BOLDSTATE

This is Tortimer, a video game character from the Animal Crossing series. He serves as the mayor of your town in all three of the Animal Crossing games, but he is not a real person. He is a character controlled by lines of code and is only capable of relaying so much pre-programmed dialog. You can usually find him sleeping in his office in town hall, or ambling about on holidays. Journalists in Missouri, however, believe Tortimer is a real person. Jacqueline Lapine, a reporter who gets paid to report factual information of importance to local citizens, believes Tortimer is a sexual predator. Jacqueline is an idiot.

Jacqueline Lapine of Missouri’s ABC17 News claims that Animal Crossing: City Folk is being used by sexual predators to trick children into trading photos online. Lapine is quick to note that Tortimer, a computer-controlled character, “could be the man in California police are warning about tonight that asks for images of Missouri children.”

I’m not sure who was the first journalist to decide that honesty, research, and integrity (staples of good journalism) were not required in reporting about video games. Lapine takes this practice a step further by ignoring the basics of news reporting.

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I was able to complete my review of MadWorld in record time. That’s because the game is short, disappointingly so. The game’s controls and visuals are excellent, but it ends far too quickly. Rent it!

Professor Layton and the Demon God’s Flute. the fourth game in the series, is coming out in Japan this fall. Japan has already rounded the bases and is going for their second homer, but America is still stuck on first having only received The Curious Village over a year ago.

Professor Layton is in limbo.

[Update: At GDC, Level-5 head of publishing, Akihiro Hino, announced that the Layton sequels will all be heading to America, with the second game expected to arrive around September of this year! (src)]

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I’d like to take this time to point out that I’m not impressed with all of Resident Evil 5. There are several elements within the game that have been borrowed from RE4 but were executed quite sloppily. It’s almost as if Capcom didn’t even try at some points.

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For some reason I forgot to shamelessly draw attention to my review of Retro Game Challenge, a delightful collection of “old” new games that we’re incredibly lucky to have received outside of Japan. It features several genres, but it’s more like a simulation of gaming in the 1980′s. Play it!

I spent nearly six hours playing Resident Evil 5 today with a friend (we were close to two-thirds complete when I left), and we love it. It’s like a suped up version of Resident Evil 4, a game we both rank as one of our top favorites. Adam Sessler of X-Play would probably agree that RE4 is a great game considering his show labeled it their game of the year in 2005. Sessler isn’t too pleased with RE5, however. He goes into detail in his written review, video review, and his Soapbox.

While I typically agree with Sessler (especially on Crisis Core), I think he’s dead wrong about Resident Evil 5.

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MadWorld is No More Heroes meets Jet Set Radio meets Sin City.

Allow me to explain.

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Mad World looks good. Not “good…for a Wii game,” but good.

Sure, it may be hiding from the Wii’s glaring graphical inefficiencies in a Sin City/Kill Bill-esque visual quirk, but it’s a clever quirk that I’m sure will allow players to focus more upon the gameplay everyone claims is so much more important.

I’ll be spending my morning with Jack tomorrow, guiding his bloodthirsty chainsaw through pounds and pounds of flesh, producing gallons and gallons of blood, on the Wii no less.

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