Home / kotaku.com rss archive / October-06-2007


AFAS: Arcade Flyer Art Saturday: The Classics Edition
After last week's Arcade Flyer Art Saturday, I promised you something a little different this week. I went through TAFA and dug up the flyers for some of the more seminal and popular games that took video gaming from arcades and into our homes. Sure, a lot the art for these is not what you might consider terribly interesting but sometimes it's good to go back to your roots. You can peruse the gallery at your leisure and after the jump, check out some short explanations of each flyer.galleryPost('afas2', 4, 'Arcade Flyer Art Satuday');Pong:The granddaddy of them all. The flyer art is minimal, just a single Pong machine being ejected into the void. But then, when you were the first and only thing going, you didn't need a fancy flyer to sell your wares.Asteroids:Atari strikes again with Asteroids. Who knew blowing up rocks constructed from simple lines could be so much fun. When it made the leap from arcades to consoles, the asteroids went to color to make them more interesting...

Clip: Too Human Trailer
Silicon Knights hits us up with a brand spanking new trailer for their upcoming sci-fi adventure. Looks pretty interesting if not a bit standard as far as space operas go. Will this be any sort of competition for Mass Effect? We'll find out come early next year.

Grand Opening: Ben 10: Protector Of The Earth Website Opens
People seem to really love Ben 10. The Cartoon Network show crosses the lines between kids and adults and when I saw the game demoed at Comic-Con, both sets of ages were there, enjoying the game with equal abandon. I tried it out myself and even though I wasn't terribly familiar with the show, the game was pretty fun. With the game's launch not far off, D3 Publishers has premiered the game's website which is now open and ready for your rather stringent approval. I'm sure you'll have plenty to say about it.Ben 10: Protector of the Earth Website

Grand Night: Ben 10: Protector Of The Earth Website Opens
People seem to really love Ben 10. The Cartoon Network show crosses the lines between kids and adults and when I saw the game demoed at Comic-Con, both sets of ages were there, enjoying the game with equal abandon. I tried it out myself and even though I wasn't terribly familiar with the show, the game was pretty fun. With the game's launch not far off, D3 Publishers has premiered the game's website which is now open and ready for your rather stringent approval. I'm sure you'll have plenty to say about it.Ben 10: Protector of the Earth Website

It's A Party!: Evites Offers Wii Invites
Evites, the invite site for all your party needs, has no added Nintendo and the Wii to it's roster of pre-made internet invites. Birthday parties, family reunions or just a simple Wii Sports or Mario themed party, all your bases are covered. So get with the hip internet set and send a Wii evite today. Or you could just embarrass yourself by sending a terribly outmoded Party City invitation over snail mail. The choice is yours.Wii party invites at Evites [Evites]

Now That's An Elf: Immortals USA Hits 30,000 Beta Accounts
Immortals USA is a MMORPG I haven't heard much about, but they announced last week that they've hit 30,000 new accounts in the past month and are still signing up accounts through the game's expected late October launch. The game is based on '5,000 years of Chinese mythology,' though apparently my anthologies of Chinese fables are lax in not mentioning 'sexy elves of the Xia Dynasty,' and I don't see any evidence of my favorite sexy bad girls of Chinese fables, the fox spirits. Basically, it looks like a sexed up version of WoW with the potential for some fascinating uses of Chinese fables and mythology - any Kotakuites played it and care to report back? Full release after the jump.New Game World, Inc. Announces the Immortals USA Open Beta sees 30,000 new accounts in One MonthCharacters created during open beta will not be deleted.Manhattan, New York, October 03, 2007. Since the Immortals USA open beta started sign ups, over 30,000 new accounts have been created to take...

In Glorious Technicolor: The Assassin's Creed Collector's Edition Figure: Now In Full Color
A few weeks back, our good friend Cheapy D revealed that the Assassin's Creed Collector's Edition would include a nice little collectible Altair figure. Unfortunately, all we had at the time was a simple black and white photo. But thankfully, German website cynamite.de has gotten a nice color photo of the whole set for us to check out, although truthfully, his outfit is mostly white anyway. I love that these collector's editions are getting more and more elaborate. Pretty soon they'll just come with a little game dev inside to help you through the game.[Thanks, Phil]

Imagine That: Bogost on Imagine: They Aren't New, Y'All
With all the press (mostly of the incredulous variety) swirling around Ubisoft's line of DS games for girls (featuring such scintillating titles as Imagine: Babyz and Imagine: Fashion Designer, as Ashcraft mentioned earlier this week), Ian Bogost is here to set the record straight and chastise us all for having short memories and no sense of history (ouch!): the series isn't new, and Babyz was first released in 1999. I think Bogost is being a little disingenuous here - is it any wonder that many of us have no recollection of minor software toys targeted towards adult women released in the mid-to-late 90s (and do interactive desktop pets really count as a 'game'?)? I'll concede that a more complete historiography makes for some more interesting observations:Petz and Babyz were software toys for adults, not for kids, at least not explicitly. They ran in a process on top of the Windows desktop, and the pets and babies literally moved around in the foreground, as you worked....

Ftw: Sony's "Create A Folk" Contest Winner Revealed
You may remember a few weeks ago we announced Sony Europe's contest for players to create a Folk for the upcoming Folklore. Well, the big winner has been announced and her name is Lisa (no last name given) and her creation, Quasarilli, will be available for download in an expansion pack soon after the game is released. For her efforts, Lisa will be receiving a free copy of Folklore and a limited edition art book. Congratulations, Lisa![via PS3 Fanboy]

Narrative Design: Games Are A 'Backward-Looking Medium'
It's nothing that hasn't been noted in a million blog posts over the years, but in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Daniel Radosh is saying it again. Too much emphasis on graphics, not enough emphasis on narrative - and sometimes those purty cut scenes can be a hindrance to a satisfying game experience (Radosh points to Halo 3 as an example, picking up on something our very own Crecente pointed out in his review of Halo 3).Teenage boys (of all ages and genders) need not worry that mindless games will become obsolete. We will always love action movies, and Hollywood blockbusters will always be more popular than quiet, character-driven films. But gamers have a right to expect more than what the medium now has to offer.Video games are still emerging from their infancy. The first 35 years of motion pictures, from 1895 to 1930, yielded a handful of films that are considered masterpieces for their technical innovations, but the following decade was when cinema first became...

The Sounds Of War: Sony Offers Free God of War MP3
Playstation Underground members were given a special treat with this week's newsletter. With the arrival (or imminent arrival. I still haven't gotten mine...) of the God of War: Chains of Olympus demo disc, Sony decided to offer gamers a little bonus in the form of a downloadable MP3. So, if you have a hankering to hear the epic music from the demo's "Battle of Attica" click the link below and be transported to the mythic world of Kratos and his monster massacring badassery (yes, I just made that up).Download "Battle of Attica"

War Games: Gamers: 1, Soldiers: 0 (For Now)
Militaries using games as training tools is nothing new; but here comes one account of a group of five gamers taking on five soldiers from the Netherlands in 'Virtual Battlefield System 2,' and scoring a resounding win (the author points out that the gamers were way ahead the soldiers in terms of familiarity with the software, which helped). It's entertaining, but also contains some musings on the future of such war games and gamers and the military. If you can forgive the typos, it's an interesting little piece on current applications and perhaps where this might lead:Many people have been saying this for a long time, and i think we approach the point that more armies will see that 'Gaming' is not only fun to do. you can learn from it. - just like we did today. In the last years, technology has taken an enormous jump. the current weaponry has been benefiting from this fact, and its inevitable that normal troops will be trained with special simulation equipment. this can...

Drip, Drip, Drip: Assassin's Creed Comic Leaked
At the yearly EB Games conference, store managers were given this Assassin's Creed comic book after seeing a thirty minute demo of the game. The comic shows a lot about the plot of the game and it's basic concepts, so as not to give away any plot points or spoilers I have just posted the cover here for you to see. If you would like to see the comic in it's entirety and possibly ruin the entire game for yourself, you can peruse it at sircuddlesGHII's Photobucket gallery of the pages.Assassins Creed Comic [Photobucket]

East Versus West: East vs. West: On Gaming Preferences
Oh, what would good ol' Eddie Said say? From Sexy Videogameland comes a rather interesting discussion by Rick Luebbers of Midway's Surreal Software on differences in Japanese and Western game design and gaming preferences. Some (most) of the generalizations are sweeping at best, and many of his examples aren't exclusively Western problems, they're industry problems - I don't care where the game is coming from. Square hasn't exactly been wowing me with fresh, inventive, and wickedly original narratives. To sum it up - most of this comes down to personal opinion and taste in games. Leigh Alexander brings it back to reality:Is it safe to say, though, that Japanese games are more fantastic while Western games are more realistic? What would a realistic Japanese game look like? Moreover, is Western fantasy doomed forever to Tolkien derivatives? If you prefer one to the other, what does that indicate about your personal taste?My game shelf is mostly full of Japanese titles;...

Is It Over Yet?: Manchester Cathedral Still Beating The Resistance Horse
It seems like money and apologies aren't enough to satisfy the great Church of England. BBC News is reporting that the Dean of Manchester Cathedral is calling for arch nemesis Resistance: Fall of Man to be removed from a list of games that have been nominated for a British Academy Video Games Award after an unseuccessful bid to have the game removed from th UK's store shelves. Says the Dean:It is a disgrace that Resistance: Fall of Man has been shortlisted... Sony has admitted that they did not have permission to film or use Manchester Cathedral in their computer game... Bafta should not be seen condoning such behaviour unless they are saying it is acceptable for producers to walk into historic buildings and film interiors - ignoring contracts, rights and liability. Bafta (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) has stated that the award which Resistance is up for, the PC World Gamers' Award, is public voted. Although they didn't say it outright, I'm assuming this means...

Bioshocked: Win Your Own 7'2" Big Daddy on eBay
Kotakuite Louis S. gave us the heads up for this auction on Dutch eBay, with proceeds benefiting the World Wildlife Fund (as far as I can tell, which is not much, not reading Dutch): a 2.2 meter Big Daddy statue constructed out of fiberglass, weighing in at 44 kilos (around 97 lbs). Bidding ends on 8 am Sunday, CET and as of earlier this morning, bidding was up to a mere 600 Euros. If you can't live without one of these in your living room, bid here. I'm just glad creepy, life-sized fiberglass Little Sister isn't included.

Arcade Flyers: TAFA October Update
It's the beginning of the month so it must be time for another Arcade Flyer Archive update! As usual TAFA graces us with another hundred flyers in each of their three categories: video games, pinball games and arcade amusement games. This month in video games we get Dead or Alive, Burger Time, House of the Dead 4 Special and Metal Slug X just to name a few. Pinball and Arcade Amusement also get their fair share with some new SMB Pinballs and Ashcraft's favorite Love and Berry Dress Up Dance. So, head on over to TAFA and see what all the hub-bub is about.

Clips: Mass Effect Character Spotlight Pt. 2
With BioShock and Halo 3 behind us, the next big epic game (not to be confused with Epic Games) is Mass Effect, set to hit shelves on Nov. 20, just in time for Thanksgiving holidayers to have something to play whilst trapped at various relatives homes. (Don't forget to bring your 360) This clip introduces us to some of the denizens of Mass Effect you'll meet throughout the game and shows off some of the gorgeous character animations that will likely set this game apart from other RPG shooters. If you missed Part One, I have included it for your viewing pleasure after the jump.

Original: Kotaku Originals: From The Bungie Split to Itagaki
With the Cons over and everyone taking days off, it was a short and sweet week here at Kotaku Originals. Bungie split from Microsoft to stand on their own two feet, McWhertor chats with Itagaki and the PS3 drops is price in Europe.Win the Full Halo ExperienceWhat Are You Playing This Weekend?Bungie Owns Bungie: The Q&ASCEE: PS3 60GB Nixed for UK TooSCEE Confirms PS3 Price DropSony's New...POP?Pandemic Responds to Angry VenezuelansCliffyB on Halo as Bathtubs of CombatSega Trademarks Golden Axe: Beast RiderThe Holiday Season - Now How Much Would You Pay?40GB PS3 To Hit Australia On October 11 For AUD$699God of War: Battle of Attica DemoSecond Hand Smoke With Team Ninja's Tomonobu ItagakiPro Evo Wii Screens, Details