Last year, rumors and pictures began to spread about an interesting game in the works: a steampunk Disney project called “Epic Mickey”. Based on the somewhat creepy concept art, nobody would have guessed that this game was a real possibility. However, the game has been officially announced and a spread about it will be placed in GameInformer magazine.
The game is a platformer slated to come out for the Wii and involves ”painting” and “erasing” levels. The most interesting part is the plot, which is said to revolve around the “lesser” Disney characters rising up to dethrone the main mouse.
Being a former Disney employee myself, I find this news incredibly dumbfounding. I’m curious to see how this project turns out, and if it can truly go the distance with a dystopian vibe. What say you?
Today is the 10th anniversary of the Sega Dreamcast, can you believe it? Although I never owned one myself, I still enjoyed sneaking into my local Funcoland to play the Sonic Adventure demo. And of course, no one can forget the infamously addicting Chu Chu Rocket game that was somehow still amusing at 4 in the morning (although, isn’t everything?). Share some of your beloved (or not so beloved) memories of the Dreamcast here!
If you were like me and, well, I guess only several hundred other people in the U.S. at the time, you may have been hooked to your TurboGrafx 16. The console that helped make the jump to 16-bit graphics - and later had a huge influence on the way we play games today by introducing disc-based titles - has hit its 20th birthday, and in honor of that milestone of sorts, 1up.com has provided an intriguing retrospective on the system and its follow-ups.
I still have my TG16 hooked up, and even pop in some Blazing Lazers or R-Type from time to time. Heck, I’ve even got the TurboExpress, which was - and still is, in my mind - pretty damn awesome for being the only portable device at the time that could play the same game cartridges as the home console. Never mind the fact that the sucker ate 6 AA batteries at a time like they were margaritas at happy hour on Cinco de Mayo; it was still fun to bring World Class Baseball and Bonk’s Adventure with you on long car rides.
Anyone else out there have stories of the good ol’ TG16, TurboExpress, or TurboDuo? We’d love to hear them!
There’s been quite a lot of buzz around this unique game, which is about to be released on September 15th for the Nintendo DS system. For those of you who are not aware yet (that’s okay, I just found out about this last week– what kind of a gamer am I anyway?), Scribblenauts is an interactive puzzle/action side-scroller where the goal is to make the main character, Maxwell, retrieve as many “Starites” as possible.
It sounds quite simple, but there’s more to it. The Starites are hidden in such a way so that the player will first need to solve a puzzle before Maxwell can reach them. By drawing out the name of an object, person, or event on the touchscreen, the player can attempt to solve the puzzle. Apparently, anything goes, since there is no right or wrong way to solve a puzzle. Zombies, time travel, salad, republicans, bulldozer, roflcopter…you name it, this game has it. It’s like my childhood all over again. Well, if roflcopters existed when I was a kid.
10 years ago today, at the Macworld Expo (*gasp*) in New York, Bungie unleashed their first glimpses of Halo upon the unsuspecting world. No one could have guessed back then that it would become one of the most successful video game franchises in the history of the medium, but it definitely turned some heads, and over the course of the last 10 years, the series has launched consoles, shattered records, given rise to Xbox Live, and spawned an empire that reaches into novels, comics, action figures, machinima, online fanbases and communities, and countless other forms of merchandising and support.
Like it or not, Halo is huge, and it’s not going anywhere.
Wait, that’s the Chief?
So today, the crew at Bungie.net posted an article about that initial release upon the Macworld crowd, giving some pictures of the blocky supersoldier who would become the Master Chief and the ringworld he blasted through. It’s an interesting time-warp of sorts, especially considering how far the game, the series, and game graphics in general have come.
Fight finished. For now, at least.
There’s also an excellent video detailing the game’s progress, as well as what’s in store for the future. With the upcoming release of ODST and next year’s Halo: Reach, it looks like Bungie is going to continue riding their Halo wave as long as they can. Really, can you blame them?
Bungie.net: “So Our Game’s Called Halo…” Thanks to Bungie for the original Halo pic, and for giving us the ability to take awesome screenshots like the one from Halo 3.
For the second straight year, some good folks have taken over a small portion of the internet and spent their time garnering donations for the Child’s Play Charity by completing a Mario Marathon. The group has spent over 50 hours to this point (as of 12:30 pm Sunday) playing through the NES, Super NES, N64, GameCube, and Wii Mario games, attempting to get 100% completion on each one, and they’ve raised over $14,000 dollars from fans across the globe for their efforts.
You can watch the marathon over at (appropriately enough) http://www.MarioMarathon.com and donate via PayPal directly from the site. They’re also trending pretty well on Twitter, with loads of people “chatting” via the message service. Head over and check these guys out! It’s like hanging around the house playing games with 1200 of your closest friends.
Since 2003, over 100,000 gamers worldwide have banded together through Child’s Play, a community based charity grown and nurtured from the game culture and industry. Over 3.5 million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals across North America and the world have been collected since our inception.
As many Halo fans know, the good peeps over at Bungie have a sort of fetish with the number seven. As such, they choose July 7 (07/07, get it?) to celebrate Bungie Day, and give their fans some sweet stuff in the process. Last year, they celebrated the fact that, altogether, people had amassed nearly 7,000,000,000 (that’s seven billion for those of you who forgot math class already) kills in the Halo 3 campaign mode. Today, it’s the much-sought-after Recon armor up for grabs.
How do you win it? Beat a foursome of Bungie’s own in a random online match today. You’ll need all of the downloadable maps, but if you jump into today’s special playlist, you have a chance of going up against four people with flaming heads (in-game, of course - it’d be tough for them to talk through their headsets if their heads were really on fire), and if you and your buddies can find a way to defeat them, you’re on your way to fancy Recon armor.
There are other ways that the Bungie folks may be doling it out, but they haven’t yet revealed those secrets. In fact, they’re not going to until sometime after 07/07, so the best advice is really to just go play as much as you can (and try to win and do cool stuff, probably).
So get out there and have some fun in matchmaking! I’ll be joining in the fun after work.
One of the most anticipated Wii games of the year, The Conduit, has gone gold, meaning thousands of disc drives are burning copies of the game at this very moment. On Tuesday, June 23, the game will be shipped to stores, awaiting your hard-earned moneys to be set free onto the world and loaded into your shiny white trapezoids. As the Sega/High Voltage press release says, “Soon you will be able to arm yourself with an arsenal of sci-fi gadgets and high-powered weapons as you fight against aliens, rogue agents and other enemy forces.”
But what about the hype? What’s your take? Sure, the game looks pretty good (and not just “for a Wii game”). It won awards at E3 and other game conferences, and it’s been talked about around the gaming community since it was first revealed over a year ago. But are we looking to a third-party answer to Metroid Prime 3, or will we be stuck with another Red Steel?
I’m seriously hoping that The Conduit turns out to be a good game. Original IPs have it rough from the get-go these days (see No More Heroes, Mirror’s Edge, etc.), but if the game is good enough, it’ll break through those bounds and make its way up the sales charts and into your home.
So, fellow Lemony gamers, are you looking forward to The Conduit? Will you be buying, renting, or passing? Let us know!
A week ago I decided to start a brand new game of Fable 2 with one goal in mind: keeping my female character hot. I know it’s shallow, but I’m starting to get really sick of RPGs that mangle my characters into looking like some sort of deformed muffin. I understand the whole “your decisions affect what you look like” shtick, but can’t your choices at least try to make you look decent?
It may be cruel, but I’m forcing a low-calorie, no-magic, middle of the road diet on my Fable 2 character to prevent her from turning into the freak show I managed to create before. Even with Fable 2’s “good” look, the character you play still has a ridiculous looking halo floating atop their head. And the evil look? Lame looking horns. If you play somewhere in between, you may be graced with zombie or Dracula face (yay?). If you are a heavy magic user (who isn’t?) then forget about perfect, smooth video game skin. You get a body covered in horrible neon blue veins, as if you had just inhaled a few blue highlighters. Oh, and don’t even dare eat so much as an apple or you’ll turn into Heffer from Rocko’s Modern Life.
Yikes
And while I’m on the topic, what’s up with character creations that start ugly and just stay that way? Oblivion is the worst offender, no matter what I try to do with the female character she still looks like my grandma.
What say you out there? Do you care about how your characters look in RPGs?
In the midst of all the mind-boggling announcements at Microsoft’s E3 press conference today, there were 2 huge presentations for Halo nuts like myself.
First was the reveal of some actual gameplay footage from the upcoming Halo 3: ODST - plus a release date: September 22, 2009. That’s 113 days and counting for the slackers out there. The game looks fantastic, playing off of Halo 3’s strengths and not really messing with what ain’t broken, plus adding in some cool new visual enhancements to the standard HUD. Also, Firefly nerds will love hearing Nathan Fillion at the beginning and Adam Baldwin about halfway through, continuing their awesome tradition of being part of the Halo universe.
But wait, there’s more! Bungie and Microsoft then went about blowing our minds just a little bit more by unveiling Halo: Reach, an entirely new game for which we have absolutely no frickin’ information, other than the precious hopes of millions that it takes place during the events of the novel The Fall of Reach and that it includes Spartans (as evidenced by the “Sierra” call signs heard in the brief, gameplay-free trailer). Halo: Reach, as the trailer says, “Falls 2010.”
Everything can be viewed and downloaded at Bungie’s site. Enjoy.
