The Valve-owned domain aperturescience.com tossed up a countdown whose timer expires at noon EDT/9 a.m. PDT tomorrow. Rumors, abetted by Easter eggs, have hinted that the game is arriving a week ahead of its announced April 19 date. Hey, it's either that or Half Life 2: Episode 3.
Given "a few days in the Mojave," one fan of Fallout: New Vegas decided to construct his visit around the game, searching out real-world locations that inspired the in-game scenery. The lone wanderer, one Chris Worth of the United Kingdom, even constructed a Pip-Boy (with admittedly 'shopped map screen) and Power Fist.
Designers from Obsidian, the game's studio, took their own trips to the desert to photograph and scout loctions, so Worth drew on that information to plan his route. Of course, visiting any vaults, or subterranean features or other notable topological formations was out as many were constructed 100 percent for the game. But from Freeside (Fremont Street) to Camp McCarran (Las Vegas McCarran International Airport) and even The Devil's Throat (a massive sinkhole IRL), Worth's travelogue pairs screenshots alongside their real-world counterparts.
Fallout New Vegas Tour [Chris Worth via Neoseeker]
Ordinarily, you toss a video like this on YouTube, and every comment shouts it down as fake. But anyone who's played indie horror hit Amnesia: The Dark Descent knows this guy's skin-crawling, pupil-dilating, sphincter-clenching, headphone-grabbing reactions are on the level.
Done Yours Yet? | If not, you still have the weekend. A quirk in the calendar, involving a District of Columbia holiday, gives Americans until April 18 to postmark their income tax returns. (Photo: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images)
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What happens when a bunch of game journalists and game developers from Capcom converge in Miami for a multi-day showcase of Capcom games? A lot of 3DS Street Passing. This is how Nintendo's unusual approach to social networking is supposed to work.
(Note: The image you see above before starting the video features the Mii of Super Street Fighter IV producer Yoshinori Ono greeting my Mii, as seen on my 3DS.)
A thinning Wii release list, a rumored impending price drop, and reports that Nintendo is about to reveal its next console all seemingly point to one thing: Nintendo is about to reveal its next console.
Game Informer says the successor to the Wii—Wii 2, Nintendo HD, Super Wii, GameCube 3, whatever you want to call it—will be revealed at E3 2011 and launched next year. IGN says we'll hear official confirmation this month. We've heard from sources that it'll be more powerful than an Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
We're also pretty sure of one other thing. We can expect Nintendo to surprise us with its follow-up to the wildly successful Wii. But even if we're pleasantly surprised, we have a few wants and a few demands. Yes, we're about to make demands of the company that has already sold more than 80 million Wiis over the past four and a half years.
So here are the blindingly obvious improvements we want from the Wii 2.
Graphics matter. And it sounds like Nintendo will at least match (or slightly exceed) the graphical capabilities of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. But those consoles could be more than six years old or more by the time Nintendo's next console arrives. We recognize Nintendo's need to balance cost and performance. It likes proven, inexpensive technology and is in love with turning a profit. But we'd at least like our future Nintendo games to look as good (or better) as the GameCube and Wii software that runs on the impressive Dolphin emulator.
Get Epic Games on board so the abundance of Unreal Engine-powered content for PCs, PlayStation 3s and Xbox 360s will play nicely for dedicated Nintendo fans, too.
When we turn on Nintendo's next home console, we don't want to see a message telling us that "This feature will be enabled later through a system update" nor should we pine for that promised launch title that didn't actually show up. No more Kid Icarus Uprising's, please. Don't force us to settle for the next Steel Diver or Pilotwings Resort. But don't push back The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword as some sort of launch consolation prize. Wii owners will be starved for interesting software over the next year as it is.
We're not just talking about better Super Smash Bros. online multiplayer connections, we're talking the whole kit and caboodle, what Xbox Live, Steam and PlayStation Network have done to set our expectations. The 3DS's singular Friend Code is a step in the right direction, but we expect more than just that. Unified voice chat, easy messaging, easy matchmaking (for those inevitable F-Zero online multiplayer races) and an even easier way to filter out the assholes and foul-mouthed pre-teens that insult us everywhere else. Make the successor to WiiConnect24 worth keeping our next Nintendo console powered on.
Oh, one more thing. Keep it free.
Our Nintendo 3DSs, with all of their fun wireless features like SpotPass and StreetPass, should communicate better with our Wii 2. We'd love to take our home console games for a StreetPass spin too, wirelessly transferring content to and fro, downloading 3DS demos and feeling like our Nintendo platforms played well together. If we could all tie our new-gen handhelds and consoles together, syncing our Friend Lists to minimize Friend Code input even further, well, that would be just dandy.
And how about a new Pac-Man Vs. please?
We've got terabytes of storage on our home PCs, tens and hundreds of gigabytes on our consoles, so let's put storage concerns on the Wii 2 behind us. At least give us enough room to store a few GameCube and Wii games, since you'll probably be offering those as downloadable software in the future... right, Nintendo?
We love that the Wii plays everything from NES games to GameCube games. Let's keep that Virtual Console party going by continuing support for all those platforms. If you can find a way to pretty up those GameCube and Wii games like the aforementioned Dolphin emulator does, we promise to never use the phrase "collecting dust" ever again. We're going to need a way to easily transfer our WiiWare and Virtual Console purchases too, lest we have another half-baked system launch on our hands.
There's little doubt that Nintendo will astound and/or initially bewilder us with the interface for the Wii's successor. Whatever it is that Nintendo has up its sleeve for the Wii 2, we just hope it plays well with all the Wii games we already own and the games played on more established gamepads on our PlayStations and Xboxs.
Not that we really enjoy downloading patches or seeing incomplete games wind up on a game disc, but downloadable software updates are a way of life. Let developers easily and quickly update their games.
We're done with AA batteries. Give me charging via USB or give me death. Or at least easily swappable battery packs. I don't want to die.
What do you want to see from Nintendo's next console? Let us know in the comments. Maybe start with "Great Games."
EA Sports sent out a few photos over Twitter earlier today - two for Madden, one for NCAA Football. Kick meters, which have changed almost annually the past few years, look like they'll revert to what we saw from Madden earlier last decade. NCAA Football showed Ralphie the Buffalo, indicating that mascot pre-game entries will be shown in that game. And, yes, Madden gets cheerleaders. Blurry, Barbie-shaped cheerleaders.
Capcom releases its first online iPhone game in Resident Evil Mercenaries VS., in which players battle zombies and human opponents as Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, or Albert Wesker. It's on sale now in the iTunes App Store for $2.99.
Here's what you're going to do when your bored at work for the next few months: The World's Biggest Pac-Man is a brower-based version of the classic blown up to epic proportions. The game connects thousands of user-created levels like tiles to create a single immense map.
Designed by web design firm Soap Creative using HTML5, the game made its debut at Microsoft's Mix11 developer conference to show off the newly released Internet Explorer 9.
Since the overall map is huge and could take years to complete, players can choose where in the Pac-World they want to begin munching so they can get a taste of all the different options these levels present. To help explorers, the game keeps track of which maps you've tried in previous games, as well as your lifetime stats. You can also check out which countries are the best dot-eaters, and see how many levels have been played and designed by the entire community. If you ever thought; "You know, I could really use more Pac-Man in my life", your wish just came true in a very big way. [WorldsBiggestPacman.com]
Kevin Bolk pulled out all of the stops when creating this "Poke-Fight Club" illustration. Meowth is collecting all of those pika-punches!
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Poke-Fight Club by Kevin Bolk (deviantART) (Twitter)
Need your daily fill of geek eye candy? If so, head over to Justin Page's Rampaged Reality and get your fix. Republished with permission.
