video games

Chris Knight's avatar

A guy named “petermolyneux2” on YouTube has… well he might have some issues, if his short film “Nintendo: A Sad Story” is any indication. I’ve watched this three times now, trying to make sense of what exactly I’m looking at. And now I CAN’T GET IT OUT OF MY HEAD!! No sound sleep for me tonight.

No sound sleep for you either, maybe, if you choose to let enter your gray matter this clip that surely must resemble what the 1993 Super Mario Brothers movie would have been had Neil Gaiman written the script…

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Chris Knight's avatar

Check this bad boy out!

This was a Christmas present from my friend Eric Smith: welder and metal worker extraordinare. It’s the Crimson Omen from the Gears of War video game series done in steel! Eric designed it on computer and then precision-cut it out of a sheet of metal with a water jet. The picture does it no justice: this thing looks positivalutely gnarly up close and in person. Eric knew that I’m a big fan of the Gears of War franchise, and I am both thankful and humbled that he went to the effort to make this.

Now I just need to figure out how to fittingly display it. Any ideas? 🙂...

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I have not yet finished playing Limbo (click here for official site), the new game from Danish-based independent Playdead Studios for the Xbox 360. A few days ago I finally beat Batman: Arkham Asylum… after owning it since its release a year ago this month! Hey what can I say: Bane had been kicking my butt since February.

Anyhoo, since I’d committed to only playing through the Dark Knight’s exploits during the evening hours, my nighttime gaming needed a new cerebral experience… and Limbo is it! And even though I haven’t reached the end of the game, I absolutely must pass along word of it to this blog’s readers. Why?

‘Cuz Limbo is like Super Mario Bros. had it been envisioned by David Lynch! Yeah, imagine Mario from the same mind that brought us Eraserhead, and that will be Limbo. It’s a side-scrolling platform game ...

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I was going to write a review of BioShock 2 months ago but never got around to it for various reasons. One of them being that I wanted to play it again to properly absorb it all. Personally, I loved BioShock 2. Even with a few issues (I had hoped to be able to explore around Rapture more) I thought it was a superb follow-up to 2007’s BioShock: a title that is on my short list of greatest video games ever.

Well today, like a bolt out of the blue, Ken Levine – the guy who created BioShock in the first place (but didn’t work on the sequel) – and his Irrational Games announced that BioShock Infinite will be landing in 2012.

Here’s the trailer. And I have to ask: “What. The. %@&#?!?“

HOW does the BioShock saga go from being set in Rapture, a city ...

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Is this game really that good? I’m thinking of getting it.

And should I play the original StarCraft first? Believe it or not, for all of the original’s legendary renown, I’ve yet to play it.

(I’m way behind on my video games. I still need to finish Batman: Arkham Asylum sometime. Not to mention Halo 3: ODST.)

Anyway, StarCraft II looks incredibly promising. Just wondering if it’s worth dropping sixty bucks for it, or if I should wait 🙂...

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I wound up driving past Epic Games’ studio in Cary the other week. Wasn’t much to see. But I couldn’t help feeling like Charlie Bucket from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: wondering if there were Oompa-Loompas inside. But chasing each other around with chainsaws.

Anyway…

What you are about to see is not an official trailer for Gears of War 3. This is something that a group of fans collaborated on and… honestly, I think this is a much better piece than the “Ashes to Ashes” trailer.

Focusing on Augustus Cole and with Johnny Cash’s cover of “Hurt” helping to set the tone, here is “What Have I Become?”

That is just plum haunting. Hey Epic Games, hire these guys now!...

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Star Wars: The Old Republic is looking so good that I have quietly but seriously wondered if this is going to be a real video game at all. What if it’s just a front for a “covert operation” by George Lucas to sow the ground on a fertile part of the Star Wars mythology that hasn’t been done yet? So far we’ve seen Star Wars: The Old Republic trailers, online comics, extensive bios and background material, at least two hardcover novels to be released later this year…

What if Star Wars: The Old Republic is like what Shadows of the Empire was in 1996: everything that comes with marketing a video game, without an actual game?

(Look, Star Wars conspiracy theories are few and far between. Indulge me a bit willya? 🙂

But while we’re waiting for the game itself to materialize on store shelves, BioWare and LucasArts have just ...

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Of all the clever logos that Google has done to mark various occasions and moments in history, this is by far the kewlest. Tomorrow is the thirtieth anniversary of the debut of Pac-Man, and Google has a fully-playable Pac-Man logo up!

Use your keyboard’s arrow keys to move Pac-Man around the maze. Other than the customized Google design it plays EXACTLY like the arcade original: including 255 screens and the 256th “kill screen”. It even has the act breaks!

Thanks to Chad Austin for the heads-up! And hey, while we’re on the subject of celebrating video gaming’s first bona-fide hero, how about we also play “Weird Al” Yankovic’s never-officially released parody of The Beatles’ “Taxman”? Here’s a homemade music video of “Pac-Man”!

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