Freyburg

My usual grab bag of indignant headline plucking and nerd rants seems to have flagged a little bit of late, so in order to remedy this crime, here’s a grab bag of awesome web videos aimed at gamers that bring the funny in a big way.

First up is “Hey Ash, Whatcha Playing“, which is super lo-fi and a barrel full of laughs.

Next is Zero Punctuation, which is some beautiful British sarcasm that rips the gaming industry and its many cliches to shreds…

and lastly, here’s a tribute to gratuitous headshots.

Part of my day job at Greedy Productions was working on this top secret documentary about the making of the Metal Gear saga, including Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, which comes out this week. Everybody at Greedy knocked their asses off to make this, so if you have any desire at all to own MGS4, spring for the collector’s edition and make me happy.

Yes, if you’ve ever said to yourself “you know what would be awesome? To be badass rapper 50 Cent in a video game, battling terrorists in the Middle East to a hip-hop beat!” (and I know you have)…well, you’ll get your chance soon. I know I’m throwing my copy of GTA IV out the window and eagerly awaiting the next stage in interactive entertainment, as seen below:

In my brief tenure as a co-host for the (now-ended) Lab with Leo, I was able to pimp my own podcast, Radio Free Skaro, while explaining the dreaded Red Ring of Death on the Xbox 360. Many thanks to the intrepid Third Guy, my RFS co-host, for tracking down this clip.

I cant say any of this is off the mark.

Infocom, the creators of some of the best text adventures ever made, had a sequel in the works for their Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game, called Milliways, that has only now surfaced. Andy Baio, who runs Waxy.org, got a hold of the companys old network drive and found not only unreleased games but emails and other private documents detailing the soap opera behind the development of the HHGTTG sequel. If you loved Infocom games when you were a kid, as I did, this is a must read. And you can play Milliways!

Turkey games are defined, at least by the fine folks at 1Up, as games that were massively hyped, and weren’t necessarily bad, but fell well short of expectations. That’s some good game bashin’!

Some enterprising geeks have created a Half Life 2 mod located in the Canadian city of Toronto. Big deal, you say? It is if a) you’re Canadian, and b) you don’t live in the city. Secretly, all denizens of other Canadian cities suspect the place is run by aliens to begin with, and now that’s it’s been revealed that in fact it’s the evil forces of the Combine…well, time to strap on the gravity gun and save the True North.