We hope you enjoyed our first installment of R.T.F.A. yesterday, and maybe even found something awesome to check out. Today’s offerings include a bit of retro love and what could be one of the greatest video game themed shirts ever. Enjoy:

Stephen’s Pick

Must Resist All Puns Using Word Good: Kotaku’s new editor, Owen Good, just finished a fantastic weekend of posts, highlighted by this gem that convinced readers to admit to all sorts of gaming neuroses — like always playing as purple characters or talking to every NPC in an RPG.

Tracey’s Pick

Air Guitar Hero T-Shirt: What’s cooler than rockin’ out with a fake guitar in “Guitar Hero” or “Rock Band“? Rockin’ out with a fake fake guitar. (By “cooler,” I mean “geekier.”)

Jason’s Pick

Top 25 NES Games of All Time: I’m a huge fan of lists. I’m also a huge fan of the NES. Put those two together and you have GameDaily’s pick for the top 25 NES games of all time. While it is a mostly comprehensive list, it is actually missing the greatest game of all time: “Bubble Bobble.”

Patrick’s Pick

Zelda Graphic Novels On The Horizon: I’ve recently gotten into the whole comic book thing courtesy of the excellent “Walking Dead” series, but I’m not sure I think Zelda’s story is interesting enough to read 200+ pages on. What about you?

* R.T.F.A. stands for “Read The Full Article.”

Would you ever buy a video game for $500,000?

Neither would we.

But recently eBay saw one of the most expensive video games ever put up for auction. It wasn’t a copy of “Kizuna Encounter,” “Pepsi Invaders,” or even a “Nintendo World Championship” cart, but an Atari 2600 game that has never been known to exist.

On February 20, eBay user Phantom listed “Gamma Attack” by Gammation for a half million dollars. Gammation, a company that was thought to only produce Atari peripherals, was only ever rumored to have produced any video games. Over the course of the last thirty years, none of them had ever surfaced, until now.

The high cost of the cartridge wasn’t the only interesting thing about the listing. For example, the only delivery method offered was “pick-up only” and the picture of the actual cart was altered to not show the actual color of the label.

With such a unique and controversial listing, and a new piece of Atari history we tracked down the owner and decided to investigate further and conducted the following e-mail interview shortly after the auction began..

I put the listing at $99,999.00 briefly, but decided to jack it back up because the last thing I wanted to do was have some rich guy that had $100G’s to throw away come along deciding he wanted a “one of a kind” and do just that.

Read more…

Mix a little tech wizardry in with a some hardcore nostalgia, and what you get is a potentially fantastic product from Retrozone that allows for downloadable content for an NES game.

The geniuses at Retrozone have dedicated their lives to keeping the retro gaming community fed with new innovations for old systems. And now they’re offering NES fans the DLC-enabled game “Glider” to play. While “Glider” appears to be based off of an old Mac game, it’s the first game to offer the ability to download new content for the game from the Retrozone website.

From the official website:

In the most advanced homebrew yet you control the paper airplane in search of a way out of the 60 room house. Fly over floor vents to get lift or use fans for a speed boost. This house wasn’t build very well so you will have to avoid water leaks, arching outlets, paper shredders, and other dangers. Shoot down fast moving enemy planes with rubber bands for more points! When your paper isn’t in danger, collect bonus items. Use the three saved game slots to continue later when The House beats you. The backup battery in the cart is socketed so it can easily be replaced with no soldering.

The Glider cart is flashable which means you can replace the built in house with brand new ones. Once you beat The House get a new set of rooms from www.retrousb.com and use a USB CopyNES.

While it may not be the most streamlined system, it is definitely an innovation that I never thought would see the light of day.

The Virtual Console’s selection just got a little bit bigger. Sega just announced the first two Sega Master System games that will be making their way to the Wii’s Virtual Console. “Wonder Boy” and “Fantasy Zone” will be available for the rock-bottom price of 400 Wii Points (100 points cheaper than formerly thought), but they have yet to be dated. Given that these games usually appear within a week or two after the press releases hit gamers that never had a chance to play these the first time around should be getting a crack at them very soon. Here’s to hoping Sega CD games are next.

Nintendo announced last week that, at some point in the near future Europe will be receiving an update to their Virtual Console catalog that will include Commodore 64 (C64) games.

It’s really is great news for them, but it leaves the U.S. now behind in the VC exclusivity market, and there should be some way to rectify that - we want our own exclusive console!

It was easy to miss this news amid the flurry of information coming out of GDC. It may even make sense for the Americans among you not to care but C64 games going to Europe is, in fact, a really big deal. This, coupled with the fact that Japan will soon receive MSX games exclusively leaves the U.S. consumer wondering where is our exclusive console? There are a small handful of console that would really fit the bill, and fill this gaping hole, but will they ever happen?

1) The first candidate that came to my mind was Panasonic’s 3DO, the console brainchild of EA Games founder Trip Hawkins. It was the perfect contender since it was an American made console that pretty much no one got to play the first time around due to the console’s exorbitant cost. This meant that it has an entire library that many gamers have never even seen.

The only problem with 3DO games is that since they were CD based games they may start eating up space on your Wii’s tiny flash memory. However, there are already other CD based games that are available for download, so it shouldn’t be that big of a problem. With only about two million consoles sold originally back in the early 1990s this would be a great way to preserve one of the strongest attempts for a U.S. company to enter the console market, prior to Microsoft.

Read more…

San Francisco — “Tetris” is the “Slim Jim” of mobile games.

At least that’s what I learned at a panel I attended yesterday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The first two days of the event are largely focused on satellite conferences, including one all about mobile games. I decided to check out a session called “TETRIS: Best/Worst Mobile Game Ever.”

“First off, ‘Tetris’ is the best game ever. Not the best mobile game, but the best game ever,” said speaker Rick Marazzani. He’s worked in casual games for over 12 years at places like Broderbund, Maxis/EA/Pogo and Digital Chocolate and is now a co-founder of mobile/web/PC development studio iQ212. And the man loves his “Tetris.” Or so I thought…

After a brief history of how “Tetris” came to be, including the rights debacle and commercialization of the game, he talked about its monumental success — over 70 million units have been sold across different platforms. For mobile games, he estimates that it garnered about one-third of the $140 million revenue that rights-holder EA made on handheld games in Fiscal 2007. It is currently the best-selling mobile game, accounting for 8.5% of all mobile games sold in North America.

Thus, Marazzani called “Tetris” the “Slim Jim of mobile games” (and “not rib-eye or filet mignon”), I guess because of its universal accessibility, although I’m not really sure why meat products were the analogies of choice. So far everything he had said pretty much made sense and was nothing new… But then he pondered the idea of “Tetris” being made today instead of back in 1985. With that in mind, what’s his advice to aspiring mobile game developers?

“If you want to make ‘Tetris’ for today, don’t make ‘Tetris,’” he said. … Wait, what?

Read more…

Horses are great for traveling, but we can’t forget about man’s best friend: the dog.

Last month, we embarked on a year-long quest to find video games’ greatest animal. We started off with finding the best horse, and our all-star panel of judges chose the one fine equine who will represent horses in our end-of-the-year competition.

Now this month, we move on to canines. That includes dogs and wolves, to you non-veterinarians out there.

While dogs (and wolves) have certainly proven to be a gamer’s best friend, they also can be a gamer’s worst enemy. You have played “Resident Evil” haven’t you? From survival-horror to action-adventure to first-person shooters to casual titles, we take a look at all the canines we could think of for our judges’ consideration. And dear readers, feel free to weigh in with your favorite hound and suggest any that we missed.

Then check at the end of the month, when our our judges will select The Greatest Canine In Video Game History.

The leading contenders…

Amaterasu as Shiranui in “Okami”

When legendary monster Orochi is resurrected with an evil curse in tow, it’s up to the wolf-embodied sun god Amaterasu to regain the 13 powers of the Celestial brush and restore peace to the world.

Read more…

It is amazing how a few recent gaming announcements have had a unique effect on me.

No, it wasn’t the fact that the Xbox 360 HD DVD Drive was price-dropped (again). And, no, surprisingly it was none of the recent leaked info on “Mario Kart” for the Wii. It was actually news about a genre that seems to fade a little more each and every year, as well as the characters within it…

By now most gamers are aware that “Street Fighter IV” has been announced. If you happened to miss yesterday’s leaked Famitsu news, a few more original characters have been added to the roster: E. Honda, Dhalsim, and Chun-Li, the last of which was extremely important for me to hear. Why?

Because Chun-Li matters.

You see, my dear Multiplayer friends, I have had an ongoing infatuation with Chun-Li since I first laid my hands on a SNES controller (I was too young to be hanging around at the arcades back in those days). Chun-Li was my first gaming crush, and she has shaped the way I look at and play fighting games ever since the early ’90s.

Read more…

Remember when the original “Super Mario Bros. 2” or the NES version of “Earthbound” that were never released in the United States?

You may have even had the opportunity to give these games a go, either on the Wii’s Virtual Console, or even on your PC using an emulator — but that isn’t how they were originally intended to be played.

What if there was a way you could play these games the way they were supposed to be — on your NES. If you are a video game traditionalist like I am, then Leon Kiriliuk from NES Reproductions may be your savior.

Leon, an avid collector of NES games, helps retro gamers by selling games that were never released (either because they never came out Stateside, or they because are homebrew games) in their original form — the classic NES cartridge. As an NES collector myself, I have to admit I was more than intrigued, so I reached out to Leon via e-mail last week to find out a little bit more about what he does, how he does it and helpful tips on how to avoid “bit rot”… Read more…

A horse is a horse, of course, of course…

But not these horses.

Two weeks ago, we announced our year-long quest to find the Greatest Animal In Video Game History. First, we proposed a list of the best virtual horses and asked you, the readers, to tell us if we missed any. Then comes phase two today: the official vote.

Now this is serious business, folks. For our Blue Ribbon Panel, we went to straight to the top:

• A pretty good game creator – Ken Levine, President and Creative Director of 2K Boston and chief creative force behind the 2007 GOTGOTY

• A pretty good artist — Mike “Gabe” Krahulik, illustrator of the “Penny Arcade” webcomic

• A pretty good writer — Leigh Alexander, editor of Worlds in Motion, writer at Gamasutra and her blog Sexy Videogameland

• A pretty knowledgeable person about animals –Tofuburger, co-founder of cultural phenomenon/funny animal picture blog I Can Has Cheezburger

After weighting each judge’s top three choices — many of which, were, uh, shocking — the winner turned out to be…

Epona from the “Legend of Zelda” series. Pokemon’s Rapidash came in at a close second. The horses from “World of Warcraft” tied with Hannah the Horse from “Zoo Race” for third place.

And the Readers’ Choice winner: Agro from “Shadow of the Colossus.” (Epona was a distant second.)

Are the judges out of touch? Or do they know something the rest of us don’t? They are pros, after all. You’ve got to see what they picked and their justifications (provided in words and pictures). So read on.

Take it away, Ken Levine… Read more…