PixlBit

The mainstream press is catching wind of this maelstrom, and boyoboy, it ain't pretty.

In shit-throwing contests, there are no winners. Only losers.

My Twitter account has lain dormant for years. I should probably delete it, because I hate Twitter. It's mostly a cesspool of quasi-celebrities, grandstanding politicians, and keyboard sociopaths. 

If you're talking about used games, your blame is misplaced. Nintendo doesn't set the prices of used games/systems, and they don't make a dime from them. Used games sell at what the market will bear, and Nintendo's games command a premium price on the used market.

Ni no Kuni makes me wish Ghibli had done more games (the reason they didn't was a really bad Nausicaa game made during the 1980s that Miyazaki felt completely bastardized the movie). Valkyria has the Great War/Roaring Twenties flavoring of Porco Rosso.

On Ni no Kuni's battle system: It had a slight learning curve, but once I got past that, I actually really enjoyed it and found its battles better than the vast majority of RPGs I've seen. It's pretty fast-paced action and the battles are usually pretty brief.  On boss battles you do have to watch the boss's body language so you can put your party into defense mode against a big attack.

Dragon's Crown is probably the best beat-em-up I've played since Konami's licensed brawlers from the early 90s. Up to 4 players, online or offline.

The Simpsons Arcade game is also on PSN and XBLA, for that matter.

Anarchy Reigns (PS3/360), from Platinum Games.

Love this game. In fact, it ranks second behind only Valkyria Chronicles as my favorite game for the PS3/Wii/Xbox 360 generation.

LOL. I actually have Ehrgeiz and Other M. And I enjoyed both games a lot. Ehrgeiz is a good fighting game with a lot of extra content. It's no VF or Tekken, but it's still good. Other M had some hammy acting, yeah, but the action is solid and the visuals are great for a Wii game.

I've also been curious about Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures. I watched a couple episodes of the cartoon on Netflix, but the game looked pretty good anyway, and Namco has been my go-to third-party game maker for the past couple of years.

Hey, don't get me wrong. I was as big a fan of NP back in the day as anyone else, and I wish they still had NP today. If you wanted actual strategy tips for your games, NP was pretty much the only game in town even after mags like GamePro, EGM, etc came on the scene. I certainly wasn't cynical enough back then to understand, let alone care, that NP was a big part of Nintendo's marketing machine.

To be fair, Nintendo Power was a marketing magazine put out by Nintendo itself, so their ratings basically picked winners and losers in Nintendo's ecosystem, especially in the early days when Nintendo still had enough clout in the game industry that they could make even Sam Walton shake in his shoes by threatening to withhold shipments to Walmart. But NP, to its credit, had lots of game maps and hints, whereas a lot of gaming mags today are a bunch of questionable reviews. :)

Simply put, the video game industry has matured and is now in the hands of suits on both the publishing and journalism sides of the industry. And while Siskel and Ebert were powerful and respected enough that they could afford to piss off Hollywood, game journalism is in a very financially shaky place and the big Western publishers have them by the curly hairs. Ubisoft went on a bitch-fit against 1UP after they were unkind to the first AssCreed. Shoe stood his ground, but Ubisoft blackballing them probably hurt the site quite a bit and contributed to its miseries later on.

The book on which the Grave of the Fireflies film is based has many autobiographical elements. Akiyuki Nosaka, the author, lived through the firebombing of Kobe that was depicted in the film. His adoptive father was killed during the bombing, his two sisters died of illness and malnutrition during the final stages of the war.