Sites Unseen

Finally the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 has been properly analysed by unbiased experts. The results are far from what Sony and Microsoft has actually claimed. It’s not shocking, really. Only clueless fanboys believed their hype anyway. The companies claimed the next consoles are going to be twenty to thirty times more powerful than the current ones. Yeah, right. Actually, they will be merely two to three times better and both of these would have pretty much the same amount of power. Now it makes sense how they’re able to sell these machines within 400 dollars. The analysis is done by the brainy folks at anandtech.com and you can read it at [doiop.com/anandtech]. (Reading the entire tech discussion may cause gouts of blood to jet from your ears.)

More analysis: Nintendo’s Next-Gen strategy
Gaming-Age forum member Chittagong (is this dude a Bangladeshi?) has posted a surprisingly thought-out and coherent take on Nintendo’s next-gen console strategy. [doiop.com/ninty] It’s just an opinion, but it’s an unusually thoughtful one, especially for a topic that tends to turn even the most rationale person into a raving fanboy.

The poster’s basic premise is that Nintendo realizes it’s not number one in the console market, and doesn’t really care. Instead they are focusing on making good games that attract specific gamers and not worrying about beating the competition. [Found in Kotaku.com]

Before proceeding to the usual links, take a look at the picture with this article. If you see some matchsticks, then I can say it’s my photography. Do you like? (It was taken with a cam-phone, so the image quality isn’t that high.)

The usual links:

The GTA Blog
[theGTAblog.blogspot.com]
My fourth site. It’s a cool new blog about San Andreas in which I explore the game world and post pictures and snide comments on weird, funny, whacky, offensive... basically anything that's interesting and can get unnoticed by casual gamers. ROFL-inducers are plentiful in the site, but just like the game, the site is not for children.

I want a game that gives you [psychological-disorder]
[doiop.com/realgames]
Yet another classic found in Kotaku! This article was actually swiped from PointlessWasteofTime.com and was written by the same guy who wrote the now kinda famous Gamer’s Manifesto (link coming up below). David Wong starts out his rant on the ultimate war simulator with this beauty of an intro:

“Like my Grandpa always said, there were no naked human pyramids in Starcraft.

There were no whiny anti-war Hollywood types or questionable war motives or granola-munching human shields. I’m starting to think that even Command and Conquer: Generals, a game so “realistic” it took a NASA-built Quantum supercomputer to run it, has left me woefully unprepared to fight an actual war.”

What Wong wants is a real, real time strategy. One that “will give me a stress headache after an hour and an ulcer after a week. I want to identify experienced players on the street by their Thousand-Yard Stares.”

What follows is a humorous and deviously insightful attack on the stupidity of real world war and real world war protestors. Read it, love it, live it.

Gamers’ Manifesto
[doiop.com/manifesto]
By the same guy who wrote the previous classic, Gamers’s Manifesto is a list of “20 things gamers want from the seventh generation of game consoles.” Fantastic stuff.

Possible screenshot from GTA 4
[doiop.com/gta4shot]
This interesting shot was posted in Kotaku last week. It might not be real, but it just could be. When you have a gameworld that’s two to three times bigger than San Andreas and looks this beautiful, you know that it’s PS3 at its greatest. Either that or it’s just the next GTA title.

Another PS2 Fan Struck Down by God
[doiop.com/BadGod]
In a vulgar display of power, God struck down on another kid, playing on his PS2, in the UK. This (dumb) kid was also playing during an electrical storm, as a result of which, he was struck by lightning, and blowing him away and having his roof catch fire. Unfortunately, no news on his controller or whether he was killing hookers in GTA. [From BDgamer.net/?itemid=19124]

Apropos of Something comic remixes
[doiop.com/apropos]
Some pretty fantastic remixed comics from website Apropos of Something. More at [doiop.com/apropos2]

Iifaros Experimental Flash Gallery
[doiop.com/Iifaros]
38 smooth examples of odd and interactive Flash animations. They all sort of feel like experiments on those black touch-screens on the Enterprise.

Flow
[doiop.com/flow]
Fantastic meaningless interactive flash animation. 668 kb.

This Sites Unseen has about 15 links and of them 4-5 are from Kotaku! Whoa! I guess some of you might feel a bit bothered about it, but it’s just that I try to point to important/interesting gaming stuff as soon as they appear, and no other site features these as beautifully as Kotaku.