Happy new year. I’ve been catching up with all the gaming I’ve missed over the last few months, and what better way to do that than with my iPod Touch?

I no longer make those day-one Green Day: Rock Band- or Sonic Unleashed-style purchases. Since becoming a casual gamer, I refuse to spend big money on games. Previously, I would’ve been the first one through those GameStation doors for Beautiful Katamari; now I’m just scouring for freebies, gifts, or those one-day gaming deals you just have to take advantage of.

This is entirely because of the “AppStore,” the place where dreams are born and destinies are fulfilled—or something equally as fucking trite sounding.

You can access the AppStore from any iOS device (that is, any device running the touch-driven Apple operating system). The AppStore is an easy to use system whereby the user can purchase and download games and applications to their iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.

Some of the games are incredible. From a glance, Gameloft titles could easily be mistaken for Xbox Live Arcade games. Eternal Legacy and Tintin are the most impressive that I have seen. Tintin actually looks better than its console counterpart.

Games are often discounted on the AppStore. Some are free—well, more than just “some.” There are a lot of free games on the AppStore. How many games has Microsoft given you for free? Maybe two a year, if you’re making a list and checking it twice.

You’re seeing new freebies on AppStore every other day. Normally they’re supported by adverts or by purchases within the game, but you never really have to buy anything to get a sense of enjoyment. A game like Blood & Glory is fine to play until it gets hard, by which point you can just delete it and find something else to play.

Gameloft’s latest free game, Six Guns, allows you to complete the whole game without making any purchases. You’re getting a 5+ hour game for what is effectively no cost. You can augment the experience with purchases, but they are not necessary, unlike in a brutally difficult game such as Blood & Glory.

Mediocre wild west-themed game? Boring. For free? NOW YOU’RE TAWKIN’!

Getting these games for free has turned me into a really picky sod. When I walk into dedicated gaming stores, I just get so disgusted. Why should I pay excess of $15 for a game when I can have hours of fun on my iPhone for just $1? If a game appears on an official Apple advertisement, you’re thinking…give it a few weeks; it will be free. Sure as night turns to day, it happens.

So you’re sitting like Lord Muck with all these free games and you don’t know what to do with yourself. You’ve hardly the space on your device for all of them, and you’re never going to play more than twenty minutes of each of them because your attention span is shot from all the festive booze. …Unless the game is triple distilled addiction.

Jetpack Joyride, snapped up as a freebie. Seven hours playtime and counting…

Becoming a casual gamer has really colored my judgement on game prices. Enjoyment cannot be given a price, and there is nothing I value more than having a great time. So why should I be so picky about having to pay for the things I want? First of all, it’s my money, and I think I deserve to have some say in how much of it I spend. Secondly, publishers still insist on releasing the new console blockbusters for $60, while the AppStore still remains a very small and developer-based market.

I undercut the big companies and help the smaller developers. The games are cheap, they give me hours of satisfaction, and some of these games even rival what I have seen consoles achieve.

A Scribblenauts game that you can actually play?

So many great games also get ported to iOS, with added features and improved visuals (like Scribblenauts Remix). You can grab a large library of games for under $20, and it will last you for weeks and weeks.

You may have noticed that I’m mostly reviewing iPhone games now. They’re short, easy to write about, and don’t scathe the wallet. There is always something else to play. Although the games are cheap, these Apple devices are still mega expensive. With that understood, the library of games is ever growing, and there’s always something free or cheap right around the corner.

You get “deals” on the Xbox Live Marketplace or the PlayStation Store, but they’re not deals, are they? Yeah, Call of Duty map packs a dollar off, fucking derp. Grab yourself one of these shiny Apple things and start enjoying fair-prices for a change.

Normally around this time of year, I’m:

• Asking the GameCola staff to vote in our year-end awards
• Reminding them that the deadline’s approaching, so please vote!
• E-mailing them after the deadline’s passed to let them know I can still squeeze them in
• E-mailing them again a week later to give them one more chance to vote

Until finally:

• Giving up and just making up the awards myself. (You know you’ve always suspected it.)

This year, however, I haven’t even started this grueling process yet. We’ve decided to push things back a bit: Instead of aiming to get the awards article posted in January like we usually do, this year we’re shooting for February, instead.

Why? Because so many games get lost in the shuffle, otherwise.

Some games come out in December (a fact so many other awards ignore). We get games as holiday presents. Many of us have an ever-present backlog to work through. By voting for the best games of the year in December, we inadvertently leave out valid nominees just because they weren’t released at the exact right time, or because we were too busy playing Back to the Future: The Game again and forgot about them. Personally, I’d love to push the awards back even further—I’m thinking mid-July—but by then, I feel like some of the interest might have waned.

So this year, we’re voting in January, and getting the article out in February. Please don’t stop loving us.

(Also, spoiler alert: Portal 2.)

Soon myself and a cabal of other GameCola staffers will be following up 2010’s Top 50 Best Games of All Time by releasing GameCola’s Top 50 Worst Games Ever. The list will have a bunch of the usual suspects and a good handful of surprises, but it will be missing one mainstay of bad game lists: Yo! Noid. I’m happy to say that Yo! Noid is not only not on the list, but it wasn’t even a contender. I can’t speak for everyone working on the list—maybe someone just forgot about it and it slipped through the cracks— but I can tell you why I didn’t support its inclusion: It simply isn’t a bad game.

Yes, it’s a platformer in which you play as the long-irrelevant Domino’s Pizza mascot, The Noid, and it was released around the same time as a bunch of notoriously bad corporate mascot-based games (like the awful ones with those 7-Up spots). It’s easy to let knee-jerk reactions to the premise of the game lead your opinion of it, but unlike the other lame mascot games, Yo! Noid wasn’t made solely to shill the world’s shittiest pizza; it’s mostly a graphical hack of a Japanese game called Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru, which explains why the pizza-obsessed man-rabbit main character spends so much time collecting ninja scrolls. The original game follows a masked ninja who fights enemies by throwing his robotic bird pet at them, and at the end of each stage, he engages in a ninja card battle. In Yo! Noid the robo-bird is replaced with a yo-yo, and the card-based ninja battle becomes a card-based pizza-eating contest.

Though difficult, Yo! Noid gets a bad rap as just another shitty mascot game, but that’s not what it is at all; it’s more like an extra-difficult version of Kid Niki: Radical Ninja. It’s not a breathtaking masterpiece by any means, and I don’t mean to sound like I implore all GameCola readers to go out and play it NOW because it will change your lives. It won’t, but it’d probably be in my top 30 favorite NES games if I ever happened to make such a list. If you find yourself among the many who condemn this game, it’s worth another playthrough with an open mind.

You might recall my dorktastic proposal, and it should be no surprise that the wedding was equally sweet and geeky (sweeky?). If you’ve got time for a sweeping tale of near-epic proportions, I encourage you to visit the aforementioned geek blog to check out the seven-part story (which, I believe, may still be shorter than my review of Mega Man 10). However, as this here is a vidjagame website, I’ll be spotlighting the more gaming-centric elements of the wedding.

So, sit back, relax, and read on! Deadly robot spiders have been deployed to ensure compliance.

~-~

The Bachelor Party

Wow, putting “The Bachelor Party” in bold and italics makes it sound like a misleadingly titled Wii game where nobody jumps out of a cake and you all have root beer floats instead. Which, appropriately, is exactly what happened at my bachelor party: I had root beer floats and murdered my friends.

Well, let me clarify before the county sheriff takes an interest in me again: It was self-defense. My groomsmen had lured me into one of the fanciest rooms in the hotel and began to fire at me with pistols, semiautomatics, lasers, rocket launchers, and banana peels; what was I supposed to do? I spent my last hours on Earth (as a bachelor) playing GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, and Mario Kart 64 with my friends.

They had set up a projector screen in the middle of a room furnished with a couch and comfortable chairs. A Nintendo 64 was hooked up to the projector already, but I also spied a GameCube, an NES, and piles of games to go with them…plus ice cream and root beer. These are people who know me well. I can do big, loud parties, but I would sooner have a small, subdued Mario Party. Playing a heated game of “Tug o’ War” with my pals across a deep ravine is about as crazy as I get.

So, I spent my evening reminding my friends how much of a jerk I am by picking them off one at a time from across the level with my FarSight XR-20 alien sniper rifle, hiding proximity mines on every ammo box, thrusting poisoned throwing knives into their corpses to ensure their vision would remain blurry after respawning, and, most heinously of all, forcing them to play Toad’s Turnpike in reverse. It was fantastic.

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The Wedding Reception

Yep, we completely skipped the wedding and went straight to the reception, where the guests (including several members of my college videogame club and a few GameCola staff members) lost all gamer cred trying to play “Name That Videogame Tune.” My new wife and I entered to Lucca’s theme from Chrono Trigger, and there were OverClocked Remixes in abundance—selections from Castlevania, DuckTales, Gradius, EarthBound, Final Fantasy, Mega Man 2, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Super Metroid were at least on the list, even if there wasn’t enough time to play them all. In fact, the last slow dance was a lovely acoustic guitar remix of “To Far Away Times,” the ending theme from Chrono Trigger, and it was something special to see even my parents on the dance floor for that one. Also in the air were the unremixed original versions of the soothing underwater tune from Donkey Kong Country and, appropriately, the Marrymore town theme from Super Mario RPG.

Perhaps the crowning achievement of the reception was that the aforementioned Paul and Lizo, who were married some five months prior, shared their first dance as a couple at my wedding. Shocking. Now, I know they say you’re supposed to wait until marriage, but even if they don’t specify whose marriage, you—oh, wait; we’re talking about dancing, not the other thing. Jeez, I hope they didn’t wait for that on my account, too.

~-~

The Wedding Favors

My now-wife took the liberty of ordering a case of one hundred blue pog containers to house our wedding favors. We said we’d figure out what we were going to do with them eventually. Probably fill them with dirt; we were on a budget, you know.

We settled on a homemade fold-up board game with a tiny six-sided die and Smarties candy for game tokens as the gift inside the containers. However, once our guests ate the contents (including the die and the paper game board, which I suspect may have been more fun to eat than to play), there wouldn’t be much stopping them from eating the containers, too. You’ve seen me play Deja Vu; you know how this works. We had to make those little blue tubes memorable enough for our guests to at least stop and stare at them before popping them in their mouths.

Fortunately, I have played excessive amounts of Mega Man.

Disguised as the life-replenishing Energy Tanks from the Mega Man series, our army of pog cylinders instantly became my favorite geek touch of the wedding. Not just because of the connection with my favorite game series, mind you—those who’ve read my Top 10 Favorite Games List know I’m a huge fan of the NES game Crystalis, and I had the most amazing opportunity to slip in what may be the most subtle and fantastic (and, considering the relative obscurity of the game, only) Crystalis reference in history on the back of the label.

~-~

The Wedding Gifts

Paul and Lizo got us these:

Mike and Vangie got us these:

Christian Porter got us this:

The Honeymoon

I’m sure you don’t want to hear about how I played Mega Man Battle Network on my honeymoon. I’m sure you’d rather see a picture of the stained glass Triforce I made.

We stayed at a series of bed & breakfasts on our honeymoon, and our first stop had an art studio where the proprietor taught classes on throwing pottery and stained glass. (Pause for a moment and let my syntax form a funny mental picture. OK, so it’s not that funny.)

Now, I’m not much of a Zelda fan, but a few interlocking triangles seemed like something elegantly simple that even a ham-fisted bozo like myself could pull together. I seem to have overestimated my skill and dedication to the craft—if it weren’t for frequent interventions from the instructor and my more artistically inclined wife, you’d be looking at a picture of the legendary Biforce.

~-~

So there you have it. Absolutely nothing else happened before, during, or after my wedding. At all. Related to videogames. That I can think of. Right now.

Join us next time for “A Very GameCola Wedding 4: Live Free or Wed Hard,” starring [insert name of two staff members who are clearly involved romantically] Jeff Day and the disembodied narrator from “Gamera Obscura.”

It happened! We warned you that we’d be live-casting the 2011 Spike TV Videogame Awards, and it happened! We wrapped up just a few minutes ago. We’ll be editing together a proper podcast shortly, but for now, if you want to relive all the fun of live on-stage teabagging, endless commercials, and surprisingly few actual videogame awards, check out the full, uncut, GameCola livecast here.

Included in this recording is NEVER-BEFORE-HEARD audio footage, like!:

• 20 minutes of us trying to set up the recording!
• 10 minutes of GameCola After-Hours, the exclusive post-podcast podcast!
• …I told you it was “uncut.”

As one fan who was in our chatroom put it, “I guess that was OK.”

Edit: The recording starts at 8PM EST! Make sure to join us all here.

Because it can’t possibly make the VGAs any worse, right?

Be sure to be there—not only will it be our first-ever LIVE broadcast, but you’ll be able to join in, right there, from the comfort of your own computer chair! You’ll be able to chat with us and other GameCola fans LIVE in the uStream chatroom, and if you register for a (free) uStream account, you’ll be able to call into the show at any time.

LIVE!

Here’s the link to the stream, in link form. Be there at 8:00 PM, Saturday night!

What’s that? Five minutes until the next class? QUICK, TO THE RHYTHM GAME!

While PC gaming has avoided the fate foisted upon the consoles by overzealous legislators, it still has its own legal minefield to navigate. Most readers have probably heard about Internet censorship in China. Political criticism, sensitive news topics, and obscenity are closely monitored. There are Internet police on patrol reading your snarky tweets and status updates, your personal blog posts and stupid, stupid forum arguments, hoping for an excuse to hit that giant red delete button which I like to imagine sits under a glass case at the core of their command center.

This is what happens if you post something like “I think some of Mao Zedong’s otherwise brilliant policies suffered from poor implementation” on Renren.com. “The CCP is a big doody-head” will provoke a much more severe response.

Even game content is occasionally subjected to censorship. While you might think that this would stifle the formation of online gaming communities (a raging hive of obscenity if ever there was one), the reality is that gamers themselves don’t have much to worry about so long as they can restrain themselves from shouting “TIBET TIBET TIBET TIANANMEN SQUARE DALAI LAMA” over teamchat.

So, what games are Chinese gamers playing? South Korea may be king when it comes to tales of RTS-induced madness, like that guy who starved himself to death while playing Starcraft, but Blizzard has its share of fans in China as well. China took the Gold and Silver medals for Warcraft III in the 2009 World Cyber Games (which are totally a real thing and not something invented for a modern remake of The Wizard). Also, that unlicensed Blizzard-themed amusement park in Changzhou which you might have heard of actually opened last summer. A colleague of mine even received a bizarre English textbook last term which had a chapter on Warcraft-related vocabulary. I mean, sure, that could be a really fun lesson, but I’m pretty sure that “death knight” will not appear on the college entrance exam.

It’s not all about the RTS genre in China though. Counterstrike (along with its Korean-developed imitator, Cross Fire) is another favorite, but not everyone can hop online and play from home. Many gamers instead get their fix at one of the local netbars, which have now spread from the big cities into smaller towns in China. I’m not sure if this is standard practice or due to its proximity to the school, but the local netbar at my current location limits entry to customers over the age of 18, as if online gaming was some kind of dangerous substance which must be kept out of the hands of children. (But maybe they’re right: China has been catching up in the gaming-related fatalities race.)

A dimly lit, smoky room full of torpid young men wasting their lives away… I guess the netbar does kind of resemble a 19th century opium den.

Despite valiant efforts to protect the children, the influence of these popular games has crept into my classroom of 11-year-old students. My recent customer-clerk roleplay activity quickly degenerated into some sort of illegal international arms deal between the boys, involving a huge shipment of M16s and AK-47s. It’s just a hunch, but I suspect this incident is connected to my discovery that someone has installed Cross Fire on almost every computer in the school.

The more casual audience, meanwhile, has been swept up in an Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies craze. Toys, books, clothing, stationery, board games, card games… You can hardly go anywhere in China right now without encountering a rack of cuddly zombie plushies, and I see piles of Angry Birds notebooks every time I enter the student bookstore.

Start your day by slipping on your Angry Bird slippers…

…and sitting down for breakfast on your Angry Bird cushion…

…while avoiding the morning chill with your Angry Bird hot water bottle.

Then, grab an Angry Bird pen to write down your to-do list…

…and throw on your Angry Bird bling before you head out into town…

…where Angry Birds will watch your every move.

With a market of a billion potential fans, you’d think Popcap and Rovio would own all of the money in the world by now, but most of the merchandise appears to be unlicensed cash-ins which sometimes involve multiple layers of copyright infringement.

Plants vs. Zombies: The Board Game is 1) actually a card game, 2) composed of screenshots from the game, and 3) Battle Line.

It’s the same fate suffered in China by the most iconic videogame characters, so I suppose it can be considered a badge of honor. Once you’ve been converted into a miscolored off-model mutant version of yourself, you know you’ve hit it big:

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something tells me that this is not an official Nintendo product…

But note that at the beginning of this post I said that China is a haven for “PC gamers” rather than “PC developers.” In a country where you can get away with building an entire unlicensed amusement park, it should come as no surprise that piracy is the rule rather than the exception, and cheap bootleg copies of games are openly sold at major retail stores in place of the real thing. Western-developed games particularly suffer from this business model despite their popularity. This post has gotten a little long, so we’ll take a look at the selection available on store shelves in Part 3. Let’s just say it never ceases to surprise.

China: You can buy games from the future.

Here’s a breakdown of the new features.

Mii Plaza has been upgraded. 57 new hats have been added, but you have to work for them. You can unlock them by achieving criteria or completing stages in StreetPass Quest 2, the new updated Quest mode. You can access this mode after having beaten StreetPass Quest twice. Quest 2 once again focuses on saving the monarch (and now his two children, too).

This mode has branching paths, as well as the ability to re-hire heroes you’ve met and fight battles with two heroes simultaneously. You can purchase items in battle to assist you by spending Play Coins. You will need to play this mode many times to collect all the hats.

Several new puzzles have been added to Puzzle Swap. Completed puzzles can be viewed as a slideshow in glasses-free 3D. The new puzzles have “pink” panels, which can only be collected through StreetPass and therefore cannot be bought with Play Coins.

The Mii Plaza also has new “Accomplishments” that can be unlocked, basically the equivalent of Xbox Achievements or PlayStation Trophies. There are currently 78 of them to complete, ranging from meeting a certain number of other Miis to doing things in StreetPass Quest 2.

Furthermore, the Mii Plaza has a new Music Player. You can unlock new music tracks by collecting more hats, among other things.

That’s enough Mii Plaza for one day. The less interesting stuff comes now.

If you’ve got an avid eye for film-making, the Camera application has received an upgrade. Amongst the new features is 3D Video Recording, which can be played back in glasses-free 3D on the system. Were QR codes not working for you? They’ve also received an improvement, apparently. This is probably for games such as Pushmo that use large QR codes for level sharing.

Got a new 3DS but want to keep your save data, purchases, funds and your Ambassador freebies from your old one? Simply use the new Transfer function and you can make the whole thing a snap.

Nintendo Zone, previously an exclusive download in stores such as Best Buy, is now a mandatory extra. What does it do? Think of a place where you can get special Nintendo news, Club Nintendo features and the promise of game demos in the near future. You had me at “think.”

The Nintendo eShop has also been updated whether you like it or not, you miserable grouch. My favorite feature is the very late inclusion of Download Code support. This means that GameCola should finally be able to receive copies of Nintendo 3DS download titles from publishers, HINT HINT.

This is one big update, and something that has been long overdue. There is still no word on the Game Boy Advance games for the Ambassadors or what the five mystery titles are, though Nintendo recently confirmed that they will be available before the end of the year. With this update out a day early, I get the feeling we’ll hear more about these games very soon.

As in, very seriously. I thought they might hurt me if I didn’t agree with what they said. If the actors playing police officers didn’t arrest me, the actors playing lawyers would sue me for slander. I tried my best to keep my mouth shut the whole time.

After the recording, though, I got to thinking. When you take a really serious look at the Phoenix Wright characters, it becomes kind of obvious that they’re all destined to be dateless for the rest of their lives. Just like the people who buy from Silver Dollar Games. Zing! No, but seriously, I can’t see any of these characters being an ideal boyfriend or girlfriend. And so, without further ado, I present to you my report, which explains…

Why the Phoenix Wright Characters Will Die Alone

#1. Phoenix Wright

Why will Phoenix never get a girlfriend? Reason #1 is the pink sweater.

Phoenix has only had one girlfriend in his life: Dahlia Hawthorne. And that was basically the textbook definition of “unhealthy relationship.” Phoenix became dangerously obsessed with her, she tried to kill him, and he was secretly in love with her sister the whole time. Not the best relationship ever, by any standards.

Once their doomed relationship failed, Phoenix went into extreme denial and never dated again. Eventually, the experience with Dahlia caused Phoenix to develop a misguided hero complex. Now he risks his life over and over again in an attempt to protect every person he meets, especially girls who remind him of Dahlia. And as long as Phoenix sees every woman as a damsel in distress, it’s going to be hard for him to get a girlfriend.

But can Phoenix ever find true love? The ending to the third Phoenix Wright game left this question open, but it strongly hinted that Phoenix worked through his Dahlia issues, and he’s finally able to move on and start a relationship with someone else. Good for Phoenix. But then, in the next game, this minor cliffhanger was completely forgotten, as Phoenix cut off all contact with his friends, became a drunken hobo, and adopted a girl he didn’t know. So…yeah. I don’t think he moved on with his life.

#2. Maya Fey

Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure that the main goal of the Phoenix Wright series is not to entertain gamers, but to force Maya to undergo severe psychological trauma. Think about it. She saw her sister and mother die right in front of her own eyes, she was held hostage by a serial killer, she was abandoned by her parents at age two and forced to live with an abusive aunt, she’s been falsely accused of murder three times, and she’s spoken to Larry Butz for more than two minutes. None of these are good things.

All the trauma Maya has suffered explains why she’s so obsessed with children’s TV shows, like The Steel Samurai. Sure, that may seem like a quirky character trait, but it’s really a cry for help! She’s trying to regress to her youth, to before all the bad things happened to her. Her immaturity betrays her deep psychological issues, and this poor girl needs help, NOW!

…Either that, or she just likes to watch violent kids shows. I’m not sure.

Using my finely-tuned psychology background–

Mandatory Disclaimer: Michael has no psychology background. He got a “D” on his final paper for Psychology in high school, and he hasn’t touched the field since.

*AHEM*. Using my finely-tuned psychology background, I can safely say that Maya’s friendship with Phoenix is an example of transference. Maya doesn’t become friends with Phoenix because she likes him; she becomes friends with Phoenix because she wants a replacement for the recently-departed Mia. After all, Phoenix and Mia are a lot alike. They’re both defense lawyers, they both live in LA, and…OK, that’s all they have in common, but still! It’s totally an example of transference. Maya only made friends with Phoenix because she needed a new big sister. End of story!

So will Maya ever get a boyfriend? Well, she’s definitely not going to date her big sister Phoenix. And it’s been established that there are no men in her hometown. And she’s high maintenance. And she’s really immature. And she’s kind of weird. And she—you know what, I’m just going to stop there. The answer is “no.” Maya will most likely not get a boyfriend, but the good news is that she’s totally fine with that.

#3. Miles Edgeworth

Edgeworth is a psychological mess, too. He has two main traumas in his life. First, he’s traumatized by the death of his father. He has recurring nightmares about this event, and he still faints whenever there is an earthquake. The second trauma is his failure to live up to Manfred Von Karma’s perfect win record, an impossibly high standard that he has been burdened with all his life.

OK, so the Turnabout Musical people made a good point in the podcast recording. Edgeworth is socially awkward whenever he talks to Phoenix in the first game. But that doesn’t mean Edgeworth is always socially awkward! It just means he’s awkward around Phoenix. Edgeworth does just fine when he’s talking to people who aren’t actively trying to clean out the skeletons in his closet, thank you very much.

No, social awkwardness won’t prevent Edgeworth from getting a girlfriend. What’s going to ruin Edgeworth’s chances at romance is…well, Edgeworth himself. Sure, women seem interested in his dashing good looks, manly cologne and elegant speech. But consider this: Edgeworth is unable to listen to any girl for more than five minutes without trying to cross-examine her. That’s fine in the courtroom, but on a date? Not so much.

Also, Edgeworth is really bad when it comes to communicating, which is a problem for any relationship. Remember the second game, where he wrote the suicide note “Miles Edgeworth chooses death”? It turned out that what he meant to write was “Hey, dudes, I’m going on vacation to Europe for a few months! See you later!” Edgeworth’s major communication issues are probably the main reason why he can’t get a girlfriend.

That, and Edgeworth has the fashion sense of a man born two centuries ago. Don’t get me wrong: Edgeworth is still awesome, albeit to a lesser degree when he plays the second fiddle in Kay Faraday: Ace Attorney: Investigations. It’s just that Edgeworth isn’t dating material. He could probably get a few dates, to be sure, but he’d have a really hard time finding a woman who fits his high standards and is willing to settle down with him.

My students will frequently just shout “SAMPLE TEXT” when I call on them in class.

As I prepared myself for the big move, a lifetime of exposure to mainstream news media images of China left me filled with worry: How frequently can I expect to be beaten and dragged through the streets for being a Western capitalist-imperialist pig-dog? What do Chinese citizens do for fun when they aren’t being run over by tanks while undergoing forced abortions? Do they actually have videogames, or is fun illegal under communist rule?

As it turns out, my fears were ill-founded. Admittedly, Chinese cities have their rough spots (i.e., the bathrooms) and the smog level often reaches “Quite Unpleasant,” but they are otherwise lively places which look much less like the evil empire capital city from Final Fantasy VI than I expected. Likewise, the country is populated not by terrified peasants huddling in ruined villages, but by anime-obsessed teens hanging out at the mall. Really, it’s just like being back at home.

CHINA: It’s kind of like putting a first-world country and a third-world country together in a bag and hitting it with a hammer a bunch.

And gaming is indeed alive and well. Yet when it comes to gaming in Asia, most people think of the popular console developers from Japan or the MMORPGs of South Korea. China is rarely mentioned other than as a source of bootleg games, DS flash cards, and knock-off consoles. So just what is gaming like in this mysterious frontier, and what hidden gems await discovery?

If you’re a fan of good old console gaming, the first thing you should know is that, well, you’re kind of screwed. As this article from Kotaku reported last year, videogame consoles are technically illegal thanks to a classic “Oh God, Think of the Children” law enacted 11 years ago. The second thing you should know is that you’re not completely screwed: loopholes are abundant and enforcement is virtually non-existent.

Much like the traffic laws.

While the article itself is quite informative, the comments which followed quickly devolved into nonsensical political wrangling from armchair analysts. I’m actually in the country right now, so I’m going to give you the real deal, the scoop, the bee’s knees, the Charleston Chew.

Handheld gaming systems are indeed curiously exempt from the ban, presumably because they do not contain the mysterious radioactive element which has been determined by China’s government to rot the brains of children. Nintendo even operates their own handheld stores in major cities but sells their products under the “iQue” brand, possibly fearing that their evil devil machines will be seized and burned with cries of “Remember Nanjing!” should their Japanese origins be made known. The PSP is also readily available at almost any electronics store, but games are often in shorter supply since pretty much everyone in China openly laughs at the thought of paying for software. Despite their availability, however, I have never actually seen anyone playing a DS or PSP in public. Granted, I spend most of my time with kids who are put through 12 hours of school, six days a week, which leaves little time for things like videogames or doing anything other than struggling to maintain some shred of your sanity.

Despite the law, the home consoles still have a presence. I asked a Chinese friend about the ban on consoles and she was not even aware that it existed, although she did remark “So that’s why I don’t see them at the mall.” While the systems are indeed not often seen at major retailers, on a recent foray to Beijing I found a number of specialty shops along Gu Lou Dong Da Jie (”Drum Tower East Street”) openly selling the 360, PS3, and Wii without having their doors kicked in by SWAT teams.

The heart of Beijing’s criminal underworld, right in-between the local elementary school and the children’s hospital.

The boxes of the 360s and PS3s all had both English and Chinese on them: they probably came from Hong Kong, which is considered a separate market from the mainland with its own laws. The Wiis, on the other hand, all had Japanese or Korean on the box despite the 2008 release of a Chinese-language version in Taiwan (which, I should add for the sake of any government officials monitoring my Internet transmissions, is definitely a province of China and not at all a separate country please don’t send me back to the re-education camp). My best guess is that the Japanese and Korean Wiis are unsold surplus stock due to the fierce competition from the Vii.

Speaking of the Vii, cheap knock-off consoles flourish under the alleged ban. The biggest barrier to mainstream console gaming may not be the law at all, but simply the fact that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo’s products are priced beyond what most people can afford. Whereas the availability of a foreign console is limited to specialty shops, the local bookstore or supermarket is a ready source for a PSP-shaped object or simple Wii-esque gaming machine.

Can you spot the real PSP in this picture? (Hint: No.)

With such alternatives available for a fraction of the price, those expensive foreign consoles might be a hard sell to parents who are likely thinking “When I was a kid, we didn’t have videogames. We had the god damned Cultural Revolution.” Nintendo has made an effort to compete by offering cheaper products like the iQue Player: what at first glance looks like another knock-off “console in a controller” is actually an official product, a miniaturized N64 which sneaks through a loophole in the ban on home consoles. It may seem unfair that Nintendo can get away with selling old games like Ocarina of Time to Chinese gamers while the rest of the world gets to enjoy new products like the 3DS and…oh, yeah, nevermind.

That’s the weird, ambiguous status of console and handheld gaming in China right now. If you’re a fan of PC gaming, on the other hand, you’re in luck. Sort of. In Part 2 of my China adventures, I’ll take a closer look at the popularity of online gaming in China, RPGs by Chinese developers, oddities I’ve dug up in the budget bin, and lots of pictures of the current gaming-related merchandise craze. Expect an abundance of plants, zombies, birds, and anger.

Slather your hands in avian fury.