Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

You walk by it all the time, a catalog of current and upcoming releases available every month like clockwork. Perhaps it’s the most honest gaming magazine of all; because it just wants you to buy stuff. This is the GameStop Guide, and for some, it just might be their entry point into our beloved obsession.

Is there anything to be learned within its dog-eared pages? Probably not, so let’s just make fun of it…

I’m just assuming this is the April release since it spotlights a lot of “COMING SOON” releases in April and May, like cover game Grand Theft Auto IV. I love the little RP, like there’s any question what GTAIV will be rated. I’m sure the ESRB is dithering between a T and an M as we speak.

The Guide kicks off with eight pages of DS product, because it probably just makes a ton of money-sense to frontload the DS right now. Of course, I’m immediately irritated because of this:

Mario Party DS was released in November 2007. New Super Mario Bros, May 2006. Mario Kart DS was November 2005. All three are still retailing for $35. Nintendo is just so incredibly stingy about letting their games slip in price (unless they shift a console game into the Players’ Choice category, which has no analogue on the DS). Throw us a frickin’ bone here, Nintendo!

There is nothing to be proud about on this page. Unless you’re Ubisoft, I suppose. I won’t buy into this franchise until they enable WiFi link play and I can feed the smaller animals to the Tigerz. And yes, that needs to includes the Babyz.

Blokus Portable: Steambot Championship is inevitably going to end up in one of those annual Worst Box Art Ever weblog posts that crop up at year’s end when the game sites want to take off early for the holidays so they pre-schedule a lot of articles they can easily write ahead of time.

I mean, why the visual conflict here? Either you’re appealing to the casual crowd who might recognize this as a video game version of a favorite board game… or you’re, you know, about steambots.

This seems telling. The trend everywhere else in the catalog is to list the game or product, and then follow it with a byline for the company or publisher. For all the first party Xbox stuff, the byline reads “by Xbox.” As in, not “by Microsoft.” Obviously we have an exceptionally pedantic graphic artist here, which explains the needless redundancy of “Xbox 360 Arcade – by Xbox,” but maybe there’s some subtle spin at work as well, as Microsoft attempts to mask their own bad reputation?

Now that we’re into the Xbox section, the Game Guide assumes we can read, because more of the featured games have explanatory text boxes. (Seriously, almost none of the DS and PSP games have text with them.) Of course, this doesn’t mean the text will read well, as we can see in the ridiculous turn-of-phrase of Iron Man being “one of Marvel’s most durable super heroes.” He’s not invincible. He’s merely durable.

Our anal retentive layout designer didn’t catch this… two of the three Smash Bros Brawl screenshots are completely borked. Whose Final Smash is that? Mr. Scrambled Cable Porn?

Whatever text you can read there for Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit can equally apply to any DBZ game ever made.

Ah, the PlayStation2 Memory Card (8MB). Still $25 after all these years. I think the profit margin on these puppies single-handedly fronted the entire PS3 development.

And one last weird bit of marketing before we run out of pages…

Let’s watch the concentric circles grow progressively smaller (all values to be defined in “number of people”): Bought Rock Band > Bought PS2 Rock Band > Bought Non-Bundle PS2 Rock Band > Bought Non-Bundle PS2 Rock Band and Drums > Bought Non-Bundle PS2 Rock Band and Two Sets of Drums > Bought Non-Bundle PS2 Rock Band, Two Sets of Drums, and Actually Clicked the Multiplayer Options “Score Duel” and “Tug-of-War”

That one person left at the end of all that is precisely who this blurb is targeting. Or perhaps the ad is trying to create that person.