For our third episode, we try out a couple of new segments!

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Direct Link: Famicom Dojo: Nintendo Has Moxie

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Direct Link: Famicom Dojo – Episode 03 – Nintendo Has Moxie

Show notes (and an explanation for those left scratching their heads) at FamicomDojo.TV:
http://famicomdojo.tv/season1/nintendo-has-moxie

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The next installment in the live action Halo series, “Combat” show ODSTs (orbital drop shock troopers) warding off a Brute threat and calling in air support. This is the follow up to Arms Race, which was shown at E3.

Fast on the heels of Dracula X Chronicles, that has a scheduled release date of November 13th, series producer Koji Igarashi seems to feel the need to pump out even more Castlevania for fans to digest in the coming months. Two new games have been announced as in production, one for the Nintendo DS, and another exclusive to cellphone gaming.

Castlevania: Order of Shadows has been announced to be a cellphone-exclusive title to the series and will be released in September to most of the major service providers, including AT&T and Verizon. The game is to be a side-story in the series, and will feature the protagonist stylings of Desmond Belmont, and his sisters Zoe and Delores. (where they though these would be good names for Belmont’s is anyone’s guess….narcotics may have been involved) One can only attribute this Konami’s sudden change from consoles and handhelds to cellphone-exclusive gaming to other games of it’s ilk, such as God of War: Betrayal. Whether or not this game will be inducted into the series storyline as canon has yet to be determined.

The other Castlevania game in production has been confirmed by Iga as being again for the DS handheld system, and promises it “will not be a remake like Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles and will be all new“. Any other information as of right now is shoddy at best, and any other solid leads as to what kind of game this will be will most likely be unveiled at Konami’s Spring Gamer’s Day. So, we have a good deal of time before anything substantial is released.

A final note is Iga’s mentioning of a future Castlevania title being released for the Xbox 360, and possibly the PS3 (if it’s sales pick up). Nothing other than this teaser has been mentioned, and won’t probably until after the release of the future DS game. We all can only hope that this long-awaited jump into the next-gen consoles means either a high-quality 3D game in planning, or a grandscale 2D game that would hopefully be the next Symphony of the Night. One can only dream.

This is the final segment in GameTrailers Metroid Retrospective, constructing the events of the 10 games in the Metroid series into a timeline and also mentioning the few cameos hero Samus Aran and her enemies have made in other games and media. You can see the entire series here. Its a nice refresher course to prepare for Metroid Prime 3, which has just been released and will be stocked on shelves in stores everywhere this week.

Above is the final round of Penny Arcade Expo’s Omegathon, where this year’s contestants faced off on the final build of Halo 3, complete with a new map, Guardian, and lots of new weapons. The second part is embedded after the cut.

Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany wasn’t left out. Gamersyde has an extensive look at the third level of the Halo 3 Campaign. and by extensive I mean huge and long. 1.3 gigs of video in high definition.

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Before this game came out, I never considered myself much of a sports player, and save for various college sports games, I still don’t. Now sure, I got a few chuckles out of Mutant League Football and Ice Hockey, and I played Baseball Stars to death, but other than that, sports games were too complicated for me. That’s why me, and millions of others, enjoyed this game. While it wasn’t as complex as Madden or NBA Live, the fact that it was so easy to pick up and play made it a lot more fun to play.
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Cory Doctorow is an authority on copyright law and a huge oppoenent to DRM. Among many many other things, he is also an author and a comic book fan. Newsarama put up a interview with him a while back and I thought it was important to link to it. He has some very intelligent things to say and offers up his own solution. I highly recommend giving this a read. Here are a few juicy excerpts:

I don’t think that downloadable comics substitute for printed comics. I think that downloadable comics entice people to but printed comics. The key calculation you have to make when you talk about digital distribution versus physical distribution is how much it entices and how much it substitutes.

But there’s a much larger audience of people who are, not price sensitive, but are time sensitive, or have other aesthetic or design considerations that come into play when they think about what kind of media they’re going to consume. For example, people who love seeing movies in a big cinema, or people who love holding books, or people who take their comics home in a Mylar bag with a board behind it, and then buy a second copy so they don’t get fingerprints on the first one. For those people, the question becomes does having a free online edition that they can sample, and, more importantly to me, be moved about on the internet in a social way from friend to friend on recommendation – does that create more sales than are lost by allowing a few cheapskates to get their copies for free?

Comic book stores, when they hook you, have a Wednesday audience. There are so many people who will come to a comic book store every Wednesday and, while they’re only in there to buy a three dollar comic, many times they walk out of there holding a twenty dollar graphic novel with a much higher margin than that three dollar comic. That’s an amazing position to be in, and it’s something that almost any other kind of retailer would give anything for. But the problem is the audience for comic book stores is not growing. The growth in the industry seems to be coming from trade editions sold in traditional retail outlets. People who will go into bookstores are still not a huge mainstream audience.

Go here to read the whole article and see Cory’s proposed solution.

IESB has been breaking all the news on this proposed JLA movie. They’ve received word that the way a JLA movie can come to pass and not interfere with any other movie series is an all motion capture computer generated imagery animated movie. Yes, they’ll cast actors, track their movements, and assign those to CG characters.
While Ryan Reynolds and Brandon Routh have made no secret they want to be on board as The Flash and Superman, respectively, Batman star Christian Bale says he hasn’t been approached, and adds: “It’d be better if it doesn’t tread on the toes of what we’re doing, though I feel that it would be better if it comes out after Batman 3”
Couldn’t agree more, but a CG movie would certainly elevate awareness of Wonder Woman, The Flash and any other hero they might want to turn into a bigger movie. And even if its very well animated and photo-real as promised, people are more likely accept it has nothing to do with current Superman or Batman movies, and re-casting would be perfectly acceptable.
Casting begins next week, we could be hearing some definite announcements very soon.