Jared Rea

Thanks to the release of “Charlene (I’m Right Behind You)” in Rock Band yesterday, I’ve finally snagged an achievement that has haunted me: Flawless Groove. I come from the Bemani / Guitar Freaks school of down-strum only, so really, this was a long time coming. I’m rhythm gaming dinosaur, I know. I still refuse to touch the bar during a game of Dance Dance Revolution to this day no matter what, amongst many other superstitions and (most likely) bad habits.

But hey, good news for you up-strumming freaks like Miss Shelby. The Rock Band bass guitar is now available, featuring a longer neck and split strum bar for two-finger play. Who says no one cares about bassists?

Before I even attempted to get the “No Country for Old Arcades” series off the ground, I made sure to contact the good folks over at Arcade Heroes to pick their brain on the idea. It’s thanks to them that I got this idea in my head that for as much as people love to declare the arcade scene as dead, history has proven that all they really need is just one amazing title to bring everyone back in.

Pong kicked off the 70’s and in the 80’s, Pac-Man proved that arcade games weren’t just a fad. Street Fighter II completely revolutionized the industry at the start of the 90’s and Dance Dance Revolution did the same for this century.

And now, a little over a month after it’s Japanese release, Street Fighter IV has landed in select arcades across North America. From what I’ve seen and heard, it could very well be that one game needed to convince the masses that yes, arcades are very much worth your time. The problem is that it also represents an easily missed opportunity.

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Here’s the second part of the Spore launch event that I promised, an interview with executive producer, Lucy Bradshaw. The entire event was running late and so I only had ten minutes to ask her the big questions, which of course led to the somewhat tepid reviews that were coming out that night.

“The one thing that I’m finding that I’m really happy to see is that even the hardest of core gamers who are saying, ‘This isn’t what I really expected,’ they’re recognizing where the magic is.”

We also talked about how focus groups originally hated Spore and what it was like to work with Will Wright on this go around. Enjoy!

EA gathered up the press to celebrate the release of Spore this week at the as of yet unopened San Francisco Academy of Sciences. GameDaily published my short news story on it, focusing on the speeches of Will Wright and renowned astrophysicists, Frank Drake.

Wright invited both members of the press and his publisher, EA Games, into the planetarium dome for a speech that covered everything from his love of making models to the hit 80’s sitcom, Alf. He also went into detail on some of his loftier goals with the creation of Spore, particularly, getting people interested in the scientific process.

There’s also an interview coming up with executive producer, Lucy Bradshaw, so I’ll add that later. Until then, check out the photos I took while at the event.

While visiting my parents back home this weekend, I uncovered some truly horrifying photos. I was on the hunt for some ancient hard drives of mine that I left behind but what I found was a stash of Kodak envelopes, stuffed with pictures from early years of the Dance Dance Revolution tournament scene which I was a part of. Yes, I was a very sick child.

The pictures go back as early as 1999 when I first discovered Dance Dance Revolution and end in 2001 which is apparently when I got a digital camera. So aside from the obvious popularity (in California, anyway), what’s changed? Now days, freestyle play no longer exists with people only playing the game for high scores. Heck, tournaments don’t even really exist. For the most part, DDR is dead with only the home releases garnering any type of success and it’s not like you’re going to be reading about those anyway.

Check out the set for some ancient Dance Dancing and I’ve embedded the slideshow after the break.

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Now that we’re fully entrenched in the HD era of gaming, it’s become quite difficult to go back and play games on older consoles. That is of course, unless you’ve got the right setup. Unfortunately, we don’t. We, being Miss Shelby and I, have a monstrous Sony Bravia that makes anything prior to the Xbox 360 look like garbage and a standard set in the bedroom that’s recently been taxed by everything from the generation before it.

So what are we to do with our Sega Genesis? And what of her poor Nintendo 64 collection? Surprisingly, Ikea had the answer.

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Like a lot of folks out there, I can’t wait to get my hands on Fable II. Unfortunately, Pub Games is a bitter first taste as you can tell from my review at The Escapist.

Pub Games is a great experiment for Microsoft but it doesn’t seem to do anyone any favors. The games themselves don’t hold enough weight to interest those not already interested in Fable II and the pay outs aren’t big enough or frequent enough to be useful for those who are. Unless of course you’re totally cheating.

Still, this hasn’t stopped me from pre-ordering a Limited Edition, even when I originally opted for a standard copy. The power of the Chief compelled me.

This week’s issue of The Escapist is up and it’s dedicated to Korean gaming. Having played just about every MMORPG on the market and tons of Pump it Up in my time, naturally, this was a perfect fit. So I went to San Francisco and checked out Aion: Tower of Eternity from NC Soft.

The current crop of Korean-developed MMORPG titles like Dream of Mirror Online, FlyFF and Rappelz are living relics of a time long forgotten. This is the climate facing Aion:The Tower of Eternity, the latest from the original Korean MMOG creators at NCsoft. Not only are they looking to wash away the sins of Korean MMOG hell with this new game, but their own distorted image as well.

If you didn’t catch the joke on the title, you should probably educate yourself on old Korean pride pop anthems. I felt it was totally appropriate.