Nintendo Files Lawsuit against HackYourConsole.com

Nintendo Files Lawsuit against HackYourConsole.com
Online Business Targeted in Global Piracy Fight
REDMOND, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- In the ongoing global fight against video game piracy, Nintendo of America Inc., has filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida against the owner of HackYourConsole.com. The site blatantly promotes and sells unauthorized Nintendo games along with devices and services that circumvent the security in the Nintendo DS system and the Wii console.
The operator of HackYourConsole.com has developed a global business focused on selling unauthorized copies of Nintendo games and game-copying devices (such as the R4 device) used to circumvent the technological protection measures contained in the Nintendo DS family of hand-held systems. The website operator, for a fee, also provides services to hack and modify the Wii console and allow the play of illegal software.
HackYourConsole.com also claims to be an authorized distributor for the yet-to–be-released 3DS Gateway cards. The Gateway device is promoted as operating similar to the R4 game copier for the Nintendo DS, which facilitates the play of illegally downloaded games. Game copying devices, such as the R4, severely undermine the sales of video games created by thousands of developers.
“Piracy on the Nintendo DS system has a huge impact on games sales,” said Jools Watsham, co-founder and director of Renegade Kid. “It can affect everyone involved, including the many honest players out there. If independent studios, like ours, are unable to recoup the money they invest into game development, through the sales of their games, we will unfortunately see fewer independent games developed in the future.”
Illegal copying of video game software is an international problem that continues to stifle the growth of the creative development community. Companies such as Nintendo, various law enforcement authorities and trade organizations such as the Entertainment Software Association, continue to take aggressive steps to prevent the proliferation of these devices on a global scale.

Now, I can't say how true any of this actually is, as I've never heard of HackYourConsole.com. I actually read a similar statement by someone from Renegade Kid, saying that they would leave the 3DS if piracy got bad, blaming it on the poor sales of Dementium 2. Now, I've played Dementium 2: The Ward, and I can safely say that I know why it didn't sell. Renegade Kid did a good job on Mutant Mudds, but the controls for Dementium 2 are god-awful. There's a reason why FPS's use two analog sticks. Personally, I didn't like Dementium 2, and I see that as a reason why it didn't sell well (Or rather, it sold half as much), rather than rampant piracy, but that's just my take on things. Maybe people just bought it used off someone who played it before, because it wasn't worth full retail, or maybe there were other reasons. Bottom line, I'm pretty sure that Dementium 2 sold half as good as its prequel because it wasn't as good, not because people pirated it (Which probably would have happened anyways)
Now, I'm not entirely certain, but doesn't the R4 have more uses than just piracy? Doesn't Nintendo use similar things to develop games for their consoles? I don't know, but I do know that the R4 can also be used as a media player (Which is something Nintendo should have thought of when making the DS). If you don't want the hackers to hack your console, just cram it full of user-friendly features that everyone wants. Sure, they'll still go after it, they always do, but there'll be less motivation for people to hack it if it's already got everything you can ask for in it. The bottom line is that no matter how secure and strong your locks are, there's always someone with a bigger hammer, or better picks. Nothing is going to stop people from tearing a device open, both physically and metaphorically. Someone will always find a way around a wall in their path. What you need to do is make people not even notice a wall is there, by creating something so good that the wall doesn't even exist.

Les Misérables

Les Misérables is a movie that I never want to see again, and that's not the insult that it sounds like.
I was originally going to review Battlefield 3 this week, but this movie demands attention.
I'll be honest, I only got this movie because of the cast. Hugh Jackman, Russel Crowe, and Anne Hathaway were really the only reasons I watched it. And I have to say, it's the best movie of 2012. That's a major feat, considering the kind of stuff that came out that year. With The Grey, The Avengers, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, MIB3, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises, Total Recall, Alex Cross, Skyfall, Wreck-It Ralph, and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey out that same year, that is one hell of an accomplishment. The music is powerful, the movie is compelling, and the entire thing wound up making me cry. That too, is saying something. I didn't cry for Forrest Gump, I didn't cry when The Tenth Doctor died, I almost teared up at the Doctor Who second series finale, the last thing that actually made me cry was the Doctor Who 2011 Christmas special, The Doctor, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. This movie had so much of an impact on me that I never want to see it again, for fear of tainting the memory of it, and fear of getting extremely depressed. Everyone in the movie could sing extremely well, and even though I don't usually like musicals, I like this. It's worth a 10.2* rating. Go out to your local library, check this movie out, and get yourself a couple boxes of tissues, because you'll need them. I'm sorry that the review is so short, but words fail me this week, the movie has to be experienced, not summarized. I'll see you next week with Battlefield 3.

Worlds of Power: Metal Gear, a book based on the best selling NES game by Ultragames

Ultragames was a subsidiary of Konami designed to get around Nintendo's NES era policy of only allowing developers to release five games a year on their console, Ultragames was Konami's way of localizing games more efficiently than, say, Squaresoft.

The very first thing I noticed about this book is the synopsis on the back, they refer to Solid Snake as Justin Halley.
The Halley I don't have a problem with, since they never revealed his last name in any of the games to my knowledge, but in Metal Gear Solid, his name is David. I don't know if this was a translation error, and his name was always David in Japan, or if they just made up a name for the American version of the game, or if Scholastic made the name up to be able to address him as something other than Solid Snake, but it doesn't match up with series canon no matter how you look at it. Immediately after opening the book I found that the inconsistencies with established canon don't end there. They namedrop FOXHOUND at the beginning of the book as the unit of which "The Snake Men" are a part of. I haven't played the NES game, but according to Wikipedia, this was one of Scholastic's many changes to game plots in their Worlds of Power series.
Another thing I need to address might seem minor, but they edited Snake's gun out of the picture on the cover of the novel. Another small thing, the book never calls him "Justin" or "Snake" it's always "Justin Halley" or "Solid Snake". It just sounds awkward. The plot is this: FOXHOUND has sent fifteen Snake Men in to take out a weapon called "Metal Gear" in a place called Outer Heaven. Sounds like the first game, right? Well, it's not. It's based on the NES game, not the MSX game, as the cover (And title of this article) should display. Metal Gear is a computer, and not a nuclear equipped walking battle-tank, Outer Heaven is a fortress inside a country, rather than the country itself, and the guy Snake is going up against is named Vermon Cataffy. Yes, you read that right, and no, I'm not making this up. Outer Heaven is a base somewhere inside Libya, and Metal Gear is some version of Skynet in this book. Anyways, because sending the fifteen in to take it out wasn't enough, Colonel South (Not Campbell, South) sends Solid Snake in, the best of the best, a one man army. Sure, seems reasonable considering the typical plot of Metal Gear games, but there exist thirty Snake Men in the novel, and a flimsy excuse for not sending the other fifteen in is given. On that note, they coulda sent all thirty in and the problem would have practically taken care of itself!
Okay, on a less cynical note, the plot of any book based on an NES game would pretty much have to be made up from scratch, because there weren't a whole lot of story-based games in a library of about, I guess 800 to a thousand depending on how many you count (Although, considering this IS Metal Gear, the series which pioneered cinematic games on top of action-stealth, you'd think they'd have more to go on)
There's one scene in the book where Snake, having rubbed his Sneaking Suit (They don't refer to it as such in the book, but I'm gonna call it that) in panther musk, then he happens upon a pack of guard-dogs. What does he do? Climb up a tree? Kill them with his equipment? Act like he's not there and stay out of their line of sight, like in the games? No, he acts like a panther to scare them off. Now, I'm no Zoologist, but I'm not sure that would work in real life, and given that situation in real life, I'd climb up a tree. Now, this IS Metal Gear, and realism is not what we're here for, we're here for the gigantic robots and over-the -top fight-scenes. Unfortunately, the fight-scenes aren't described with a whole lot of detail, and, like I said, Metal gear is a computer, and there's no fight-scene between Snake and Metal Gear. A lot of the dialogue happens at the beginning of the book, and at the end. During the rest of the book it's mostly describing what Snake is doing, and when Snake finds a radio the dialogue sounds like it was copy/pasted directly from the NES game, and the translation from game to book (In addition to translation issues from Japanese to English) are very apparent. I've only ever played the MSX version on the MGS HD Collection, and never the NES version. As a result, I can't tell whether or not if they actually did just copy the codec sequences verbatim, but it still feels out of place in the book. Snake even notices that the codec sequences are strange. In addition to that, when you rescue some of the Snake Men, I'd say that those dialogue sequences were ripped from the game as well. In the beginning of the game, Snake is warned against taking the advice of some of the Snake Men, because some of them mighta turned traitor. This never comes to a head for some reason, but had it, it would have made for a good plot-twist or two. Now, with a unit called "The Snake Men" you'd think that everyone in it would have names like "Solid Snake" "Liquid Snake" "Acid Snake" "Portable Snake" "Liberty Snake" "Snake Eater" "Twin Snake" "Metal Snake" "Solidus Snake" "Silent Snake" and stuff like that, right? Well they also copied all the names from the game too. One of the Snake Men is called "Grey Fox. And he's not named "Frank Jaeger", his name is Frank... Something else that I can't remember, but it's not Jaeger, like it's established as in Metal Gear Solid. Not changing his codename to something else was also a bad idea, because it's out of step with a unit name like "Snake Men".
At one point in time Snake comes across matches and cigarettes. That's perfectly fine, considering that he's always had them in the games, but he passes them up, thinking that they might be poisoned. Why would they be poisoned? I guess they were just sending a message about the dangers of smoking, but there's almost no reason for them to be poisoned (Okay, they captured all the Snake men, but there's no reason for CaTaffy to give your men poisoned cigarettes in preparation for an incursion by ONE GUY.) If he was preparing for an entire ARMY to attack (which would be logical), he wouldn't be expecting ONE GUY to take a random guards coffin nails.
Now, after listing all of this, I actually still like the book. There's a bunch of stuff that's out of place, but being the Metal Gear fan I am, I can sorta forgive an early novelization of an NES game for stuff that didn't get confirmed until 1998 (Unless it WAS confirmed before the novel, in which case there's no excuse).
I give it an 8.9* rating, because despite its flaws, I actually liked reading it. From start to finish I actually liked it. I'll see you guys next week with my Battlefield 3 first impressions.

My camera

It was a tossup between Call of Duty 4, Prince of Persia, and reviewing the World's of Power Metal Gear novel, but I figured I'd try something different this week, a technology review.
I use a Sanyo camera to record all of my videos, pick any of my Youtube videos and you've got an example of the quality. It only records in 4x8 480p, but it fills up a 2GB SD card in about 40 minutes, which is why my earlier videos were recorded in 20/40 minute increments. You can hook up a TV out cable, but the one that came with it only supports mono audio, and you can't connect USB drives to it for larger capacities. You also can't connect it to a PC and use said PC's hard-drive as storage, because it automatically shuts it's interface off and acts like a USB drive. It has an auto-off function that cannot be turned off, just shortened or lengthened (5 minutes or 2 minutes) sure, it saves energy, but if I need to go do something for five minutes and thirty-seconds, the camera shuts off. This wouldn't be a big issue if it didn't have a delay between pressing record and it actually recording after you turn it on with SDHC cards, like the 16GB one I use on a regular basis, and the delay gets longer the more footage is on the card. I've gotten in the habit of offloading all the data I've shot at the end of the day, rather than offloading it when I've filled the card up. Also, at seemingly random times it will stop recording to save the clip and then I have to restart it and it works perfectly fine. So far I've only had issues with the 16GB SDHC card I mentioned before, and not the standard 2GB and 1GBs I was using prior to that. It's not a camera I would recommend to anyone, but it gets the job done. The AVI files it records in get messed up when uploaded directly to YouTube, for some reason the color is split between R, G and B, which is why I have to convert them to WMVs with Windows Movie Maker. I don't know if it's YouTube's problem or the camera's, but it's an annoyance. It also won't record more than one hour, twenty minutes, 28 seconds in one go, which isn't usually a bad thing, but when I'm trying to record a long video, it's a bit of a pain to have to edit the pieces together.
Anyways, it doesn't just record video, it also does stills. The stills come out to a few kilobytes, and the zoom is pretty good. It's an old camera that does the job I need it to, but the age makes it a little hard to work with sometimes. The LCD on the back is dying on and off, with pixels randomly stuck on different colors at different times. The batteries that came with it got sucked down fast, even when it was new, which is why I keep it plugged in at all times. The downside to that is the batteries are never charged when I need them for outside work (although my 3DS is fine for that). I could always do with a better camera, but the new ones are so expensive that I'm sticking with this one until it dies, or my TV dies and I have to get a widescreen.
All in all, it's a fine camera, the stuff that annoys me might have been fixed with software updates or whatever, but I don't know. I'll get back to games and other stuff I can look up on Wikipedia next week.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Well, I played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 a while ago, might as well review it.
I didn't play CoD4 before I played this, and after having done so, I really don't think it would have made much difference if I had. It starts off with a series of flashbacks to Modern Warfare, essentially recapping what happened in CoD4, but still telling you nothing about the actual plot of the game. There's a lot of military-style music in this game that sounds like it was copied out of Metal Gear Solid 2 (I know saying that one military game copies music from the other is like saying that Chrome copies Internet Explorer by nature of having the feature of browsing the web, but there's a LOT that reminds me of MGS2 in this game)
The controls are nice, and pretty much everything a shooters controls should be. Not at all spaced out, very intuitive, and easy to learn and use. There was a fair bit of repetition, and the game was a bit short, clocking in at around eight hours of play time. That being said, I enjoyed every minute of it. Call of Duty gets a whole lot of flack from one side, and the other side over-rates it. I'm somewhere in the middle. I really like it, I like its controls, the characters, the gameplay and the story, but it has a few issues. For being touted as a "realistic shooter" some of the textures are low-res (Especially ground ones), while others can take a while to load in. The loading-screens are hybrid load-times and cutscenes, so unless you're in a hurry you'll probably not be bothered by loading times (Although they'll sometimes start playing even if you're just reloading a save from the checkpoint). The swapping from character to character can be a bit confusing at times (Mainly due to the fact that you swap between about four or five. It'd really help to play Modern Warfare before you start controlling Soap, just so you know who he is), but I tended to ignore it because I was having a whole lot of fun. I preferred the stealth sections to the outright action-based ones, mainly because I like Metal Gear Solid a whole lot and partially because it was more fun (And a bit more intense) sneaking around an enemy area, moving right past armed guards and letting them live than it is to kill everything, because I could imagine their superiors chewing them out when they found out that I'd crawled right past them and they didn't notice!
Now, the similarities to Metal Gear Solid: first thing is that you at one point see Soap Mactavish from CoD4. You serve alongside him, and at one point in time another character from CoD4 shows up and helps you out for the rest of the game. Also, the opening music is, like I said above, very similar to the opening of Metal Gear Solid 2. The menu-theme sounds like the title-screen to MGS3, and like I said, the stealth elements exist. Remember when I said that you find a character from CoD4 somewhere in the game? Well even after playing CoD4 I still didn't understand how he got to where I found him, and after that he joins your group.
And now we must address the infamous "No Russian" mission.
At one point in time you infiltrate a terrorists group and accompany himself on a rampage through an airport. You can easily get through it without killing any of the civilians, but about the time that Russian SWAT shows up, you can't proceed without killing them, which is probably the most... Okay, "shocking" isn't the right word, nor is "controversial"...... I think that "jarring" fits better. At the point where you realize that you can't proceed in the game without killing the cops in that level... It's definitely the most jarring moment in the entire game. Infinity Ward touted "dynamic AI" as a feature for this game. According to Wikipedia, one of the functions of this is that "The player cannot depend on enemies to be found in the same locations as a previous play-through because enemies will behave differently each time a level is played."
I'm not sure how true this is, considering that every time I re-spawned at one checkpoint during the mission in Brazil these same two enemies would run out of a building, jump down and run across a patch of grass. This was every time I respawned.
And here we come right into something else: I'd say the game is a little on the short side. Although that might be a good thing, because it doesn't over-stay, or really does it pad the gameplay out too much (although I did have to replay a few missions over and over). I'd say that you could probably finish it in a shorter time-period than I did if you were a bit more skilled with the game than I was. All in all, I'd say it's a good game. You're definitely meant to play Modern Warfare first, and MW3 soon after. It's definitely meant as a package deal, but I'd suggest playing other games in between them in order to break it up, otherwise they might start to grind a bit. Like I said, I actually liked it, despite ragging on Black Ops II in the past. I'd give it a 9.0* rating. It was by no means my first FPS (Or CoD game for that matter) and it will be by no means my last. One thing I have to criticize is the lack of bots in multiplayer, when Perfect Dark had bots in multiplayer nearly a decade before (IDK, but Goldeneye might have had them too).
Someday I might get around to Call of Duty: Ghosts. After playing this I'm actually fairly interested in the series. Enough to get the last game in the Modern Warfare trilogy anyways.

From Russia With Love, a retrospective on my first impressions

From Russia With Love is a third-person shooter based on the James Bond movie of the same name. I picked it up a while ago because people said it was good, and I would have to agree with them. I played the PS2 version, but stopped about the time I got Metal Gear Solid 2 in the mail (That's the ACTUAL Metal Gear Solid 2, not MGS3 with an MGS2 catalog sticker on it)
This game was released in 2005 for most consoles and most regions, being released on the PSP in 2006 and in Japan (Inexplicably exclusive to the PS2) in that year as well, a few months after the release of Casino Royale. A game known as Phoenix Rising (A title that was originally going to be used for Everything or Nothing) was intended to be released, starring the likeness and voice-talent of Pierce Brosnan, but it was canceled in favor of this one. It stars Sean Connery as James Bond, and while the character-model looks like him from that film, the voice is Connery's modern one, rather than clips from the movie. That's just nit-picking though. First, I'm going to have to compare it to the other James Bond TPS I've played: 007: Quantum of Solace.
For some reason the PS2 version of QoS was received better than the rest of the games were. I haven't played the other versions of it, but I have to say that I really didn't enjoy myself a whole lot when playing it. For one, the cover-system is annoying in certain places, and some of the stuff you have to do didn't appear in the movie, and the rest of it is mildly confusing and grindy. Plus it cuts out the chase-scene and just makes it into a cutscene.
Now, in FRWL, you're doing a whole lot of stuff that has little to do with the movie, but the game is at least fun. Looking back, the game reminds me of MGS3 (To an almost suspect degree), with its camera-control and stealth, as well as the aiming system being a little off. Like most TPS's, FRWL takes its aiming-system from Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, and like most games that followed Splinter Cell, does most everything that TCSC did a whole lot better. There's a lot of stuff that happened in the game that didn't happen in the movie, but like the Harry Potter games that EA made, they make the game a whole lot more fun than if it was just a straight adaption of the film. Like I said before, the aiming is a bit off at times, to the degree that ammo is sometimes wasted, and not having enough ammo will sometimes kill you. If I remember correctly, I stopped playing the game out of a combination of frustration and the arrival of Metal Gear Solid 2, and I haven't gotten back to the game since. This was the last Bond game made by EA before the lost the license to Activision, who went on to make Quantum of Solace, Goldeneye Reloaded, 007 Bloodstone and 007 Legends. The EA branding might make gamers wary nowadays, but this game was made during their heyday, with games like Chrono Cross, Chrono Trigger, and the Harry Potter series under their belt, back before the DLC policies of Mass Effect, the publishing policies of the EA Sports games, and the DRM policies of Sim City. All in all, I'd say it's a fun game. I'll have more to say once I've finished it.

The World Ends With You: A Retrospective

Lest I forget to review games again, here we go with something I've been wanting to write for a while now.
I didn't really discuss the plot, but that's because it's so integral to the game that I didn't want to spoil it.. I didn't describe the gameplay in-depth, so I'll go into it here. Neku controls by using the stylus and touchscreen to move him around. A lot of the controls (Even outside battle) require you to use the touchscreen instead of the buttons, since the game was designed to be used equally by lefties and righties by default, which tends to annoy my muscle-memory of always pressing A to select something (OFC I might be confusing this with GTA Chinetown Wars, which also did that). On to the combat. In order to fight, you must equip pins. Pins level-up the way you do, except they have a cap as to how much XP they can have. Also, if you don't play the game for a while you get XP for how long you didn't play it, which can be easily abused by setting the DS's clock ahead a few years. However, even after XP farming my strongest pins that way the final boss was hard to beat. In fact, even the regular bosses were hard to beat that way! The combat consists of you moving through combo-chains as your partner via the D-pad or the face-buttons. As I mentioned before, the constant tapping of the sharp d-pad on my DS lite led to me developing a rough-patch on my left thumb, as well as some cramps (Partially due to the size of the DS lite and its stylus compared to my hands, and partially because of the gameplay) afterwards. Now, the partner combat actually requires you to pay attention to what you're doing on both screens rather that just paying attention to one screen at a time, which at first proved challenging, but after a while became second nature. Neku's combat consists of you touching the screen with the stylus in a way that activates the pins he's wearing. Depending on what brand your pins are they may get a bonus or a negative depending on how popular the particular brand is in each area of the Shibuya shopping district (an actual place in Japan, and as far as I can tell, is fairly accurate). Your health-bar is shared between Neku and his partner, and when both ends of the green bar meet, you're in trouble. Same goes for the enemies, they share an HP bar between screens too. It all works together seamlessly as soon as you get used to it.  The story is very compact, and by the time I was done with it I felt some combination of worn out and satisfied with it all. A sequel would be fine, but it doesn't really need one. I'd rather it end on a high-note than have a cash-in sequel for the 3DS just because it was the second top-selling DS game in Japan and the top-selling one here.
All in all The World Ends With You is a must-own title for the DS (And by the way, the title DOES get explained eventually). I have to say that it's probably my favorite DS game, the characters feel human (Despite strange proportions), the plot is interesting, and the game is altogether fun from start to finish. There was one part where you had to wear a certain pin around certain areas in order to increase its popularity (By the way, fighting with different brands of pins can increase their popularity there, although I never noticed any pluses or minuses for having more popular pins or less popular ones, despite the game telling me so) and that's the only part of the game that seems out of place. (The pin just slows Neku down and replaces one of your regular pins)
Now, I forgot to mention the food mechanics and clothing ones. Clothes require a certain bravery score to wear them, and you increase it by leveling up, which allows you more benefits that the clothes impart. Unfortunately, without spoiling anything, when your partners leave, so do the clothes they're wearing. On the flip-side, money pretty much comes easy, so there IS that. Food gives your permanent bonuses to your HP, Bravery, or certain other scores (If I remember correctly), so it's not a worthless mechanic. I enjoyed every bit of the game, even the Tin-pin slammer minigame once I got the hang of it.
See you next week with more reviews!