X-Entertainment has a good yarn on the first issue of Nintendo Power. He even talks a bit about it’s free predecessor, Nintendo Fun Club News, to which I was a crypto-subscriber. Remember, back then video gaming was a pretty geeky pursuit. You had to hide it if you wanted to keep your teeth.

Amazon’s search function can be a good source of amusement. Today I entered the search string, “civilization 4”. The top 2 results were expected: the regular and special editions of the game. But nestled between the Civ 4 Strategy Guide and Age of Emipres III was this gem:

Something Awful has a few pages of video game boxes phototshopped to have titles that more honestly represent the game. Here’s a sample (click on thumbnails for larger versions):

This is great – some of you may remember the old videogame Paperboy. You bike down the street and throw newspapers at people’s porches while avoiding lots of random hurdles like runaway tires, dogs, kids playing with r/c cars, punk rockers, ninjas, mummies, skateboarders, the usual video game stuff. Here is a video of a paperboy in a truck driving down the street when suddenly a bunch of people dressed like those video game hurdles get in his way. Wait for the ending, it’s clever.

I posted a while back about Video Games Live, an orchestral concert of video game music. They’re calling it quits. From Slashdot:

Video Games Live (‘The first major North American concert tour featuring music from some of the biggest video games combined with video footage, lasers, lights, and live action’) announced today that they have cancelled all tour dates in their national tour except for two scheduled for this weekend in Seattle and Vancouver. Fans across the country who have paid for tickets to these events must now manually request refunds and suffer convenience charges. The event was cancelled ‘because ticket sales were slow and did not reflect the great interest expected.

Coulda just said, “I don’t know what the fuck we were thinking.”

1up gave a glowing review to a game that will be released this week for XBox, called Stubbs the Zombie in “Rebel without a Pulse”. It uses the Halo engine and some of Stubbs’ developers also worked on Halo. It’s said to have lots of gore balanced by a good amount of humor, and it’s set against the backdrop of the idyllic American 1950s. The perspective sounds intereseting, while not entirely new (MediEvil on PS1). You control a zombie instead of the usual zombie hunter, and your arsenal consists of parts of your body that you can detach and throw at people. And it features split-screen Co-op (got that Crabby?). People are already claiming that this will be the best game of the year that no one played (like the awesome sleeper Beyond Good & Evil).

FWIW, geeks seem to have a special affinity for zombies. Sure zombies eat human brains, and, yes, they’re ugly and undead. But I’ve never understood the fascination. I’ve often felt that zombie games put their theme first and gameplay second. That can be OK if the theme is great and the gameplay doesn’t suck (ex. Black & White, Psychonauts). But zombies alone is not a sufficiently compelling theme. So I’ve avoided them with the thought that they typically relied on their theme which, to me, sucked.

From an article:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation on Friday to outlaw the sale to teenagers of electronic games featuring reckless mayhem and explicit sexuality.

An interesting move for someone who, were it not for the easy access for teenagers to violent media, would not have the fame, wealth, and political position he now enjoys.

When I was 11 I remember going to the theater and buying a ticket to Commando. Terrible movie, but I liked it at the time. When he embedded the circular sawblade into some nameless guard’s head, I wonder if I thought back then, “Hey. This guy would make a great state governor.”

Capcom has released a game for the Nintendo DS called, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. From Evil Avatar:

Mix adventure gaming, crime scence investigation and court room drama with the DS interface and you have a winner!
Also if you act now, through Capcom’s US website, you can get a free, “Objection!” stylus.