DO NOT LET DR. MARIO TOUCH YOU HE IS NOT A REAL DOCTOR

There’s one thing I’ve always noticed about kids today: They play so much crap. That’s not to say every new game that comes out is crap, either. I just lost a week to the Capital Wasteland of Fallout 3 (Along with a few days of pure awesome after I found the Experimental MIRV), and am totally happy with it, but, I also rediscovered my NES in the basement. Here are a few must play games for that lovable box.

First up: Dr. Mario.

I dunno about you, but I love puzzle games. A simple game like Tetris or Bejeweled can suck me in for hours and often makes me miss appointments, work, etc… And Dr. Mario is certainly one of those time obliterators. Dr. Mario’s objective is simple: There are viruses in the bottle, use the pills that are given to you to line up color and eliminate the viruses.  Sounds easy, right? Well, it is… For a while. Like Tetris, as the levels pass, it gets faster. There are more viruses, too. If you like puzzle games, this is something to pick up. It even came back in many reincarnations!

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It’s more than a feeling. Sometimes games can take us to the highest of highs, or kick us square in the balls/vag, leaving us pain-stricken and confused. So, rather than hide our emotions, I encourage you to chip in and share some of your emotional experiences with the vidya. Enclosed are some of my favorites (or most painful memories).
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Okay, I discovered this by accident. It’s how to play the full Banjo game from the trial.

Step 1: Get into Spiral Mountain
Step 2: Go to the giant Ape and make him hit all 3 orange tiles. Make sure the one furtherest away from the tree stub with the monkey is hit LAST. DON’T GET THIS JIGGY YET.
Step 3: Get the orange from Ape’s tree, and give it to the monkey on the tree stub. GET THIS JIGGY.
Step 4: Go to the mole hill above the tree stump, learn how to egg attack, and beat the Ape. A Jiggy will fall.
Step 5: If done correctly, the 2 Jiggys will be right next to each other. Jump right in the middle of them. You should collect 2 Jiggys at the same time, extending the trial.

TRY IT OUT. The only thing you can’t do is save.

Looking back on arcades as a whole, I’ve noticed a slow decline in clientelle variation.  From the very beginning, as I’ve mentioned before, I remember having all sorts of folks frequenting Ebeneezer’s, all coming together for one common purpose:  To play the vidya.

While there are certainly many people in a modern arcade at any given time, it seems like not only are there fewer females and non-whites, but the few who do visit these places hang around in little cliques.
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The upcoming Street Fighter movie may be set directly to rape all our childhoods (as well as make it its drug-addicted, amnesiac junkie of a crackwhore), but at least this latest trailer of the upcoming home version of Street Fighter IV isn’t. Farthest thing from it – it actually shows one of the best fights ever to happen in the Street Fighter storyline, and does it with as much style and as much finesse as only the series’ creators only could. Make no mistake about, this shit is legendary and will go down in history. It’s Gouken versus Akuma.

Created in the same stylized cel-shaded 3D animation with all the inkbrush strokes and splatters as in all the trailers, this excellent piece of eye candy depicts both Akuma and Gouken in a battle so fierce and violent that the earth literally breaks up around them, sending them into a fiery abyss. And even then they continue, trading world-quaking blows as if nothing had happened. Gouken seems to get the upper hand, but then Akuma reveals just how much of a magnificent bastard he is and does that move we all know and love.

Forget the Legend of Chun Li. If the studio could have just gone with CGI, maybe got some assistance from Capcom, then we’d have an awesome movie on our hands. It may not be more ‘Hollywood’, but at least you’d be doing the series the justice it deserves.

For those of us eager to see what awaits us this new year, well, here’s the feed right from Capcom’s PR department: their 2009 lineup of videogame gems just waiting to blow our socks off. Or mildly entertain us for a bit before we point our browsers to /v/ and rage at every little thing we don’t like about said games. But it’s all  good, right? Anyway, let’s get to them vidya gaems before I just copy-paste the entire damn PR press release.
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There’s one thing that would piss off an arcade denizen more than anything else:  When someone new came in and started ripping and tearing into the regulars.  Worse still, when they’d brag about it.  Essentially, as it was put to me, you made fast friends or fast enemies, especially when it came to fighting games.

When I started playing Street Fighter II, I was about four or five years old.  Of course, I was awful at first, but the big dogs took me under their wing, probably because seeing a preschool-age girl kicking ass at a serious fighter was hilarious.  Or maybe that’s just why I’d have done it.  Regardless, kids learn quickly and I was no exception.  Within a couple of months, I was the Ebeneezer’s Street Fighter II champion, and with every win, I’d receive cheers from everyone except for the poor sap who thought they could beat me.  It wasn’t until much later that I realized that I had become a secret weapon.

I don’t think I’m alone in this.  Every arcade had someone like me:  The person you’d trick someone into playing with when you’re pissed off just to watch them cry.  Even nowadays, I’ve had the (mis?)fortune of seeing a 300lb. zit-covered behemoth annihilate a muscle-legged little Korean boy at DDR, so some traditions still live on.

Now, to put this in perspective, not everyone who came in would be given this treatment.  It wasn’t some sort of freakishly cruel hazing ritual, to get your ass handed to you by a toddler.  It was specifically reserved for the jerkoffs who would saunter up to the cabinet while someone else was playing, toss in a quarter, destroy their opponent, and then continue from where said opponent left off, all without so much as a ‘Hey, can I play you?’  Worse yet, would be when they either didn’t say a word, and acted like their opponent didn’t exist, which could be topped only with an utterance of ‘Too bad.’  At that point, I’d be carried over and placed on a barstool, handed a coin, and given a reassuring grin.

Those types of people tended not to come back.

Then, there’s the type who stuck around.  They’d come in, be nice, smile a lot.  Maybe they won, maybe they didn’t.  They were usually weirded out by the little one who got picked up by mom at the end of the day.  They sure as hell didn’t play Street Fighter with me.  The struck up conversations with the people they played with.  They made fast friends.  Eventually they even talked to me!

And the community grew.

Well, I know ONE fellow Gamerblag member will be raging about this bit of news, but as it is, I’m currently raging too.

The full roster of the upcoming King of Fighters XII has already been announced, and as you can see from the picture above, one specific character is missing. One who’s always been a staple of the series, and definitely recognizable no matter where she gets to. Athena? Generic schoolgirl. Kim Kaphwan? Generic korean badass (although one of my favorite characters). But where the fuck is my fan-throwing, fanservice-drooling, cleavage-bouncing titty-monster MAI? OR YURI? OR WHIP FOR THAT MATTER?

They better be unlockables, Playmore. They’d better be.

For those of us unable to view images for some reason, here’s the roster in convenient list form:

• Ash
• Duo Lon
• Shen
• Kyo
• Benimaru
• Daimon
• Iori
• Athena
• Kensou
• Chin
• Terry
• Andy
• Joe
• Kim
• Raiden
• Ryo
• Robert
• Ralf
• Clark
• Leona

Not even Vanessa? NOT EVEN VANESSA?

The last Street Fighter movie was terrible, but at least it made an effort to present the material as is. We got to see Guile do the somersault, we got to see Zangief and Honda have an impromptu wrestling/sumo match, hell, we even got to see a half-assed hadouken (although it’s more or less a consensus that the Ryu/Ken duo was the worst of it). But at least we saw the characters, as ridiculous as they may seem, to resemble the characters they were supposed to portray. And lambast me if you will but I still think that Raul Julia made a very convincing M. Bison.

Fast forward to NOW, with another upcoming Street Fighter movie, one that centers on everyone’s favorite thunder-thighed Chinese beauty, Chun Li. And it sounds easy enough, right? Just give a chinese actress her costume, those cute bun-things on her hair, and a license to kick the shit out of people. Doesn’t even have to be Bison, it can be just thugs.

Except we get this.

M.Bison is a ruthless businessman with a beard instead of the psychotic megalomaniac in a general’s suit and cape like he should be.Vega is just a thug in a mask. Balrog is a bald, black dude with a bazooka who’s really really strong.

I hate you, Hollywood. I hate you. I wish I could hate you to death.

Epic Games’ Gears of War 2 for the Xbox 360 is a good game for two good reasons: one is that it still lets you use the unholy love child between a lead-spitting rifle and a gasoline-guzzling chainsaw to kill the bad dudes, and second is that it preserves everything that is great about the first game and adds something else into the mix that doesn’t spoil the entire brew. Epic, beyond all expectations, has done it: they’ve nailed that sweet spot in sequels where both fans of the original and new entries into the series can actually pick up the controller, have fun with everything and enjoy themselves without feeling shortchanged or left out. It’s safe to say that if you do plunk down the necessary cash to purchase this piece of software, you will get your money’s worth. (continue reading…)