine, real product to get excited about I’d nearly forgotten the feeling. That giddy, child-like rush of seeing actual games that are actually running, on a machine that is available at retail, and that will be released in the foreseeable future.

After Nintendo’s prick-teasing and Sony’s blatant lies, feasting on a smorgasbord of real produce is a breath of fresh air.

The only dampener is that Microsoft have fucked us over again. The HD-DVD drive is launching in Japan, Europe and the US in November, while we have to wait until 2007. Ah well.

I know, I know, all this PS3-bashing is getting a bit old. Passe, even. There's only so many things that could go wrong with it before we all assume a semi-permanent state of apathy, and just ignore the thing until either a Team Ico game surfaces, or it doesn't cost me a fortnights pay.

But sometimes...well, sometimes the urge to give them one last kick is just too strong to resist. Wired scored an interview with Sony's "unholy trinity": Ken Kutaragi, US president Kaz Hirai, and worldwide studios head Phil Harrison, and boy did it entertain. If by entertain, of course, you mean reveal itself to be riddled to the core with lies upon untold layers of lies.

Wired: Why won't the US price of PS3 be lowered along with the Japanese price?
Phil Harrison: We started by calculating the price for the US and European territories by looking at what consumers considered the 'magic price points'. In these territories, the prices we announced were very well accepted.

"Very well accepted"? I could choke myself to death on hyperbole, and still not come close to denting that irrefutable piece of steaming frog shit. To use my second wartime analogy of the week, that's tantamount to saying the holocaust was "very well accepted" within the Jewish community.

Kaz Hirai continues the madness when he takes the mic:

Wired: Will the PS3 include component video cables in the box?
Kaz Hirai: I'm not sure, but I think the answer might be "no."

You're "not sure"? Kaz, Kaz, Kaz...you're the US President of Sony Computer Entertainment. You have a rather important piece of hardware launching in under two months. You know exactly what's going in those boxes. And you know it won't be component cables.

$1000 for a PS3, the flagship for Blu-Ray and 1080p gaming, and it looks like it's shipping with composite cables. Jesus Christ.

From an interview with Gamedaily.biz. And no, it's not a joke :

"[Nintendo and their DS] are appealing to the same audience that Game Boy has always appealed to. And if you look at the adoption rate of the DS over the first 17 months, not only does it trail the PSP but it also trails their other platforms ... They're potentially losing some of their core audience and they're not really expanding beyond that, and we think we're expanding into a completely new audience as we did with PlayStation ... we'll dip down to the younger consumer eventually, and we'll ultimately appeal to that vastly Earth wide audience we carved out with the original PlayStation."

Just...wow. Jack, you seem like a nice guy. Maybe you've got a wife. Maybe a couple of kids, a nice dog, a nice house. Maybe you're just spruiking the company line to put food on the table each night, or pay for your wife's botox regime.

Then again...maybe you're just a fucking liar. Sony have said some pretty outrageous stuff in the past twelve months, but that pile of horse shit is tantamount to saying it was Germany who took line honours in 1945.

Any of you watch the Today Show? No? Didn't think so.

So you probably missed this cracker of a story this morning. With the release of Bully drawing a little nearer, it looks like it's been unable to escape the same kind of controversy the game has faced overseas.

On this morning's show, an illustrious panel including a wealthy private school boy (ie toffee-sucking cunt) and a blathering old school counsellor waxed on about how the game should be banned.

It's not their opinions that are the point here. They're welcome to them: I admit, while the game does not focus on bullying, there is violence in the game, and you do whack the shit out of schoolkids.

What's worrying is that Channel 9 saw the need to run a poll asking, "should violent video games be banned". Not, "should THIS game be banned", but all violent games. And the results were...well, predictable.

But that was not the end of their idiocy. No, they then almost straight away cut to a story about a video game being released by the Navy as part of a recruitment drive! And they loved it! Because it was by the Navy! It's not cool to depict schoolyard violence, but it's OK to sign people up to cruise around blasting Indonesian fishermen! They're only Asians, after all!

I'm not going to go into some tirade about the maturity of the medium, the vilification of gaming or even the knee-jerk conservatism of Channel 9 producers and its sizeable audience. There are plenty of other people who have already written about those topics to death, and they do a much better job of it than I can.

I just think that it's reflection on the awareness and ignorance of the Australian public is really, really sad.

...right then. Apparantly there's a Gameshark code that whacks an Arwing into the Kokiri Forest. Add this is it.

Good stuff. Though it's hardly canonical....

Dead Rising is some good shit. Zombies, crying women, zombies and chainsaws sure do make a good game.

A good game, yes. Maybe even an excellent one. And yet it is weighed down by niggling imperfections. Flaws, if you will. Let us weigh up both the pros and their diabolical counterparts, the cons, in an effort to determine a winner.

Pros: 55,000 zombies. Chainsaws. Crying women. Battle axes. Lawnmowers. Shotguns. Fat old lady zombies. Sledgehammers. Erotic photographs.

Cons: Otis. Otis' transmitter. Boss battles. Kick-ass weapons that disappear in your hands. Friendly "AI". Scarcity of save points. The inability to both operate a radio and jump at the same time. Otis' mama.

And....it appears the pros have it on points. And rightly so - that fucking transmitter might send you insane, as will anyone you attempt to rescue (ie be unable to help and thus condemn to a bloody, awful death), but come on. There are 55,000 zombies and a mall's worth of weapons with which to dispose of them. Just five minutes with the lawnmower makes this thing worth whatever price it is you paid for it.

It's a Mario comics bonanza.

I don't speak a word of Japanese, so I have no idea what the fuck is going on here, but the idea of Nausicaa keeping a forbidden garden of world-threatening Mushroom Kingdoom flora is...well...alluring.

Wow. I've seen some cool Nintnedo-related stuff over the years, but a Japanese comic detailing the "real" story of Mario & Luigi just takes the cake. Allow me to both translate and provide a brief plot synopsis:

Here we see a young Mario, understandably upset that some shifty Italian travelling salesman is getting all the pussy, and all he's left with are lonely, tear-soaked evenings receiving cheeky blowjobs from Yoshi. Over a strangely sauceless plate of spaghetti, Mario swears that one day, he too shall savour the sweet, sweaty delights of Italian cunt.

Nine years later, and....things aren't going too well. Mario has joined a gay dance troupe along with his brother, Luigi, and perform daily for peanuts, drink tokens and soiled womens underwear. Things start looking up, however, when Arsenio Hall, spurred on by the ravings of an ageing Japanese man (and Mario's enormous erect cock), signs the super siblings to a movie deal.

Their first movie is a big hit, and the brothers dreams are coming true. Pussy, cocaine, limousines, the works. It also appears Mario is not only popular with the ladies, but also small zombie children and a boy with an unnerving fascination with the plumbers "package". Incidentally, Giuseppe Buffon, Mario's long-time driver and confidante, would go on to beat the manslaughter charges stemming from the hit-and-run deaths of the two boys in front of the car.

These days, the brothers are living the good life. Mario is married to Princess Peach and has a human toilet, in which he shits frequently, Bob Hoskins plays to rave reviews as Bowser, and Luigi fucks the Princess on the sly (or whenever a coke binge ends with her unconscious, and unresponsive, on the floor). An empire is built, and a boyhood pledge is fulfilled. Good. Times.

[Thanks patrickmacias]

You all know the date, price, package, etc.

It's...well, it's great that the Wii is on its way. It's no longer a distant blip on the radar, it's something that exists, it will be out soon and we will actually be playing it.

That is the good news.

The bad news is that...well, for Australia especially, it's a bit fucking cheeky asking us to pay $400 for the thing, bundled game or not. And it's even cheekier to ask us to fork out $80 for a "complete" controller, especially when you're going to want four of them.

Don't get me wrong, it's great that it's significantly cheaper than the 360, and you can get 2.5 of them for the price of a PS3. But we all know what's under the hood of this thing, Nintendo, and an angrier Gamecube with a magic wand is not sufficient cause to charge us $400.

Which would be a poignant statement for me to make, were I not already planning my camping spot for the midnight launch. Just know that I will be lining up...well, no, I won't be even the slightest bit angry.

Which is why they're charging $400 for it. Bravo, Nintendo. Well played.

A day that began innocently, with expectations running high in anticipation of tangible Wii launch details (at least for the Japanese market), sank into farce, sank lower into "high" farce, emerged comedic and ultimately ended with some actual news.

10:00am: If you were anywhere near the Penny Arcade Forums this morning, it was a sight to behold. Sixty pages came and went before the conference even started...and then it didn't start at all, because the entire western world couldn't get their time zone differences right.

2:30pm: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (awesome name) apparantly breaks a news embargo and posts US launch information. November 19, USD$250, Wii Sports included.

3:30pm: Five and a half hours later, the conference actually begins. For all the millions of Nintendo fan sites in existence, none of them can speak Japanese, so only a trickle of info from the Japanese Wii conference spills out thanks to Joystiq. Included are Virtual Console prices (approx AUD $6.50 for NES games, $10.50 for SNES and $13 for N64), console price (approx AUD$285) and Japanese launch date (December 2).

My personal highlights for the day were the entire Penny Arcade forums watching a "live feed" of a Japanese press event from June, the utterly unsubstantiated rumours of Twilight Princess being delayed until 2007 and the shockingly greedy "OMFG ITS EXPENSIVVZZ" outcry.

I am intrigued by the apparant discrepancy between the Japanese and American launch date. No doubt the American conference tonight will shed more light on this, but for now...I am intrigued.

It's TODAY, bitches! From 9:00am, you can swing by your favourite flavour of retailer and pick up Dead Rising. Yes, it's a few weeks later than the US, and yes, there's no snazzy "collectors edition", but come on. You've played the demo. You know you don't need that shit. You know all you need is Frank West, some every-day items fashioned into weapons and an unenending horde of the undead with which to unleash them on.

Happy Z-Day everyone.

David McLean, Regional Director for Xbox Australia, went on record yesterday to "officially" kick Sony while they're down.

“(The PS3 delay) doesn’t surprise me. And it further wouldn’t surprise me if this product wasn’t seen in March next year either,” he told Gamespot in an interview yesterday.

He then proceeds to [insert corporate boasting here], and comes across looking like a right smug little cunt.

I can't help but wonder what the games industry would be like if it were run by actual adults instead of testosterone-fuelled, dick-comparing fucknuts. If the heads of Ford and GM, or Boeing and Airbus, carried on like this there'd be an outcry.

David: pull your head in. We all know the 360 has a free ride in Australia this Christmas, you don't need to go mouthing off to emphasise the fact.

Unless you're a liar, Neon Genesis made no fucking sense whatsoever. All that business with the chair in space and every second kid in the school becoming pilots? Completely lost on me.

Luckily, it had awesome, giant robots piloted by weird young kids, so I still loved it. I now stand to love it a whole lot more.

Hideaki Anno, who wrote the TV series, and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and Ikuto Yamashita, the design team, are on board for four feature-length movies that will re-tell the Evangelion story from a "more comprehensible" point of view.

Apparantly, these remakes will "feature all new animation and will eschew some of the more esoteric techniques used in the original series such as the interspersing and scattering of difficult words and text phrases in the animation".

Which is good news for everyone. Especially those of us who like seeing giant robots punch the shit out things. The first of the four films will hit Japanese theatres in late 2007, so expect dodgy DVDs to be available in Chinatown by Christmas that year.

[via ICv2]

Avast, ahoy, sail ho and all that shit.

The freighter above, the S.S. Salvation, is en route to these antipodean shores, bearing a most precious cargo: copies of Lego Star Wars II & Dead Rising for the 360.

Lego Star Wars II will be on shelves Wednesday, 13 September (tomorrow, bitches!). Dead Rising will be a day later, being released on Thursday, 14 September.

Good times.

The Company of Heroes single-player demo is now available for download. It's made by Relic. It looks like the best damn thing to happen to RTS games since Kari Wuhrer was running around looking strangely shit-hot in a tight pair of army pants. And it looks fucking awesome. That should be all you need to know.

IGN got the scoop on Ubisoft's new steering wheel peripheral yesterday, and I really like the look of the thing.

It's just a shell, so any Wii game that involves driving can use it, so you won't get shafted on compatability. It also means you can use it for games that only partially use driving, which is also cool (use the Wiimote normally for action sequences, then just pause it and clip on the wheel for a driving stage).

Best of all, it's free, because it's coming bundled with GT Pro Series, one of Ubisoft's seven Wii launch titles. I kinda hope you can buy it seperately, though, since...well, GT Pro Series looks a bit crap.

EDIT (15 Sep): It has since come to my attention that this wheel does not have a base. So it's just a doughnut that you wiggle around madly in mid-air, which defeats the purpose of having the wheel altogether. The Official Squid of Man verdict has consequently been revised from "nice" to "pointless".

"It's one of the most instantly enjoyable games around, and were it not for the humbling price tag, we'd demand you go out and add it to your collection immediately. Whether you're 3 or 33, this is one of those rare games that can genuinely appeal to everyone whether you're into Star Wars or not."

You may, should the urge take you, peruse the full review over at Eurogamer.

I dont' give a shit about the "humbling" (read: regular) price tag for it, because co-op gaming is where it's at. It should be out on Friday, so hassle your local EB or JB on Thursday night and see if they'll break the street date for you.

So the PS3 is a no-show for Aussie gamers this Christmas. That leaves an advertising vacuum of sorts, with both Microsoft and Nintendo suddenly given extra room, and motivation, to pimp their respective consoles a little harder in the coming months.

Considering Nintendo Australia's gross incompetency, I thought it would be Microsoft who would step into the breach and flood the market with 360 advertising in the lead-up to Christmas. But what I just saw at EB in The Galeries in Sydney left me pleasantly surprised.

The place is covered with Wii posters and promo material. Everywhere there was a PS3 poster there's now one for the Wii, as if EB were having some kind of silly opposites day.

It's both invigorating and slightly unsettling to see so much Nintendo marketing everywhere. I'm getting this weird tingly feeling that Luke must have got just before Chewie started thinking with his stomach.

Master Replica's "Studio Scale Replica" Milennium Falcon. This thing is so crazy the term "toy" just doesn't do it justice.

It's 32 inches long. If you can't envisage that, it means it's fucking enormous.

"The studio scale Millennium Falcon is an exact copy of the filming miniature. Constructed with an internal metal armature for structural integrity, with quality resin and ABS components with authentic surface details. The Falcon has illuminating headlights, cockpit, and engine effects. Comes complete with a custom museum quality display stand, stylised display plaque and certificate of authenticity."

Best of all? A limited edition variant is hand-signed by Harrison Ford.

See? It's not only the greatest "toy" ever made, it's quite possibly the greatest single thing mankind has ever produced. This surely is the pinnacle of all human endeavour.

Sadly, it comes at a price: $4500 for the "regular" edition (sans the mark of Solo) and a whopping $5500 for the limited edition.

It's not due for a while yet, so there's still time to commit heinous crimes and/or sell body organs to raise some cash....

The Official Squid of Man Prediction was wrong. I console myself with the fact that I shouldn't have trusted anyone from the Electronics Boutique Corporation, and that with most major retailers displaying massive "November 17" posters I am not alone.

Sony themselves have announced that they aren't limiting the Australian release. They've canned it altogether. Europe and Australia are getting the royal shaft this Christmas, the victims of Sony's "blue laser diode" production woes.

We won't see the PS3 until March 2007. That's a full twelve months after the 360, and 4-5 months after the Wii. It also misses the Christmas spending season.

Twelve months ago, you couldn't have written shit like this.

#37: Make high definition, and specifically 1080p high definition, the biggest selling point of your console. Then price your console at ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS....and do not include a $40 HDMI cable.

You know, just as soon as you start to have a little faith in the Australian gaming public, shit like this comes along to just ruin your day.

Seeing the all-sales charts dominated by the likes of AFL and two fucking versions of both Singstar and FIFA is enough to break this poor Squid's heart. If two DS games and Guitar Hero hadn't been on there I just don't know what I would have done.

[thanks GFK]

Guess she had the rumble pak in....

What's the difference between this:
And this?
Uh.....Fuck all. Except the fact the GBA sold about a billion more units than the PSP, and people still couldn't be arsed hooking it up.

It'll be $49.95, and include:

- Geometry Wars
- Wik: Fable of Souls
- Outpost Kaloki X
- Bejeweled 2
- Hardwood Backgammon
- Texas Hold 'em

As well as a one-month Gold subscription and demos of Uno, Marble Blast Ultra and Feeding Frenzy. So it's basically a packaged advertisement aimed at getting you connected to Xbox Live Gold.

Fifty bucks is a bit fucking steep if you ask me, considering Geometry Wars & Wik are the only things on there worth playing.

Then again, people paid $110 for Prey, so on that strictly value-for-money basis this is a bargain.

Thursday, September 21, for $199.95.

Nice one.

Incidentally, in the press release for the announcement it says the DS has sold 300,000 units in Australia. That's already double the Gamecube installed user base. This "blue ocean" thing might actually be working.

September 14: New York. September 14: Tokyo. September 15: London.

Three press events held in each of the three primary video game markets within 24 hours, each being convened specifically to talk about the Wii.

So this is the day for launch details. And also the day for a slight pang of concern from Australian Nintendo fans.

At each of those conferences, each of those three regions will find out how much the Wii is going to cost, when it's going to launch and what games it's going to launch with.

I think it's cutting it a bit fine for an October launch if the events are in mid-September, so all signs are pointing for a November launch. For those three territories.

What worries me is that, like the 360, Nintendo may be looking to curry favour with those who matter most, and leaving markets such as Australia/NZ out in the cold. Nintendo have said repeatedly that they're aiming for a 16-week "launch period" in which the Wii will be released worldwide. Sixteen weeks is a nice way of saying four months. Which is a nice way of saying 2007.

Now, that's an absolute doomsday scenario. Nintendo have been kind to Australia of late, what with the early DS launch in 2005, and we may well get bundled in with the PAL announcements at the Euro conference in London.

But we may not. And I think each of us needs to find a way to prepare for that eventuality.