Points of Interest – 12/20/07
InFormers: Robots in the News
- Review: Figures.com has a review available for Masterpiece Starscream.
Assorted Mushrooms
- Video: If Steve Martin could have one wish this holiday season, it would be to see all the children of the world join hands and sing together in the spirit of harmony and peace.
After that… well, a man has to have priorities, does he not?
- Video: Psychic Warfare: “Old video footage reveals the start of what may have been a deadly Russian weapon: Telekinesis.”
Didn’t someone make a game about this?
- Video: The cars of the future… um… we’ll get back to you.
- Video: Did you know that there’s a book about Spam? Yeah! …there is. Yep.
And to help promote it, here’s a brief history. On toast.
- Blogging: The 5th turtle reveals why Archie Comics never published the end of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures series, titled The Forever War.
Guess Archie wasn’t so cool then, after all. They just got to benefit from outside intercoolence.
- Article: IGN rounds up their Top 5 Comic Badasses of 2007.
Video Power
- Editorial: For the cost of games these days… to develop, to purchase… should they be so buggy?
- Newsbit: PriceGrabber.com reports that the average price for a Wii online is $650. In related news (same link), some guy in the UK is trying to sell his used one for a world record.
- Newsbit: Sony’s Jack Tretton is now saying that more developers are going to make games for the PS3 first, then port them to other consoles.
- Newsbit: At a recent investor conference call, the chairman of Take Two found the very notion of Grand Theft Auto for the Wii to be quite laughable.
- Video: Have yourself a Merry raving Christmas!
- Review: GameSpot: For when you just have to say SOMETHING bad about a game, no matter how silly.
I won’t argue the other versions don’t have better graphics and more going on, but this is effectively striking at an NES game for being an NES game. Is that really right?
- Article: GameDaily postulates that a platformer need not be of the Mario branding to be good, and so it is that they offer eight examples to support this claim.
- Article: GameDaily takes a look back at the Top 20 News Stories of 2007 in part 1 of this feature.
- Article: Mods are good for the longevity of a game, and Games Radar knows plenty of good ones.
- Video: Remember that fake-yet-convincing Super Mario Galaxy DS video? Here’s another version, with allusions to the Nintendo ON, which seems to reveal that this was put together by the same guy, and helps explain its convincing-but-not-quite quality.
- Article/Videos: Thanks to Wolf for providing the link to Yahoo’s look back at the Best Games of the Past Decade.
- Newsbit: Now here’s a good little bit of kindness: a retirement community helped a 13-year old girl get a Wii for her father, who had suffered a stroke.
- Video: Yahtzee returns once more, this time taking us through the western RPG known as Mass Effect.
- Review: So, Sonic the Hedgehog is now available on iPod, and apparently it’s not that good. Which might be expected. If they can’t get it right on the Game Boy Advance, what hope does an MP3 player have of doing better?
- Pic: Season’s Greetings from Rare, who have created this lovely image in the spirit of the season. Poor Banjo; he seems so bewildered. Maybe it’s because those pinatas had better watch themselves near that fire…
And is that a hint at Killer Instinct 3 across one stocking? Why, I think it is!
- Hardly anything concrete on that front, though.
- Accessorize: Now here is a nifty way to keep your Wii ready to play GameCube games at all times, without having to worry about those flaps.
- Article: The third part of 1up’s Street Fighter retrospective has been posted, this time covering the merchandise aspect of the series. Comic publisher UDON had even agreed to an interview, but for some reason chose to silently back out. Poor form, guys.
- Newsbit: So yesterday, American Beverage Association vice president Kevin Keane (not this guy, amusingly enough) was quoted as blaming video games instead of soda for being the cause of children’s obesity. Turns out, things were misconstrued a bit.
–LBD “Nytetrayn”