fortytwo points

Fortytwo Points Gets the Best Birthday Present / Marketing Material Ever

I turned 25 today and although we swore not to get each other anything, my love got me by far the best gift I have ever gotten. I am fully devoted to making this website into something special and knowing that, my girlfriend Reembeat designed and ordered two of these awesome t-shirts (one for me and one for her). You can see The Reemster modeling her's below:

Like any respectable broke-ass website owner, I plan on hawking these suckers right here on fortytwo points. That way you can out-obscure people with your choice in amateur game sites.

-Unfather

Pandemic and EA's The Saboteur Brings Us Back to WWII; Nazis Groan

I've certainly made no effort to garner EA's The Publisher's good will in the past, but despite my ill comments I am willing to accept that they frequently have their hands shoved into the warm, beating chest cavities of great developing partners. This time it's Pandemic's heart that is at risk, yet I can't help feeling like, maybe this time, it will be for the better. Having access to pockets that deep should certainly help a little...

Pandemic have built themselves a sound legacy with Full Spectrum Warrior, Destroy All Humans! 1 and 2, and the Mercenaries games, yet they've never really exploded into the zeitgeist with a smash hit that the community just can't stop talking about. They seem to have an excellent talent for creating engrossing worlds and genuinely likable (if not sometimes hollow) characters, so hopefully their latest efforts with Saboteur for the Xbox360 and PS3 will change this.

You play as an Irish racer who decides to fight his own war against the Nazis after they kill one of his friends. The protagonist was inspired by William Grover-Williams, a war hero for the French Resistance during WWII, and your most important weapons are infiltration and sabotage. Using them, an arsenal of period appropriate lead-spitters, and your own cold, murderous hands, you set out to reclaim portions of occupied territory for the native people.

Watchmen Saturday Morning Cartoon

Okay, it has nothing to do with video games but who isn't excited to see The Watchmen movie?

It was a rhetorical question.

The movie drops tomorrow, but until then, enjoy this mock Saturday Morning Cartoon by HarryPartridge:

Genius. Gotta love the nuances, and my thanks to King-mag.com for pointing this one out.

-Unfather

Flashbang's Blush flOws like Spore (the fun parts, that is)

It's sometimes surprising if not downright amazing what social networking can do for you. I really only joined Twitter to compliment fortytwo points with some real-time updates and I never thought it would actually lead me anywhere I cared to be. This parts not surprising, but I was wrong.

As I investigated my few followers in an effort to determine how crazy they must be to have taken an interest in my Twitter account, I found that one of them (at least) probably isn't an individual. Instead, they turned out to be a gaming service.

Now, this is exactly why I never did and really still haven't gotten into the whole web 2.0 hoopla. You're a less valuable community when someone starts using your channels to hawk their wares in what will probably be an apparently objective manner. It's not wrong to sell shit through creative means, but it is wrong to think that someone's your friend and to friend them as if they actually were. Take a look at Tila Tequila. No one in the world actually likes her and yet she has millions of online "friends". Am I the only one who finds a service that facilitates this kind of madness unappealing?

GTA: Chinatown Wars Brings the Franchise Back to its Roots

Rockstar will remind us where the Grand Theft Auto franchise came from next month with their brand new Nintendo DS exclusive GTA: Chinatown Wars, and the best part is, they're bringing some great new stuff to the series in the process.

Set in Liberty City once again you play the role of a young man who's father has just been murdered. As you set off to deliver some prized family heirlooms to your uncle, you are attacked and they are stolen by the same Triads who murdered your kin. Driven to take back what's yours and to avenge your father's fate in the process, you set off to make things right once again.

Many seem want to forget it sometimes, but the first two GTA games were exclusively top-down affairs (if no less controversial), and some may even remember the occasionally pinball-like nature of the scoring system. Though the later does not return, the former does, and you control young Huang Lee (the protagonist) from the sky once again, this time with the debatable benefit of cel-shaded graphics. Much of the action is still true to the nature of the series in that you'll be beating down defenseless prostitutes and skidding over crippled pedestrians to your heart's content, but there are some key changes meant to breathe new life into the series and that should be noted.

The Twitterati Grows by One

I've been trying to avoid entangling myself in the social networking scene since I became a Digg user a few years back because, frankly, I just don't care. It's hard for me to believe that people really care what you're doing every second of every day, but the times have shown me that apparently, they do. I was doing a damn good job up until about an hour ago, but now it is all for naught. With a reluctant sigh, I have joined the Twitterati.

I knew I was going to have to buckle under the pressure of at least one of these gimmicks and I finally decided that if this one's good enough for Kevin Rose, it's good enough for me. You can see my Twitter page here.

I should warn you now that if you're interested in knowing what I ate for dinner or when I last took the dog out for a walk, you're going to be sorely disappointed. I will occasionally post something irrelevant just for kicks of course, but for the most part I will be using it as an additional outlet to spread my opinion of the gaming industry and games themselves. So in that way, it should make an excellent addition to the site. You can see the Twitter widget/updates in the right sidebar, under the recent posts (FortyTwitter. I know it's not clever but I have a theme going here).

Recent Site Changes

In order to get out of doing any real work, I've been tweaking the design of the site lately and trying to get things to look the way I want them to, rather than the way they have to. Today I made some huge strides in this regard. Some of my favorite changes include:

- The Calendar has been removed from the sidebar and given its own navbar button. It pained me to do this as I wanted to keep it on the front page, but it just wasn't working. I plan to put it back as soon as I can, potentially as a footer. Let me know what you think of this

- Navbar now has text roll-overs so that there's some feedback when you mouse over them

GTA IV DLC Gives us Wang and We Say "Thanks?"

1Up's Kat Bailey shared with the world yesterday some ground-breaking news; there's gonna be dick in GTA IV's Lost and the Damned DLC. Now, that's probably not going to be the reason why Xbox Live owners pick it up today (it's out today, remember?), and it's probably not going to be appreciated amongst the seemingly homophobic GTA IV community, but it is significant for the precedent it sets. Mainstream games, or their DLC at least, can now have full frontal.

This may be the beginning of a new area of art house-style experimentation amongst game developers or it may be the porn industries first serious foray into the digital entertainment market. Either way I welcome this shift in atittude, despite the fact that I will be skipping past this particular part of history. It means new people will work with games and that in turn will generate new ideas (even though the first few will probably suuuuck). Rockstar has opened a door that someone only had to dare open, and now every one else can benefit from it.

You probably don't, but if you want to see the first schlong rendered in a popular video game, check out the video below. I won't tell:

(update 2/22/09: dick video got pulled and I can't find another. sorry meat gazers, you're just gonna have to download it)

Okay, I lied I'm totally telling. Your IP is...

-Unfather

Mugen X

Over a thousand characters. A hundred stages. More fighting than you can shake a stick at. I'll be back in a few with video.

-Unfather

Taking a Little Break...

Hey hey hey.

My last post wore my ass out. Hard to believe that writing can do that, I know, but when you try to make a solid story out of nothing but internet speculation it can lead to much frustration and distaste for staring at a monitor.

I have some questions to prep for my upcoming post and our good friend TidalSpiral is hard at work on his next piece. Lord of the Ring fans should prep fresh knickers cause he's got some short-staining bad news, I hear. We also have some iPhone game reviews coming your way so keep an eye out for that, too.

Anyway, today is going to be a little light on my part. Resting my eyes and trying to get you some answers you actually care to hear means I'll be on the couch and not typing too much. So why don't I buck the workload onto you?

I need ideas. I mean, I have ideas, but I need ones that I know you want to hear about. Want us to review Gears of War 2? Drop us a line and let us know. Want to get our two-cents on the casual gaming industry and it's affect on our beloved art? Drop us a line and let us know. Want to just shoot the shit and talk about breast physics? Drop us a line and let us know, or hit the forums  'cause I'm paying for that specifically so people have a place to talk about titties.

I'll be sure to keep you... POSTED (HA!). Thanks for checking in and just so you know, chances are my next update is probably gonna be a sketch ;)

-Unfather