With another Monday behind us, we look towards Tuesday and its magical, embargo-lifting powers for exciting gaming news. Today the Nintendo Media Summit embargo ends, and later on Multiplayer's own Patrick Klepek is giving everyone that wasn't there a taste of things to come. In the meantime, enjoy today's link selection:
Jason's Pick:
The Super Genintari 4-in-One Console: It's what happens after an Atari 2600, SNES, Genesis, and NES have one wild night together.
Tracey's Pick:
Cluttered desktop folders become art: My desktop is disgusting. If only I had the patience to arrange my folders into a dinosaur or "Space Invaders" (or to actually just put some things in the Recycle Bin).
Stephen's Pick:
The Co-Op Game Bill Of Rights: Microsoft's Andre Vrignaud lists the musts and the would-be-nices of co-op gaming. Flexible save points, persistent parties, easy ways to communicate. He doesn't say fist-pounding is mandatory, but he does say that being able to switch to your co-op partner's camera view (with permission) would be nice. Agreee?
Patrick's Pick:
Yuri's Night 2008: If you were in the San Francisco area this weekend (sadly, I wasn't), you could have celebrated the anniversary of the first human to go into space and seen both Will Wright speak and Freezepop perform.
Any week that ends with a comic book convention is a good week. Here in New York the NY Comic Con kicks off this Friday, and it will hopefully be bigger and better than last year. With a little something for comic book fans and gamers alike NYCC it should help make this week fly by. To kick this week off right, here are our link picks:
Stephen's Pick:
"Revenue is vanity. Profit is the goal." Capcom marketing manager Christian Svensson expands on comments he made to our own Patrick Klepek, and winds up revealing a whole lot about how games are sold, how publishers and retailers deal with each other and when it's a poor decision to make a TV ad for a game. The knowledge is dropped here and here. It will make you smarter.
Jason's Pick:
Game Informer's List of 150 Things For Gamers To Do Before You Can't: With new games coming out every week, how can you know what you need to accomplish before you die (or get married, or have kids). There's nothing like a to-do list 150 items long. It's time to get cracking.
Patrick's Pick:
How To Swiftly Defeat "StarCraft"'s A.I.: Play Against The Terrans: I haven't touched "StarCraft" in a great many years, but at least I know how to smack down the computer when it comes time to pre-hype for "StarCraft II."
Tracey's Pick:
Wrath of the Lich King is in alpha: Late last week news broke that the new "WoW" expansion is in alpha, which has people speculating on the game's release date (it could be as soon as this Fall). Mila Kunis, Macaulay Culkin and I will be waiting...
It's been a whole week of us passing along our favorite links to you, our favorite people. Hopefully we were able to turn you on to some wonderful happenings across the world wide web that you may have missed otherwise. This week has finally come to a close, and we can only hope that you everyone has a weekend full of gaming ahead of them...
Stephen's Pick:
How To Explain "GTA" To Mom and Dad: The WhatTheyPlay website presents an 11-step explanation to parents of what "Grand Theft Auto" is all about and what aspects of it, if any, parents should worry about.
Tracey's Pick:
DC Preps New 'Watchmen' Hardcover : Out in October, the $40, 436-page hardcover edition is a "deluxe presentation" of the classic graphic novel. Speaking of Watchmen, I wonder what's going on with the video game...
Jason's Pick:
Exidy, Inc. History Lesson: There's a good chance you missed out on the "classic" arcade and unlicensed NES titles that Exidy, Inc. released. Take a quick strole down memory lane and check out some of their more alternative titles like "Chiller" and "Crossbow."
Patrick's Pick:
Army offers chance to win Wii: Doesn't the title say it all?
If you were to combine all of today's links into one ultimately awesome link you would get something along the lines of a quiz that would tell you whether or not a group of 5 year-olds could take on the monster from "Cloverfield" while boycotting the new features on Gamestop's website. Yes, "ultimately awesome" is the only way to describe that. Well, hopefully that was enough to entice you to see what we thought was cool on the web. Have at it:
Stephen's Pick
Boycott Vs. Boycott Of Boycott: Joystiq's Justin McElroy, the funniest writer in the gaming blogoverse, gets serious as he dresses down people who want to boycott "Battlefield: Bad Company" and kicks off a wild thread of comments.
Jason's Pick
Gamestop's Website Gets An Update: A whole new set of site features give me even more of a reason to avoid going into one of their stores. Unfortunately, the best feature (pre-order select products online and pick them up in-store) isn't avalible yet. Hopefully select products means "games."
Tracey's Pick
HowManyFiveYearOldsCouldYouTakeinaFight.com: This quiz seems ridiculous, but c'mon, let's be realistic: "Mario Kart Wii" is coming out soon. If it comes down to a fighting pile of schoolchildren at my local video game store, I'll do what it takes to get my copy. For reals.
Patrick's Pick
"Cloverfield" Viral Campaign Continues: Paramount Pictures is supposedly working on a "Cloverfield" game. I wonder if J.J. Abrams was savvy enough to have his grand viral campaign tie into the inevitable sequel and the game.
* R.T.F.A. stands for "Read The Full Article."
None of our links have anything to do with "Ikaruga." Our headline was more of a friendly reminder for all you Xbox 360 owners out there to download it today. Also, we know that the "R" in the title of this stands for "read," but there are just some videos out there that are too good to resist passing along, like my link to Robert Kelly's stand-up. Here are our picks for the day:
Stephen's Pick
Humiliation Via Anagram: GameSetWatch Catches GamePro red-handed
Jason's Pick
Comedian Robert Kelly Takes on Video Games And Girlfriends: If you've ever had a girlfriend, you've undoubtedly had this happen to you in some capacity.
Tracey's Pick
47 Million Counterfeit 'Pokemon' Cards: Pokemon USA and Nintendo of America have seized 47 million counterfeit cards over the past 16 months from facilities across the world, including seven raids in New York last month. Fake Pikachus, no more? I doubt it.
* R.T.F.A. stands for "Read The Full Article."
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."
We here at Multiplayer know that there are many interesting things on the Internet (besides what's on our blog, of course). Every day we'll offer some gems we found that you might've missed. We'll dig for the cool stuff, so that you don't have to:
Stephen's Pick
Game Intensine 'Assassin's Creed' Review: You can have your game reviews scored by numbers or letters, but I'll take my "Assassin's Creed" review in line graph form, please.
Patrick's Pick
Ask Iwata: Mario Kart Wii Edition: Nintendo president Satoru Iwata continues his excellent series of interviews with his development teams. Read this, then go back and read the others.
Tracey's Pick
In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop: In this New York Times article, TechCrunch and Gizmodo comment on how bloggers can endure "great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy." Amen.
Jason's Pick
Invisible Walls Episode 4: GameTrailers' (relatively) new video podcast. This week's episode covers everything from WiiWare to one grumpy gamer's valid concerns pertaining to the possibility of EA and Take-Two merging.
* R.T.F.A. stands for "Read The Full Article" ... bet that wasn't what you were thinking.
