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 Welcome to ShufflingdeadCast, the Shufflingdead.com podcast! This is going to be a weekly, hour long audio show hosted by Newbs and sulci. Hit the jump for the full show notes. → Continue reading ShufflingdeadCast Episode 1: The iPad and Awkward Silences      
This week’s Magic card is Leatherback Baloth, another new awesome green creature from the Worldwake expansion set. Although they fall slightly behind Elephants in the continuum of creature type honourability, my favourite Magic the Gathering tribe is Beasts. They tend to look like crazed dinosaurs that eat forests for breakfast, and when they team up, they have immense crushing power. Worldwake’s offering of Beasts is pretty minimal, there are just two of them, and one of them is so poor it doesn’t even warrant entry into my Beast collection. The other though, is this mean mother to the left, Leatherback Baloth. Imagine having this dude out on turn three (or two with mana acceleration) as an effective attacker and blocker in the early game, allowing you to build up to more Beasts, the kind that turn this guy into an indestructible, trampling juggernaut.  Yesterday, I reported that Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata had a good laugh about the iPad. Now, Jobs is getting a little wound up about everybody mocking his new device, and doing a little heckling of his own. In a town hall with his employees, Jobs started an angry rant against Google, unhappy that they were invading his company’s smart phone turf. Ever the showman, Jobs capped off his tirade with “This don’t be evil mantra: ‘It’s bullshit.’” “Don’t be evil” is Google’s informal corporate slogan. Jobs’ iPad has received a lot of criticism for not supporting Adobe’s Flash, and now he’s let people know why it doesn’t. He feels “they [Adobe] are lazy… they have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it… Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy.” He added that Flash will soon be dead with the rise of HTML5. Not willing to take things lying down, Adobe has thrown up a collection of what iPads trying to access Flash encrusted sites might look like on their blog. Until Adobe’s blogger got in a bit of trouble for it, this collection included a slice of Bang Bros. The implication, of course: you can’t look at porn on your iPad during meetings, so don’t even bother with the thing.
The Interneter of the Week is Matt Casamassina. He’s the former Editor-in-Chief of the Nintendo channel over at IGN.com, who recently betrayed Nintendo and switched over to being “Editor-at-Large” for the site. Ass-amassina started out as editor of N64.com in 1997, which quickly became the N64 section of IGN. Back then, Matt had a passionate love for Nintendo, the kind of love the company deserves, and he maintained those feelings for many years. His ties to the company grew strong indeed, and culminated with his face winding up on a character in Perfect Dark. He also stalked (now former) Nintendo Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Affairs Perrin Kaplan, and developed a bizarre, slightly sexual, relationship with the woman. As the years wore on, and friendly faces like Kaplan left the company, Matt began to feel his love for Nintendo wane. Despite the masses continually mocking the absence of games present on the N64 and GameCube, their words only got to him with their attacks on the Wii. Matt was converted to the angry masculinity of HD consoles and became Editor at Large for IGN in 2009. Before he went crazy, I regarded Matt as one of my writing heroes. He was someone who turned writing for a fansite into a career, invented fun characters like Ed the rumour mongering Janitor, and always maintained his Nintendo cred. Matt Casamassina, Shufflingdead salutes you for occasionally making the internet a more inspiring place.  We all know of the athletic excellence on display every year at the Nerd Olympics, but does gaming have a place at that other Olympics? Canadian magazine Maclean’s recently pondered that very question in an article entitled “Will there ever be a Olympic medal for ‘Call of Duty’?” The publication spoke with CEO of the Global Gaming League Ted Owen, who claims “gaming has its place in the world stage.” He feels, and rightly so, “it’s the same skills as if you were a hockey player or a baseball player, anything like that.” Owen argues that pro gamers in China and Korea are treated like celebrities, where people have the proper respect for a well-timed Zerg rush. I think he also uses the term “eSports,” but maybe Maclean’s just made that up. In any case, Owen hasn’t gotten very far; the IOC continues to ignore his pleas for Olympic gaming. Superhero and Olympic gold medalist for snowboarding Ross Rebagliati opposes Mr. Owen’s idea. Despite coming up in a time when snowboarding lacked recognition in professional athletics, Rebagliati has no respect for gaming as a sport. He claims “sport has to have some kind of physical act.” I guess Ross never played that game in Mario Party where you have to rotate the joystick really fast.  Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, who has successfully taken over the world with his company’s Wii and DS video game devices, took the time to have a good laugh at Steve Jobs and his magical iPad. Speaking from an undisclosed location, Mr. Iwata chided the iPad tablet as being nothing but a bigger iPod Touch, and added “there were no surprises for me.” Iwata went on to claim that 3D gaming is not the future, downplaying the investment Sony has made in 3D TVs. Having thoroughly destroyed Sony on two fronts this generation, Iwata probably has a better grasp of what consumers want. |
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January 31st, 2010 by 
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