It’s Halloween weekend! Time to dress up in your costume, scare the neighbors, and grab some candy! Along with Powet’s creepiest games feature, this week’s Lost Classics and $20 GOTW focus on some very scary video games. We’ve got the most recent Castlevania along with an adventure title from the Playstation era. As a bonus, we even threw in some import love. Click below and check out the scares.
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Throwing all you oldschool gaming fans a Halloween treat!

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Remember all those old Warner Brothers cartoons with the weird Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson-style contraptions? You know, the one where the ball goes down a ramp, knocks over a line of dominoes, sending one down onto a teeter totter with a lit candle at the other end which burns a hold in a rope allowing a piece of cheese to drop into a mouse cage, making the mouse inside run while powering a pulley which opens a door that hides a spring-loaded boxing glove behind it? Or how about the one where a toy car with a matchstick attached to it rolls down a ramp, striking the match lit, then lighting a small firecracker which sends a small rock flying on top of a button which activated a spring-loaded jack-in-the-box that bumps a wooden plank holding a small glass of water which knocks over and pours into a measuring cup which then gets heavy enough to activate a catapult that flings a bomb at the unwitting target? Ever wondered how cool it would be to actually build one yourself? Well thanks to developer Kevin Ryan and publisher Jeff Tunnell, now you can. The Incredible Machine was originally published by Dynamix and Sierra Entertainment. From 93 to 95, the series had the same developers, but a different group of developers worked on 2000’s Return of the Incredible Machine: Contraptions and 2001’s The Incredible Machine: Even More Contraptions. The entire series and intellectual property was acquired by Jeff Tunnell’s Pushbutton Labs earlier this month.
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The best way to describe Epic/Chair Entertainment’s Xbox Live offering is an old school gaming experience with a new school style. Although Shadow Complex contains 3D graphics powered by Unreal 3, its gameplay is reminiscent of old school 2d games such as Metroid. The game’s plot, penned by comic book writer Peter David (The Incredible Hulk, X-Factor), is a side story to the Orson Scott Card novel Empire. You play as Jason Flemming, an everyday guy who was doing some rock climbing with his girlfriend Claire. When Claire is captured by members of a terrorist organization (which has already assassinated the vice president by the way), it’s up to you to rescue her.
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Dane Boe of Gagfilms.com knows how to mash. Sure theres a thousand Mugen videos on Youtube, and there’s no shortage of flash junk on Newgrounds either. But these simple and to the point videos are ridiculous fun and have better production values than you might expect.

Watch two more films putting pitting Contra and Sonic against easy targets. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Since the alphabet is the building block of our language, the Powet Alphabet is the building block of what makes us geeks.

When Sony entered the market as a console manufacturer, they began a whole new era of gaming, and much of it was due to the rise of disc-based gaming. Disc based systems at the time were becoming more commonplace due to CDs being easier and cheaper to manufacture. Since they could hold more information than floppy disks and cartridges, it was easy to see why they were becoming increasingly attractive to developers. Even before the Sony, there were already several disc-based systems on the market, although few of them fully utilized the potential of the added storage space and horse power of the medium. The Sega CD for instance, was merely an add-on to the Sega Genesis. Most of its line up either consisted of amped-up versions of Sega Genesis titles, arcade ports, and interactive movies. such as the controversial Night Trap. The Super CD, an add on for the Turbographix-16, had a slightly more impressive lineup (including the highly sought after Dracula X), but it never made it beyond the borders of Japan. The 3DO, which was a standalone system, carried many of the interactive movies that graced the Sega CD, and it also boasted arcade-perfect ports of games such as Samurai Showdown and Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo. However, its high price tag prevented it from making a huge impact in the marketplace. The Phillips CD-I, just plain sucked.

Around the early 90s, Nintendo wanted to jump into the CD gaming market. Originally, it was Sony who would help them develop the technology that would power the new system. Sony was of course no stranger to gaming. Under the name Sony Imagesoft, they developed and published several games for their soon-to-be competitors (in fact, you may have even seen a couple of them as Lost Classics). However, the deal would fall through due to lawsuits on both sides, and Nintendo opted to go with Phillips instead. That deal would also fall apart, and Nintendo would eventually abandon the concept of a CD based gaming system altogether in favor of cartridge-based the Nintendo 64. It’s because of this reason that many suspect that the Playstation is what Nintendo’s CD system would have been. Regardless of weather or not that rumor was true, it was ironic that Sony, the people slated to work with Nintendo on their new hardware, instead usurped their place as top dog console manufacturer.
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A lot of you are probably playing through one of Maxis’s most recent hits, Spore. In that game, you create a species and take it from a single-celled organism all the way to an intergalactic space empire, designing their buildings, armor, and vehicles along the way. It seems huge in scope, and it is. However, Maxis has done a similar game in the past, called SimLife. In SimLife, players are tasked with creating an ecosystem, complete with plants and animals. They can also tinker with the genetics of the world’s plants and animals just to see what they can create, and even alter the climate and topography just to observe its effects on the flora and fauna. As the game’s tagline says. this game is truly the genetic playground. It may seem overwhelming at first, but thankfully, there is a tutorial to help players get started. Players can either take on one of the game’s scenarios, or just experiment in sandbox mode and see what they can create. Like many of Maxis’s older games, SimLife has been unofficially classified as abandonware, but you can still find a copy on amazon by clicking the thumbnail above. Hopefully given Spore’s popularity, Maxis can work on a sequel to this game. Come to think of it, it would make a great add-on for Spore.

During the early days of the Xbox 360, there weren’t a lot of launch-window titles that made people want to run out and buy the system. Dead or Alive 4 and Condemned were nice, but other than those two and a few others, the Xbox 360’s post-launch library was pretty weak. Thankfully, Microsoft’s Xbox Live downloadable games service, introduced during the previous Xbox life cycle (albeit to little fanfare) was kicking into high gear this generation, starting with its integration into the console itself (rather than having to buy a separate disc). Over time, players would be treated to a slew of classic re-releases, newer titles, and independently developed games. One of the first games available on the service, Geometry Wars, took old school style gameplay and touched it up with some nice graphical effects. It was in the tradition of Space Invaders, where one played simply to earn a high score. It was incredibly addictive as well. So addictive, that many Xbox 360 owners played this game more than any game that was released via retail during the first 4 months after the Xbox 360’s release. Now, Bizzare Creations has created a sequel which adds new game modes while keeping the previous game’s gameplay intact.
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