This is so much fail…

Don’t ask why, but I was idly brows­ing the Har­riet Carter site, a glo­ri­ous domes­tic baz­zare of gifts for old peo­ple and As Seen On TV prod­ucts, when I stum­bled upon the com­plete fail­ure above.

“Gui­tar Hero® hand­held game packs all the action of the mon­ster video game into a pocket-sized ver­sion you can play any­where!”

O RLY? I bet Free Bird sounds AWESOME on that tiny speaker.  For $17.98 plus ship­ping and han­dling, it even has a cara­biner, so you can clip it to your belt and walk around with an over­priced piece of plas­tic shame dan­gling from your waist.  This is exactly the type of bull­shit clue­less par­ents buy their kids,  try­ing to save a few bucks, only to find it quickly dis­posed and for­got­ten.  They could just take their money to GameStop and buy a used copy of the real Gui­tar Hero for about the same price.

This deserves a spot on my Worst Gifts for Gamers list. Per­haps a Part 2 is in order.

Geeky Gamer Jewelry on Etsy

As the site says on its home­page, Etsy is the place to buy and sell all things hand­made.  Here is a show­case of some of the coolest geeky gamer jew­elry I’ve found there, and the awe­some sell­ers who make it:

Pix­e­lated good­ness from an aptly-named seller,  Pixel Party offers charm bracelets, cuf­flinks, ear­rings, and more in the clas­sic 8-bit style of your favorite video games.

The Gamer Gear Store sells unique-looking hand-sculpted pieces from “all school” video games, as well as other great geeky gear inspired by vin­tage comics and movies.

The Clay Col­lec­tion sells super cute minia­ture poly­mer clay ver­sions of your favorite video game acces­sories, hard­ware, and characters.

For those who want to wear their D20s instead of just rolling ‘em, Candy Corn Stu­dios sells beau­ti­ful, wear­able art made with the real thing.

I really heart the jew­elry that Omega­zoid sells.  Sim­ple plas­tic beads emu­late that 8-bit pixel look perfectly.

The two ladies behind Char­lie Carter Cre­ations sell awe­some clay jew­elry based on video games, and other geeky stuff like Futu­rama, Mup­pets, and child­hood toys.

Know of any other great Etsy sell­ers, or do you make and sell geeky/gamer jew­el­ery too?  Leave me a link to your store in the com­ments and I’ll add it to my list!

Nintendo at E3: Epic Yawn, for the Most Part

Fol­low­ing along with Nintendo’s E3 press con­fer­ence on Twit­ter, the live reac­tions were less than enthu­si­as­tic.  Well, it’s no won­der with a pre­sen­ter like this:

Does she look excited about Nin­tendo to you?

For the most part, Nintendo’s pre­sen­ta­tion ambled along like an old woman with a bad hip.  The over­all expe­ri­ence was so blah, #nin­tend­o­fail was in dan­ger of becom­ing a trend­ing topic for a while there.

These were the lowlights:

• Wii Fit Plus — Some minor improve­ments to Wii Fit, such as omit­ting wait-times between exer­cises and the abil­ity to tar­get spe­cific areas.  Riveting!
• Wii Motion­Plus — Add-on hard­ware to make the Wiimote sen­sors more pre­cise.  Will run you about $20 for some­thing that makes the Wii func­tion the way it’s sup­posed to.  Oh and by the way, some new games will require it, like Red Steel 2.
  (notic­ing a trend here with the tack­ing “Plus” onto every­thing?)
• Ter­ri­ble scripted jokes between Bill and Reggie.
• Final Fan­tasy Crys­tal Chron­i­cles: Crys­tal Bear­ers — Yet another Final Fan­tasy title…
• Women’s Mur­der Club: Games of Pas­sion — New “inter­ac­tive fic­tion” game series for DS, adding another nail to the cof­fin of real adven­ture games.
• Style Savvy — Yet another brain­less pink-packaged game aimed at tweenaged girls.
• DSi cir­cle jerk: over 1M units sold in less than 2 months, and DSi gamers will soon be able to share pho­tos on Facebook.
• Wii Vital­ity Sen­sor — Periph­eral that mon­i­tors pulse rate, ner­vous­ness, etc. I don’t even know what the fuck to say about this…

I’m on the fence about:

• Leg­end of Zelda: Spirit Tracks — Demo playable at E3 this week, but didn’t like the few screen­shots we saw.
• Mario vs. Don­key Kong — Play­ers will be able to design their own lev­els, game­play looked kinda fun.
• Golden Sun DS
• War­i­or­Ware DIY — Gamers can design their own minigames from scratch & share with friends; kinda neat, I guess.
• Res­i­dent Evil: The Dark­side Chron­i­cals — Another on-rails shooter from the RE franchise.

But there were a few sprin­kles of cool:

• Wii Sports Resort — Bas­ket­ball, archery, sky­div­ing & more.
• Super Mario Galaxy sequel — yes, yes, yes!  The demo looked awe­some, the graph­ics bright and beautiful.

And then, sav­ing the best for last, Nin­tendo made up for much of its E3 snorefest with the announce­ment of…

Metroid: Other M

Okay, seri­ously, I want this game NOW!

Update: Penny Arcade sums up my feel­ings exactly.

The New Moon Trailer: OMG Squee!*

*Dis­claimer: I do not ever say things like ” squee ” or other words usu­ally belong­ing to the ver­nac­u­lar of 12 year old  fan­girls, but felt the dis­claimer was nec­es­sary to save me from hav­ing to explain myself to idiots who can’t tell when I’m being sarcastic.

Here’s what all the fuss is about:

If the trailer is any indi­ca­tion, I believe  New Moon is going to suck and suck hard , but it’s really not the filmmaker’s faults.  My lack of enthu­si­asm for the movie can be blamed on author Stephe­nie Meyer’s dread­ful source mate­r­ial.  For your con­ve­nience, and for my own per­sonal amuse­ment, let’s re-cap Meyer’s super-epic plot to the sequel of Twi­light , shall we?

• It’s Bella Swan’s birth­day and her vam­pire friends throw her a party at their digs.
• At the party, Bella gets a paper cut.
• Jasper, one of the newest vam­pires, can’t con­trol him­self when he sees the blood.
• Pre­dictably, he goes into a rage and lunges for Bella.
• Bella’s sexy vam­pire boyfriend Edward Cullen (pause to swoon here) saves the day…
• …But then tells Bella he must leave her for­ever in order to keep her safe, then peaces out.
• Bella can’t han­dle him leav­ing and goes all emo, bor­der­line suicidal.
• That’s okay though, because there’s yet another sexy guy, Jacob Black, just wait­ing around to take Edward’s place.
• And Jacob just hap­pens to be a werewolf.
• Jacob tries to get Bella to “drop that zero and get with the hero” but she ain’t havin’ none, and con­tin­ues to mope around and do reck­less things, like ride motor­cy­cles and go cliff diving.
• At some point Jacob the Were­wolf saves Bella from Lau­rent and Vic­to­ria, two ran­dom vam­pires turned vil­lians, recy­cled from the plot of Twi­light .
• Then out of nowhere, thanks to some weird, poorly-explained mixup cour­tesy of Edward’s sis­ter Alice, who can see the future but fucks it up som­times, Edward thinks Bella com­mit­ted suicide.
• In true Romeo and Juliet fash­ion, Edward decides he can’t live with­out Bella either, and runs off to Italy to kill him­self too.
• But Edward’s a vam­pire, and sui­cide is eas­ier said than done.  Rather than try to explain about the evil Vol­turi and the other bull­shit sec­ondary char­ac­ters that Meyer pulls out of her ass when she needs a plot, Edward’s sui­cide attempt can best be expressed as: DEATH BY SPARKLES.
• Just in the nick of time, Bella saves Edward from expos­ing him­self thus sav­ing him from the Vol­turi and there’s a big dra­matic reunite­ment scene.
• Some other unim­por­tant crap hap­pens in Italy, then Bella, Edward, and the rest of the vam­pires return home.
• Bella wants des­per­ately to become a vam­pire, and so she calls a Super­friends meet­ing where all the vam­pires take turns vot­ing on whether or not it should happen.
• And like the end­ing of  Twi­light , Meyer recy­cles the same “does Bella become a vam­pire or not?” cliffhanger in New Moon .
• The end!

It’s mind-blowing stuff, I know.  If you really want, feel free to read  my less than glow­ing review of the  New Moon book over at Ama­zon.  It’s just all so ridicu­lous, even for a fan­tasy book based on vam­pires.  Most of the book’s 563 pages is spent with Bella, as she pines away for her lost vam­pire love, and let me tell you, it was hell read­ing through page after page of this:

“I was not allowed to think of him. That was some­thing I tried to be very strict about. Of course I slipped; I was only human. But I was get­ting bet­ter, and so the pain was some­thing I could avoid for days at a time now. The trade­off was the never-ending numb­ness. Between pain and noth­ing, I’d cho­sen noth­ing.”

So by default,  New Moon the film should at least be a slight improve­ment over New Moon the book, if only because the nature of the media spares you the lit­er­ary tor­ture.  But Hol­ly­wood isn’t dumb.  It knows there’s good money to be made by cater­ing to the overzeal­ous female fan­base that made the first film such a suc­cess.   Twi­light fans want hot vam­pires, mushy romance, and plenty of Rob Pat­tin­son screen time.  Make no mis­take, New Moon will be one big fan­girl orgy from start to finish.

But why take my word for it when you can read real reviews of the trailer writ­ten by (what I hope are) teenaged girls?

“ok WOW!!! new moon is going to be AH-Mazing, i love kristen’s face when she say ” kiss me” her eye­brow is funny! and the were­wolf, i didnt even expect it to be that big, but OMg i love it!! but tay­lor GOOOOSSH!! i thought he was Hott, now he like fire! but edward was really sad!cant wait! woooo and bella looked eally pretty”

“The part when she got the paper cut and jasper tried to get her but, edward pushed her was so intensed i was like O.O”

“omg omg omg not going to faint but omg. that as freak­ing awsume. may i faint from how hot jacob is. p.s. i think the wolfy looks friendly”

“OMG! This movie looks even bet­ter than Twi­light! It’s dri­ving me crazy cause I wanna see it so bad! Idk if I can wait for Novem­ber 20 to come! Btw: Jacob, so hot!”

Well there you have it.