Posted by Michael Pinto on Sep 1, 2009 in Videogames
I’m blown away by the fact that Sega is making a Napoleon videogame: Because you’d have to be a Napoleon in your medium to take on the subject of Napoleon as an entertainment project! Firstly the man is larger than life, and his story is a canvas that stretches across all of Europe (and other places like Egypt). In fact silent film makers didn’t even touch this story until 1927: Directed by Abel Gance the result was one of the best known films of the 20th Century. Read more…
This is a promotional video for the anime themed Nintendo DS game Spice and Wolf: The Wind that Spans the Sea which comes out on September 17th. This is the second title in the series, Spice and Wolf: Holo’s and My One Year came out earlier this summer. Here are some screen shots from the up and coming title: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Aug 29, 2009 in Videogames
Looking at this clip of Guitar Hero 5 on the surface it feels so wrong: Nirvana was really about punk at heart — a do-it-yourself ethos that rejected commercialism. But sadly I know that’s a lie because the genius of Kurt Cobain was mixing punk with pop music. And that ability to bring the Sex Pistols into the shopping malls of America in the 90s was a sort of wonderful magic moment which for a few minutes made mainstream entertainment a little bit more entertaining. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Aug 28, 2009 in Videogames
For your entertainment I’ve stitched together three commercials from the early 80s for Intellivision Major League Baseball. The first spot features none other than sports writer George Plimpton giving a comparison between Intellivision and Atari. What then follows is a spot which show rabid fans in the bleachers who feel the same way, and that’s followed by a French translation! Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Aug 18, 2009 in Videogames
Everyone knows about the classic game Perfection, but what I love about this commercial is that it mentions the very rare follow up game Superfection. This spot was broadcast in 1986 but clearly dates from a few years earlier: Both Perfection and Superfection were created by Lakeside Games. Superfection which came out in 1975 is harder to find that Perfection which has become a time honored classic. Here’s a video of Superfection in action: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Aug 16, 2009 in Videogames
I loved this obsessive fan made video which is a montage of nothing but death scenes from old school video games set to the music of the Misfits! Part I above features the song Skulls while Part II below uses Night of the Living Dead as the soundtrack: Read more…
Introduced in 1976 Atari Breakout was a breakthrough game — it’s interesting to note to that future Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak worked on the prototype (who was hired by Steve Jobs). This Japanese piggy bank celebrates this legendary arcade game — and what’s cool about it is that you can actually play a function version of the game on it. I also rather like the fact that all the decals on the piggy bank are in Japanese: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Aug 10, 2009 in Videogames
Looking at this latest trailer of Samurai Warriors 3 (known as Sengoku Musou 3 in Japan) I’m very impressed with the level of detail that Koei and Omega Force have put into this Wii game. This series has been running since 2004 and combines historical settings with just a little bit of magic for fighting scenes. This latest version should be out at the end of November, 2009. Here are some very well done character designs I from their preview website: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Aug 8, 2009 in Videogames
Ah yes the trailer with the masses chanting “Eddie! Eddie! Eddie!” Now I’ll grant you that Eddie Van Halen is one of the most amazing living guitar players of our time (well sort of living if you look at that photo), but the real point of Van Halen is the dysfunctionality of the band itself! And a proper video game should reflect this discord as the central game play of the product. Frankly no one has fantasized about playing a Van Halen air guitar riff since the Reagan era, instead the real game should focus on what went on off stage: After all that’s what we’re really interested in. Heavy metal as a genre lends itself best to a This is Spinal Tap state, so why not give the people what they want instead of some juke box hero plot device that we’ve already seen a hundred times before? Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Aug 7, 2009 in Videogames
This is a bit of a self plug, but my design firm has just launched a free online game for the WNET/Thirteen kids series Cyberchase which runs on PBS Kids! The name of the game is Stop the Stormerator and I’d have to say that it’s the largest scale game project I’ve worked on since the CD-ROM era. We were lucky in that we got to work with the actual voice actors from the show, and the game features their talents a great deal. The only catch is that you have to register to play the game, but that only takes a few seconds. Here are some screenshots which show off how rich the game is: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Aug 6, 2009 in Videogames
Crude humor? Yes! Cartoon violence? Yes! I’ve been following Mini Ninjas for a while due to the japanophile angle — the game is being developed in England so I was very happy to see that they’ll be bring it to to the good old USA. I loved the concept from the minute I heard it, but these videos give a bit more backstory, and I like what I’m seeing even more! Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Aug 6, 2009 in Videogames
Shown above is the new gameplay trailer for End of Eternity a role playing game for the PlayStation3 and Xbox 360 that’s being put out by Sega and tri-Ace (the game is suppose to come out at the end of this year). I’ve got to say that I really love the subtle steampunk look of this game colossal machine-city called Burzel. Below is the first cinematic trailer which came out in April: Read more…
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man Banpresto will be releasing this beautiful Zippo lighter in November of this year. I love the added touch of having the high score at the top and having the bitmap typography at the bottom — it’s the little bits and bites that count. Read more…
As a retrogaming fanboy my eyes lit up when I glanced at this NES Controller Business Card Case. Normally I try to discourage my friends from mixing anything fannish with business — for example having a cartoon character on your tie is a great way to say “hello I’m a dork!” However in this case I’ll make an exception for this business card case because it’s clever enough and would open doors across multiple generations. Being a Japanese card holder there are two compartments: one to hold your cards, and another to store cards that folks give you.
Usually LucasArts does a great job with anything that they touch, but something seems a bit off on this promo for Star Wars The Force Unleashed: Ultimate Sith Edition. Part of it may be the average quality of the voice acting, yet part of me also isn’t blown away by the visuals shown here. Well my hopes aren’t too high, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt until I see more — which I suspect we will as the game is due out for Christmas season this year.
Shown above is the latest commercial for the upcoming action videogame Senki Gundam for the Playstation3 and is due out on September 3rd, 2009. The developers behind this game also did the well remembered Dreamcast and Saturn games — so Gundam fanboys are pretty psyched about this. Below is a video from earlier in July which shows some actual gameplay: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jul 17, 2009 in Videogames
And of course you know that Futo is the largest of the Mini Ninjas! But if you didn’t know that this Edios games looks might be worth keep track of — it’s due out in September and will be eventually be available on the PC, Xbox, Playstation3, Wii and Nintendo DS. In the game Join Hiro embarks on an epic quest to “restore harmony to a world on the brink of chaos”. To battle a magical army of evil Samurai you have to use all of your hard earned Ninja training skills. I just love the look of this game, you can tell that developer Io-Interactive had fun with the details as seen in these screen shots: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jul 15, 2009 in Videogames
Sega’s Block People is an well done new arcade game — what makes it cool is that like a typical video game you have these cute creatures who need to crawl over blocks to get to their objective. But the twist that makes this arcade game is that the building blocks aren’t on the screen, but are in fact physical blocks that you have to place in front of the screen:
I really love the latest rage of kit-bashed character universe games that are coming out — shwn above is the latest video for Tatsunoko vs. Capcom and below is a preview of Marvel vs. Capcom 2. And why are these videogames so cool? Because there’s a silly sort of honesty top them! Let’s face it: Every fanboy has always had those X-Men vs. Superman type of arguments, granted they’re silly but we all love that at heart. Read more…
Here’s the latest trailer for the Wii game Fullmetal Alchemist: Prince of the Dawn. What I like about this trailer is that while he pre-rendered animation looks great (when doesn’t it?) the actual game play scenes look pretty good too. This impresses me because as much as I love the Wii as a gaming platform it leave’s something to be desired in the rendering department. Here’s another video preview from a bit ago which shows more of the gameplay, including cut scenes: Read more…
I’ve been getting excited about the Sega science fiction game Infinite Space for a while, but of course my main fear was that we’d never see this cool anime spaceship themed saga in English. Well be careful what you wish for because the above trailer shows the English dub is shown above, and the voice acting is kind of average to say the least. You’d think that Sega would have learned from the Anime industry in the United States, but that isn’t the case here. However on the flip side even if the voice acting is bad what counts is the game design which looks impressive from what I’ve been seeing so far…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jul 2, 2009 in Videogames
There’s always something so rich about the games that LucasArts releases and Tales of Monkey Island for the Wii keeps to that tradition. Shown above is the official trailer and below is a sample scene which shows the “Launch of the Screaming Narwhal”. The developer of this game is Telltale Games which was founded by a team of former LucasArts employees who were working on the ill fated Sam & Max: Freelance Police project. I really love how they brought a cartoony feeling to a 3D world in what little I’ve seen of this game so far: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jun 22, 2009 in Tech, Videogames
If you’re a retro computing fanboy like me on Saturday you were devastated to learn that Apple denied permission to the developer who created a Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone. Now normally this news wouldn’t surprise me, but what broke my fanboy heart is that the developer jumped through all the right hoops: Not only did they get a license from the owners of Commodore but they even got positive signals early on from Apple. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jun 18, 2009 in Videogames
This is the trailer for Edge of Twilight and while I can’t speak to the game play, the steampunk styled art direction in this Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 title looks nothing short of absolutely amazing. Even the voice acting and sound design on this trailer do a nice job of complimenting the visuals. In fact I hate to say it, but when you look at game trailer like this is makes you sad that nothing this original or interesting is being made in Hollywood these days: Read more…
Looking at this clip of Guitar Hero 5 on the surface it feels so wrong: Nirvana was really about punk at heart — a do-it-yourself ethos that rejected commercialism. But sadly I know that’s a lie because the genius of Kurt Cobain was mixing punk with pop music. And that ability to bring the Sex Pistols into the shopping malls of America in the 90s was a sort of wonderful magic moment which for a few minutes made mainstream entertainment a little bit more entertaining. 
Ah yes the trailer with the masses chanting “Eddie! Eddie! Eddie!” Now I’ll grant you that Eddie Van Halen is one of the most amazing living guitar players of our time (well sort of living if you look at that photo), but the real point of Van Halen is the dysfunctionality of the band itself! And a proper video game should reflect this discord as the central game play of the product. Frankly no one has fantasized about playing a Van Halen air guitar riff since the Reagan era, instead the real game should focus on what went on off stage: After all that’s what we’re really interested in. Heavy metal as a genre lends itself best to a This is Spinal Tap state, so why not give the people what they want instead of some juke box hero plot device that we’ve already seen a hundred times before? 
