With all the negativity about, here’s the first in a series of things that are fantastic. No griping allowed in these posts.

Dream Theater is finally in Rock Band. I was jazzed about hearing they would have a song in Rock Band 2, but having DLC right now for a dollar is lemon icing.

We’re moving to a new house. The lease is up for some of our friends so our two’s company is turning into four’s company in a sprawling palatial mansion or such. Happening in September.

Being an official. Back in June, with full intentions of learning to become a basketball official for the winter, I signed up to be a football official for the fall as well. Now, ten weeks of training and buying silly costumes later, I’ll be officiating at a Pop Warner scrimmage on the 19th. At the end of August, Freshman/JV/Varsity games start. If I get to officiate a varsity game, I’ll let everyone know! (But not which one. Google has eyes.) I’m sort of excited to give back to the community after a little over three years of living down here. I have high hopes for this. Some of the folks in my association have been officiating since before I was born. Some even made it the whole way up to the NCAA or NFL levels!

I’m not understanding the vitriol surrounding Celebrity Sports Showdown. If the avatar was Mario instead of LeeAnn Rimes, you wouldn’t see 3/4 of the anger. Here’s Joystiq’s news post:

Go skiing with Fergie in Celebrity Sports Showdown: And then kill yourself immediately, please. We suggest taking your copy of Celebrity Sports Showdown, EA Canada’s zeitgeist fart and 12-sport minigame miasma, and wedging it vertically between a few issues of Teeny Bopper Monthly before leaping into it, face first, using the mound of self-pity you’ve buried yourself in over the years as a diving platform. Trust us, it’ll be less damaging to your dignity than spending this holiday cruising over icy bumps with the mistress of lady lumps.

And why anger? Indifference I can see. Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games will surely be a poorer playing game, but it sold three million units. Wii Sports Resort will feature less variety, but will likely be eaten up with a spoon.

I don’t know if the game will be any good or not. I know as much as you do. But the framing aspect of the release and the response thus garnered by the hardcore just fascinates me.

The snark and downright mean-spiritedness coming from “those two” sites is just tiring and disappointing. Would these bloggers say those things to the designers when they inevitably get called up to preview the game? No, probably not. They’ll just mumble out some suggestions while grimacing over that the game isn’t for them. So when they come to write their posts, why aren’t they just honest and say “here’s what we know about the game and it probably isn’t something I’d like and here is why”.

Instead they play the “too cool for school” role where everything is beneath them and they fire off the cheap ha-has like some class clown with self-esteem issues. And if it is too far to make an outright claim such as “Henry Hatsworth rips off Proffessor Layton” which they know to be untrue or disingenuous, then they put some snark into their post or header image and let the troll brigade at it.

You can be snarky if you wish. Hell, I sure am. And you can be mean. We’re big boys and girls. We can take it. Just be honest and fair. And switch it up a bit. It’s okay to like something that may be a little against the grain for your colleagues. It’s all we ask.

Some days I wish I could somehow take the collective Joystiq and Kotaku commentors and strangle them until they are dead. Or: I could work day and night to create a system that inputs Stupid Energy and outputs Electricity. Then I could solve the world’s energy problems by creating a popular blog that talks about popular videogames in a snarky manner.

EA rents out the Rose Bowl and has a shindig.

Midway rents two U-HAULs.

I just picked up the super duper collectors edition today (mainly for Head Coach), but it is nice to see Madden back on top again with an 88 metacritic. Oh, and Gamespot continues to be haters that seem to think every team has unlimited resources. Can’t they just enjoy a game for once?

Via Kotaku regarding Blitz: The League: The Sequel:

Now, you’ll have the opportunity to specifically target an area of the opponent to injure. You have a Clash meter (which fills up after making great plays or late hits), so if your meter is high enough when you’re about to make a sack or tackle, the game will slow down (think bullet-time) and enter into a mini-game where you’ll pick the area you want injure (head, arms, chest, etc…). Once you’ve selected the area, you will have to mash the buttons to get a meter to fill before time expires. The more the meter is filled, the more damage they’ll sustain.

It’s not too often I can get to do this with only the press release/preview info, but… BINGO!

I mean, it could be good. I haven’t played it. But having those four items kick off the previews isn’t a promising sign. I’m sure plenty of fourteen year old boys will eat it up with bread and a coke.

Madden 09 says that the Jets will go 11-4-1 and lose to the Browns in the playoffs with Favre at the helm. Besides predicting a tie game and the Browns in the playoffs, Madden 09 predicts that Ralph Nader will be the next President choosing Harry Connick Jr. as his Secretary of Tunes and that Postal will win Uwe Boll his first Oscar. Further simming shows Jesus returning to Earth in 2017 to start a social networking startup, ham sandwiches becoming the new American currency in 2019 and contact with extraterrestrials will happen in 2027 when a race of highly advanced beings from Alpha Centuri catch the corpse of Carl Sagan in a 419 scam.

After the extatic notes on the MTV Multiplayer blog about Siren: Blood Curse, I decided to boot up the shiny black obelisk and download the demo. While I was in the store browsing the virtual isles, I also grabbed the Pixeljunk Eden demo. I’ll get back to that one.

As a big big fan of survival horror games, I was really jazzed about a new good survival horror game that flew under my radar. I even thought Rule of Rose was pretty good, so you’ll see my standards for the genre are pretty loose.

But the demo was so plagued with problems that even I was turned off. The controls were extremely loose, which in a sneaking game is not particularly useful. The character takes up a huge part of the screen and is always in your way. It reminded me of the camera angle in Skate, except in that game the focus needed only be on your feet and upcoming obstacles. The world was sufficiently bright in that game that visibility was never too big of a problem. The demo was over in about fifteen minutes. In a twelve chapter game, you would think they could have shown me a whole chapter, maybe ending on a cliffhanger? No. The demo ends with me walking down a tunnel.

In the reviews, people keep mentioning the “sight-jacking” feature. If that was in the demo, it was never called out. Finally, the demo wasn’t scary. It wasn’t even tense. Don’t you want to highlight your key experiences in your demo? Sell me the game! You have my attention.

Clearly, I’m missing something as it’s scoring particularly high on Metacritic. If it was any other genre, I’d quit there. But I’m really jonesing for some survival horror action, so I plan on finding out if the rest of the game is like that crummy demo.

Now I had zero expectations for Pixeljunk Eden. The other Pixeljunk games didn’t even strike my fancy enough to download a demo, so I’m not entirely sure what drove me to try this one. After some frustrating false starts, (Why not have seperate jump and swing buttons? I keep doing the wrong one.) I really hit my stride. Not only is the game absolutely beautiful in screens and in motion, but the exploration mechanics get to be a lot of fun the higher you go in each garden. Even the beautiful world map plays like the rest of the game. It’s not just a game that looks pretty and has no substance. And contrasting with the Siren demo, I played for about an hour and a half and still had items to enjoy when I switched it off.

That’s how you do a demo.