They did it. They finally did it.

They managed to combine two of my favorite edges in video games. Mother 3 and Garry's Mod.

This is not spoiler-ish at all now that the character of the Ultimate Chimera is somewhat famous with the stage of New Pork City on Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but this is a chapter scene of the game where an experimental abomination is loose and the prk soldiers have to catch it back, all of it reenacted as a cute multiplayer survival game.



The role is simple: DO NOT GET CAUGHT BY THE CHIMERA! Or else... INSTANT KILL! The players take form of Pork Troopers and one is the Ultimate Chimera as far I see. You walk around hunting the beast to see if it's around, and if its close, run! But you cannot do it for long, as the trooper could get tired (should lay off the Pork Chips, uh?) The players can turn off the chimera and win by pressing the button on the back, but it takes strategy and a bit of luck to do it.

The model of the UC is directly from the Wii game, but the troopers are made from scratch. It amazes me how well detailed they are in the posing and design. Really feels like it is authentic from a console game!

I just gotta say, I cannot wait until I try this on GMod, the game is not 100% complete yet, but it is public and playable now. I gotta fire this up and not let myself to become a juicy dinner by accident!

Here is the actual scene of the GBA game. You do not have to watch it if you want to live it yourself.

[Note: This is a resubmission of an old entry for the Untapped Potential musing we had months ago. I am resending this because I feel this is an issue I want more people to talk about.]



For over 30 years, the videogame industry has been evolving in graphics, engines, systems, story lines, ergonomic, commodity, energy consumption and has also branded a very important field in our lives.

Now, what about women? Yeah, you know, chicks.

Video games are stereotypically targeted to be boy stuff and it undeniably is for marketing and attitude, us men love to be better than someone else by nature and we play videogames to try to be the best on the world in something regardless on what it is. Now the idea of putting women on the market is not new, hell no, it's been for a very long time.



Going to a trip on essentials, let's talk about Mattel and Play-Doh. We all know Barbie is not only a popular role model chosen by suburban mothers to keep their little girls on track on a long time, and Mattel seeing this little gray box of happiness (and easy money) to make a videogame based on their rose-tinted universe and counterpart of Hot Wheels. Speaking of it, Mattel is very well known to sort Happy Meals easily on that matter, blue things for boys, pink things for girls, and it is modern discipline that being caught playing with dolls or make-up is the biggest humiliation a father can receive from his son, and that's why boys have Hot Wheels, I mean yeah those fast motherfuckers are cool and I like racing too, fast things are exciting. Now on Play-Doh it is a much more impressive idea. Play-Doh did an important bond with our life as children (if you were born around the 50's and beyond) because it created an important treaty in our life to play with girls without it being wrong. When you and your sister play with Play-Doh you are learning team work, share resources, economy and synergy.


So ok ok, let's go back with videogames. I am a guy, I love videogames, and it is natural that I love women because I am a guy and putting a woman on a main role on a videogame sounds like a great idea. Yeah it does. still we are filling the whole bucket with testosterone and no estrogen.

OH WAIT, WAIT, THERE IS ROOM AFTER ALL... OH HOW COULD I FORGET NINTENDOGS, IMAGINE BABYZ, AND DINNER DASH! OH HOW BLIND AM I!

So here is the problem. Casual games are doing a job to introduce a wider audience into our hobby, we are not very conformed with the idea, but it is a very good economic success. (hence, Nintendo's office swimming in gold and platinum with WiiFit), however we still have to take out this.



If we want to put girls sharing the audience we should balance out the male marketing to do a clear field for them to take approach to the controller...



To do so it is important to do Play-Doh instead of Hot Wheels/Barbie borders. Let's make games that are designed for people to enjoy, and I even mean any audience despite expertise.

One way I think that could work is to make a title where the game is a girl, BUT her gender is not pushed to be too explicit. For example, Samus.

Samus Aran is strong, agile, smart and courageous, and we forget most of the time that it is about a woman all the time, hell many still ask "WHAAAAT SAMUS IS A GUUURL!?". Another one is Jade from Beyond Good and Evil; her gender is obvious, but she isn't defying anatomy, gravity or social consideration too much, she is just an intelligent and brave lady that wields a baton uncovering the conspiracies behind a breached government.

Another technique would be to not generalize genders, there is nothing wrong with having many male heroes but it wouldn't hurt to also make another half with women that also feel fun as well, that of course is not to go all feminist.



Another great idea is to give the player the option to be either a boy or a girl, the first time I saw this was on Word Rescue, an educative (but FUN) DOS game that mixed a Super Mario Bros platforming style with spelling. GameFreak followed this years later on Pokemon Crystal introducing the first girl trainer Kris.

Or even better yet how about not specifying the gender of the character? Kirby is pink, round and soft, but you are not very clear on what gender it is, that goes without saying it blushed when was kissed by Ribbon in the ending of Kirby 64.



Enough talk about the game structure, how about the marketing? Many games like Tomb Raider, Dead or Alive or Grand Theft Auto and, damn, Duke Nukem depend on the male target, all filled with gore, violence, drugs and tits, hell yeah manly shit. But this is much more saturated than it appears, mainly as there are no many women with guns as our friend Elsa said once.

Or, you know, how about you the female readers give more ideas on what to do on the issue? It is hard to dig the opposite gender's psychology without being a girl.

So, aside thinking about the children, how about we also think about our sister? Our girlfriend? Our wife? Our best friend? Our grandma? Our daughter? Women? If you want them to start play games, then by hell start to prepare the field so they stay.

Why to choose between pink and blue when you can be yellow or green?

There is something interesting with games these days, as they have evolved so fast and so many titles have come out, original ideas are running out quickly, but also spontaneously appear making an unique concept. But are games fully prepared to be out when we all see them in shelves now?

Let me talk to you about an experience with Assassin's Creed.

Last week there was an offer of it on Steam which was for 5 bucks (reaaaaaally good price checking out eBay, Amazon and GameStop), so without a doubt I downloaded it and popped it in.

Now let's go with the whole concept, the idea behind it seems very deep and original to me, and I enjoyed being on the era of the crusades after the corrupt people in the middle east be them Islamic or European. The scenery is also fantastic, the first time I saw the gates of Damascus with the glorious Arabian music amazed me and made everything look worth analyzing, as the place felt more alive. Constantly, I have heard complains about too many side quests and the lack of actual assassination, but I actually enjoy side missions because they make the characters and setting memorable. That goes without saying every of them gets registered in a memory log and has a little of "collect-a-ton" with the flags standing in random places around the world which so far they look like a mindless MacGuffin and I am used to it after wasting a couple of years in my life playing Donkey Kong 64 and still not being able to complete it 100%.

All in all sounds like the ideal single-player game for me in PC aside the Half-Life series, that is if it wasn't because some tiny details that ruined all of the experience for me.

Just today I want to continue the long advance I did yesterday like rescuing a lot of poor villagers from merciless bandits or take down the corrupted merchant, but when I loaded the file, I was back at Jerusalem retrieving my sword back after completing my first mission instead of being in the climax of Damascus! I just got dragged back a whole chapter! What happened?!

There is no real excuse for the game there, a "Saving" icon appeared when I was completing side missions, and there was no option for saving manually. So in other words, the game fucked up with me. I have faced many similar cases in which I frustrated because I forgot to save (if you played Pokemon and Final Fantasy, you REALLY know what I mean), but this time it was not me who fucked up, it was the game who did it. And for all this, I lost pretty much the whole intention of keep playing this on a long time.

So, while I still cannot figure what was the deal with it, I just have to wonder what happened with the testing or supervision Ubisoft had behind this. The cutscenes are unskippable, it takes 10 steps to quit the game without using Alt+F4, and now there seems to be no way to trust the game is really saving or not which leads to an endless amount of blind frustration of what could happen or not. If the problem was in not closing it the right way, they at least should have considered in:

1. Not make it so long and time wasting.
2. Tell me that it had to be performed that way in first place!

Oh wait, you DID told me that quitting could lose everything that was not saved, which makes sense to me, but I saw the "Saving" icon, so I did not worry. Remember? Because when a game tells me that is saving a game, I suppose that all of it is ready for my next use.

Games are supposed to take a long time to release so the bugs are eliminated, not only for making all the pretty textures and polygons, even then, games like Team Fortress 2 keep updating for sudden bugs or flaws the staff finds chronically. So the graphics, gameplay and concept are completely welcome for me, but seems that the skeleton behind is shattered.

So why am I whining about this when it was only 5 bucks? Well, just think about all those people that bought it in full retail price! We are all expecting to get what we payed for, many read reviews to be sure their purchase is worthy, but to see at the end that it's broken, it feels like you got scammed no matter the amount of cash. Money is money.

This is why I love companies like Nintendo, they have a big debugging department to make sure there are no bugs and glitches if not tiny ones that could be funny to see. The whole wonder of Assassin's Creed just crumbled by some technical details which greedy executives and HD nazis these days would call them "irrelevant".



While all the trip started great, and the feeling was fantastic, all of it got interrupted with no climax, and no cigar.

You might remember E3 2005, we were introduced to all that was coming for next generation and we could barely contain it because it was emulating a lot of realistic details like the palette in real life. There is something we cannot deny, our colors in life is full of tans and gray tones especially if you live in a desert area. But another fact is that as life is boring, our colors are as well.

When people were talking about high definition I expected a spectacular change for my eyes, but not much from what I have seen really impressed me at all. It is all gray, dark or full of unnecessary glowing. All this was relevant in 2006 but now with the many titles that are out the formula has been recycled over and over again making it something worse than a simple untapped potential.

A common argument that has been rounding this decade is that graphics are not as important as game play or story lines. While I fully support that philosophy, I cannot help but to think about the poor palettes in the game environment. If you want a concept to be effective, and if you want it to be eye-catching try using color.

Now while this effect does a nice job making textures and the surroundings more believable, sometimes the characters and setting are so unpolished that they make the whole effort crumble apart easily, otherwise it doesn't matter much to me. Let's put Metal Gear Solid 4 as an example. Even though the Metal Gear Solid saga looks astounding and full of material, just by looking the poor tones in the fourth installment has made me avoid it a bit much from trying. The story, setting and development seems outstanding and spectacular with the (self-spoiled) battle climax. However if I want to get in the actual game outside the cinematics I want it to be enjoyable and less tiring for my eyes with a similar color everywhere.



An example to make apart is Half-Life 2. The game has some of the most impressive story telling in a first-person shooter ever, especially as the surroundings tell you the story in it. The world of Half-Life 2 is full of the gray-ish palette but because the whole world in it is sad and has humanity suppressed, for once the colors actually make sense because the post-modern industrial installments are not fully functional and toxic wastes are every where. it is a well settled apocalyptic world full of depression but still hope remains waiting to see a new day. I know the same could be said about other titles like Gears of War and inFamous, but they do not seem to share a common interest in making the player explore the place further to see the vanished and simple life of the people that used to live there supporting the motivation alive.

There is a curious case on the small but successful franchise of Team Fortress. I just got the classic game from 1999 included on the Half Life 1 Anthology, and while the game structure is basically the same, the tone does not invite to play as much as the sequel from 2007. I know that it is a bit unfair to compare blocky polygons from ten years ago with high definition renders, but the change of humor and colors is so dramatic that the new one is more believable not just because of the graphic quality, but because the colors are alive and well managed. The textures, despite the lack of detailed rendering, are solid and full of life, also giving credit to the amazing radiosity techniques.



Moving on I want to bring another title to note in. Mirror's Edge, despite the not-that impressive story and just pretty decent game play, it has all of what I dreamed from high definition. Powerful colors everywhere. The red colors are strong as a cherry, greens that would make Mr. Destructoid envious and blue skies clearer but as lively as the ones you know. Even if the game has a lot of glowing, I find all of it well applied instead of just marking the glowing food on the floor. The city is full of shining from the strangely polished but relentlessly beautiful buildings.

To close in, I want to bring attention to the incoming title The Saboteur. The style has been noted to be like another sandbox game, but the subliminal message as you continue the game seems to be a satire of the modern twist in games in environment design, because the more you save of Paris from the nazis, the place if recovering it's color from the dark noir tone. A very Beatles message, but fresh and reliable on the expectations so far.



To summarize, I want to tell any developer (or wanna be developer) to take as much advantage of the graphic capacity of the system they are hosting and keep things alive. it is fortunate that some companies are aware of not falling in the same trend and to keep their games less dull looking. Let the sunshine in, baby.

Well, damn. I already knew it by a leaked list but it's so damn good to see an actual footage. We can see two of his specials and his moves are pretty nice. He even got a shoryuken. Seeing Megaman X and Legends together in the same game is a bit odd but full awesomesauce

Also Joe the Condor made the cut as well. Don't know about this series but I'm loving it.



God damn it, why havent I bought a Wii yet? I have skipped two Christmas days already.

Today I was at the supermarket to do the weekly shopping, when I stumbled across the magazines and found Nintendo Power. Decided to grab it just to check some pages, and then I notice at the bottom of the cover "Your wish is GRANTED! Shantae finally returns in an all-new plaformer. Six pages of EXCLUSIVE pics!"

I already knew the news, and I was extremely delighted, but a cover of 6 pages? I was not going to miss that. So courteously I decided to scan them for you to enjoy. They are not full quality, but at least you manage to check some of the artwork.

EDIT: Wow, they are much better and bigger than I expected... umm well still check them out.

Check out the pics in the gallery


Is it just me or Shantae is in the perfect balance of cute and hot? Though I think she is cuter than hot. But she got a nice body. But still cute. Umm... yep.

Risky Boots got a light overhaul in design and I like her skull thematic. Gotta admit that top is clever.

By the screenshots I see a very familiar style... KONJAK?! It would be no much of a surprise, he has collaborated with WayForward before, but daaaamn isn't it beautiful?!

I think this is the perfect excuse to get a DSi, Shantae was overdue so long for a sequel and more attention and after 7 years she is ready to enchant everyone with dances and good old action-platforming.

If you want to check better quality pictures, well, buy the magazine or steal it from your friend who got it, there is some awesome concept art to check out too.