Image of the Day - Tetris Construction
This bit of photo manipulation comes from Erik Johansson’s personal portfolio. This Swedes-man, who is sadly not related to Scarlet Johansson, does things with photographs that are less Photoshop and more black magic. I heartily recommend looking into his work.
Tetris - Constructions Since 1985
OMG A New Pokemon!
Hey Kids! Apparently there’s a new Pokemon to be revealed for the next DS release, so start jumping up and down like idiots right now! Seriously, somewhere Lemcott’s head is exploding! Fans will have to wait two weeks for Pokemon Sunday to give them more however, but I’m telling you right now it looks an awful lot like a were-hog.
Side-thought -> How the hell are we suppose to catch them all if they keep making new ones?
Side-thought 2 -> Pokemon Sunday? Their excitement sells this post. I’d really like my own television show in Japan, le sigh.
Click past the break to catch further video proof that Japan is a very crazy place.
That Other Sonic the Hedgehog 4…
Greg was awfully excited about Sonic the Hedgehog 4 this week, which I insist we all refer to as Episode 1 - The Phantom Repentance. And who can blame him, old school sensibilities with new graphics across all three platforms.
But no matter how good Sonic 4 might be, it just won’t have a caged Mario.
1up pointed this glaring omission out yesterday when posting about the original Sonic the Hedgehog 4, a 1996 hack of Sunsoft’s Speedy Gonzales on the SNES. And while Youtube verifies that we’re probably better off with whatever Sega has in mind, rescuing caged Mario’s is priceless.
Catch the video after the break.
First L.A. Noire Details Emerge
A few years back, Rockstar announced L.A. Noire. Since then, we’ve heard a whole lot of nothing on Team Bondi’s open-world love letter to the film noir. Most people (myself included) probably just assumed that the whole thing had been dumped somewhere along the line. Turns out that the developers have been hard at work the whole time, and the first real details are beginning to pour out.
As you might expect from a game published by the Grand Theft Auto guys, L.A. Noire is an open-world action game set in 1947 Los Angeles. The entire city has been rendered from the ground-up to be as realistic as possible. The team has been working from film and photographs to replicate the City of Angels as it existed in the years after the second World War. Now, just because this is an open-world game, don’t expect a GTA clone. Noire’s protagonist, Cole Phelps, is worlds apart from Nico Bellic.
Cole, a beat cop who will progress from the traffic desk all the way to homicide, is out to clean up both the streets and his own corrupt police force. Of course, he has to deal with his own dark past, including a few naughty deeds during the war. As a police detective, you’ll have to solve cases and peg the right man. Oh, and this is my favorite part - the game will not make it easy for you. Unlike many games, you won’t come across glowing items sitting on pre-selected shelves. L.A. Noire’s crime scenes have been designed to look natural. In the example provided by Game Informer, a player might see a pair of glasses sitting near a suspicious stain. If you pick up these glasses, you can notice such details as the brand etched on the frame. As you look over these bits of information, they will be jotted in your notepad, which you’ll need to refer to often as you piece together the case.
Once you get a suspect into the station, you’ll have to interview them. Your dialogue options come from a similar system to that used in Mass Effect - tilt the stick in one direction to take on an accusatory stance, shift in another to butter them up. The developers have created some new facial motion-capturing tech to make this more realistic. The voice actors went through full make-up and were sat in booths with cameras covering every angle of their faces. As they delivered their dialogue, every one of their facial motions - from the twitch of an eye to an accidental smile - was recorded and digitized into the game’s animation. This is crucial to the gameplay - naturally, suspects will try to lie to you. You’ll have to keep a close eye on them to find those telltale signs, and then you’ll need to refute their testimony by pulling counter-evidence from your own notes.
It’s no secret that film noir is a passion of mine, so it thrills me to no end that details are finally beginning to leak out of Rockstar’s offices. The gameplay sounds incredible - everything from the realistic investigations to watching for minute facial tics appeals to my love of the adventure genre. If Team Bondi can pull this off, L.A. Noire will be a pretty sure contender for my game of whatever year it comes out in. This month’s issue of Game Informer promises more details, and should be hitting stands any day.
source: IGN
Games Rebels Play — January
The first week of February is already coming to a close, which means we’re a bit late this time around. But at least we’re late in style. Read on to find out how we here at 4cr spent our gaming time during the month of January, and about how Sean thinks dwarf chicks are uncannily hot. Be sure to chime in and tell us what you’ve been playing, too.
Edgar:
I picked up Borderlands in January, been playing a lot of that. Really fun game, especially playing coop. Still in my first play through of Dragon age too, god that game is fun. It’s keeping me from buying lots of game, cause I just want to finish this one. I love the story. That’s about it for me. The rest of my days have been planning the stuff for the new house we bought, and taking care of my baby boy.
Greg:
Well, rebels, I recently flew off to China for a two-month business trip, so January was a mad dash to make sure everything was in order. Of course I still got a little bit of gaming time in.
I finally polished off Sega’s incredible Valkyria Chronicles. I know that I’ve ranted about this game a few times already, but it really is an experience that every strategy fan should dive into. I also dashed through my 2009 game of the year, Uncharted 2. It’s easy to see why everyone is ranting about it - nothing quite matches up in production quality, voice acting, or raw charm.
The other game that I played in January is Climax’s reimagining, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. This game is.. I don’t even know how to feel about it at this point. The ending, which you should absolutely not look up if you have any intention of playing the game, really did knock me out of my chair. Really, this is the game that reassures me that the Wii is a perfectly valid system for a mature, ambitious game. The storyline and characters are well-written, the motion controls are superb, and the psychology-based shifting gameplay is a neat innovation. Check it out before it becomes scarce.
Jody:
I have been playing through all of the Zelda games in order of release. Finished up Zelda and Zelda II, and have been working on A Link to the Past. It’s been a bit slow going though, because my wife and I are expecting our first kid very soon, and most of my weekends have been spent putting together a kickass nursery of awesome. Aside from that, I have been playing Borderlands on 360 off and on when I can, and have recently started up Suikoden Tierkreis on DS again. I had made it about eight hours in previously, before moving on to other games, so I started it back up. It is actually a neat game, even though the main characters voice acting is way too fast. It’s like there are no pauses between lines in his dialog, but the pauses are in everybody elses. It’s strange.
GK:
I just did a bad thing. I just did a very bad thing. I reinstalled World of Warcraft.
Shaun:
I’ve become absolutely smitten by No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle. I didn’t care much for the first game, but this sequel takes all the cool ideas from the first, adds in new ones, and takes out all the stuff I thought was super lame. It’s got just the right amount of humor and absurdity to balance out the over-the-top violence.
Vinnk:
Not a lot of time for games with the new job and new baby. But sometimes, late at night, when I can’t sleep due to the stress of the world I boot up the original No More Heroes and do some good cathartic killing. I intend to continue this tradition when I finally get my copy of No More Heroes 2. It isn’t out in Japan yet but I am getting a US copy shipped to me. Any day now…
Sean:
To help sate my appetite for Mass Effect 2, I dove feet-first into Dragon Age: Origins over the past month. While certainly a few themes apart from BioWare’s Sci-Fi epic, Dragon Age is a kindred spirit. The density of character interaction and party management has been turned up to 11, which should please not only BioWare fans, but any veteran of the RPG genre.
That being said, BioWare has played a horrible trick on us; Dragon Age is actually a real-time strategy game, which becomes all the more apparent when playing the PC version. The game doesn’t sit quite as comfortably in the console arena, where direct party member control is often needed, and can become quite tedious.
The story is compelling, however, charging each event in the game with layers of moral dilemmas and uncertain outcomes. The last few hours of the game present the player with one difficult choice after another, leaving almost no room to consider the full ramifications. But these decisions do matter, even if effects of some won’t be felt until the inevitable sequel. It’s rare that a game makes you seriously think about your choices, let alone take the time to force you to experience the consequences.
Those who were disappointed in Fable II may be able to find solace here. You can choose one of six distinct origins, the threads of whichcan be felt in your travels — even for the origins you did not choose. Aside from the achievements/trophies, it’s worth completing each origin story to fully understand the political landscape.
That, and dwarf chicks are uncannily hot…
Nick Rumas:
I was once again consumed by Wii Sports Resort in January. It is the game I simply cannot get enough of. I love it so very much. NSMB Wii also took up a lot of my time, and I’m extremely happy with it in virtually every respect. It’s pretty much exactly what I wanted the DS game to be. Not the greatest 2D Mario platformer in the world, but a step in the right direction. Lastly, I finally got into Wii Fit Plus, and I’ve been having a blast with it.
Unfortunately, with the Wii taking up all of my time, I’ve once again started to neglect Mother 3, which I only managed to put a few minutes into during January. I am still determined to finish it before winter’s end…
Nerdsery Mayhem!
I’ve been with 4cr for a while now, and during my time, I’ve seen great rebels like Vinnk and Edgar succumb to the lures of parenting. As is my way, I thought, “If the cool kids are doing it, then so should I.”
After convincing my wife to rock the casbah, we were pleased to find that we would, in fact, be having a tot of our very own. The actual due date is rapidly approaching - only a couple more weeks to go - and we’ve finally finished up the nursery this week. All that’s missing is, you know, the newborn. As I am a tremendous nerd, and my wife is (luckily) fully supportive of such things, we decorated in a neat Nintendo theme. Hopefully, our kid won’t grow up to be a Sega fanboy, or else he might end up being put up for adoption. I kid, I kid. Kinda.
Check past the break for a couple of photos of our beloved nerdy nursery, which I have affectionately dubbed the “nerdsery.”
It was either that or “Professor Fantastic’s room of Awesome.”
Let me start off by saying that Etsy is awesome. There are so many fantastic little art pieces and doodads and such. The only bad thing I can think of about the site is that it pains my wallet every time I go. The main framed art comes from Fort Awesome Studios, who not only have one of the best names ever, but they have some of my favorite video game fan-art available on the net.
Hangin’ out with the frog humidifier, you see a stuffed Link and a Club Nintendo Mario hat. These items are destined to be found on the floor of the nursery within the kid’s first couple days in the house.
Some of the neat artwork - wall one…
..and wall two!
These adorable robots come from Stephen Edwards Graphics. Not Nintendo related, but really, how could we resist these little guys?
Finally, the good folks at fangamer.net have this totally awesome Super Mario RPG-inspired poster entitled “Starry Starry Pipes,” which is really just fantastic.
So, that’s it. Hopefully our son won’t grow up to think that we’re terrible parents for forcing daddy’s love of Nintendo upon him. And if you know of any other cool game (especially Zelda) related stuff on Etsy, let me know, and I’ll try to convince the wife that we need them.
Snoopy Wars?
Tom Torrey, being the crafty fellow that he is, decided to combine two of his childhood loves - Peanuts and Star Wars. The kit is a combination of an old-school tie fighter model and some random plastic that he has siting around.
While the pairing is pretty damn odd, the results are amazing. Just look at that thing!
source: Molly McIsaac
Awesome Metroid Art
Found this awesome illustration of Samus over at Luis Melo’s site. Loving his work, including his Transformers and Faxanadu images. Good work.
Image of the Day: Nanananananana.. Batman!
Rumas’ Pokemon find in Google’s Time-Life archive prompted me to poke at the database for more gems. Naturally, one of the first terms that I entered was Batman. I wan’t disappointed by the results.
When I saw this cover, from a 1966 issue of Life magazine, three things immediately struck me. One - that sure is a “mighty leap” from Mr. West there. Two - Batman’s utility belt is ludicrously huge. And three - other than a penchant for wearing their underwear on the outside, I have no idea what Batman, Superman, and the Marques de Sade have in common.
Man, every time that I look at this cover, I love it more and more.
Life 3-11-1966 cover - Adam West as Batman
Stuff That Is Awesome - Time Lincoln
A few days ago, I was was browsing our sister site Toronto Thumbs when I noticed something mind-numbingly awesome - Time Lincoln. Yes, Time Lincoln. Ok, those two words don’t exactly give one much to go on, so let’s take a look at the solicitation for the book:
What happens when the Great Emancipator is suddenly freed from the bonds of time to right wrongs throughout history? Taken out of time on the night of his assassination with the help of H.G. Wells’s time machine, Abraham Lincoln finds himself waging war upon the forces of evil in the past, present and future! In his last hour, he lived a lifetime!
Let’s just go through this step-by-step, shall we?
Great Emancipator is a great wrestler name, righting wrongs throughout history is a line of employment that I wish I could sign up for, H.G. Wells build a pretty rad time machine, and Abraham Lincoln is a man who knows a thing or two about wars and the waging of them.
Thumbs’ writer Kevin Hickey was down on the whole thing, especially since it happened to feature yet-another comic book appearance by current president, Barack Obama. While I do think the Obama cameo has long-ago grown lame, I’m pretty hyped for time-traveling steampunk emancipation. The only thing that could make this any better would be if Abe picked up Teddy Roosevelt and the two of them went on a dinosaur safari.
Time Lincoln is being released by Antarctic Press and hits comic book stores later this month.
Also recommended - The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril