The Daily Duh: 5/9/05

Guild Wars has made the most elite skills harder to acquire, making it harder to instantaneously generate an ubertwink killing machine. PvPers are outraged. Why could this be? Aren't PvPers just interested in the competition and the challenge? Surely their pleasure doesn't come from simply mowing down newbies effortlessly! I mean, aren't PvP players the sort to deliberately pick skillsets other than the most uber ones for the joy of the challenge? I'm shocked, simply shocked to hear all of this!

Gamespot reports that A gold-seller in WoW made $23,000 in April. It was a bad month - he made over $44,000 in January and February. What we learn here is that being a fuck is still profitable, and that the profit margins plummit rapidly as time goes on. No doubt gold-seller will be buying a nice HDTV soon so he can pwn better. Because gold-seller is the sort of person who cares about that shit.

Also at Gamespot, they have a feature called Burning Questions. Ignoring the fact that the questions aren't particularly burning, except in the THE GOGGLES, THEY DO NOTHING sort of way, ("Is Nokia going to release another handheld?"), question two this week is interesting. Note in it that Gamespot admits that the fact that the graphics on a DS game are worse than the graphics on a PSP game plays into DS games getting lower reviews. Stop here for a moment. Consider. The fact that the DS is a less graphically impressive machine puts all of itgs games at a disadvantage. Now, this makes sense in terms of a comparision between the DS and the PSP... but for individual games? If I have both a PSP and a DS, and I'm contemplating two games, isn't it pretty much a given that I know the DS has less impressive graphics? I probably don't need the damn review to knock the DS game down for that. And if I just own a DS, all my games are going to get knocked down because of graphics? What the fuck does a review site have to gain by assessing an "On a system we don't like very much" penalty to individual games? Oh yeah. Ad dollars. Which might explain the Nokia question too, actually.

There's a Star Wars game based on Episode III out. I wonder if it's better than the Star Wars Pez Dispensers based on Episode I. And doesn't Lucasarts have a policy against the Dark Side winning in games? No links - if you care, you know.

And finally, there exists a game called It's Mr. Pants. More shockingly, the game is American, not Japanese. No punchline is provided for this setup, because, well... It's Mr. Pants!