General gaming

General gaming

Super Mario Galaxy and Others Being Added to Wii Budget Line - Report

Posted: 08 Aug 2011 06:00 PM PDT

Super Mario Galaxy

Since being announced along with the Wii price cut in May, no additional titles have been added to the Nintendo Select line of budget Wii titles. That will reportedly be changing soon with the addition of some other quality titles.

Retail sources have indicated that four more Nintendo games will be joining the budget line, according to Kotaku: Super Paper Mario, Super Mario Galaxy, Punch-Out, and Mario Strikers Charged. That's not a bad offering of titles for $19.99 each, particularly from Nintendo, a company that traditionally likes to maintain the premium pricing of its games for longer than most. There's no word on exactly when the games would get their new, discounted prices, but it'll be happening sometime in August.

The original four Select games were Mario Super Sluggers, Wii Sports (replaced by Mario Kart Wii as the Wii's bundled game), The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Animal Crossing: City Folk.

Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition is Arcade Perfection

Posted: 08 Aug 2011 05:31 PM PDT

When you're sitting in a room with Seth Killian (Capcom Community Manager and Evolution Championship Series veteran), Derek Neal (Producer for Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition and EVO veteran) and IGN's Fighting Master Mark Ryan Sallee (yeah, he went to EVO too), and they start talking about SF3 tournament players, it can get hard to really follow the conversation. Unlike Sallee, I'm the casual SF3 player in the office -- a guy who appreciates the game's amazing 2D visuals and smooth animation, but lacks the tournament chops needed to play on the same level as these experts.

Despite our differences in skill, it's hard to not recognize Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition (SF3: 3SOE) as a revival effort for the last great fighting game from a bygone era. It's a piece of history from back when television aspect ratios were still 4:3, and no one had ever heard of high definition video games. The arcade scene in the U.S. at the time seemed to be dead, but Street Fighter III still stood as a landmark of that period thanks to an unprecedented effort by Capcom to outdo anything seen in a fighting game before. Just look at Elena's idle animation alone and you'll gain a genuine appreciation for the amount of love crammed into the SF3 series of games.

Gamerscore World Record Holder Surpasses 600,000

Posted: 08 Aug 2011 05:13 PM PDT


Here I was thinking that I had done something significant by finally going over 50,000 Gamerscore recently. Meanwhile, the Guinness World Record holder for highest Gamerscore has reached a new milestone, surpassing the 600,000 mark.

Raymond Cox, better known by his Gamertag Stallion83, reached exactly 600,000 with the 40-point Homewrecker Achievement in Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon, according to his website (via IGN).

His list of games played on Xbox Live is absolutely enormous -- he's played 880 different games, many of them the same game but from different regions. He's earned 84% of the Achievements across those games for a total of what is, as of this writing, 600,445 Gamerscore.

Relive Some of EVO 2011's Best Moments

Posted: 08 Aug 2011 04:43 PM PDT


The EVO fighting game tournament is really quite an event. Since assuming the EVO name in 2002, it's grown both in size and the amount of attention it gets each year. The rotation of games has changed over the years from Tekken Tag Tournament to Marvel vs. Capcom 2 to Mortal Kombat, and the players and crowds are as passionate as ever.

If, like me, you're not a huge fighting game fan, the event probably isn't something you would consider attending. Even so, that doesn't make it any more difficult to appreciate a lot of what goes on there, as proven by the recent video of Noah, the eight-year-old sensation who entertained the crowds this year.

The video above was one of three put together by former 1UPer Richard Li. It's a collection of many of the moments from this year's tournament finals, which took place in Las Vegas late last month. Regardless of your fighting game knowledge level, it's an enjoyable watch as it does a fine job of capturing the emotions of both the players and the crowd as it watched the action.

Fruit Ninja Kinect Review

Posted: 08 Aug 2011 04:18 PM PDT

To some folks, the mere existence of Fruit Ninja Kinect could mean the sky is still falling -- where casual games end up filling shelves and homes while edging out traditional core experiences. For context, Fruit Ninja started as a popular fruit slicing smartphone game developed by Halfbrick Studios and downloaded over 20 million times across five platforms since its April 2010 debut. This basic version is available for .99 cents -- but now for $10 (and a Kinect), you could play it on an HD console with your entire body serving as the controller. Before you go all Chicken Little on me about how another baby game is coming to your hardcore console, splash some water on your face and consider this: Yes, bite-sized casual games like this rarely transition well to traditional core platforms like the 360, but what if Fruit Ninja Kinect turns out to be one of the best examples of simple fun using Microsoft's motion based peripheral? Is it anything but expected, considering Fruit Ninja itself is one of the few mega successful smartphone games wrapped in the cultural zeitgeist of casual games?

The first thing you'll notice when playing Fruit Ninja Kinect is that the environment here is much different than playing on a handheld device, even though the core concept is fundamentally the same. Traditionally, Fruit Ninja is a game where you swing and slice fruit that's been tossed in the air like a modern day samurai with a Ginsu knife, but only using the power of your finger instead. There's not much to the game fundamentally, and it's designed as quick entertainment.

Duke Nukem to be Profitable as Red Dead Ships 11 Million

Posted: 08 Aug 2011 03:36 PM PDT

Red Dead Redemption Undead Nightmare

Since being released in May 2010, Red Dead Redemption has impressively sold in more than 11 million units. That accounts for the number of games sold to retail, as opposed to the number sold through to customers. It was announced as a part of Take-Two's financial results for its first quarter of fiscal 2012, which ran from April 1, 2011 through June 30.

Net revenue was down to $334.4 from $375.4 during the same period a year ago. That's no surprise, as fiscal 2011 enjoyed the strength of Red Dead's launch, whereas L.A. Noire -- while doing very well with 4 million units sold-in -- couldn't match its success. This all contributed to a GAAP loss of $8.6 million, as compared with income of $27.4 million last year.

Before you go blaming Duke Nukem Forever for the decline, Take-Two said it expects the game to make money despite the... poor critical reception. Strauss Zelnick said today, "Although it received disappointing reviews from critics, the release is projected to be profitable for Take-Two."

Nintendo Wants Your Zelda Flipnotes to Show Miyamoto

Posted: 08 Aug 2011 01:47 PM PDT

Zelda background

Besides what we already know about, Nintendo has additional plans to celebrate the 25-year anniversary of The Legend of Zelda series, and one part involves fan participation. Nintendo today announced the launch of a new Zelda website and a contest where users can submit Zelda-inspired flipnotes to be featured on various Nintendo outlets.

The new anniversary website doesn't have much to it, at least as of yet; there is a very brief history of the many games in the series, video of the orchestra playing Zelda music at E3, details on the flipnote contest, and wallpapers like the one above.

Snatcher Radio Drama Will be Free Initially, Sold on CD Later

Posted: 08 Aug 2011 12:43 PM PDT

Snatcher

The initial release of the radio drama based on Snatcher will be free. The collaboration between Hideo Kojima and Goichi "Suda 51" Suda was announced last month but that particular detail was unclear at the time.

Kojima revealed the news on Twitter (as translated by Andriasang), where he also made it clear the project would still need to make some money -- he just isn't sure about the specifics of doing that.

Sdatcher, as it's called, isn't being created for profit, but there are people who need to be paid. One way money will be generated is by releasing a CD version of the drama after it's made available as a free download. We don't know exactly when that will be happening; the initial announcement pegged it as coming alongside episode 300 of Hideradio, Kojima's Japanese podcast. Of course, the show isn't set to a specific schedule, so it's not especially helpful in trying to peg down an exact (or even a vague) date.

Mario Film Writer on Nintendo's Lack of Involvement, Game References, and an Angry Dennis Hopper

Posted: 08 Aug 2011 11:25 AM PDT

Super Mario Bros movie

In less than two years, the Super Mario Bros. movie will be 20 years old. And while many would not consider it a classic, it is an undeniably interesting project. Back in 1993, videogame movies weren't commonplace like they are today; it was uncharted territory to take a game and attempt to make a film out of it. As the first of its kind (at least in North America), the writers had a great challenge in trying to come up with a comprehensible plot based on a franchise that had, to date, put very little emphasis on its story.

That was hardly the movie's only problem: production managed to be overbudget as early iterations failed to work out for one reason or another. In an extensive interview with Super Mario Bros. The Movie Archive, one of the movie's writers, Parker Bennett, outlined how things came to be, including the many problems that were faced in the creation of Super Mario Bros.

There were numerous scripts written for the movie -- including one that would have seen a Die Hard-inspired Bruce Willis cameo -- but what ended up being used "wasn't a coherent script," in Bennett's opinion. There were concerns that viewers wouldn't understand what was happening, which led to Bennett and co-writer Terry Runte doing an "incredible amount of looping." Also known as automated dialogue replacement, or ADR, that is the process where lines are recorded after a scene has been filmed so that they can be dubbed into the movie.

The Witness is a "Longform Game" From the Guy Who Made Braid

Posted: 08 Aug 2011 11:15 AM PDT

I just played two hours of The Witness and I'm not sure how to define it. I'm guessing I'll struggle with that until I reach the ending, though the copy of Mulholland Drive next to designer Jonathan Blow's TV suggests that's not a sure thing. And until I find out the game's inevitable spoilers, I'm not sure I want to ramble on forever about it.

Then again, maybe I'm trying too hard. It's a puzzle game. You show up on a deserted island with blue screens scattered around, and each screen has a move-a-ball-from-the-beginning-to-end puzzle on it. Solve these and you open doors, unlock more puzzles, and eventually create enough energy to open a secret room at the top of a big mountain off in the distance, at which point spoilery things happen. That's the game on a superficial level.

Posted by Shri Krishna

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