Directional Pad

Surviving through an Interesting-News drought

Hey. We've not updated for the past couple days. There's a ton of reasons and excuses I could give, but none are as true or applicable as this: all recent news has sucked. Of all the things going on lately, I haven't felt compelled whatsoever to actually put up a news post of the same length and calibre as our others for stuff that's been occuring in recent weeks. To prove that we're still alive, here's a list of some of the items I didn't feel like writing about and my justification.

• Blue Shift was released on Steam. Has anyone ever actually cared about Blue Shift? No, seriously. Having the HD Pack available over Steam is neat and all, but it doesn't work with any of the Source updates. So you're stuck with ugly Half-Life with a better engine, or slightly-less-ugly Half-Life with an ancient engine.
• Bungie started a 'Fight the Flood' hurricane relief fundraiser. Neat way to raise cash, but after so much constant news coverage of Katrina followed by even more constant coverage of the aftermath and all the massive blundering failures at all levels of government, I just couldn't take it anymore. Oh, and also because this reminded me of The Flood, which is one of the major contributing factors to why I never finished playing Halo.
• Shigeru Miyamoto was interviewed, and managed to say a lot without actually saying a lot. Features hard-hitting questions like "[So,] you want to preserve the air of mystery around Nintendo?" Gee, you think? Also features several nebulous comments about nebulous things.
• October's OPM hit news stands with the Shadow of the Colossus demo disc, but we already told you that. It's really cool, though. You should go get it. Apart from taking down the first Colossus, you can also cruise around the hub of the world, and explore out into sections you weren't intended to see . . untill the game crashes because it runs out of content.
• We <3 Katamari's release date slipped two weeks to the 20th. I was too heartbroken to report about this. It's still a very touchy subject, and I'd much rather not talk or think about it, because I'd hate for this disappointment to mar my eventual enjoyment of the game to any extent.
• Final Fantasy VII - Advent Children slipped into Winter 2005. Kinda like my reaction to We <3 Katamari . . except with seething hatred rather than disappointment and sorrow.
• Cyan Worlds closed up shop. I haven't played a Myst game since Riven, which I never finished because constantly shuffling around between the 87 discs the game shipped on quickly infuriated me. Frankly, I was amazed to find out that they still existed as an independent developer entity, and hadn't been absorbed by a monolithic publisher/developer like EA or more specifically Ubisoft, who published the last 52 itterations of Myst. So, good job surviving for 12+ years, too bad you spent all that time desperately trying to milk the last few dollars out of Myst.

These, of course, were only some of the articles we didn't report on. These were actually just the ones where I went "Well, I could kinda maybe live with reporting about this, but what more can I really say than 'this exists. read it.'?" So I lumped them all together in this article, where they look slightly more meaty and substantial as a group.

Did you care about any of these news items? Do you feel you would have been able to properly report about them in a timely fashion? Well, why don't you try? Go ahead and give it a shot over on our Contact Page. Just fill out the form with your contact info and use any of the source articles above (or hey, provide one of your own!) to write a sample news post. We're still looking to flesh out our team of reporters, so if you'd like to be an official Directional Pad Interweb E-correspondent iReporter, fill out the form. Oh, and be sure to select "Writer Application" as the type, that tends to help.

Hopefully news will pick up next week, when the yearly Tokyo Game Show starts up. The rumor mill that I've been casually ignoring because they're, you know, completely unsubstantiated rumors is currently leaning towards there being some hefty-big Nintendo announcements. We'll see, and we'll be reporting when the news is concrete and real.

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