Our nation’s birthday was this past Saturday, so in celebration, this week’s $20GOTW and Lost classics will feature games based on Sony’s Syphon Filter, a franchise about keeping the world safe from terrorism. When it debuted on the original Playstation in the late 90s, Syphon Filter gave players its own brand of espionage action. It may not have been Metal Gear Solid, but Syphon Filter was the closest thing players got to playing through an episode of 24. Syphon Filter’s storyline covered 3 PS1 games and a PS2 entry which featured online play. In 2006, Sony bought Syphon Filter to the Playstation Portable, creating one of the best games available on the system.
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Hasbro has started a promotion for the new GI Joe: Rise of Cobra movie. The promotion allows you to create your own custom joe character/figure on their website. Grand prize winners will get their character made as an actual 3 3/4 inch figure.

All you have to do is go to this link and start the character creation in the wizard. After you get the figure looking the way you want it, you’ll then enter in that character’s story. The character above was the one I created, but I was too lazy to make up a story for her. This is a pretty neat idea and I’m glad Hasbro is leveraging their fairly standard gi joe body types and accessories for something cool like this.

Again, contest can be found here: http://hasbro.promotions.com/gijoecobra/

2000 was a good year for Squaresoft and its fans. Square released a parade of hits that year, from Vagrant Story to Chrono Cross, and this game was among them. The Front Mission series is a turn based strategy RPG featuring mechs, which has its roots on the Super Nintendo. However, this is the first time that the series has hit U.S. shores. Front Mission 3 contains 2 different storylines, chess-like gameplay, and deep mech customization. Fans of games such as Final Fantasy tactics and Advance wars will love this game’s strategy action, and robot lovers will get a kick out of the many ways they can outfit their mechs.
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Lost Planet, along with Dead Rising, was part of Capcom’s strategy to make an impact on the Xbox 360 market, and it did, gaining critical acclaim for its fast-paced single player campaign and solid online multiplayer. Later on, the game was ported to PC (allowing cross-platform multiplayer with the Xbox 360 via the Windows live service) and PS3, although they received a somewhat lukewarm reaction compared to the Xbox game. A sequel to the game was recently announced, along with a movie (with a screenplay written by writer/voice actor David Hayter), so there is no better time than the present to explore the Lost Planet.
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The 7th Kingdom, the top property in the FANtastic Exclusive series of polls from 2006 and 2007 has been spun out into its own line. The Four Horsemen excluded the property from the FanEx polls for 2008 because it proved so popular, they felt it could sustain its own full line.

The top vote-getter in the poll for 2007 behind the Elephant Swordsman was Queen Alluxandra of the Bloodmane Clan. She was chosen as the first figure to be released in the 7th Kingdom line post-FanEx. The sale of this figure and its variants will follow the style of previous FanEx releases. Each variant will be sold exclusively through a different online retailer, while the main figure will be exclusive to the Four Horsmen’s site StoreHorsemen.com. Additionally a full set of all 11 figures will be sold for US$220 starting Wednesday, July 1st starting at 8PM EST, also at StoreHorsemen.com. Sets will be limited to 125.

I voted for Alluxandra in 2007, so I am pumped for these figures. I will say though, there are way too many cats in this line up. Based on the numbers it looks like the 4H picked enough retailers to do a variant for each unique figure, but when given the choice, nearly all the retailers chose the cat because the Animal Kingdom was so popular, while the poor mutant was apparently not chosen and is exclusive to StoreHorsemen.com. A shame, I think the Mutant is one of the best variants along with Isadorra.

After the jump, you can see more of the Queen and each of her variants.
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The King (of Pop) is dead; long live the king. Some feel that Michael Bay’s career should suffer the same fate, given poor critical reviews of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. And yet it’s breaking or tying box office records left and right. Who is correct? Find out on this week’s Powetcast

(How do you feel about the slew of celebrity demises in the last two weeks? Or do you just want to weigh in on the latest summer blockbuster? Leave a comment below!)

Audio Netcast Details
Subscribe to the Powetcast on iTunes
Direct Link: Powetcast Episode 13: Cinema and The King Are Dead

Show notes after the jump!
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As was reported on some time ago, Midway Games is in the midst of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, as well as the possibility of having Warner Bros. buy them out. Well, you know what they say. When it rains it pours. Now it appears, since money is being thrown around, the producer of the two Mortal Kombat movies and owner of Threshold Entertainment – Larry Kasanoff – is now suing Midway to hold onto his IP rights over the movies and copyrights associated, as reported by GamePolitics.com

Kasanoff has stepped forward, claiming that not only were his movies and TV shows the main reason why Mortal Kombat became as widely known as it did back in the 90’s, but also that Threshold was responsible for turning game big-names like Lui Kang and Scorpion into the icons they are today with all the media it produced. Kasanoff’s suit also moves to block Midway’s proposed sale to Warner Bros.

So remember kids, if your ego is big enough and money’s involved, you can pretty much make up any bullshit story you want to in order to protect your “interests”. Lets all get out the rulers and measure just how big Mr. Kasanoff’s reach is.

Throughout its limited lifespan, the Dreamcast didn’t have too many RPGs that made it over to American shores. However, the few it did have were classics. Grandia II was definitely one of them, and even after the premature death of Sega’s system it lived on through PC and Playstation 2 ports (although those two were a bit rough around the edges with the PC version containing several bugs and glitches). While it’s your standard Japanese RPG for the most part, Grandia II’s story, gameplay, and monsters help set this game apart from its peers. While it’s no Final Fantasy 7, genre fans will want to add this game to their collection.
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