Gaming Today

10 Ill-Advised Video Game Tattoos (LIST)
The PS3 Could Have More Lifetime Sales Than the Xbox 360 Within the Next Year
Major Nelson’s 360 Numbers, and New Dashboard Update Goes Live Very Soon
PS3 Outsells 360 Last Quarter
Walkthrough Weekend: Fable 3, Fallout: NV, Force Unleashed 2, Vanquish

10 Ill-Advised Video Game Tattoos (LIST)

Posted: 29 Oct 2010 05:37 PM PDT

Okay, I like games as much as just about anybody and I’m not denying that the video game culture can and has shaped the lives of many, many people just like me. And I also understand the primal need to brand yourself permanently with something you enjoy as a means of propping yourself up as a “unique” and storied individual. Using someone else’s intellectual property to define yourself is very important in the world today.

But if you’re going to slap somebody’s cartoon on your body forever, it’s not something you should rush into. You certainly shouldn’t let your in-training tattoo artist cousin ink you with his first attempt at a rough sketch of Kratos eviscerating Master Chief so you can prove your undying love to the Sony gods. Spend some money. Shop around. Make sure the person drawing your video game tattoo has a firm understanding of just how important Shy Guys were to your development as a human being.

You also might want to hit the gym some beforehand. Just saying.

By way of example of what not to do, we present the following: 10 ill-advised tattoos, for various reasons. Hopefully this will cause you kids to think twice before you take the dope and run off to your nearest Target and start jabbing yourselves with Sharpies.

10. Clown Samus

Here’s an interesting choice — rather than opting for the more technically interesting and proportionally correct Samus Aran of later Metroid iterations, this tattoo sides with the little-remembered NES “Cotton Candy Gun” version of the space bounty hunter.

I appreciate this depiction of my favorite Nintendo hero, as she is so proficient in dispensing cotton candy to hungry, excited children, she doesn’t even have to look in the direction that she’s aiming. I can get behind Clown Samus, using her years of training in space bounty hunting to bring joy to children at your local county fair. She’s a hero, but she also gives back to her community.

9. Respect your art school training

Remember when we were talking about making sure the guy who is drawing a picture on your body with a stabby implement actually has the ability to draw the things you want him to? This is why — because if you don’t, you could end up with a pile of cartoons on your arm that look like they’re recovering from facial reconstructive surgery.

If you’re nerdy enough to get Mega Man, Mario and Link seared into your flesh (okay, you’re right, tattooing isn’t really a “searing” kind of action, but I’m quickly running out of synonyms for “branded like so much livestock”), you’re nerdy enough to care about accuracy in your imagery. I can’t get past the fact that Mega Man has a bulbous muffler attached to his arm, Link has some kind of spinal deformity, and Mario is less like a heroic monster-stomping plumber and more like a guy whose overarching ambition is to bags groceries for a living.

Although that might also describe the guy who willingly paid for this tattoo.

8. There’s a duck in your pants…?

I’m not really sure I get this one. Maybe it’s the convex nature of the imagery slapped on this dude’s firm and swelling gut. Is he trying to depict that he’s packing digital heat and that he could draw those Zappers and sling some hot light in the direction of any stray laughing dogs?

I dunno. I’m not really sure why you’d want the NES light gun flanking your real-life love gun anyway. Seems like it draws unwelcome comparisons in the follow-up to a date: “Want to have sex?” “You know, I really have a craving to play Wild Gunman — do you have that?”

And with that gut, it’s not like you can pull it back with some kind of sexy dance or something. So you just got c-blocked by a toy from 1985. Way to plan ahead.

7. A chest-wide montage of awkwardness

There’s such a thing as overkill. Any tattoo containing Q*Bert qualifies for this category.

For the most part, I think this one speaks for itself. However, allow me to point out the tasteful wrap-around of the nipples by the artist, preserving those tiny lions’ manes of cultivated, whispy nip-hair from discomfort, and yet still allowing their owner to display them proudly alongside those long, exceptionally muscular Q*Bert legs.

6. Lamest possible conclusion

There’s only one thing worse than a badly drawn tattoo — and that’s thinking you can improve on a badly drawn tattoo with a “brilliant” idea. Like Master Chief popping off his helmet at the end of a hard-fought, galaxy saving alien war to reveal that he’s actually a kid-friendly platforming fat guy.

This is a classic example of why you should make sure you can pay for the tattoo you really want. Mario Chief here smacks of a last minute decision to combine two marginal tattoos into one really, really terrible one. Next time you’re impulsively about to ask some artist to make you a piece of advertising for some company’s flagship cash-cow, ask your friends for a couple of bucks. You’ll only have your whole life to pay it back.

5. Even your tattoo thinks you might be a rapist

Sorry, guy. You chose poorly with this one. Points awarded for the creativity of trying to create a fighter jet cheesecake pinup out of a cartoon video game character. Points deducted by going to someone who drew her with the shoulders and build of a man and the frightened expression of a woman walking to her car in the dark, in a horror movie in which no one’s been murdered for a while.

Look, people judge you by your tattoos. Some do it professionally, in print, on the Internet. This is not one that’s going to score you any points, particularly with the ladies. A tattoo like this says several things:

I take Mario far too seriously, and probably have creepy Mario porn fanfics on my computer at home. Which I wrote.
I have little, if any, understanding of women. Also I’m openly attracted to cartoons.
I have little to no money, as evidenced by how awful my tattoo looks.
I’m quite probably an idiot, seeing as I’m willingly showing off my painfully bad tattoo for the benefit of your Internet photos and mockery.

Newsflash — none of those impressions helps in convincing women to give you their phone number. You’re actually increasing your chances of getting pepper sprayed.

4. Maybe you could pretend it’s a birthmark…

Or a deformity.

Although I guess if you’re going to get an instantly dated pop culture tattoo, you could do worse than Pac-Man. Around the time your skin starts to sag, making the tattoo unrecognizable, most everyone will probably have forgotten about Pac-Man anyway. Which means you can say the tattoo is anything — a symbol of your lost islander tribe’s ancient heritage of eating and battling ghosts, perhaps. Or a depiction of your respect for dead elders. Maybe a visual display of your womanhood being pursued by the spectre of male-dominated patriarchy and the cherry of equality and freedom, within reach but still requiring work to achieve.

Conversely, you could save yourself the effort and just grow your hair out. That sort of brand loyalty might fly over at Namco, but if you expect to ever be allowed the responsibility of working the drive-thru window, you’re going to need to cover up the 8-bit section of your face.

3. Adding potential for racism to beloved characters

I haven’t really got anything funny to say about this — at this point I’m just trying to process the information flooding my visual cortex without suffering an aneurysm.

Side note: I always got the impression that Crash Bandicoot was…I dunno, Australian? Anyway, were there mad scientists on the side of the North during the Civil War, or is he just endorsing racism? Can fictional pixelated animals be racist? Where does someone get a hold of a pair of those kick-ass glasses? How much regret at seeing that emblazoned on his skin every morning has accrued in this guy over the last 1,141 days since that picture was taken?

2. A meditation on Kratos in Silly Putty

It’s hard to make fun of this guy because it’s very possible he doesn’t really have much idea of the holocaust of dignity that takes place on his back every single second of every single day.

I mean, sorry to tell you this, dude, but this looks like you stretched Kratos’ face out and then stapled it to a soft round hunk of cheese. I think you were going for “menacing” or “scary,” but that one eye kind of looking off in a funny direction conjures up “kicked by a mule” or “fell down some stairs” more than anything.

Man, it just looks like a big cow with a scar, doesn’t it?

1. Everything awesome in a single tattoo

The quintessential tattoo. If ever a guy had thought of the single greatest tattoo ever, this is that guy, and he has that tattoo.

You learn everything you need to know about this guy within nanoseconds of seeing his iconography. He may as well have slapped “Steve, incredible badass” across his forehead — the message is the same, only this is so much cooler. Its purification and distillation of Steve’s essence is probably why he snapped this bathroom mirror Myspace profile pic of it. This is all you need to know about him.

I’ve really got to hand it to this guy for finding a way to combine such totally unrelated elements in a way that speaks to the overall awesome of all of them. Let’s break it down so we can see how Steve (that’s the hypothetical name I gave him) achieved such permanent, unremoveable, lifelong greatness.

He started with Jesus. He gave credit where credit was due.
But anybody can have a cross tattoo so he stepped it up with the marijuana leaf, signalling that cannabis, too, is important in everyday life and spiritual and personal health.
And then he threw in Bowser, the greatest villain of anything ever. Forget classical asskickers like Dracula or the Borg or zombies — Steve knew that a giant Princess-kidnapping Turtle-Dragon embodies the struggles of the human condition for enlightenment against the ever-present oppression of mediocrity, laziness and fiery cruelty. The sunglasses, of course, represent the blindness inherent in the search for true love.
And he gave him a guitar! And not just any guitar, but a double guitar, as Bowser’s fire-breathing plumber-fighting prowess is surpassed only by his musical ability. It also is meant to signify that physical limitations like having only three fingers to play an instrument with 12 strings cannot hold back Steve’s indomitable will.
Finally, Bowser is on a surfboard — the balance between the spiritual and the physical is achieved, but Steve knows that balance is precarious and he must maintain vigilance, lest he topple bodily into the raging surf of self-destruction. It can be spooky, but he and Bowser always have that marijuana leaf if they need to mellow out a bit.

Honorable Mention

You’ve seen it. You cannot un-see it.

The PS3 Could Have More Lifetime Sales Than the Xbox 360 Within the Next Year

Posted: 29 Oct 2010 03:41 PM PDT

According to Sony, the PS3 has sold 41.6 million units since its release in November 2006. According to Microsoft’s financial reports (they don’t have it neatly laid out the way Sony does), the Xbox 360 has sold 44.6 million units since its release in November 2005.

That’s a very small difference, and in this calendar year, the PS3 has dominated the 360, selling 8.1 million consoles compared to 5.8 million 360s sold — the PS3 won in every individual quarter this year as well — and that’s even with the new 360 S hitting the market this summer. Logically, though, the difference between Microsoft introducing the new 360 and Sony bringing out the new PS3 last year is that the slim PS3 came with a price drop while the 360 S did not.

From the beginning of Microsoft’s last fiscal year — which began in July 2009 and is when the PS3 slim was released — to now, the PS3 has sold 17.8 million units to the 360′s 13.1 million units. And then we must consider that the PS3 managed to sell more units this past quarter (3.5 million) than it did the quarter the PS3 Slim was released (3.2 million), which is not an insignificant fact.

If the PS3 keeps up the pace, it will have higher lifetime sales than the Xbox 360 by the end of calendar year 2011. One wild card, of course, is Kinect, which will be unleashed upon the world next Thursday. But the Move may be enough to counter Kinect; Sony credits the increase in sales this past quarter over the same quarter last year to the release of the Move 15 days before the end of the quarter. The other wild card is the PS3′s blu-ray player. Every day, folks upgrade to HDTVs, and we’ve long known that the blu-ray capability of the PS3 is a big reason why people buy that console.

If the PS3 does catch up to the Xbox 360, it will be remarkable because the PS3 was released a year after the 360 and was thought by gamers to be the inferior console for so long because it had few attention-grabbing exclusives and many of the multi-platform titles released on it were considered to be more buggy than their counterparts on the 360.

Of course, the undisputed king of this console generation is still the Wii; it has about a 30 million unit lead on the Xbox 360 right now. Still, it’s very interesting to see the console fanboys having to do battle now on what is just about a level playing field for once.

Major Nelson’s 360 Numbers, and New Dashboard Update Goes Live Very Soon

Posted: 29 Oct 2010 02:04 PM PDT

This being “fun fact day” because everybody’s been revealing their last-quarter results in the past 24 hours, Major Nelson has thrown out some numbers on his blog to show everyone how well the 360 is doing. Here we go:

The are 42 million consoles sold in 35 countries.*
In the last year alone there has been an 157 percent increase in the time spent watching movies and television on Xbox.
42 percent of Xbox LIVE Gold members in the US are watching an average of an hour of television and movies on their Xbox, every single day or more than 30 hours of digitally distributed television and movies a month.
The 25 million members of Xbox LIVE around the world are each spending more than 30 hours per month on the service – that means cumulatively Xbox LIVE members are now logging more than one billion hours a month on the service.

He also says that the new dashboard update, which has been in beta for a little while now, will go live to the public “in the very near future,” which I would assume means “by the time Kinect is released next week.”

*My personal calculations put lifetime Xbox 360 sales at 44.6 million. I think Major Nelson is a quarter behind.

PS3 Outsells 360 Last Quarter

Posted: 29 Oct 2010 01:45 PM PDT

Yesterday, we learned that the Xbox 360 sold 2.8 million units last quarter, and that it outsold “every competing console in the U.S. for each of the past four months.” But is victory in the U.S. the same as victory around the world?

No. Sony revealed today that the PS3 sold 3.5 million consoles in the same quarter (the one that ended on September 30). That’s a slight improvement over the same quarter last year, but the much bigger deal is that Sony also moved 35.3 million software units, a huge increase from the 23.9 million sold in the same quarter last year. Microsoft didn’t release total software sales for the quarter, though, so we can’t compare, but that kind of jump has to mean something, especially since Sony had never before moved 30 million PS3 software units in a non-holiday quarter. Looks like the console wars are getting heated.

Walkthrough Weekend: Fable 3, Fallout: NV, Force Unleashed 2, Vanquish

Posted: 29 Oct 2010 01:11 PM PDT

CPU’s everywhere are taxed to the max as gamers across the land sink their teeth into Fall’s biggest titles. Having endured a relatively quiet summer, the industry rolled out their big guns a little early this year, pre-figuring the holiday game glut with a number of surefire hits. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II, Fable III, Fallout: New Vegas, and Vanquish are all engrossing, epic titles, and the myriad secrets they contain demand careful scrutiny.

Below, we’ve compiled all the insider cheats, unlockables and walkthrough information you’ll need to rampage through the weekend like an unstoppable juggernaut of gaming prowess.

Walkthrough Weekends will be a recurring feature, so check back every Friday to read all the most useful hints, tips, guides and lists from the previous week. That way, you’ll be prepared when 5 o’clock on Friday rolls around. Don’t spend your free time staring at loading screens!

The Force Unleashed II