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Now that the Thanksgiving turkey is digested, and your Black Friday shopping is finished, it’s time for a special 3-in-one edition of $20 GOTW, Lost Classics, and Maximum Letdown! Our first two games on the list are available either at or below the $20 mark anywhere you buy video games, so you don’t need to wait until after any holiday, camp out in front of the store, stand in line at Best Buy, or fight through the parking lot to cash in on these savings. The third game, not so much, but it’s a Maximum Letdown, so chances are, you aren’t gonna want it anyway. Anyway, click below and lets get started!
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It looks like Transformers: War for Cybertron is getting a little more life with another 10x XP extended holiday weekend. The game’s official Facebook page updated with the following:

“We kick off another 10x XP blast starting…now! We will keep the XP rewards up to 10x their normal value all the way through this week and into this weekend, ending on Sunday Nov 28th at midnight. Enjoy a leg of turkey while you level your transformers up even quicker this weekend.”

This is going on right now through Sunday evening.
A shame this does nothing for anyone having trouble with Escalation.

Forget about Nancy Regan’s “Just Say No” campaign. This is how you fight the war on drugs. You, bad ass DEA enforcer/SWAT Power Ranger agent Max Force and your buddy, the equally bad ass DEA agent/SWAT Team Power Ranger Hit Man grab your machine guns and rocket launchers, and arrest every dope fiend, d-boy, thug, and even dog (yes, dogs can be arrested) you come across, and if they refuse to come quietly, then use your rocket launcher to blow the ever living shit out of them, and watch as they explode in a shower of blood and guts. You’ll visit seedy places such as the K.R.A.K. stop, which believe it or not, is a drug lab. Wow, these cats are so flagrant that they’ll put it right out there that they’re running a crack den. Along the way, you’ll either blow up, arrest, or arrest AND blow up heroin dealers, killer clowns, super strong retarded dope fiends who dumpsters stuff at you, and guys wearing mullets who throw hypodermic syringes at you, which are presumably full of their product. You even get to get behind the wheel of your car and run criminals over.

It’s obvious that American Gangster Frank Lucas doesn’t run this drug cartel, and your main enemy is a remarkably evil bastard named Mr Big, a huge head in a wheel chair. When you beat him, he turns into a demonic robo-skull-snake thingy which you also have to kill. This was ported to Nintendo thanks to Acclaim. In a hint of irony, the NES version was promoted as the first NES game with a strong anti-drug message…yet all references to drugs were removed. Even the K.R.A.K stop was changed to K.W.A.K stop. Oddly enough, the blood and gore was still retained. Of course this was one of the many games that were re-released on the Midway Arcade Treasures compilations. The main theme is even easy to hum along to as well.

Narc was the first game that bought a real solution to the drug problem facing our nation: dress up like a Power Ranger, grab your guns, get behind the wheel of your corvette, and kill everything that moves, including dogs, hippies, and morbidly obese heads stuck in wheel chairs that turn into giant demon robo-snake skull heads after taking enough damage. It’s just too bad that Midway’s 2005 attempt at a remake was nowhere near as interesting (or original) as this classic.

Fun Fact: Narc’s Max Force was featured in the Power Team animated series, which was Acclaim’s answer to Captain N. The series centered around a teenager named Johnny Arcade as he commands a team of semi-popular characters from Acclaim Video games such as Wizards and Warriors.

Note: This is also coming to Playstation 3.
The sequel to 2007’s sci-fi role playing masterpiece, Mass Effect 2 once again raises the bar for RPGs. Set two years after the events of the original Mass Effect, you once again step into the shoes of Commander Shepard as he/she joins the organization Cerberus, an underground organization dedicated to protecting humanity at any cost. An all new alien menace is abducting entire human colonies, so Shepard has been tasked with putting together a team of bad-ass space mercenaries and stopping them. However, stakes are high, and many say that this is a suicide mission.
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From the ‘so bad it’s good’ department comes Blood Warriors. Developed by Japanese company Kaneko, Blood Warriors was one of the many fighting games that sprung up during the 90s that attempted to cash in on the popularity of Mortal Kombat. Now granted, it’s still a pretty crappy game, but it’s like Super Street Fighter 4 compared to games such as Way of the Warrior and Survival Arts. It does the “digitized actors and bloody graphics” routine as expected, and of course the localization, to say the least, is lacking. Playing as one of 9 stereotypical Japanese warriors (the cast features such ground breaking character designs as a samurai, a ninja, a female ninja, and a Kabuki Warrior, who, like all other Kabuki Warriors in fighting games, attacks enemies with his hair), you beat the crap out of each other in 2 rounds. If you win the match, you can pull off a fatality by the press of one button! Hay, one-button fatalities! That’s one improvement Blood Warriors has over Mortal Kombat! Too bad there isn’t much else to rave about. Well, the character costumes are improved over all the other Mortal Kombat ripoffs at the time. That’s not saying that they are very good, but at least they are better than say, Blood Storm’s mongloid Running Man characters. It’s one of the rarest arcade games in the world, so however you can play it, you should play it. It’s almost like the fighting game equivalent of an Ed Wood movie.

The name Halo has become synonymous with Xbox. Ever since Halo 2’s non-ending, fans have waited for 3 years straight for Bungie to finish the fight, and this sequel does not disappoint. Taking strides forward in both single player and multiplayer, Halo 3 closes out the trilogy in style and it gave players plenty of reasons to keep it in thier consoles long after they are finished with the campaign. Well, at least until Reach came out.
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Brave New Films, a progressive viral film site born out of the 2008 election, has taken a sharp stab at conservative pundits. Unfortunately they did so by slandering a classic video game character in the process.

An email sent out of subscribers and an update on their home page shows a headline “Pac Man vs Palin? You Betcha!” paired with an image that depicts the Namco owned character chasing former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin like one of the enemy ghosts. In the text they refer to him as “Progressive Against Conservative” Man though there is little mistaking the character, right down to the basic yellow pie shape.

The game itself is identical to the original Pac Man, with a purple maze instead of blue, and the ghosts replaced with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Bill O’Reilly. When a player eats a power pellet and then eliminates an enemy ghost, an audio clip from one of the conservative pundits plays. Likewise, when a pundit catches Pac Man, a clip taunting the player also runs.

Parody and satire are well and good, and fair use laws when paired with non profits are generous and fair. However, it cannot be mistaken by my eyes that Brave New Films and its founder Robert Greenwald are guilty of stealing Pac Man for their own gain. There are millions of unique or even similar flash games available and plenty of like-minded developers who could’ve made a game for Brave New Films. Instead they took an existing idea and willfully modified the visuals and audio. The core game mechanic, the very thing that makes Pac Man an arcade classic, is completely unchanged.

Brave New Films did not respond to requests for comment, we will update if they do. The game is currently still available at http://bravenewpacman.com/