Per Gaga herself, this video has a “homoerotic military theme” and is about the “purity of my friendships with my gay friends, and how I’ve been unable to find that with a straight man in my life. It’s a celebration and an admiration of gay love—it confesses my envy of the courage and bravery they require to be together. In the video I’m pining for the love of my gay friends—but they just don’t want me to be with them.”

Check it out for yourself!

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For me, 3D Dot Game Heroes (herein known as 3DGH) was an investment of pure whim. It wasn’t until I saw some dot-composed heroes on my routine Mega Man blog-run that I had even heard of such a title. After some Wiki’ng, I learned what I needed to know. The game was supposed to be a gigantic homage to retro Nintendo games, particularly harking to the classic Legend of Zelda, with the added benefit of total character customization, and apparently it had been hyped-up for some time as the PS3 alternative to Zelda. A couple of positive reviews and a YouTube or two later (and a chat with a very convincing GameStop representative), I gave this underdog a try.

The next day, I traded it back in and cut my losses.

Don’t get me wrong. I totally see what Silicon Studios was going for here. Imagine an old NES adventure RPG. Now take those simple pixellated sprites and pretend they’re composed of thousands of tiny three-dimensional Rubic’s cubes. Splash in a large and shameless dose of Legend of Zelda mimicry, plenty of self-deprecating humor, the ability to compose your own dot-hero, and you’ve got 3DGH. It sounds like it would work, and honestly it does in most respects. Gamers (especially myself) are attracted to the ability to dictate who (or what) they play as. Why should we settle as some generic warrior when you could run around the Lego-like kingdom of Dotnia as a shark, a ninja, or Santa Claus? And that just covers a small sliver of the game’s preset characters. Head into Edit Mode and make yourself your own hero. A wise monk? A police officer? Pikachu? Yeah, toss together whatever you like, then go smack some monsters around as them.

The problem with such a novel idea is that Silicon Studios really missed the mark on the graphical presentation. The idea of taking pixel-made sprites and adding 5 more sides to them is nostalgic in a way that gamers may have dreamed of their favorite game characters in 3-D before polygons came to fruition. However these characters are not composed of “dots” as the title implies. Instead, they are composed of tiny little cubes, each (by default) set with a thick border around the edges. Because of these thick borders, everything in the game appears to be painted over a sheet of graph paper, making it very difficult to differentiate any details at all. Even with the borders removed, the world of 3DGH more resembles a Lego-constructed fantasy than a retro gaming dream-come-true.

And it doesn’t end there. The entire kingdom of Dotnia is just too damn distracting in general. Water rapidly shimmers and sparks like a New York City night club. You’d swear the tile floor of the castle is actually just a virtual rendition of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. And objects in the distance and around the edges of the screen are heavily blurred to enforce a limited field of view, causing me to spend more time checking for a lost contact lens than navigating the map. So that awesome Black Mage you just spent an hour creating? It’s now a convoluted mess of building blocks lost in a sea of over-the-top design choices.

Obviously with only one day of playing 3DGH, I can’t comment much about what the later stages of the game have to offer. I do know that the general set-up is very reminiscent of classic Zelda titles. You traverse in 8 directions, defeating monsters with swords, boomerangs, bombs, arrows, et cetera. You travel to six dungeons to collect the magical orbs while solving puzzles, uncovering treasure, and battling more monsters. The game is sprinkled with tons of nerdy humor and references to older games, and the characters often break the fourth wall in dialogue.

The game’s audio dips into the NES era pool as well, again mostly from Zelda. Characters taking damage emit a little chip-tune “oomf” like Link once uttered in his older adventures. Walking through a doorway creates a static “footstep” sound. Even the soundtrack is one huge Zelda doppelganger, almost as if the composer tried to make it sound as close to Zelda melodies as possible without getting in a lawsuit with Nintendo. Not to say that the soundtrack is bad by any means. There were a favorable amount of chip-tune-styled ditties that I enjoyed. But as a whole, it feels unoriginal.

So to say the game is merely a homage to NES Zelda is a large understatement. To be a homage would mean that the game is inspired by something but still sports enough original content to warrant itself as new. Instead it feels like a generic version of a popular product that small-time companies put out to try and attract the same demographic, like grocery store versions of name-brand cereals. Get it? 3DGH is to Zelda as Honey Nut Toasted Oats is to Cheerio’s. It’s what moms accidentally get for their kids on their birthday instead of the real thing.

But I understand that this was intentional, and I can’t say that 3DGH is truly a bad game. It’s probably a real gas if you can overlook the eyesore it takes place in. It’s a niche title that appeals to a specific demographic that I obviously do not fit into. After all, there are very many redeeming qualities that are evident from the get-go. For example, the character creation offers a lot of freedom to let your dot-creativity roll (as much freedom as one can have building a character out of cubes, anyway).

But the game polarizes itself because of how much of an obscure background in retro-gaming the player is expected to have to fully appreciate the content. And the graphics, though an intuitive idea, do not offer an engaging an experience as I feel the developers wanted.

I ultimately expected more for forty of my hard-earned dollars. And compared to the other entries in a huge library of games you can buy for the same price (or less), I wouldn’t recommend 3DGH to any casual gamers, or even most regulars.

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http://www.popeater.com/2010/05/11/greyson-michael-chance-paparazzi-video-lady-gaga-bieber/?sms_ss=facebook

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The game currently has about 30 characters, with no word on the final amount. We know for sure about Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Wolverine, Ryu, Morrigan, and Chris Redfield. However silhouettes in the official artwork reveal some other characters, some more obvious than others, such as Chun-Li, Felicia, Dante, Super Skrull, Dr. Doom, Captain American, Deadpool, Frank West, and Mephisto.

As for me? Three words: CHRIS FUCKING REDFIELD!!
Full articles here and here

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Yeah, that’s right. Ricky Marty is officially on our team. (I guess it’s better than some of the other trash we have over here on the dark side…)

In other news, the sky is blue.

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Nintendo World Report… uhm, reports…

In a surprise announcement, Nintendo Co., Ltd. released a brief teaser regarding their next portable system. Tentatively called the Nintendo 3DS, the system features three-dimensional gameplay without the need for glasses.

The handheld is set to release sometime in Nintendo’s next fiscal year, which ends March 2011. Nintendo promises that the system with include backwards compatibility with DS and DSi games. Other details regarding the system and its 3D capabilities will be revealed at E3 on June 15th.

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