I just wanted to take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy 2008 before I drink myself stupider tomorrow night. Thanks to everyone who has supported Gamescrap in its first seven months in action and look for things to only get better in the next year! Also, a special thanks to Cain Dornan for getting my ass back into the wonderful world of gaming journalism - I owe you big!
The general consensus is that the holidays are a time of giving, where families reunite once a year for their obligation to tolerate each other and exchange gifts that they half-heartedly bought for one another while listening to the same Christmas carols from the 1940’s and every permutation thereafter. What you may not know, however, is that every year something comes along to give Christmas its dark side, like Black Christmas, last year’s atrociously funny Christmas horror flick where people were murdered with sharpened candy canes and got icecicles drilled through their eyes. This year, however, the devil came in a more deceitful form. With the Wii being this year’s hot thing to have, the temptation comes in a small package at the seemingly reasonable price of twenty bucks bearing the name Ninjabread Man. While many a tech-stupid parent will look at this low rent action hero as a deal, little do they know that they’d be better off buying themselves cancer than subjecting themselves and their children to this crap. It’s hard enough to believe that anyone can create a character lamer than the Arby’s oven mitt in terms of general creative retardation, but the brains at Conspiracy and Digital Data Design have managed to achieve the unthinkable. Guara-damn-teed, if this game ends up under enough peoples’ trees, we’re going to see a proportional spike in holiday suicides.
Join me, if you will, for a trip back to 1982. Disco was essentially dead, Pac Man was cutting edge, Kool and the Gang was actually considered to be cool, and ET was the all time highest grossing movie EVAR. Another sign of the times was that Atari had 80% of the market share, thus giving Atari free reign to do pretty much whatever they wanted, since they were publishing their own games (save for Activision that is) they profited off of every piece of software that was put out. Smelling a cash cow, the head of Warner Bros. Interactive, who owned Atari at the time, negotiated a deal to get the rights to the ET franchise for a game since it would only make sense to get the rights to the biggest movie at the time onto a game for the greatest console at the time. It was a win-win situation for all…or was it?
In keeping with my promise made in the Gamescrap forums, we're going to see a lot of updates this month. However, to tide anyone looking for a new game over until the next update later this week, I offer you this little morsel of crap from everyone's favorite decade: the 80's.
So let's go back to 1989 where side-scrolling beat-'em-ups were taking up that awkward point between shooters and fighting games as the current flavor of the month. A game that would have otherwise been lost in the shuffle of the torrent of games saturating the arcades was a little gem known as DJ Boy. What set DJ Boy apart from other side scrollers was that everyone was on roller skates and its influences stemmed from hip-hop culture at the time. Just think of it as Breakers 2: Electric Boogaloo meets Final Fight. Anyways, the game received some notoriety that goes past the normal political incorrectness of white kids beating up on black kids. The worst offender would have to be the totally over exaggerated portrayal of African American women that would make any white guy planning on doing black face think twice.
Not only were these chicks stereotypes in every sense of the word, they also let loose with a deadly fart attack where they would hike up their dresses and send a cloud of green gas your way. Talk about classy. The arcade game was later ported to the Genesis where some of the more offensive material was taken out and these girth-ridden women were retooled to be less offensive. Instead of the fart attack, however, they ended up throwing donuts at you, which goes to show that the world will never learn true tolerance.
Of course, DJ Boy featured other more comical bosses...
Before I got my PHD in bad games, swankdom, and how to make a bad ass tater tot casserole, I was a young lad with a Vectrex and a NES. When I was growing up, I always wished that gaming, the hobby I loved and lived, would someday be taken seriously. Now here I am some twenty years later and I’d like to officially retract my childhood wish. After years of piss-poor video game award shows, namely the Spike VGA’s and G-Phoria as the most vile offenders, I’ve finally given up on any hope of any kind of legit and entertaining event showcasing the best of gaming. After seeing Spike’s nominees for this year’s awards, I can’t help but feel embarrassed for the presenters, the numerous B-List celebs, and the developers most of all who ultimately end up playing second fiddle to the likes of William Shatner. So before I start going off on an anger-fueled harangue, let’s look a little more in-depth as to why video game award shows just plain suck.
I just wanted to take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy 2008 before I drink myself stupider tomorrow night. Thanks to everyone who has supported Gamescrap in its first seven months in action and look for things to only get better in the next year! Also, a special thanks to Cain Dornan for getting my ass back into the wonderful world of gaming journalism - I owe you big!
Join me, if you will, for a trip back to 1982. Disco was essentially dead, Pac Man was cutting edge, Kool and the Gang was actually considered to be cool, and ET was the all time highest grossing movie EVAR. Another sign of the times was that Atari had 80% of the market share, thus giving Atari free reign to do pretty much whatever they wanted, since they were publishing their own games (save for Activision that is) they profited off of every piece of software that was put out. Smelling a cash cow, the head of Warner Bros. Interactive, who owned Atari at the time, negotiated a deal to get the rights to the ET franchise for a game since it would only make sense to get the rights to the biggest movie at the time onto a game for the greatest console at the time. It was a win-win situation for all…or was it? 
