A Week's Worth of Snark

It has been an incredibly strange week for gaming nerds. And when there's news, there are stupid message board and blog posts to laugh at/be outraged by.

Tuesday was a horrible day with 1Up being sold to the Hearst Corporation, half of its staff immediately being canned, EGM being cancelled, and Gamevideos.com apparently shutting down due to lack of ad revenue. Fortunately those let go seem to be landing on their feet: The 1Up Show crew has done especially well, with their new Rebel FM podcast landing at #2 overall on iTunes (according to Nick Suttner's Twitter feed). And while I pronounced the site dead to me in my last post, it looks like that might have been too hasty; my favorite 1Up writer, Jeremy Parish (not among the fired), has pledged to help keep the revamped site boobie-free.

But as hard as this was for 1Up fans to endure, it has been almost as hard to watch the parade of delusional teenagers blogging on the site about their departure from 1Up, as if they had worked there and been let go themselves. I won't link to any of them, because they seem to be mostly gone from the front page now, and I'll be damned if I'm going to waste time searching for them. Of course everyone grieves in his or her own way, but playing make-believe that you were among the casualties and writing soul-searching blogs about what you'll do now that your time with 1Up is over is not just pathetic, it's insulting to those who were actually affected and now have to find new jobs in the worst American economy since the Great Depression.

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Friday saw a breaking story on a new patent filed by Nintendo, called the Kind Code. Kotaku called it a "potential paradigm shift", which is almost certainly an overstatement, but nevertheless, the technology, which would apparently allow players to select a sort of auto-pilot option during parts of a game which they did not want to (or, more likely, could not) complete, sounds like it could be the next evolution in cheats.

The self-righteous hardcore crowd has reacted to this exactly as you would expect them to: pronouncing Nintendo dead, refusing to play any game that implements the tech (even as an option), even declaring the death of the entire medium. Keep in mind this is just a patent, no plans to actually implement it have yet been announced, and since it was filed in the name of Shigeru Miyamoto, it's unlikely that the system would initially be implemented in any games not for Nintendo consoles or handhelds. Of course the irony is that every time the self-appointed gatekeepers of video games start sounding off about Nintendo's idiocy, Miyamoto and co. rake in another few million yen. Personally, I'm all for the system. I know plenty of non-gamers who have expressed interest in certain games, but ultimately decided against getting into the hobby because of a fear that they could never be good enough to make the investment worthwhile. If technology like this would make them feel more comfortable experimenting with some "core" gaming experiences, that can only be a good thing. With developers and publishers having to lay off staff, anything that could bring more money into the industry (without being anti-consumer) is a good thing.

Finally, there's the strange case of Robert Pelloni, a would-be indie developer who has apparently been singlehandedly crafting his own DS game for five years now. The problem is, Nintendo has refused to let him get his hands on the DS dev kit, for various reasons that Pelloni has addressed in a ranting, obsessive, and almost certainly unreliable way at his site. As a result, Pelloni had started a protest which involved locking himself in his studio for 100 days in order to draw attention to the apparent injustice of Nintendo not wanting to hand their developement tools over to any unstable loner who comes knocking at their door. Sometime late Friday or early Saturday, the protest ended with Pelloni "faking his own death" on his webcam and subsequently being raided by the police after a concerned 4chan user (yes, they can feel concern) tipped off Bob's family and local authorities.

Setting aside for a moment the obvious fact that this stunt has probably ruined Pelloni's chances of ever being taken seriously in the industry (well, maybe Gamecock will offer him a job), the man obviously has greater problems than not being able to get his game published. I have personally known someone who pulled the "death over webcam" stunt, and it is not, as Pelloni is now claiming, "just a joke". Nor is it a publicity stunt. I loathe the term "cry for help", but that's the most common expression for this type of behavior. Hopefully Bob will set his game aside for the time being and get a little perspective before, oh, I don't know, realizing that there plenty of distribution outlets and platforms besides the DS.