Nintendo appeases the hardcore Super Smash Bros. tournament crowd with a wired adapter for GameCube controls, playable at the Smash Bros Invitational. The newest Mario Kart was released last week, selling out Pro Controllers everywhere, crashing the Club Nintendo website, and increasing sales of the Wii U in the UK alone by 666%. In less than a week, Mario Kart 8 has sold 1.2 million copies worldwide. YouTube announced a monetization scheme for users uploading Nintendo videos. Is Nintendo finally listening to its fans, or did it just take this long to unlock the Wii U’s potential? Vinnk and Sean put down Mario Kart 8 long enough to discuss what Nintendo is doing right, and if there are bigger things on the horizon. The Wii U is having a renaissance, and it’s not even E3 yet.
Leave your own voicemail at 608-492-1923, or just share your thoughts in the show notes at FamicomDojo.TV: http://famicomdojo.tv/podcast/97
This spiritual successor to the Japan only Namco X Capcom brings together characters from 3 different companies to do battle in Strategy Rpg Greatness. An ancient treasure has been stolen, causing rifts between worlds, bringing together characters from several different franchises. However, the storyline is all just an excuse to bring over characters from various Sega, Namco, and Capcom franchises. It’s not just popular franchises like Street Fighter, Resident Evil, and Tekken either (although those are included) but there are characters from God Eater, Sega’s Shining Force, Sakura Wars, and even Dynamite Cop to name a few. Since you’ll probably be unfamiliar with most of the characters you’ll encounter, the in-game Crosspedia tells you everything you need to know about whoever shows up. Characters are grouped together in teams of two, with some teams containing an optional support character. When you engage an enemy in battle, it’s a side scrolling fighting game style battle sequence when you try to do as much damage to the enemy as possible before using up all your moves. You can even call in a nearby team and support character for assistance. The game is incredibly casual, as a character’s turn doesn’t end until you end their turn manually or they engage an enemy. You can move freely within your characters allowed move area, and use items as many times as you want. If a character is knocked out, reviving them is as simple as going next to them and saving them. During the game, you’ll hear tunes from each of the games represented, and you’ll travel to somewhat familiar locations. While the storyline doesn’t make any sense at times, you’ll have to much fun with the characters to care. Fans of strategy RPG games will want to pick this game up, and if you’re familiar with any of the characters represented, you’ll enjoy the game even more.
Sometimes a game gets a second life on a new platform or console, typically with upgraded graphics, additional sound effects and/or voices, and additional Internet-enabled features only a Millennial could love. Sometimes a familiar name is slapped onto an entirely new game that
seeks to upend the status quo for the franchise and provide a clean slate — usually with a new developer, and sometimes a new publisher —
to begin totally anew. Sean and Vinnk compare video game remakes to reboots, decide which games deserved them, and which actually got them, and which ones they ended up playing and liking anyway.
Leave your own voicemail at 608-492-1923, or just share your thoughts in the show notes at FamicomDojo.TV: http://famicomdojo.tv/podcast/85
Movies based on video games are a lot like video games based on movies. They’re trying to cash in on an existing franchise and are usually almost completely devoid of any quality. But there are exceptions! Every once in a while there are games like Golden Eye which buck the trend. There is even the occasional movie based on a video game which isn’t completely horrible. I have a strange fascination with movies based on games, both the bad and the good.
Part of enjoying a video game movie is managing your expectations. I don’t think it’s fair to ignore that a movie is bad but there’s no sense in getting your panties in a bunch when a director you don’t like becomes attached to a film based on your favourite game. This list of the top of the top will demonstrate that even at their best video game movies are not ever treated with a ton of respect. If Uwe Boll or Stephen Sommers aren’t doing your video game movie, the alternative isn’t that Christopher Nolan does it, it’s that no one, or someone worse, does it. With that in mind, enjoy my top 5 favourite video game movies.
Welcome to the Powet Top 5, where we explore the top (and bottom) 5 items we think are relevant to any of a variety of topics that span the imagination. Sit back, read, and respond.
Screenshot from the forthcoming Rise of the Triad remake, rebuilt from the ground up using Unreal Engine 3.
It’s quite easy to remake something, be it a tv show, movie, or video game. Maybe that’s why there are so many of them. At worst, a remake can be nothing more than a simple cash grab aimed at nostalgic fans. At best however, it can bring back what fans loved about the original work while introducing it to a whole new generation of fans. It’s not hard to make a good remake either, especially in gaming. There are 4 simple steps to making one:
1. Preserve (and enhance when and where necessary) what worked the first time around
2. Fix (or get rid of) what didn’t work
3. Add in new features that enhance the original experience without diluting it
4. Give it a graphical makeover. It doesn’t have to use today’s cutting edge graphics (and in some cases, it probably shouldn’t, just so as long as it looks better than it did the first time.
Here are 5 of the best remakes in video games. They’ve gone above and beyond simply reskinning and re-releasing the original game, they’ve added to it, and in some cases changing it completely while preserving what players loved about it so many years ago. Check them out, and sound off below if there is a remake that you enjoyed or that you want to see. [Read the rest of this entry…]
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. [Read the rest of this entry…]
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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.