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Make GameStop’s Activity Book for them, win $500
By Joe Fourhman | August 27, 2008
This is probably been at the GameStop DEAR GOD DON’T YOU WANT TO PREORDER SOMETHING counter for a while now… it’s a very nice Activity Book featuring a AAA lineup of E-rated games. High quality paper, lots of nice full color character art. The actual puzzles are pretty lousy and the interior cover looks like a low-res screenshot of GameStop’s website (complete with blue underlined “links”), but overall it’s a great timekiller for the little gamer in your life. The activities feature predictable E-rated suspects like Pokemon, Wall-E and Mario Kart… but also manage to go a tad obscure by including games such as Boom Blox, Harvest Moon and Samba de Amigo. It’s all to promote gamestop.com/playground, “a fun and safe website for kids entertainment.”
But here’s the mcguffin: the book details a national (US only) mail-in contest with a pretty sweet prize: a $500 GameStop Gift Card. Four runner-ups each win a $100 GameStop Gift Card. All you have to do is come up with a activity for a future activity book (which may or may not be printed), based on an E-rated game. Not a bad payoff for stuffing some Pikachu stickers in an envelope and calling it a matching game. Entries must be postmarked by September 12, 2008, so hurry it up!
There’s no shame in participating even if you lack children.
What if Metal Gear Solid 4 was an NES game?
By Stephen Munn | August 27, 2008
Doctored screenshots are fun. Completely faked ones are even better, as long as they’re not passed off as real.
With that, I’ll suggest you check out this compilation of faux screenshots compiled over at Infendo. In particular, I’m very fond of the shot at left. Not only does it reference somewhat the way Metal Gear looked like in its NES days (it didn’t even look this good, actually), but it sticks a nice pointy thing right in Konami’s famously terrible localization skills. Those skills have really only improved in the past five years, sadly enough.
There’s a nice shot at PS3 launch title Genji as well. The best looking shot is probably the one for Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess as it might look on the original Game Boy, though I can’t help thinking it’s too high resolution for that old fella.
Source: Infendo
Topics: Gameboy, NES, Nintendo Wii, PC, PS3, Retro, XBOX 360 |
Enjoy this article? You may also like:Castle Crashers Living Up To Its Name
By Joe Haygood | August 27, 2008
Castle Crashers has been awash in all kinds of hype and furor, first over its gameplay, and then after the type showed it listed at $22.50 to purchase the game.
Now it is awash in more grumbling, but this time from players around the web, including some of the fortunate (or not so fortunate) at Destructoid who found their 360’s dropping them out of multiplayer Castle Crashers games, and shortly thereafter the game would just bomb on its own.
Castle Crashers developer The Behemoth, has acknowledged the issues with the online play, putting up the cartoon to the left on their devblog. No word on when the fixes will be uploaded, but not a good start for a game that was already enveloped in controversy from the beginning. Also not good for Microsoft, which seems to want to bump the default price of an XBLA game to 1200 points.
A Vampyre Story Trailer
By Joe Haygood | August 27, 2008Autumn Moon Studios has released a new trailer for “A Vampyre Story”, and I have to say that so far the game is looking top notch. Everything about this game screems old school adventuring fun, and it is nice to see a LucasArts veteran go back to the genre that made them famous beyond Star Wars.
After being in development hell for so long, it is nice to see this game shaping up well for an October release in Europe. Looks like a definite import for me unless they find a US distributor.
Strange Transmission Ahead: No Known Survivors
By Joe Haygood | August 27, 2008
Yesterday, the Dead Space developement team unveiled NoKnownSurvivors.com, the new website that delves into the backstory to the Dead Space universe. There is a story that will be told over nine weeks leading up to the release of Dead Space at retail. Each week a new body part on the website will start to mutate and grow, eventually turning into a Necromorph body part and unveiling a new segment of the story.
PixelJunk Monsters + StarCraft + giant space poo = Savage Moon
By Joe Fourhman | August 26, 2008
Fresh from the PlayStation Blog, news of a new PSN title… Savage Moon. From the announcement:
Coming exclusively to PLAYSTATION Network this fall, Savage Moon is a frantic, action-packed tower defense game in a gritty sci-fi setting. You are tasked with protecting mining facilities from ravenous space bugs using some truly fearsome weaponry. And you’ll need as much strategy as firepower as you fend off wave after wave.
The key phrase in that paragraph is tower defense. Given my love for PixelJunk Monsters, it’s almost a certainty that I’ll look into this Starship Troopersified version.
But wow, what is up with all that poo in the screenshot?
R-Type Command: Tactical Shmup!
By Kelly Monfort | August 26, 2008
R-Type. Who among us can deny the awesomeness of this game? From the late 80’s to the early 90’s this game dominated the Side-Scrolling Shmup genre. Now someone has turned it into a tactical turn based shmup. Who? Atlus is who, famous for it’s turn based RPG’s like Etrian Odyssey and Operation Darkness. However they have taken it a bit further in their diverse game selection to include R-Type Command. Let me tell you, they have done a fine job!
AeroRant #238 PC Snobs
By Richard Windsor | August 26, 2008
I have been a gamer for a long time, ever since the day my dad surprised me with an NES I have long been in love with the glorious home console. Over the years I have owned almost every single console to see daylight, except for the Saturn, it sucked. During those years of console gaming I have also enjoyed playing many games on the PC, it offered experiences that you just could not get on the consoles of the time, but today things have changed and it seems that there is a small group of die hard PC fans who think that PC’s are still the end all be all of gaming, which is fine if you believe that and keep your mouth shut about it, but we all know that the fanboys have long lost control of their tongues.
This console hate seemed to really hit a boiling point with these snobs once console FPS’s started becoming more and more popular. The FPS was one of the few genres that one really needed a PC to enjoy, but now consoles get almost every major shooting game, and that I think irked some of the PC hardcore enough that they became seriously crazy and dedicated to a cause that just does not make sense. This rationality that a PC FPS is better then a console one is something that I just don’t get. Sure the graphics will usually be better and you get a bit more precision with a keyboard and mouse, but you also spend all of your time hunkered over a screen getting carpel tunnel syndrome while your legs and arms fall asleep. I have played many a round of Counter-Strike until my arm turned black, but at some point I realized that I could have just as much fun playing Halo or Call Of Duty, and I could keep all the feeling in my extremities.
I’m not saying that PC gaming is bad, I plan to spend many hours on Spore soon, but a certain group of people seem to think different is bad for some reason. These people are missing a lot of fun that can be had if you just put down the mouse and pick up a controller. PC gaming has suffered a bit recently and maybe it is because it has tried to think of itself as more of an elite gaming platform, but in the end it’s just video games and the last time I checked they were about fun, and I really don’t have more fun playing on either platform.
I bring this issue to light because I have some PC playing friends who refuse to buy consoles, which is fine if you have a solid reason, but their reason is that console games are no good and don’t offer any kind of real gaming satisfaction. This makes my head explode because almost all the games that they play are also available on consoles and vice versa. All this arguing stems from who had the better input device or who can anti-alias better, to me it’s just a bunch of people with nothing better to do then complain about things they can’t control….oh wait, that’s what I am doing…..I’ll shut up now, just play what you want on what you want and shut the hell up!
You say you want a Dance Dance Revolution?
By Stephen Munn | August 25, 2008
How exactly does one go about figuring out which is the best Dance Dance Revolution game to buy? Review scores are not a good idea, because they’re all relative. Maybe the first DDR reviewed the best, but Ultramix 3 is actually better… just not better enough to warrant a better score years later. Let me back up a little, because I’m confusing myself.
I want to buy a Dance Dance Revolution game. I’ve got a Wii and a 60GB PS3. That means I can play any of the DDR games for PS1, PS2, Gamecube, or Wii. There are none for PS3. Knowing little about any of these games, I’m having trouble figuring out what’s my best course of action here.
If anyone can offer me any input on this, I’d love to hear it. Look below for aggregate scores and releases. Keep in mind I can’t get the Xbox or 360 versions, I don’t have those platforms. Everything else is fair game.
Topics: Gamecube, Music, Nintendo Wii, PS1, PS2, XBOX, XBOX 360 |
Enjoy this article? You may also like:Kojima: Will Make Games For Syringes
By Paul Munn | August 25, 2008
Hideo Kojima has stunned the world by saying that this really was it, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is the very last Metal Gear game he will ever make.
Roit.
Today he said he may produce another Metal Gear title, possibly a prequel involving Big Boss. Now as I mentioned in this week’s podcast I used the very nice Piggyback Games official guide to make it through my first MGS4 playthrough to earn the no-kill and doll collecting rewards and I’m playing it through again to go after a no-alert playthrough. I never finished Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops on the PSP because of my old-man-like complaints about the I’m-so-great-I’m-gonna-use-circle-instead-of-X and one-analog-nub-is-cool-too control scheme. Since MGS4 controls so much better than any previous MGS game I’m not sure I’ll be able to double back and play the rest of MGS:PO. But as I was saying, not playing MGS:PO meant there was a good hunk of story revealed about Big Boss that I hadn’t seen before.
That also leaves open the situation that enough of what MGS4 showed didn’t happen in MGS:PO, leaving some nice ground to cover in Kojima’s next game. Ah well I guess we’ll find out, or be confused by long cut scenes in that game too.
So why would Kojima make even more of these games? Is 20 years of them not enough? Does he lack faith in that Zone of Enders franchise he kind of flailed around on for a little while there? Maybe Konami has given him a limitless supply of those nifty little syringes that give you a psyche boost so that on those days when he looks in the mirror and wonders why he’s doing another one he just pokes his neck and he’s good to go again. Except these don’t have the ugly side effects like the ones Snake gets warned about in MGS4.
Source: PlayStation Universe
