Another weekend, another couple of days of terminal fatigue, a couple more links, a couple more days of declining health \m/

• For those who question the integrity of videogame journalism and/or believe it’s the only industry where corruption is a very strong possibility, this may open your eyes. Variety published a pretty damning critic of “Iron Cross”, a thriller that only seemed to carry some weight due to Roy Scheider’s (“Jaws”, “All That Jazz”, “Blue Thunder”) presence, who eventually passed away during its shooting. Meanwhile, the article is removed and its author, Robert Koehler, is accused by his superiors of having published it without them noticing. All because Variety had a contract with the films producers, who had paid them 400 thousand dollars to set up a support campaign for the Oscars. Oops.

• Pasokon Gemu! is a 2008 article written by Quintin Smith for Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Yes, I have been linking to a lot of stuff there lately but even if it is a PC-centric site, it still provides some of the best videogame writing you can find on the internets. As is the case: even though many other sites cover videogames and japanese culture surrounding them, there’s always something that falls beneath the cracks, such as curiosities and stuff less in demand by western audiences. In this article there are some examples of that – like the fact that arcades are still incredibly popular over there in spite of having died out in the rest of the world and an arcade game based on the Half-Life series: Half-Life 2: Survivor.
• Nevermind the fact that Ubisoft doesn’t understand its consumer base (just for now, though). As it would seem, they don’t even understand their own games. Case in point: the cover artwork for the european and north-american versions of Settlers 7 are almost opposite in style and tone, even going against some of the objectives Ubi set out to achieve.
• Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is coming to Wii’s Virtual Console. Excellent news. Rondo is a curious game: it never saw a proper western release until a conversion for the PSP some years ago, while Symphony of the Night went on to achieve critical and commercial success. Curious because, much like Metal Gear Solid for PSX did the same with Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake for the MSX, SotN appeared fresh to players even though it recycled many visual and sound assets from Rondo. And whereas SotN was Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest aimed toward a more open-mind audience, Rondo was Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse for those looking for a traditional extension of the series. Both are great in the sense that they heralded very different futures for the series, but only one came to be.
• “Oil Rocks is unique in the world, a pearl of Soviet ambition built in several phases after 1947. Oil Rocks is a full town on the sea: it has 200 km of streets built on piles and landfill, counting with a population of over 5,000 men (families stay on shore!). Most of the inhabitants work on shifts – a week on Oil Rocks a week on shore. There are tall blocks of flats, a bakery, a cinema, a garden, a school. The facility is poorly maintained, with miles of roads now submerged beneath the sea. Around some worker’s dormitories, the waterline now stands at the second-floor windows. Although a full one-third of the Oil Rocks complex’s 600 wells is inoperative or inaccessible, operations have continued without a significant increase in investment”.
• Something delicious: Popular Science magazine, together with Google, made all of their back catalogue public. Founded in 1872 (!), the magazine published science and technology articles for the general, non-specialized reader, with the intention of educating the audience about several aspects concerning science (can you imagine a magazine doing the same with videogames?). Here are a few examples of what you can find: cars set to warn of H-Bomb fallout (June 1955) and the call for faster underground shelter building due to the chance that the russians were creating their own based on a “serious, energetic civil-defense program” (January 1962). If you ever wondered what kind of things influenced the world of the Fallout series, such as an optimistic outlook of the future and the fear of nuclear war, this is one place to start.
• Nietzsche, other than belonging in the “lunatic philosopher with an undeniably manly mustache” category, was also a composer. His obsession with Wagner was well known but it would seem that Julian Young, when writing his book “Friedrich Nietzsche – A Philosophical Biography”, found out Nietzsche wrote some music as well. Young decided to make it available here.
• The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing. The desperate struggle to escape the nightmarish island controlled by Tom Nook. The cruel truth that Nintendo hides from everyone.
• Picture set of Biblioteca Vasconcelos, in Mexico. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words but in this case, it’s certainly the more than one thousand words kept in that megalibrary that are worth the image.
• Steambirds. Steampunk. World War Two. Aerial, turn-based dogfighting. Not as good as Achtung Spitfire (then again, how many are?), but it’s a nice time waster.
• Parrot AR Drone, or, something that finally justifies the price of an iPhone. Could use two 7,62mm miniguns, though.
• The story of the stonecutter. Simple and powerful. Bonus: no Quick-Time Events included!
• And what if Liberty City Police Force had a Twitter account?
• Down, down-right,right, HOBOKEN!
• “My fellow wasps, our time has come! No longer shall we suffer human oppresion! Tonight, we ride our spiders into Valhalla!”
• And I suppose the wasps’ plans began with this.

“You were almost a Jill sandwich!”