We Sell Parrots and Smash Brothers.

So right now I'm in beautiful Newburyport MA, the town that saw my ass into this world, kicking screaming and covered in placenta (I was going to say polenta, but then I realized that my mother was not an ear of corn). I'm stuck here because I have to get a metal plate screwed into my left Fibula. I broke it when some overenthusiastic idiot fucked up a judo move at Brazillian Jiu Jitsu. We were going to get the operation done in NYC, but we know the foremost doctor in ankle orthepedics up here so we decided to go with a known factor.

Anyway, before I limped my way to the Accella train, I took some snaps of this buisness in my part of Brooklyn; Bushwick. I was passing by to get a key made when I decided to go inside. This place, it turns out sells pets and used videogames. I'm not kidding. What can make a busted ass Sega Saturn with a broken controller port sadder?

A puppy mill.



Welcome to Bushwick!



See the sights!



Meet the small, furry residents!



Our staff is damn near starving for attention!



Sample exotic wares!



Bring home souvenirs for the kids at home!

And with that, I'm gonna go to bed. I have a glass of Brazillian Cachaça over ice nd a long boring day ahead of me tomorrow. I'm gonna blog about the Squadcast when it decides to hit the interwaves.

Here's hoping I don't have to spend two months in a cast.

Pata-Pata-Plagiarism: Is Patapon a rip-off?

A few weeks back, the following video by made the rounds on Digg:

Cute huh? Apparently it's a short film called Bendito Machine and was created by an artist named Jossie Malis (he has a site for it too!) but wait...this reminds me of something. What ever couuuuld it beeee....

Yep. It's everyone's favorite games-as-art portable RTS "Patapon" for the PSP on Sony. Now, here's the rub; Bendito Machine came out in 2006 as far as I can tell (it at least won awards for it). Patapon came out 2007, just a year later.

Is it possible that everyone's favorite artsy tactical rhythm strategy game is a work of plagiarism?

I don't know about you, but what bugs me about it isn't simply that the animation style is similar and that certain key elements (the eyes that the god machine crap out, the color scheme, the outlines) are similar, what really gets me is that it's also thematically similar. In both cases we have a tribe of small people combating huge monsters, in both cases there is a focus on tribal dance or reverence doing something and in both we get the sensation that the little tribal people are going to be stomped into so many tiny pieces (which, consequentially, happens in both cases).

What's your take? Is Patapon ripping off this guy? Or did he have a hand in making this game? If the former, I'm kinda miffed. If the latter, I'm surprised we haven't heard about it. Or maybe, oddly enough, it's just one big coincidence.

So it begins...

So who is this asshole?

On the internet, I'm Papapishu mostly just the guy responsible for the Squadron of Shame, the 1UP community's bookclub for games. The idea is to take one's Pile of Shame, the shrink-wrapped pile of games that we haven't gotten around to playing or finishing, or games we never got around to buying, and to play them as a community. Psychonauts? Been there. Fatal Frame? We've done it. Odin Sphere? You betcha.

Recently we launched our "Squadcast", our podcast about the games we play. So far we've covered The Shivah (Dave Gilbert's adventure game starring a Rabbi), as well as Out of the World (a.k.a. Another World, the clasical platform/adventure game from 1991)

I've made a few attempts over at 1UP.com and Destructoid, but now I've decided to start my own blog. Don't get me wrong, both communities are great; but in both cases, your content isn't really yours to own. So, I'm going for blogspot.

Here's to another blog!