For as long as I've been writing about videogames -- as a fan, as a co-founder of a hobbyist site, and as a freelancer, counting all the way back to the days when I wrote terrible reader reviews for RPGamer while Paws was running things on that part of the site -- I've tried to remember to type the word "pixelated" and leave it at that. It's not a real word in the dictionary. It gets the red-line stink-eye from Microsoft word. Hell, I don't even see it in the Videogame Sty1e Guide. Nevertheless, I've used it to describe game visuals in which pixels -- the dot, the fundamental element of a digital image -- are especially prevalent, for better or for worse.

Of course, I couldn't "just leave it at that." All of the indicators that pointed to "pixelated's" non-existence (Word, dictionary, sty1e guide) have -- at least as long as the sty1e guide's been out -- made me go back and begrudgingly change the word to "grainy". Only this isn't entirely accurate, since it carries a negative connotation and doesn't entirely carry the same meaning of what I try to emphasize when I mean "pixelated" -- Mega Man 9 is pixelated but it ain't grainy. Nevertheless, I'd change the word more often than not.exi

Now, this post isn't a complaint or a plea or whatnot -- the situation is just a little curiosity of mine. Today, I saw two separate instances of the word "pixilated" in place of where I'd use "pixelated" instead. Running the spell-checker in Microsoft Word to give me some assistance with regards to "what is the correct spelling then, Mr. Gates?" would return "pixilated" too. But, I never used it because -- despite it being a real word -- it doesn't fit the definition:

Main Entry: pix·i·lat·ed Listen to the pronunciation of pixilated
Variant(s): also pix·il·lat·ed Listen to the pronunciation of pixillated ˈpik-sə-ˌlā-təd
Function: adjective
Etymology: irregular from pixie
Date: 1848

1: somewhat unbalanced mentally ; also : bemused
2: whimsical

Given the definition of the word, I don't believe that it fits the context of either of the articles I saw -- though in a certain light I might be able to justify its usage in Kotaku's Cave Story post (in which I'd imagine it would use the second dictionary definition -- "whimsical").

The funny thing is, if you plug "pixilated" into Google, the engine offers a correction (as it usually does before the first search result):

Did you mean: pixelated

Word. Sergey and Larry know whassup.

I'm captivated by Mega Man 9.

See, I was expecting good old-fashioned nostalgia wrapped up in an entirely unfair bow, with the name on the gift tag reading "Cheap Cheap Cheap", an experience that I would indulge in for about an hour or two before admitting defeat and refusing to ever play again.

Instead, so far I see extremely well-designed, very difficult but not unsurmountable levels which each come with tricks or gimmicks. There's the teleportation ring -- oh, and the robot that picks you up and forces you in a direction -- in Galaxy Man's level. There are the corkscrew platforms in Tornado Man's level, the bubbles and flying platforms in Splash Woman's level, and the elephants in Concrete Man's level. Each gimmick gives you a very simple, almost harmless taste of what's to come, and then comes back later in the level much tougher than before. It gives you the opportunity to learn and understand what it is you're supposed to do to pass the level, and if you just sit and watch any given situation for 30 seconds, you'll be able to understand exactly what to do.

Now, granted, I've only been to four of the eight stages thus far, but I'm fully liking what I see so far. I do miss the ability to slide, but other than that, the game is gravy. The boss behaviors are excellent -- they have patterns, but they mix them up a bit, so that you can't just exploit one thing over and over. Remember in Mega Man 2 how you could control when Metal Man attacked, because he would never fire until you did? Remember how you could defeat Heat Man without him ever shooting off fireballs, because every single time you shot him, he would just blaze towards you without doing anything else? So far I've not found any kind of exploitation in Mega Man 9. Yet, you can still see every attack coming with split-second's time, so you're given a (barely) fair shot at escaping whatever it is that's coming your way.

It also deviously plays on what you might expect as a Mega Man veteran. Little things like how Tornado Man's air whisps come up at you a split second after you'd expect them to, so all you really have to do is run from one side of the screen to the other and you wouldn't get hit, except you probably wouldn't do that at first because of previous Mega Man bosses whose attacks homed in on you. Or Splash Woman's bolts that come down at you, except they always come at you where you stand, not where you'll be, so all you have to do is wait and then step out of the way, except you normally wouldn't because -- again -- you're accustomed to those bolts anticipating where you'll be. It's a little confusing to explain -- but when you play it, you feel it.

Mega Man 9 is absolutely fantastic so far, and until I meet my 389675th untimely death at the hands of disappearing blocks, I expect it to continue being fantastic.

First thing's first: Trigames.NET Podcast episode 108 has been up for almost two days now, so if you don't know where to get it, download it from here. Those of you with Zune / iTunes should already have it in your RSS feed. If you want to read the blurb, you can get it here.

Remember, there's still the homework of sending us your most horrible stories while playing online against ignorami. What's the most ignorant or flagrant thing you've been called or heard someone been called, or whatever you've heard, when playing online? The saddest (as in dude, that's sad, not as in "cry tears" sad)?

Now, onto the show. I was in a Gamestop today coming back from lunch when I spotted, right next to the Rock Band 2 demo unit, a lonely drum kit not being used. The reason? Its green pad -- the right-most one -- had been broken clean off.

So why was Gamestop STILL showing it off there?

One look closer showed the answer: These twerps were trying to sell the unit as a $49.99 SKU. WHAT THE HELL!

Wow. Just... WOW. If there ever were a more appropriate situation for Kevin Pereira's "Really????????" than this, I'd like to see it.

Oh, and in case anyone's interested in seeing this debacle in person, this was the Gamestop I was at:

GameStop #1363
Broadway and 33rd Street
New York NY, 10001 US

I'm not going to publish the phone number here :P I don't trust any of you. You probably know how to get it anyway.

A few key things that make me want to buy it:

- Built-in web browser and functionality for downloading games and other Nintendo software directly to its internal storage, a la iPods and Zunes that connect to their music stores directly

- Addition of the necessary SD slot to allow for photo / music storage -- can we maybe get some Virtual Console service on our DS???

- 3 megapixel camera -- but this is up in the air. Is it really 3 megapixels? And can I capture movies with it?

A few key things that make me sad about it:

- Gone is the GBA slot. Ok, so maybe the lot of you don't even use it. I sure as hell do. Carrying one DS lite versus carrying my DSi and my GBmicro... the former is obviously less of a space hog.

- If the camera ISN'T 3 megapixel. Chris Kohler and the Game|Life blog over at Wired wrote down 300,000 pixels but mistakenly associated that with 3 megapixels. Which one is it? 300,000 or 3,000,000?

- Price increase. It's going for the equivalent of $180 over in Japan when it comes out this November. No, it's not a surprise, and it's not unjustified, but can't you just picture the happiness leaving your wallet for that brief instant when you fork over the dough? This is Japanese pricing, though. No word yet on US details.

This isn't a point-for-point matchup in determining whether or not I'd buy the unit, of course. Yeah, there are 3 on each side, but that's just coincidence. I'd have to first find clearer information on the camera resolution. Then I'd need to know US pricing details. Finally, I'd need to know further information: is the battery life increased? How do the bigger screens look, since bigger isn't always better (larger pixels = blockier image)? Does audio playback functionality features like slow-down and stuff mean that I can also record audio, too, and can I record movies in addition to taking pictures, making interviewing people for Trigames that much easier? Will there be VC support for the DS?

I'm not going to just automatically buy this thing because they shove it in front of my face, but I do think they've made worthwhile enhancements. I kind of feel like I want a PSP3000, too, though...

In any case, it's time to sleep. Catch the information on any one of the many live blogs going on (I've been looking at blogs.wired.com/games).

Some of you may dismiss this after seeing Michael Bay on this top ten list. I, for one, love that placement. But I'm sure all of you will like this sucker: Uwe Boll is ranked #5 out of the top ten worst directors working in Hollywood today.

"Specializes in creating aimless, plot-less movies out of video games that have absolutely no business being made into movies..."

Back to studying. Oh yeah, episode 108's up. If you know where to look.

Devil May Cry is winned. In other words, I beateded it. That's one more off my backlog to make up for the three, four, five or six I added to it. I'm pretty sure Mr. Dreds is doing much better than I am as far as backlogs are concerned.

Devil May Cry -- the original -- is really odd to me. It was touted as Hella Stylish, from the characters to the combat and everything in between, but many of the story elements -- cutscenes, characters, dialog -- didn't scream "stylish!" but rather "cornball!". The ending was so full of cheese it'd give my lactose-intolerant friend hellish diarrh- well, let me not get potty-mouthed now. The voice acting was -- eh -- not bad, but the dialog just made a lot of it barely tolerable. Further, and more important, I just didn't find anything super stylish about the combat. Even when I first saw the game back when it was released as my friend was blazing through it, I thought, "Certainly looks fun, but what's so 'stylish' about it?" Maybe it's a matter of taste, because to me, "stylish" combat equals Tachibana Ukyo of Samurai Shodown fame.

Then there's the mission structure, which just weirded me out. Devil May Cry seems like a game primed for continuous, organic progression -- and yet it breaks everything up into bite-sized missions. You've got this great big castle to explore but you can only consume it in chunks, and if you happen to fail a mission, you start over from the beginning. Is this necessarily a bad thing? Not at all -- but it does feel very odd in the context of the game's castle design.

One thing that's frustrating is dying and restarting, because there's no Retry button unless you have a yellow orb. However, I'm not talking about retrying from where you died -- I'm simply talking about how the interface is designed. When you die, you look at the YOU ARE DEAD! screen for a few seconds, then have to read as the game tells you, "You can restart from a save point." *pause* "Visit the load screen? Yes/No", then you choose yes, and then the load screen comes up, and then you have to wait for the file to load, and then you go back to the mission start screen where you have to buy your power-ups again. I'd really, REALLY just like for the YOU ARE DEAD! screen to give me three options: "Restart Mission / Go to Load Screen / Quit Game". That's it. If I hit Restart, just send me back to the beginning of the mission without having to spend the seconds to sit through loading and re-buy my power-ups. Yes, it's a small thing. No, it doesn't make DMC "zomg terrible gam". But it does get irritating. This is the same problem that the GBA Castlevanias had for years -- booting you back to the title screen every time you died.

The combat, though, is way fun. Again, I didn't find it super stylish, but that really doesn't matter when you're having a lot of fun. It's fun because it's easy to pull off moves that are well-animated, do what you expect them to, and pack a hefty punch. It's fun because as easy as it is to pull off those moves, the enemies' behavior and sheer strength (in either numbers, how hard they hit, or both) make it really difficult for you to succeed. So what you're left with is all the tools you need to succeed -- just like in any good, challenging game (Ninja Gaiden, Ikaruga) -- and you just have to be good at the game. You're never gimped at any point in the game, having to make extensive use of health refills or whatnot (in fact you can only carry one health refill at a time). The game rarely feels cheap, and even on those occasions where it does, you do have some power-ups at your disposal (Holy Water is DMC's version of a shmup's Smart Bomb, essentially). So, no, it's not perfect in that regard, but it's very close. The boss battles are awesome -- I enjoyed how they mixed the encounters up between bosses whose pattern you had to learn and bosses with quasi-random behavior who you had to just wail on and then roll out of the way before you got fried.

There was a point in the middle of DMC where I got sick of it and just wanted to stop, but somewhere in between chapters 13 and 15 it just clicked. Oddly enough it was the mission structure that helped -- knowing that each mission is bite-sized made me realize that whatever objective I was trying to accomplish just shouldn't take very long, and if I was ever wandering around without a clue in the world as to what to do, then I was missing something really obvious. Its "puzzles" are very straightforward, if you can really call them puzzles in the first place, so knowing that made me remember to just keep it simple, stupid.

Will I be replaying it again on hard? No, not likely. I want to keep moving through my backlog, and the reason I tried to blaze through DMC was so I could get to the much-acclaimed DMC3: Special (Wussy) Edition. I'll probably be spamming that one next. But first, GMAT studying, and then Yakuza..........

So my mile-long backlog has just gotten worse with a few recent acquisitions and different games started. As I desperately try to reach the end of the original Devil May Cry (right now on Mission 20), the following giants stand in my way.

Hitman: Blood Money

Thank heavens for GameTap, and thank heavens for Metaboli, the European company onto whom Turner is unloading GameTap so that the awesome service doesn't die a grisly death. Among the games I recently downloaded "to try" (Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic; Warlords Battlecry II and III; all the Hitman games), Hitman: Blood Money is the one that caught my eye the most in terms of, "Ok, I'm going to sit down and play this seriously now."

I missed it back when it came out in the first year of the 360's life and when it later came out in that Triple Pack. Right now, I find successfully completing a mission "the right way" (low body count, low notoriety) extremely satisfying, but I also feel that it's a WHOLE LOT of trial-and-error. It's not that stealth games aren't normally trial-and-error, but rather that when you go into something like this, you kind of expect someone to lay out a plan for you. You are performing hits for an organization, you know. Anyway, I thought some rudimentary Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear type of briefing might be in order, but no such luck. I had to play these first two post-tutorial stages several times to find out guard routines and the schedules and habits of my marks.

In the end, though, that's not so bad. It's not entirely realistic -- playing a level again and again and again to figure out what everyone does -- but then, who cares in the end? For me, it's part of the fun to discover some new thing that could ultimately aid you in your mission, and then saying, hey -- let me start over and see if that works.

In the Opera level, where I was supposed to assassinate Delahunt and the star of the show, I ended up dressing up as the costar, shooting the actor in the dressing room, placing a mine on the wall adjacent to Delahunt's box seat, and then detonating it right when I was at the exit. However, I could have tried playing the part of his costar and shooting him on cue (the co-star is an executioner and has a fake WW1 pistol; you're given a REAL one if you go to coat check at the outset of the level) and then detonating the mine while on stage, but I was actually late to the scene so the actor was shouting, "Idiota!" at me. :) I could try planting the mine on stage, then sniping Delahunt from an alcove on stage. Or, I could see if I could leave the real WW1 pistol in the co-star's dressing room for him to pick up and unwittingly use. It's got a lot more possibilities than I thought at the outset. On the podcast, which will go up tomorrow night, I originally said that the game felt rigid; I should have just said that it's a little too trial-and-error instead, because it's not rigid once you know everything about the level.

Anyway, I'm glad I decided to check this game out. It's come a long way since the original Codename 47, which had a fantastic premise that was marred by brutal, exacting difficulty and weird control. I still own the original disc... or do I? I'm not sure, but since it's on GameTap, it doesn't matter -- I can go back and see how bad it is today.

Viking: Battle for Asgard or whatever the hell the subtitle is

I just picked this up for $18 for PS3. Aaron Thomas didn't have too many nice things to say about it, but Slunks seemed to enjoy it, and I was looking for some mindless hack-and-slasher to enjoy on my PS3. So far, it's decent, and it's enjoyable, but the combat is a little laggy. By that, I mean it feels more like -- well, here's an analogy: It's more Crystal Chronicles than it is Zelda. It's not as responsive as God of War, to which it's often compared. But I like the overall look, and it's brainless fun in a quest-driven "nearly open-world" environment, which gives it a different feel. I just hope the combat gets a little more intricate as the game moves along.

Also, it's weird to see a lot of Viking-types speak in accents from the UK. I've never heard a Viking speak like a Welshman.

...then again I've never met a Viking.

Yakuza

Garnett Lee over at 1up Yours has been raving about this game nonstop, so I had to see what the fuss was about. I'm a fan of beat-em-ups, but I wasn't expecting a beat-em-up in quasi-roleplaying clothes. I think it's novel how they wrapped up random battles in the guise of street punks who want to shake you down for money, or con artist ladies who allege that you grabbed their butts to have some "savior" try to accost you and -- again -- shake you down for money.

Now, the combat feels great. Mostly. Your character fights in this sort of graceful-yet-clumsy way, with the clumsy aspect making it actually feel more hard-hitting. There are Virtua-Fighter-esque punch-punch-kick combos, and there are also circle-button throws. The delicious thing about the throws is that when you double someone over, and then grab them, you can walk them over to a wall or table and smash their face in it. There's something about the walking-over part -- it really adds to the anticipation, for one thing -- that just makes it feel so cathartic (I referenced this on last week's podcast).

The only problem? It's really annoying to try to hone in on an enemy because the movement controls don't feel entirely tight. It's hard to directly face the dude you want to doof up, and so sometimes you'll see your combo attacks flailing into the wall. It gets highly annoying when there are like only two or three relatively strong foes around you; at least with more foes, you're bound to hit something.

Regardless, Yakuza is quick, simple fun wrapped up in an interesting story and presentation, and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next.

You know where to hit: mailbag (AHT) trigames (DAWT) net or this here lucky form. (Please use the Mailbag radio button to hit the mailbag.)

You know WHAT to send: http://www.gamespot.com/users/MrCHUP0N/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=m-100-25541594&tag=all-about;blog1

Your worst online experiences, in other words. Specifically about online gaming and idiots who don't know how to act. So, not, "I lost 10 matches in a row," but "I encountered this huge asinine jerk who wouldn't stop talking about _____". Not, "I kept getting disconnected or lagged from this game," but, "There was a string of 10 games where people were sore losers and dropped on me." We'll be reading these on the podcast. We record Saturday, 11:30AM.

NOTE: MsCortana found that the podcast was not completely uploaded. I've since re-uploaded the file and it should be there in its entirety. Please let me know if it's still incomplete when you redownload.

Red Ring Stories! Several listeners send in their horrible stories about the Red Ring of Death. Also, we discuss the "publisher's perspective" with regards to videogame reviews and publisher dude's problem with these reviewers' "sense of entitlement" and yawnsuch.

Note: We got a note from Darren, but after we recorded. Darren, we'll read your Red Ring Story next week!

Get the episode here. RSS update and blurb to come.