Payday, like Left 4 Dead, is a 4-player online co-op FPS that stresses teamwork. Except this time, you aren’t working together to survive the zombie apocalypse, you are teaming up in order to pull heists. You’ll run in, take and restrain hostages, shoot it out with law enforcement, and (provided everything goes well), escape with the money. Taking control of one of four criminals, you pull off a number of different heists. Although there are a small number of maps, the heists are generated randomly. If you die, your teammates have the option of exchanging a hostage in order to get you back. There are three skill trees you can upgrade, and several skills that you can unlock. The game has been supplemented with free content. There is a single player mode, but your computer controlled teammates are horrible, so online co-op is the way to go. The game doesn’t have a storyline, and at times the game seems rather unpolished. However, for a $20 downloadable title, you can do worse. This game is fun, and easy to get wrapped up in. In fact, I had to stop myself from screaming “GET THE @#$% DOWN NOW!!!!” while dealing with some hostages.

Gamasutra reports that Hirokazu Yasuhara has joined Nintendo, working at the Nintendo Of America headquarters in Redmond, WA. He joins as a designer with NST, who are credited with creating the Mario VS Donkey Kong series.

Why is this news? Yasuhara is credited as a co-creator of Sonic The Hedgehog, working with Yuji Naka at Sonic Team and at Sega through 1997. During that time, Sega produced games that challenged and overtook Nintendo in many regards. He also worked with Namco-Bandai on Pac-Man Party on Wii and 3DS. With his new position at NST he will inevitably work with Mario. Hirokazu Yasuhara will become the first game designer to be credited on games featuring the three biggest names in video games: Sonic, Pac-Man, and Mario.

If this is not an impressive enough feat, he also has level design credits with Naughty Dog working on the Jak & Daxter series on PS2 and all three Uncharted games on PS3.

Game Developer magazine published a great interview with Yasuhara in 2008 you can read here.

Many younger Poweteers recognize Factor 5 from their PS3 disappointment Lair. A few older poweteers remember them for their awesome N64 and Gamecube Rogue Squadron games. Before those however, they created the equally awesome, yet severely overlooked Turrican games, which hit the Sega Genesis, Commodore 64, Amiga, and the Super Nintendo. Super Turrican 2 for the Super Nintendo is actually the third Turrican game released on 16-bit systems, with Super Turrican being released on SNES and Mega Turrican being released on Genesis. Like its predecessors, Super Turrican 2 is a side-scrolling platformer in the vein of Metroid (although the stages are linear). However unlike other games, Super Turrican frequently incorporates other styles of play, mainly vehicles. Many levels you’ll take control of a tank or jeep. Sometimes you’ll even engage enemies in a Mode-7 sequence. When he is on foot, your character has several weapons, including a grappling hook straight out of Bionic Commando. While Super Turrican 2 was nothing groundbreaking, it was still an excellent game that exemplified what was great about SNES platformers back then. All three Turrican games are available on Virtual Console, so check them out.

Transformers: Fall of Cybertron comes out on August 28, 2012.

Raventhorne is another indie Xbox game, which brings back memories of games like Actraiser and Castlevania. This 2D side scroller cast players in the role of Raventhorne, a recently slain Viking cast who finds himself in the underworld. How was he killed and why is he not in Valhalla? This is for you to find out. Along with your fighting stances, you’ll make use of several magic spells, and you’ll level up as you go along. While there isn’t a lot of variety in the game’s enemies, the game’s combat mechanics and art style make it a must buy for indie gaming fans, especially since the game is only $1. With more independent games of this caliber, we might be seeing developer Milkstone Studios’s games on Xbox Live Arcade pretty soon.

There have been some famous utterances in the history of media. Famous lines such as “Yippie-Ki-Yay, Motherf**ker” and “Hasta La Vista, Baby” have been immortalized in our brains since first hearing them, and find themselves worthy of repeating upon anointed occasions. Video games are no exception, what with many games being dialogue-heavy, and thus producing a myriad of memorable lines.

However, not all dialogue is the stuff of writing gold. Indeed, for every fantastic line, there tends to be at least one line that’s so cheesy or utterly out-of-place that it defies logic to even include it in the game and makes us ponder how the game’s writers ever thought they were geniuses upon adding it. Alot of these truly awful lines are so bad, that they actually come full circle, and become immortalized even more than if they were an awesome line.

Thus, we have my Top 5 Worst Lines in Video Games, in no particular order since they’re all equally and awesomely bad.
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These past few weeks have seen ‘gamers’ exhibit some of the worst and most embarrassing behavior seen in the fandom. Weather it’s sexual harassment of female fighting game players, angry fanboys spamming metacritic over Mass Effect 3’s dlc, or those same fanboys making the charity Child’s Play an unwitting endorser of their campaign to have Mass Effect 3’s ending changed (and spoiling it for everyone else who didn’t play through the whole game in a week in the process of doing so), it seems that the behavior of certain subsets of the gaming community are hellbent on reaffirming the stereotype of gamers being losers. With that said, I thought I might use this week’s $20 Free Game of the week to showcase gamers doing good. In fact, how about showing gamers assisting with the cure of diseases?
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