Anyone who’s played video games for any length of time knows about Mountain Dew and its association with gaming. I can fondly remember more than a few caffeine-fueled gaming sessions where I happily consumed quite a bit of the stuff.

Before I agreed to write this post, I asked Deana to send me a sample of the product, since I’ve never really tried this flavor of Mountain Dew. Deana obliged by sending me with three bottles, one of which I carefully tasted tested, and a free T-shirt. I was going to include a nice picture of them (since the T-shirt is pretty nice), but alas there seems to be an issue with my digital camera. Hence, you’ll have to be content with just the picture to the right, which is courtesy of Mountain Dew.

So how did it taste? Generally, if I receive a free sample of something I won’t write anything negative just to be polite.  But I won’t endorse it either. However, in this case, I don’t have to be so circumspect. I liked it. It was a warm 68 degrees yesterday in Portland and the raspberry taste of Voltage really did hit the spot.

The berry flavor is bit stronger than I thought it would be, since I thought it would be more of a blend between the original Mountain Dew flavor and raspberries, but the overall, the taste is pleasant. This is something I would buy on my own.

I should also plug the sweepstakes site that I mentioned earlier. The site, in which you can win gaming gear, iPods, etc. is at dewmocracyvoltage.com. The site does require registration, but to be fair, unless they have some way of contacting you, there’s no way of notifying you if you’ve won something. The site has a number of mini games on it that you can play to win points, like the one below:

The idea is to register on the site, play the various mini games and accumulate points. Points can then be turned in for various gear. To be honest, I haven’t registered myself to try it, but the sweepstakes site seems pretty straight forward and worth a visit if you have a bit of spare time. Overall, it’s a fun diversion that can potentially win you some nice gear.

Anyways, thanks Deana for the free product. I enjoyed it.

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Sony is betting that a price drop in their PlayStation 2 console will cause many of those buyers to eventually adopt the PlayStation 3, better securing its foothold in the North American market. Unfortunately such a move will not free Sony from its dependence on exclusive gaming content to stay relevant.

Some industry observers have applauded Sony’s decision at the beginning of this month to drop the price of their nine-year-old console to the magic price point of $99. They reason that the PS2 matches up technologically with the Nintendo Wii and appeals to the same demographic of casual gamers. They also think that the PS2 will act as a gateway to the PS3, noting that a large percentage of current PS3 owners are former PS2 owners.  Finally, they reason that the price cut will attract the budget conscious to the Sony line of gaming products.

While I can see how they can arrive at that conclusion, I can’t help but think that there is a serious flaw in their logic. The “x factor” in their strategy is the PC. At the $400+ price point, the base cost of a PlayStation 3, a lot of gamers don’t just decide between getting an Xbox 360 and a PS3 but also consider whether to buy a new PC instead or upgrade their existing one. While $400 doesn’t quite get a gamer a top of the end PC, a reasonably well equipped PC could be had for just a couple of hundred dollars more. And no one can argue that the PC is not only just more versatile in its possible uses but also possesses the largest library of games available.

The PlayStation is too expensive and I think its price point is the stickling point on why it doesn’t have larger market share in the United States. No one is arguing about the PlayStation’s technical capabilities or even the library of games, though in this category, it lags behind its competitors. Developers go where the market is and when they see far more Xbox users versus PlayStation users, it’s an easy decision for them to make more games for the former.

This is why I think games like God of War III, which is exclusive to the PlayStation 3, is so important for the console. The God of War franchise is one franchise that is good enough to cause someone to buy the PS3 just to play this game. It’s akin to a number of PC games that actually forced their users to purchase new or seriously upgrade their existing hardware. However, this advantage drops if this franchise ever becomes cross platform.

This is unfortunately the crux of Sony’s strategy of staying alive in North America:  exclusive games. It’s these few, rare games that only come on the PlayStation 3 that prevents it from being practically be driven off the continent. I’m not saying this to bash the platform; however, when your biggest technological selling point is unrelated to gaming (i.e., you can play Blu Ray movies and your major competitor cannot) then it’s apparent that your business strategy isn’t focused primarily on competing on providing a better gaming experience.

I don’t like seeing Sony in this situation. I would like them to succeed and don’t want to see yet another medium in which Microsoft is so dominant. But I also think Sony has only itself to blame for the predicament in which it finds itself.

The price cut on the PS2 won’t drive PS3 adoption because it’s easy to see that budget conscious consumers aren’t going to buy the most expensive console in the market. Maybe the PS2 could compete successfully against the Wii, but the wisdom of putting 9-year-old console up against something that the public perceives as generations ahead technologically is certainly questionable. Also, as I mentioned before, at the $400+ price point, the Playstation faces competition from gaming PCs. And with competitors that can offer a comparable gaming experience at lower prices, the PS3 is almost wholly dependent on exclusive content to differentiate itself. That doesn’t seem like a winning strategy.

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A charming video was recently aired in Korea which features Jessica of the K-pop band Girls’ Generation fighting off a monster attacking Seoul. The commercial promotes the multi-player video game Dungeon & Fighter, a game which is pretty much unknown outside of Korea. Although if they continued to show cute videos such this in the United States and elsewhere, the popularity of Dungeon & Fighter is sure to increase.

Girls’ Generation promotes Dungeon and Fighter:

Via AllKPop.

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While K-On! have seemingly won over the much of the blogosphere with its characters gushing with overwhelming moe, it is this very same cuteness overload, among other things, that has turned me off this series.

K-On! attracted a lot of buzz before it aired. Any anime that was produced by Kyoto Animation before the advent of the second Haruhi series was bound to get a lot of attention. The third episode just aired and the consensus opinion by most, but not all, of those who are covering this series is that it’s a winner. It’s become a popular series for many anime bloggers who have enthusiastically gushed about the cuteness of the characters and the show’s production quality.

While I admit that show is very cute. It’s almost too cute. The show takes almost every opportunity to showcase the watery eyes of the characters or else show them blushing coquettishly. This is clearly by design, and I can’t help but think it panders this to an unbearable degree.

It’s pretty evident to me that plot development and pacing both take a back seat to opportunities of showing the girls in as many cute poses as possible. The very opening sequence of the first episode should have clued me into this. In the sequence, Yui, the main character, stereotypically oversleeps, stereotypically trips in the cutest way possible and runs out the door stereotypically with a piece of bread in her mouth. It’s all very cute, but it’s also derivative, overdone and, in a way, overwhelming.

Episodes 2 and 3 has loads more of this type of content and I can cite plenty of examples of where the pacing of the show bogged down miserably as we watch the main characters essentially do nothing but act cute.  I know I’m missing the point. K-On! is the moe equivalent of Ikki Tousen. The whole point of that show was to watch girls getting their clothes blown off during the fights while the point of K-On! is clearly to showcase the girls’ cute qualities at the expense of anything else.

From a business perspective, the show will do brilliantly. There’s no doubt in my mind that sales of K-On! related merchandise and goods will prove to be hot sellers. Why shouldn’t it? The show gives many maniacal fans of cuteness exactly what they want, and they will vote with their wallets.

I had hoped that this show was the second coming of Minabi Straight!, another show that had loads of cuteness in it. However, what elevates Minabi Straight! from K-On! was not only the adherence to an engaging plot but the fact that it even managed to be deep, showcasing themes about friendship, dreams and overcoming adversity.

I have no issue with people who enjoy K-On! for what it is. I admit I enjoy a lot of fare, such as Ikki Tousen, that’s vapid and is the anime equivalent of fast food, fattening but with little nutritional value. It would be hypocritical of me to deny others their own guilty pleasures. As for me, I think I’ll dust off my copy of Minabi Straight! and watch that instead.

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As I mentioned in my other post, I decided that this site needed a conceptual and visual face lift. One of the things I’ve dispensed with are the category thumbnails and the featured content gallery. They looked nice, but manually configuring them every time I put a post up just took too long. I could implement some code that could automate it, but in the end, I’d still have to use custom fields, etc. to link the thumbnails to the main article. One side benefit I’ll be gaining is the ability to use long titles. I disliked how long titles screwed up the formatting the category thumbnails due to how they interacted with the cascading style sheet.

The site hopefully looks cleaner after these changes. This will probably make my bounce rate higher, but for now, I think I’ll let my content rather than my site design keep and attract readers.

I’m going to clean up the sidebars too. The sidebars are overly cluttered and some of the ads and banners are going to go. The only stuff that will stay for sure are the RSS feeds and largely because I made an agreement for each of them for their placement on the site.

This gets me to the content. The original focus of this web site was games, anime, science fiction and fantasy. I thought there was a lot of cross over in these fields, since visual media tend to traverse these genres readily.

However, when it got down to actually write about these genres, I faced a rather odd dilemma. Games and anime are just too huge of a topic to give it adequate coverage. While I won’t abandon writing about these topics, I will most likely need to pick a niche for gaming (PCs, consoles, gaming news) and just pick one or two series at most to write about for anime.

Science fiction and fantasy topics present other difficulties. While there’s plenty to write about with science fiction, I’ve noticed that the science fiction posts I’ve written don’t get read. I really thought I was going to end up writing a lot about Star Wars and similar topics, but it seems that I’m among a small minority to find these topics interesting (or maybe my writing in this area is lacking). Science fiction will probably be written about only as they relate to upcoming movies.

I’m probably going to retire writing about fantasy altogether. Fantasy as it relates to video games will probably get some coverage, but that’s about it. I don’t want to end up like one of those very sad sites that continually reminisce about fantasy movies that were made years ago or conjecture about whether Drizzt Do’Urden would trump Legolas in a fight.

I’ll be narrowing and expanding the site’s focus in the following ways:

• Games - niche to be determined, some general game related news
• Anime - one or two series, some general anime news
• Geek Culture - which broadly gives me the license to write about what I happen to find interesting

Most importantly, I plan to simply improve my writing. One of the take aways from my experience from Sankaku Complex is that good writing does matter. People look for it since there’s so much bad writing out there. Honestly, I never gave it much thought, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.

This will mean that for a while, I’ll probably write less but focus on delivering a higher quality. Unfortunately, I’m not one of those naturally gifted writers that write wonderfully at the first pass. I struggle with writing and to improve the quality of mine will probably means much tighter editing and a longer revisionary process. I will also focus more on writing more original content as opposed to rehashing stories from other sites.

I’m sure the changes I make won’t help my traffic numbers. I will definitely attract less people. However, I’m hoping that the people that do visit will like what they see and read. I’ll be writing on this site for a long time, so these changes are focusing this site towards slower, but steadier growth in readership.

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For a lack of a better way to put it: it’s grown dull. It’s not that the articles I wrote were bad per se, but after a while even I get tired of stuff borrowed from other web sites. I got lazy and little by little most of my original content was slowly disappearing from this site.

This also coincided with my involvement with Sankakucomplex. I’ve been regularly contributing over there, and it has definitely had an impact on how I perceive this site. I’ll leave the details about that for another post, but suffice it to say, it’s made me motivated to make this site better.

Bear with me for the next couple of days as I redo this site both conceptually and its overall design.

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So Funcom is offering a free 7 day trial of Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. I’m slightly tempted by this, but  I am more than a little disappointed that it’s only seven days. With only seven days available, you will probably have enough time to roll a couple of characters and maybe try out a few missions. For MMOs, that isn’t really enough time to get a feel for the game. Most of MMOs play pretty much the same in the beginning part of the game. Your character runs around with beginning equipment, mostly fetching things for non player characters and killing small numbers of low level monsters and critters. Hardly exciting stuff.

I’m a little surprised Funcom is so stingy. This is the game that’s supposedly bleeding subscribers, getting the majority of their lunch money taken away by World of Warcraft and the remainder by Warhammer. I haven’t paid a ton of attention this game, but even I’ve heard of the server merges and the resignation of their CFO. Supposedly Funcom has also made a lot of changes to their game, balancing classes, fixing bugs and improving PvP. That makes the short trial even more ridiculous because as a new player you probably won’t see any of those improvements until you reach the mid levels, which is hardly possible within a scant seven days.

Anyway, if you want a diversion from your main game, you can download the trial here.

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