Video Game Mythbusters: Digging Up E.T. Cartridges in Desert Edition

     On Saturday, one of life's great mysteries was solved. E.T. cartridges were unearthed in the desert in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Filming for an upcoming documentary, XBox Entertainment Studios, along with Fuel Entertainment, hired a excavation crew to go out to into the site and attempt to dig up where the cartridges were supposedly buried. There's not a complete number of how many E.T. cartridges are buried. So, far they have found a few hundred copies and are still digging to find more. The tale of Atari burying millions of E.T. cartridges in the middle of the desert one of the great urban legends of video games, if the not the king of video game urban legends being referenced and the talk of gamers for years.

     For those who haven't heard of the urban myth, set back and I will tell you the tale. Once upon a time E.T. came out in a June in the year of 1982 and it was good. It became a blockbuster hit debuting at #1 with a gross over 11 million and stayed at the top spot for seven weeks. E.T. became the highest grossing movie of all time with $359 million until it was dethroned by another Steven Spielberg film, Jurassic Park in 1993. With a hit movie, it's only right to further cash in on its success with a potentially hit game right? Atari secured the rights to make the game in July 1982, giving its designer, Howard Scott Warshaw, five months to make the game as they wanted it to be released for the Christmas season.

     E.T. the Game came out as planned in December and it was bad. Actually, it was horrible. Due to Atari wanting the game to be released for the holiday season, it was rushed leaving an incomplete and buggy mess. According to Warshaw it took five weeks to make the game. The game started off strong, but after word of mouth on how bad it was and negative reviews, sales dropped and the game became what is considered to the biggest failure in video game history and one of the contributors in the video game crash in 1983. Atari suffered hard in losses. E.T. the game sold 1.5 units and made $25 million in sales, but left Atari with $100 million  loss and 3.5 million cartridges that nobody wanted to buy. The only solution Atari had was to bury the unsold copies in a landfill in the middle of the desert and try to recover. E.T. the Game was a pioneer, not only being the first of its kind, video game/movie tie-ins, but also the trend of them sucking.

This Is a Hot Video Game Character Post

     On Thursday, Nintendo did a direct conference for its upcoming game Super Smash Bros. for the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. It presented a ton of news about the new game, most importantly, one announcement was that not only would Samus Aran and her Zero suit counterpart would have their own separate slots, but Zero Suit Samus was getting a updated look. In the previous game in the Smash Bros. series Samus, when performing her final smash firing her Zero Laser. This attack would cause her power suit to break apart, becoming Zero Suit Samus. Zero Suit Samus was a weaker form with most of attacks not racking as much damage compared to her suited counterpart. To accommodate this better, director Mashiro Sakurai made some tweaks to Zero Suit Samus, designing her with a new pair rocket heels. Good news, right? Nope. News of this has set the internet on fire, in a bad way.
     Zero Suit Samus's new footwear has caused a bit of outrage to fans of the series. Samus' new redesign has people addressing the issue in gaming with oversexualizing its female characters for the sake of fanservice. This isn't new with female characters in video games, as in almost every game, there is a female character who is just T&A. The video game industry is a male dominated industry where it is made for men for men so, it's no wonder that we have female characters that are designed to be fanservice. Oddly enough, the issue mirrors this situation has been the design of women in games, being styled as oversexualized objects of male fantasy. There have been concerns of women in MMORPGs, being dressed up in armor that doesn't necessarily does what it design to do: Protect. I understand that video games are suppose to cater to fantasy and that seems to be the excuse for the fanservice but it still, in some form, have to portray things in a realistic manner and fully represent people as accurately as possible. Meaning that we might to give up a bit of the fanservice fantasy and have to design women, most notably in fighting games and MMORPGs, in outfits that make sense to their roles in games.

     Samus is suppose to be a kickass bounty hunter and is suppose to be the representation of female empowerment. You can't really carry that mantle in a pair of rocket heels, not even good looking rocket heels.  Overall, I'm not saying that Samus should be in a burqa in the next Smash Bros. or Metroid game, but designer her in a way that makes sense. Even though the heels are suppose to make her attacks more powerful, are still not believable that a person who regularly engages in fights, would wear. In the last Smash Bros. game, the developers were aware of that issue and gave her boots with a short heels. Samus hasn't been a stranger to being sexualized in the Metroid series, but the past directors did it in a way that matched who her character was, except for the people who did Other M. The only thing worse than rocket heels are wedges.