General gaming

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• Portal: No Escape is an Awesome Short Film
• Fall Update to Let Players Turn PlayStation Home Into a Game
• 16-Bit Defined: 20 Years of Super Nintendo
• 1UP's Top 5 Super Nintendo Games
• Six Must-Play Super Nintendo Imports
• Playing With Power: The Super Nintendo's Technical Tricks
• Nintendo Planning Pre-TGS Event, Stock Price Jumps in Response
• The Next Sonic 4 Episode Won't be Out Until 2012
• Kirby Wii is Now Return to Dream Land, Coming in October
• This is a Free-to-Read Age of Empires Online Review

Portal: No Escape is an Awesome Short Film Posted: 23 Aug 2011 04:14 PM PDT Portal is obviously a tremendous game, but how would it transfer to other entertainment mediums? We've already gotten a taste of what it would be like as a comic, and now we can see what it would be as a short film. Titled Portal: No Escape, director Dan Trachtenberg has re-envisioned a grittier take on Portal and turned it into the 7-minute film seen above. It stars Danielle Rayne in the role of Chell, although, with her never speaking a word, that's never explicitly stated. She's kept prisoner in a room and eventually discovers the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device (the proper, fancy name for the Portal gun) and uses it to escape, only to realize she's in a test chamber. The fan-favorite Companion Cube doesn't make it an appearance, nor does GLaDOS or any cake, though you do get to see a few Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cubes. Trachtenberg said on Twitter that it was filmed prior to Portal 2 being announced, making it upwards of a year and a half ago that production began.

Fall Update to Let Players Turn PlayStation Home Into a Game Posted: 23 Aug 2011 03:05 PM PDT PlayStation Home has changed a number of times over the years. This fall, it's getting what may be its most drastic redesign yet. The new Home will feature what's described as a "'hub and districts' design." It's intended to better integrate all of Home's content -- particularly the games -- so that all of it is better organized and more easily accessible. The new Hub area seen above will feature a rotating selection of games you can play, with indie PC title Cogs planned to be among what's located there when the update first goes live later this year. Also new is the Activity Board where you'll find all of the games you can play, rewards, and a user-generated content "events system."

16-Bit Defined: 20 Years of Super Nintendo Posted: 23 Aug 2011 02:39 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 16-Bit Defined: 20 Years of Super Nintendo Two decades later, we take a look back at the system that created the console cycle. By: Bob Mackey August 19, 2011 This article originally appeared in 1UP Presents #2, our amazing print magazine that contains 58 ad-free pages of original content on the best paper ever. If you'd like to read more about the Super Nintendo, check out Bob Mackey's list of must-play imports, his examination the system's technical tricks, and our readers' top 5 SNES games, also from Issue 2. How do you follow up the NES? This question undoubtedly ran through the creative minds at Nintendo as the faint spectre of the 90s began to loom on the horizon. In many ways, the ubiquity of their Nintendo Entertainment System stymied the release of a new console; simply put, the NES was a standard feature of any American household, common as the Mr. Coffee.

1UP's Top 5 Super Nintendo Games Posted: 23 Aug 2011 02:39 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP's Top 5 Super Nintendo Games Find out which titles 1UP readers selected as the best of the best on the SNES. By: 1UP Staff August 19, 2011 Super Mario World You could say that a Nintendo console hasn't properly arrived until it sees its first Mario game. By that metric, the Super NES arrived on day one thanks to the inclusion of the superb Super Mario World as the system's pack-in title. At the time, fans probably found it a little too easy to take Mario World for granted -- it was free, it arrived a mere year after the equally amazing Super Mario Bros. 3, and Sega quickly started flinging nastiness at its earnest tone and deliberate pacing with the ad campaign for Sonic the Hedgehog -- but in retrospect that just goes to show that we didn't appreciate just how good we had it back then.

Six Must-Play Super Nintendo Imports Posted: 23 Aug 2011 02:38 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet Six Must-Play Super Nintendo Imports Check out the best 16-bit games you (probably) never played. By: Bob Mackey August 19, 2011 The 16-bit market wasn't the best place for American publishers to take risks; with Nintendo's ruthless grip on the production side of things, anyone who put out a Super Nintendo game in the United States had to make sure their product sold, and sold well. And as the system aged, carts only increased in size and cost, which is why you'd often see Super Famicom games of the era listed at 100 to 150 dollars -- Japanese publishers simply passed the price of their potential risk on to the consumer. And while certain niche titles were often priced at a now-unbelievable 80 dollars in the U.S. (in mid-'90s bucks, no less) this approach certainly didn't work for everyone, causing many games to forever stay in their native Japanese homeland -- until, that is, intrepid young hackers began taking apart and reassembling them for an English-speaking audience. These games might not be for everyone, but we can at least be thankful they exist in a Western-friendly format. Satellaview

Playing With Power: The Super Nintendo's Technical Tricks Posted: 23 Aug 2011 02:37 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet Playing With Power: The Super Nintendo's Technical Tricks Despite the opposition's claims of "blast processing," the SNES wowed in more ways than one. By: Bob Mackey August 19, 2011 Mode 7

Nintendo Planning Pre-TGS Event, Stock Price Jumps in Response Posted: 23 Aug 2011 02:01 PM PDT An event Nintendo reportedly intends to hold next month seems to have caused a spike in Nintendo's stock price today. Bloomberg reports that Osaka trading saw Nintendo shares jump 8.4 percent to 13,100 yen. That's the highest it's been since July 28, the day the 3DS price drop was announced. In the U.S., Nintendo closed out the day yesterday at $19.67. Today, it started out at $21.20 and steadily rose all the way to $21.65. Tokai Tokyo Securities analyst Yusuke Tsunoda attributes this to invitations that were reportedly sent out yesterday for an event to be held on September 13. Nintendo has declined to comment on the event, which kicks off just two days prior to the Tokyo Game Show (running September 15-18).

The Next Sonic 4 Episode Won't be Out Until 2012 Posted: 23 Aug 2011 01:21 PM PDT It'll still be a while yet before the next episode of Sonic 4 is released. Episode 2 isn't set to be released until 2012. Some companies, like Telltale Games, seem to have completely mastered episodic gaming. Seasons of Sam & Max, Back to the Future, Tales of Monkey Island, and so on have seen their episodes released on a regular basis without any major delays in between. Then there are examples like Valve, where episodic gaming was adopted in order to speed up the release of Half-Life games... and we're now going on four years since Episode Two with no signs of Episode Three or Half-Life 3. Rather than release one bigger version of Sonic the Hedgehog 4, Sega decided to break it up into multiple parts. Episode 1 was intended to come out last summer but was pushed back until later in the year, finally coming out in October. Episode 2 hasn't really been heard from much, and with Sonic Generations set to celebrate the series' 20-year anniversary later this year, it won't be until 2012 that we get to see the next chunk of Sonic 4.

Kirby Wii is Now Return to Dream Land, Coming in October Posted: 23 Aug 2011 12:20 PM PDT We knew the name "Kirby Wii" wouldn't stick around forever, even if the latest Mario Kart, Mario Kart 7, didn't get a particularly original name. Nintendo's PAX lineup reveals Kirby Wii has been officially named Kirby's Return to Dream Land and will be out on October 24. That's one month after the new Kirby game for DS, Kirby: Mass Attack, is released on September 19. It bolsters the upcoming lineup for Wii, which is really lacking outside of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Nintendo of America continues to say it doesn't plan on bringing over any of the three JRPGs fans have been petitioning for (all of them are already available in Japan), including Xenoblade Chronicles, the game that was released in Europe last week to very strong reviews. Nintendo did recently say it would be watching how things go in Europe, so that's a more promising development than what came before it. Prior to Dream Land, Kirby had been fairly quiet as of late on consoles. Kirby's Epic Yarn came to Wii this past October, but before that, it had been a decade since the last real Kirby game on consoles came out, Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards. (Kirby Air Ride was released on GameCube in 2003, but that was a racing game.)

This is a Free-to-Read Age of Empires Online Review Posted: 23 Aug 2011 12:15 PM PDT When Microsoft shut down Ensemble Studios a few years ago shortly after the release of Halo Wars, I never thought we'd have a new Age of Empires game, much-less one being developed by remnants of that fabled studio. Microsoft, along with Gas Powered Games and Robot Entertainment (who has several former Ensemble employees within) has brought the franchise back into the spotlight with a mix of online social components and made it free-to-play. However, this entry in the series stumbles a bit in its execution and feels more like a conglomeration of ideas than a well-focused game that the franchise deserves. The biggest highlight for this game can't be ignored: Age of Empires Online is free, right now, via the Games for Windows LIVE client. How much can you play for free? Well, if you're to believe the promotional materials associated with the game you can get all the way to the level 40 cap without dropping a cent. But this journey to the level cap will be a grind with sub-par equipment for units, limited inventory space, few options for multiplayer, and other features that would otherwise be at your disposal for a premium civilization of your choosing.

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