Category: Gaming

(via Engadget)

Today’s dumb crook news, courtesy Carroll County News Online.

BERRYVILLE – Two Berryville men have been charged with theft of property for allegedly stealing $1,200 worth of video games from Wal-Mart and selling them next door at the “Game Stop” store.

Kyle Ramer, 18, and Sam Hess, 21, were allegedly caught on camera removing video games from their cases and stuffing the games down their pants.

. . .

The link to Game Stop was discovered by Wal-Mart’s loss prevention person, Bartos said.

“While he was in Game Stop, he asked if they had any large amounts of video games come in, Bartos explained. “They said yes, and it all matched what had been taken.”

Wow!  Steal from Wal-Mart.  Go next door and sell to Game Stop.  Sheer genius!!!1!VWBUG!!  I’m signing up for whatever class these guys took to learn this.

[tags]Dumb crook news, The value of education in today’s society[/tags]

Again with the pink console thing.  I get liking pink, but why all the pink consoles?  That’s the thing I don’t get.  Regardless, Nintendo has announced more games for the Wii as well as announcing a pink DS Lite for Europe on October 27th.  What still has not been announced is a price.

Nintendo announced a new Mario sports title for the Wii, called Mario Strikers Charged (working title). The sequel to Super Mario Strikers is likely to make full use of the Wii controller–the game is playable at Leipzig, and GameSpot will bring you more information as soon as we can. German footballer Philipp Lahm was featured in a video to promote the game, and it was demonstrated on stage by a Germany TV star.

Battalion Wars 2 for the Wii was also announced and will be playable on Nintendo’s stand at Leipzig. Very few details of the game have been released, although Nintendo did say that it was abbreviated to BWii. The original Battalion Wars was released on the GameCube in late 2005.

[tags]Nintendo, Wii, Nintendo Wii, Battalion Wars 2, Mario Strikers Charged[/tags]

Joystiq has mention of the current price drop for the PS2, from $149.99 to $129.99. To go with this, it seems Sony is releasing a pink model (at least, in Europe). I don’t get the draw of pink, but it worked for the RAZR phone, and I’m guessing it will work for the PS2. On top of this, it seems a pink PSP is in the future as well (again, at least in Europe).

Oddly, shortly after these posts were made on Joystiq, there was a post discussing the ever-important question of why there aren’t more female gamers? I was worried that I would read the article to find that companies thought it was because there weren’t enough pink consoles. Fortunately, I was wrong – instead, the lack of female developers gets the blame.

Set for release in Europe only – at the time of writing – the limited edition pink PlayStation 2 will hit shelves on November 8 this year, bundled with two pink DualShock controllers and a pink Memory Card.

. . .

The pink PlayStation 2 will retail at €159.99 across coutries united by one glorious currency, while the UK can expect to fork out £129.99. Us Brit-types do get a copy of SingStar Pop bundled with the whole shebang, however.

. . .

Set for release on October 27 in Europe only, the P!nk PSP Value Pack will cost €229, or £169. Anyone picking up the pack will gain access to exclusive P!nk-related downloads, courtesy of Sony’s YourPSP.com service.

The mention of P!nk-related downloads refers to the collaboration with the artist Pink, by the way. So it looks like buying a pink PSP will get you some music by Pink to go with it. We’ll see how that all pans out when the Pink console is released closer to the end of the year.

[tags]Sony goes pink, Pink PS2, Pink PSP[/tags]

(via Kotaku)

Every once in a while, some gaming site or magazine does a worst games list, usually to compliment the best games list just published there or elsewhere. But now Wikipedia is getting in to the list business, with the Wikipedia list of computer and video games considered to be the worst ever. This list appears to be updated according to group discussions on the topic, which at least attempts to make it less vendetta oriented.

Here are just a few of the many bad games on the list.

• Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis (2003, GameCube/PlayStation 2) This game inspired the golden mullet awards on G4‘s X-play, and X-Play also named it the worst GameCube game ever
• Burning Desire (1982, Atari 2600) is a pornographic video game with crude graphics and boring, simplistic gameplay. It was considered to have one of the worst premises ever and the game had an explicit ending scene after each level.
• Extreme Paintbrawl (1998, PC): Horrible physics, abysmal graphics, and a bad team A.I. gave this game the “honor” of being the worst video game ever reviewed by IGN (although, score-wise, it has been beaten out by Olympic Hockey Nagano ’98, which got a 0.0/10 on IGN, although the actual game was not reviewed. IGN went on to review as many games carrying the “Extreme” title as they could and bashed them for being so “extreme.” The game was lampooned for knowingly being shipped without any AI programming whatsoever; that section of the code had not even been implemented. PC Gamer US awarded the game one of its lowest scores ever, a 6%, advising gamers, “Avoid at all costs.” At the time, this was the lowest score ever “awarded” by PC Gamer US, and remained so for many years until it was eclipsed by “Skydive!” which was rated 5%.
• Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon (1993, CD-i) is widely considered to be the worst Zelda game ever created. As part of the termination of a contract from Nintendo, Philips gained the license to produce three Zelda games. All three received overwhelmingly negative feedback and are referred to in some circles as the “Unholy Triforce.” They were notorious for bad animation, scripting, and voice acting, but The Wand of Gamelon was roundly condemned by all Zelda fans and is #6 on EGM’s 20 worst games list. Filter also ranked it #1 on their “Top 10 Worst Games of All Time” list.

I remember the Extreme Paintbrawl debacle. Shortly after PC Gamer wrote the horrible review of the game, one of the programmers for the program wrote in. I don’t remember the exact details, but I think he said the game was shipped early over the protests of the programmers because the company had to make a deadline. I believe he also said there was a patch that fixed the AI and made a number of improvements to the program and that perhaps the magazine should look at reviewing the patched version. The editor responded that they only reviewed shipped versions of games, so as to prevent exactly the problems seen with Extreme Paintbrawl. Too bad not enough companies learned the needed lesson that games should be relatively finished when shipped. I think most consumers don’t mind patches for odd minor bugs and omissions here and there, but to not even include AI and add that in a later patch? Well, no other company has been that bad that I know of, but a lot of companies have shipped incomplete games with plans to patch them later (I’m singling out Dungeon Lords as an example of this problem).

[tags]Worst games ever, The problem with incomplete games[/tags]