I’m posting this from my severely underpowered netbook in a hotel room in Boston, just a few blocks from the Hynes Convention Center. Day 1 of PAX East is done, and there are two days left before the show’s over!
Keep an eye here next week for post-PAX coverage. Photos, previews, swag round-ups, that kind of thing.
If you like Diablo and you haven’t played Torchlight yet, then you already know how you’re spending your $5 this weekend. Steam has Torchlight on sale for $5, 75% off its usual $20 price tag.
Torchlight is basically Diablo with a relatively modern graphic engine and much less dark moody crap. You choose from one of three classes and venture deeper and deeper into a randomly generated dungeon, hitting waypoints and eating up scrolls every so often to warp back to town to sell your stuff. It’s not the most complicated game, but it’s certainly fun and addictive. It’s also very low-tech friendly, with a netbook mode for your less powerful hardware. It’s classic hack-and-slash clickfest, and just the thing to cheaply sate your desire for adventuring and loot-hunting until Diablo 3 finally comes out.
This week’s flashback is a seldom-remembered game in the biggest franchise in video game history: Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins for the Game Boy. This is probably the only great unsung Mario game. Every other excellent Mario game is beloved, whether it’s the first Super Mario Bros., Mario 3, Super Mario World, Mario 64, or even Yoshi’s Island. No one remembers Mario Land 2, even though it was probably the best non-remake, actually-starring-Mario Mario game on a portable system until New Super Mario Bros. came out a few years ago.
[From The Game is a regular department on Aggrogate, featuring replica items from video games. FTGs can feature merchandise, convention swag, special edition pack-ins, or personal replica projects from across the Internet. If you have something you want featured in From The Game, drop me a line.]
This week’s replica is a gaming numismatist’s dream. The Imperial Septim is the coin of the Empire (called the Septim Empire in Daggerfall) that spanned across the great continent of Tamriel. A replica Septim was included in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion Collector’s Edition, along with a “Pocket Guide to the Empire,” a map of Cyrodill, and the obligatory “Making-of” DVD.
The Septim was the highlight of the Collector’s Edition, and easily justified the extra $10 originally tacked on to the price tag. It’s a big metal coin that actually looks better than its in-game counterpart. The coin looks so good that fans actually produced mods for Oblivion and Morrowind that better reflected the replica.
Nintendo has finally announced a successor to the DS… sort of. It’s more like Nintendo announced-its-intent-to-announce the successor to the DS in Japan, but either way it means a few tiny details about the future of portable gaming. A Nintendo Co., Ltd. (Nintendo of Japan) press release (PDF) said that the company is preparing a new portable system, tentatively titled the “3DS.”
According to Nintendo, the 3DS will let players enjoy 3D gaming without special glasses. The exact details of how the 3DS will accomplish this are extremely iffy. Joystiq has reported that two Japanese newspapers are claiming that the 3D image will come from Sharp’s “parallax barrier LCD” technology, and that both screens will measure 4 inches across, each. The 3DS is also purported to be backwards-compatible with DS and DSi software. Meanwhile, Nintendo of America has been completely silent on the subject. The 3DS will be on display at E3 in June, so more details should be available in the summer.
It’s a great day for zombie hunters. You can get Left 4 Dead 2
[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]
Battletoads. Mega Man. Castlevania. Contra. Ninja Gaiden. The NES was infamous for some amazingly difficult games, and that’s not counting the ones that were unbeatable because they were terrible and poorly designed. “Nintendo Hard” describes a video game that’s, well, ridiculously hard. It punishes you for even trying to beat the game by surrounding you by enemies, giving you little to no health, setting up unforeseeable death traps, and basically just setting up every possible obstacle in your way.
Nintendo Hard games can be good or bad. Good Nintendo Hard games are rewarding and well-made, with solid controls. You feel challenged by the game, but you don’t feel it’s truly unfair because of malicious programming. Good Nintendo Hard games have you coming back again and again to get a little bit farther each time. They include Battletoads, Bionic Commando, Contra, and pretty much every NES game you have fond memories of even if you couldn’t actually beat it. Bad Nintendo Hard games are difficult because they were lazily made. Their controls suck, the enemies take too much damage, and you aren’t given enough lives or continues to have a chance to win. These were often the shovelware cash-in games on the NES, like LJN’s many titles, including Back to the Future, Terminator 2, and Wolverine.
The previously exclusive-to-console-bundles 250-gigabyte hard drive for the Xbox 360 is now available standalone. Microsoft has announced that the drive hits stores today and will retail for $130. This seems to replace the 120GB hard drive, which used to retail for $130. Microsoft hasn’t stated whether the 120GB drive will remain on sale for a lower price point, or whether it or the 60GB drive will be phased out of the market.
The new hard drive hasn’t showed up on Best Buy or Gamestop’s web sites yet, and it’s only available on Amazon for preorder. Check your local stores to see if it’s actually on shelves yet.
If you played through Fallout 3 but haven’t tried any of the DLC yet, you’re probably going to want to get in on this. All five DLC packs are half off all week, just 400 MS Points ($5) compared to their usual 800. If you haven’t played Fallout 3 at all, you can basically save a Hamilton or two on the Game-of-the-Year Edition experience; the regular Fallout 3 for Xbox 360 is $28 new on Amazon and $23 used on Gamestop. Add $20 for all five packs, and you’re still paying between $9 and $14 less than the Game of the Year Edition
Of course, you don’t have to get all of the packs. Mothership Zeta, The Pitt, and Operation Anchorage are relatively linear adventures. They’re fun, but they don’t really open up the game. Broken Steel and Point Lookout are the real gems in Fallout 3 DLC. Broken Steel lets you play through the game past the ending and bumps up the level cap to 30, and Point Lookout gives you a whole new area to explore.
Let’s turn the clock back 20 years, to 1990. Now let’s get depressed over the fact that 1990 was 20 years ago. Okay, now that that’s out of the way, let’s look at these awesome retro video game ads. They come from various DC and Marvel comics between 1989 and 1991, and show off some of the best of the worst of the games of those times. Click on the pictures for ridiculously high-rez scans, if you have a hard time reading them.
