I never got around to posting my reactions to the Wii press event that was held a couple of weeks back. So, here are some brief thoughts. The console price-point is nice, especially with a pack-in game. The $60 controller is a little bit shocking, but that is a lot of tech in your hands, so it's almost understandable and not a deal-breaker. The Channels stuff is interesting, the only disappointment was the pricing for the Virtual Console games. I would have liked to see a $2 NES, $4 SNES, and $8 N64 scheme. The way that it is, I don't anticipate buying too many classic games. All of the actual Wii games looked like a ton of fun, so I'm looking forward to November. But about TGS... I've been watching a lot of video content both here at GameSpot and around the Net (GameTrailers has a lot of great high-res stuff), and I thought that I would highlight some of the games that really impressed me, in case anyone didn't get a chance to check them out. I'm presenting them as the "best" games on basically just the Xbox 360 and PS3, because those are the only two that really had any sort of competition. Nintendo doesn't participate in TGS for whatever reason, so there weren't any games that really jumped out at me. On the PS2 I think Final Fantasy XII has got to be my most-anticipated game at the show, but Seaman 2 also looked really interesting. For the Xbox 360, I think that Viva Piñata is a game that I could really enjoy. First of all it's a Rare game, so it already gets my attention. But it seems like they have taken some of the fundamental design elements from Dungeon Keeper, Animal Crossing, and maybe even a bit from the RollerCoaster Tycoon games, and then set it all in a colorful, kid-friendly environment. The content-sharing over Xbox Live seems like a nice addition too. But looking at Microsoft's more recent X06 event in Barcelona, Assassin's Creed is really shaping up nicely. It apparently wasn't shown in Tokyo for some reason, but it really does look like it will be a genuinely "next-generation" game. The emphasis on open level design, both in the actual physical layout of the level and the attention to the player's choice while solving problems, is refreshing. And the attempt at meaningful intelligence on the part of the non-playable characters in the game is promising as well. We'll have to wait and see how well it is all implemented, but it is coming from the Sands of Time developers. Back to TGS, of all the brilliant games that were shown for the PS3, I think Shirokishi Monogatari or "White Knight Story" was the most impressive. The amount of depth that this game looks like it will offer is exciting. Plus Level 5 really hasn't made a bad game yet. I can only imagine what 2nd- and 3rd-generation PS3 games will look like... I just hope that they continue to strive for innovation in gameplay and design, rather than graphics alone.

Good Lord! What a horrible game the Falcons played tonight... I suppose that's what I get for saying that I didn't think there was a team that could beat Atlanta's running. But I guess I should have elaborated - Atlanta can beat themselves like nobody's business. It was like they didn't even want to win. But to be fair, it was like the stars were aligned for New Orleans to get their storybook win. Is the Saints' defense that good? No, not really. When Michael Vick scrambles, Atlanta converts downs. And that didn't happen on more than a handful of plays tonight. To make matters worse, there wasn't much happening through the air either, with receivers dropping almost anything that came their way. But the two biggest issues still facing Atlanta are their kicking (special teams are actually quite good in every other way) and that Vick doesn't have a consistently threatening passing facet to his offense. New Orleans ran man coverage on the wide outs all night long and double-teamed Crumpler in the middle. The ineffectiveness of Atlanta's passing allowed them to swarm the line of scrimmage and contain the run. And that might just be the silver bullet... I will give them this, they proved that a big front 4 on defense can dominate Altanta's smallish O-line. With most teams you run to open up the pass, but Atlanta is going to have to make people respect the pass to open up the run. Here are this week's scores:

Carolina 26, Tampa Bay 24 Chicago 19, Minnesota 16 Cincinnati 28, Pittsburgh 20 Green Bay 31, Detroit 24 Jacksonville 14, Indianapolis 21 NY Jets 28, Buffalo 20 Tennessee 10, Miami 13 Washington 31, Houston 15 Baltimore 15, Cleveland 14 NY Giants 30, Seattle 42 Philadelphia 38, San Francisco 24 St. Louis 16, Arizona 14 Denver 17, New England 7 Atlanta 3, New Orleans 23

I guess the only good news for me is that I'm now 37-8 through week 3...

I honestly do have things other than football going on in my life right now. I just haven't felt like writing about anything else lately. But just for the sake of keeping a little variety - I recently became a GameSpot moderator, which is pretty cool. There's a lot of information to process, and it's not really as cut & dry as I thought it would be, but I'll get the hang of it. I also decided to change the scenery around here a bit and put up a new banner. That's SHODAN from the System Shock series, if you didn't know. Really amazing games, by the way. But if you don't really enjoy playing older games, you might want to keep your eyes on BioShock. It's multi-platform and it's being developed by the same visionaries behind System Shock 2. Anyway, here are my picks:

Carolina @ Tampa Bay Chicago @ Minnesota Cincinnati @ Pittsburgh Green Bay @ Detroit Jacksonville @ Indianapolis - best game this week NY Jets @ Buffalo Tennessee @ Miami Washington @ Houston Baltimore @ Cleveland NY Giants @ Seattle Philadelphia @ San Francisco St. Louis @ Arizona Denver @ New England Atlanta @ New Orleans

The Falcons/Saints game should be a good one as well. It'll definitely be the biggest challenge Atlanta has faced so far this season, but I don't know if there's a defense in the league that will be able to hold out for four quarters against that running game. Granted, as the season goes on people will devise containment options. But I think the Falcons' biggest problem is getting points up on the board... They can put together incredible drives, but far too many end without a score. Mort Andersen coming back should be a big help.

I'm doing pretty well for myself so far this season. The surprises this week for me were the two Pennsylvania teams. I had the Giants/Eagles game going the other way - Philly by a touchdown at the end of regulation. And I thought Pittsburgh would at least manage a field goal. Jacksonville's defense is good, but it's not that good. Part of the Steelers problem was Roethlisberger being so off. I almost think it wasn't worth him risking complicating his condition. Here are the scores. And I'm trying something a little different this week. My correct picks are green and my misses are red.

Buffalo 16, Miami 6 Carolina 13, Minnesota 16 Cleveland 17, Cincinnati 34 Detroit 7, Chicago 34 Houston 24, Indianapolis 43 New Orleans 34 , Green Bay 27 NY Giants 30, Philadelphia 24 Oakland 6, Baltimore 28 Tampa Bay 3, Atlanta 14 Arizona 10, Seattle 21 St. Louis 13, San Francisco 20 Kansas City 6, Denver 9 New England 24, NY Jets 17 Tennessee 7, San Diego 40 Washington 10, Dallas 27 Pittsburgh 0, Jacksonville 9

So that makes me 25 for 31, or 25-6, after this week. I really enjoyed the Falcons game. The addition of that new quarterback option has opened up all kinds of possibilities for Atlanta's running game. And I'm glad that all of that pocket-passer nonsense has finally been thrown to the wind. Michael Vick just makes plays. I wonder if Tennesse is paying attention? Anyway, things are looking good in the NFC South.

Well, TV.com brilliantly decided to end their Football Smashup feature after the first week of the season. I understand their decision, because they clearly have much more important topics to cover... Big thanks to jekyll for pointing it out to me in the first place and giving me a reason to let TV.com have another chance. But I think I'm done now... I guess I'll just go ahead and post my predictions for the week 2 games tonight. Although, I have to admit I was really looking forward to a reward for my herculean powers of prognostication. And now that I've properly jinxed myself, my winners are in bold.

Buffalo @ Miami Carolina @ Minnesota Cleveland @ Cincinnati Detroit @ Chicago Houston @ Indianapolis New Orleans @ Green Bay NY Giants @ Philadelphia - the best game this week Oakland @ Baltimore Tampa Bay @ Atlanta Arizona @ Seattle St. Louis @ San Francisco Kansas City @ Denver New England @ NY Jets Tennessee @ San Diego Washington @ Dallas - 2nd best game? Pittsburgh @ Jacksonville

The Jaguars over the Steelers?! Yeah, I should know better, but what can I say, I'm a sucker for a good upset. And I just really don't like the Steelers. Hmm... Not a lot of road-winners for me this week. Plus, I took a lot of safe picks, and only sort of crazy upsets... Now just watch me go 4 for 16! :lol:

What is it about NFL season that makes every day seem a little bit brighter? :P I didn't know if I was going to like Monday Night Football on ESPN, but I have to say that I'm impressed. They have some nice bottom thirds and the announcers aren't too annoying, except for that guy from Pardon the Interruption... How about some scores? I don't have the express written consent of the broadcasters or the NFL, so I hope they don't bust in here and shoot up my laptop...

Miami 17 - Pittsburgh 28 Atlanta 20 - Carolina 6 Baltimore 27 - Tampa Bay 0 Buffalo 17 - New England 19 Cincinnati 23 - Kansas City 10 Denver 10 - St. Louis 18 New Orleans 19 - Cleveland 14 NY Jets 23 - Tennessee 16 Philadelphia 24 - Houston 10 Seattle 9 - Detroit 6 Chicago 26 - Green Bay 0 Dallas 17 - Jacksonville 24 San Francisco 27 - Arizona 34 Indianapolis 26 - NY Giants 21 Minnesota 19 - Washington 16 San Diego 27 - Oakland 0

I managed to come out all right in this first week of TV.com's Football Smashup... 13 for 15. The Jets/Titans game was a toss-up, and I picked Tennessee. I thought that they were actually going to be able to pull it out right at the end. The only thing that really surprised me was 2005's 8th worst offense rolling over 2005's 8th best defense for a 27 point shut-out... Crazy. I almost picked Baltimore for no better reason than I don't like Jon Gruden. But what are you gonna do? Tampa was the 2005 NFC South champion after all. And I'm really glad that my Falcons ran all over Carolina and only 27% of the Smashup voters thought they would win.

So what do you get when you mix a French physicist, an Irish mathematician, and Pong? Well, that would have to be Plasma Pong. And incidentally, that would also be an answer to the question: How do you redesign something as primordially simple and fun as Pong? Two paddles on either end of a fixed, rectangular field of play, with a ball bouncing back and forth... Two sides are closed, causing the ball to ricochet in an elementary Newtonian manner, while the remaining two sides are completely open and must be defended by the paddles, which are constrained to moving in one dimension. A player scores when their opponent fails to defend their side. The fundamentals of the game are grounded in any number of sports, with the most applicable being tennis. The field, the paddles, and the ball. It's so simple. What could be changed to make a game with rules hundreds of years old seem fresh and engaging, if not entirely new? The answer to Steve Taylor was to think about that fourth variable to the equation - how the ball travels through space, or more accurately, what forces act upon it as it moves.... Plasma Pong introduces the concept of fluid dynamics to the tried and true gameplay of Pong, in that the ball isn't just bouncing around in a vacuum, under the influence of it's own inertia. In Plasma Pong the player can affect the ball not only by making contact with their paddle, but by either spewing "plasma" onto the playing field, altering flow, or by sucking that plasma back towards their paddle (along with the ball), and blasting massive shock waves across the field. The resulting game is very much an entirely new experience to any classical Pong remake, not to mention visually impressive. Fans of Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved would probably see some similarity. Plasma Pong is an excellent game. The AI is challenging but beatable; more often than not, you'll be your own worst enemy. It's FREE, so you really don't have any excuse not to try it. And I would be willing to guarantee that it's the most fun you'll ever have involving Navier-Stokes approximations.

Good idea: Getting my buddy Jason to talk his brother-in-law into letting us watch UFC 62 on his sweet 50-inch television. Bad idea: Renato "Babalu" Sobral charging at Chuck Liddell like a crazed rhino. Seriously, they should call Liddell the Sandman, instead of the Iceman, because that guy puts everybody to sleep. Joe Rogan mentioned during the fighters' arrivals that Chuck's list of KOs reads like a Who's Who of the UFC. I'm not really a fan, because Randy Couture is my hero, I'm just saying the dude has got some insane power. The Griffin-Bonnar rematch was pretty impressive. Forrest in particular has improved his technical ability fairly dramatically, and they were both swinging for the fences. Unfortunately it went to a questionable decision, and some of the slack-jawed troglodytes, to quote C. Montgomery Burns, in the Mandalay Bay started booing Forrest during the post-fight interview... My favorite fight was either Cheik Kongo versus Christian Wellisch or Rob MacDonald versus Eric Schafer. Kongo looks like an absolute monster that would give Tim Sylvia a serious run for the heavyweight title. And Eric Schafer managed to pull off a beautiful arm triangle on MacDonald. The poor guy didn't even have a chance to tap out. He blacked out in about 5 seconds. I think if I ever went mad and decided to train for the world of MMA, I would absolutely have to sport the star-spangled Hammer pants à la Diedrich Bader and his Rex Kwan Do fighting system. Because nobody wants a roundhouse kick to the face while you're wearing those bad boys... Easily one of the most quotable movies ever. :lol: I started up Shadow of the Colossus again. When I first played it, I didn't face off against the final colossus for some reason, but I just decided to start over and play it all the way through. It probably is one of my favorite games ever, despite not even finishing it. A lot of people scoff at the idea of video games being art on the level of film, but I imagine those people haven't seen SotC. I think the emblem bandit is back again... My tagger emblem seems to come and go, and I think my Readers' Choice 2004 emblem may be gone for good. :(

Or at least that's the impression that I get about the CNET Entertainment developers. I don't actually know how the team is organized, but it seems like they work specifically on one site or the other. Personally, I've always thought that GameSpot is the best site, with TV.com an ever-improving work-in-progress and mp3.com an afterthought at best. The new Tag functionality for blog posts and Union content (both on GS) is an excellent addition that I've been hoping would be implemented for a while now. But tagging of blog posts isn't yet enabled for TV.com. Likewise, TV.com has an incredibly slick method for displaying your User Videos (in your profile) that utilizes a client-side script to toggle between simple and detailed views. It's easily a more useful and impressive method than GameSpot's. I don't really know how long this has been available, because I don't spend much time on TV.com. So it's new to me at least.... But I honestly don't get why this happens. It seems like they could have a uniform enough code-base to branch from for the individual sites when necessary, and features could be developed in parallel for the entire Entertainment division. But I guess it's just another example of how infrequently developers actually use object-oriented design in real-life situations. I haven't ever had the need to code a lot of PHP, and, granted, everything I ever did was very procedural. I'm really digging the new features that have rolled out this week. But I know that on GameSpot at least there are plenty of things that need fixing before the system is made more complex. Anyway, I'm getting a bit backed up on my reviews. Usually I try to write a review as soon as I'm done with a game. But I finished off Indigo Prophecy and Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal about 2 or 3 weeks ago, and still no reviews. Laziness... I'm about 3 or 4 hours into Kingdom Hearts, and it's really difficult to get into this game. The gameplay so far is just hammering the X button ad nauseum, and the storyline & character relationships are both a bit weird. I think I may start up Shadow of the Colossus or Psychonauts. But I also just reinstalled WH40K: Dawn of War, so that might suck me back in.... That's all for now. Have a great weekend.

I've been catching up on my podcasts these last few days. And as I sit here thinking about the ones that I subscribe to, I can't help but notice that they have a decidedly nerdy slant. But for anyone that's looking for something good to listen to, I can whole-heartedly recommend GameSpot's own HotSpot & Designer Threads, the PC Gamer Podcast, Diggnation (even if you don't use digg), and last but not least, GDC Radio. Anyway, one of the more recent episodes of the PCG podcast (42, I believe) referenced a relatively recent study (and I'm using that word loosely) on, quote, "the effect of video game violence on physiological desensitization to real-life violence," that in fact being the title of the resulting paper. I'm not usually one to give this type of rhetorical nonsense the attention that it craves, and so I have to admit that I was ignorant to the type of charlatanism that was the basis for the political rigmarole that rears its head every 6 months or so. But this study (search the page for "desensitization") by Drs. Carnagey, Anderson, and Bushman is really just sad. It seeks, through empirical data, to prove the titular hypothesis that as little as 20 minutes of exposure to violent video games (Carmageddon, Duke Nukem, Mortal Kombat, and Future Cop) results in a marked decrease in an individual's physiological arousal to observing real violence (footage of people being beaten, stabbed, or shot), than those who play non-violent video games. Okay, now I don't really consider Psychology to be a true science, but these three academics just need to take a primer on the scientific method. Not only do they not take a base-line reading of how people respond to watching the real-life violence without exposure to any video games, but they don't have any other methods of stimulation, much less a control sample (which I suppose would be just having a nice, friendly 20 minute conversation)... How do people respond to watching real-life violence after playing 20 minutes of a physically-demanding competitive sport? Or after engaging in a heated debate on a contentious socio-political issue? Or after watching 20 minutes of a violent film or television show? Using any tests similar to these examples would have made the results of the study even slightly more believable. Nevermind the fact that the very premise of finding a causal link between a person's physiological and emotional responses to a subject is, to my mind at least, a bit of a stretch. So bringing this rant to an end, I don't discount the possibility that violence in video games might be a contributing factor to violent behavior in children. But as it stands, this sort of ludicrous, attention-seeking grandstanding being passed off as thoughtful, objective, scientific research is just disgraceful.