Nintendo not only gave its 3DS "Ambassadors"—early adopters of the device—10 Virtual Console classics for free, it also didn't let anyone else buy them. That exclusive privilege appears to be headed to a close, as the Japanese eShop has already listed Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, and will get Super Mario Bros. next week.
DualShockers notes that Nintendo is still holding out the Game Boy Advance titles Ambassadors got two weeks ago, as a token of appreciation to them. No word on how long that will last.
The super-old collection of HyperCard stacks Myst will be published as Myst 3D on the 3DS, with a release date scheduled for March 27.
The publisher handling the port says it will add 3D effects to the original game, so it isn't a reboot or a new adaptation. It will, however, include the Rime Age, which wasn't included in the game's original PC release.
Hoplite Research, which developed the ports of Myst for the DS and the PSP, is back on the case again.
YouTube's PsychicPebbles is extremely sick and tired of Skyrim's "arrow to the knee" meme, and composed this salute to all who dared to ever think it was funny. It's extremely loud (especially when it breaks in with FUS RO DAH) and it's extremely profane—in fact, I recommend turning your speakers down to one tick above mute. But for those sick to death of over-flogged played-out jokes, it is oh, so satisfying.
Say this for George Leutz: that man is determined. Undaunted by the 70 hours of nonstop gameplay it is estimated to take to beat the 28-year-old all-time world record in Q*Bert, Leutz is at this moment 25 hours into his third assault on the record.
His first two attempts, in April and May, ended in the most agonizing of ways. In April, 16 hours into the attempt, someone kicked a power cable elsewhere at Richie Knucklez, the New Jersey arcade where Leutz was playing (and is tonight) and the power surge reset the machine he was playing. In May, Leutz retired at the 54-hour mark after extreme exhaustion had set in.
Scott Patterson's web site is carrying livestreamed video of the attempt. Patterson said Leutz slept at Richie Knucklez and awoke at midnight Thursday to begin play. This could be his final attempt, Patterson said.
I'm trying to see what the real news is here: On one hand, a Salvation Army bell-ringer stole a BB gun, two video games and a vibrator from a Kmart. On the other, Kmart sells vibrators?
Lest you think this is the Hitachi Wand, a "personal massager" that has some non-masturbatory applications, cops in Sterling Heights, Mich. identified the purloined plasti-penis as a "Trojan" brand vibe. Also he made off with a bottle of K-Y so this one was definitely headed up old dirt road.
Cops say the ding-a-ling ringer, an unnamed 21-year-old Detroiter working for $8 an hour, got a five-finger discount on a BB gun and ammo on Dec. 5; the lube and the vibe on Dec. 7, and then finally the two "Xbox games" on Dec. 15, when his crime wave came to an end.
The Xbox games were not identified. Any guesses as to what he was picking up?
Sometimes games aren't to your exact liking. If you have computer skills, maybe you can create a mod. If you have computer skills and developed the game, well, you can do that, too.
J.E. Sawyer, who worked as project director on Fallout: New Vegas and the game's DLC, created a mod for his own playthroughs. As Shacknews (via website No Mutants Allowed) pointed out, the mod increases the number of weapons and armor and cuts the level cap, XP gain, health, and healing.
The mod is available via Sawyer. You will need all Fallout: New Vegas DLC installed as well as the pre-order bonus packs and Fallout Mod Manager.
So why did Sawyer release a mod instead of a patch? "The game's over," he wrote. "The ship has sailed. No one is working on it anymore. No testers, nothing. This mod is just me working in my free time. If I horribly botch something, you can just un-check the mod and go on your way." Sounds good to me.
Fallout: New Vegas was originally released in Oct. 2010.
2011 saw its share of disappointments, but it was also a year that contained a good number of nice surprises. Some were games we just didn't see coming—they snuck up on us and grabbed us with their excellence. Others were games that we thought were going to be terrible or at best so-so, but which would up being terrific.
I polled my fellow Kotaku editors and assembled a list of some of the most pleasant surprises of 2011.
Bulletstorm
I'll be the first to admit that I wasn't sold on Bulletstorm. It looked juvenile and boring, like a generic FPS dressed up with some color and silly language. I played a bit of it at a press event and remained unimpressed. I wrote a skeptical, critical preview.
As it turns out, I should have given Bulletstorm, and by extension its developers at People Can Fly, much more credit. Our reviewer back at Paste loved the game, and when I finally really sat down and played it, I found that I loved it too. It's genuinely funny in its brash dumbness, and it plays like a dream. The slide-kick alone is one of the most satisfying, endlessly fun gameplay mechanics of the year. I am still surprised at how much I love this game.
SpaceChem
An iPad/PC game based around making chemical compounds certainly doesn't sound fun, but boy is it ever. As Stephen Totilo wrote in his Review, it is "a stellar puzzle game well worth your time and brain cells." Easily one of the best iOS games of the year, and the most fun I've ever had nerding right the hell on out.
Pixeljunk Sidescroller
This one was a surprise mainly because it came out with so little preamble, pomp, or circumstance. And yet it was a fantastic game, utterly worth buying in every way. Ashcraft called it "his new favorite shooter," while Totilo described it as "the total package of retro-chic style and substance," and one of his favorite PlayStation 3 games of the year. (!!) That alone puts it on the "surprises" list.
Superman on iOS
When Totilo wrote this game up, he said that it's not perfect, but simply surprising that it's so good, given the crappiness of most Superman games. I haven't played it, but I'm actually surprised that a Superman iOS game is good at all, so it makes the list!
The Witcher 2
It wasn't so much a surprise that The Witcher 2 was good—its predecessor had also been a fantastic game that got better and better the more you played it. The surprise was the way that The Witcher 2 was good. The Witcher had been a fairly niche game, a stat-based hardcore CRPG that made those of us who love that sort of thing very happy, but didn't have much mainstream appeal. With a new engine and control scheme, The Witcher 2 arrived on PCs loaded for bear, a game that was ambitious not only in its scope and storytelling, but in its mainstream accessibility. In fact, it was the game that the very-mainstream Dragon Age II wished it could be, a complex, hugely branching tale of moral intrigue loaded with great characters, cheap thrills, and fun action combat (once you got past the first few levels.)
I'll be very interested to see how its coming Xbox 360 port does—provided it's a console translation of the amazing game we PC gamers played in 2011, The Witcher 2 will surprise a whole new crop of console gamers in 2012.
From Dust
What looked like a somewhat strange god-game from Eric Chahi wound up surprising us with is depth, difficulty, and satisfying gameplay loop. Stephen Totilo described it as "a very good video game that starts badly," going on to say that it crept up on him, and as he wrapped up the campaign, he was in love with it.
Trenched
Trenched, of course, is now known as Iron Brigade, a humorous action/tower-defense game from Tim Schafer's Double Fine Productions. I remember when Schafer unveiled it at the end of the GDC awards in March, and I felt… underwhelmed. It was weird, the tone was kinda bro-y, there was this guy yelling, and I wasn't clear on what the game was. Then, it came out, and I played it—and fell in love with it. Double Fine has a reputation for making games that favor art and story over gameplay, but project lead Brad Muir's design chops made Trenched arguably the best-playing Double Fine game of all time. It's great in single-player and even more fun in co-op, and was one of the summer's most enjoyable surprises.
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP
So obviously, I loved this game a whole lot, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a surprise. I knew next to nothing about it before it came out, and it sure took me by surprise.
As our own Brian Ashcraft put it, "I had no idea iPhone games could do that." Indeed, Ash.
Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars
When the 3DS launched, the pickings were pretty slim. I had a bunch of the launch titles, but there were very few that I wanted to play for more than five or so minutes at a time. Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars was the exception in a big, big way. A combination of Ghost Recon and X-Com, it was a top-down tactical strategy game with an emphasis on troop positioning and canny battlefield exploitation. It was also supremely addictive. Our own Brian Crecente agreed, calling it a 3DS Must-Buy. Later games like Super Mario 3D Land and Cave Story 3D replaced in in my regular rotation, but I still play Shadow Wars quite a bit.
Dead Space 2
I'm putting this one in because I was all but convinced that it was going to suck. I had liked the first Dead Space no small amount, largely because of its isolation and genuine scares. Seeing trailers (like the one at the left, actually) with Isaac talking, stupid rock music playing, Uncharted-ish action sequences… it left me thinking they were going to amp up the game and wreck it. Little did I know that Dead Space 2 would be one of the most polished and enjoyable mainstream action games of the year, a near-seamless blend of horror and action that was almost impossible to stop playing. Bravo, Visceral.
Gunstringer
Man, did I not see this one coming. Who did, really? I'd been kept in the loop by Microsoft PR, and when they finally sent me a copy, it was right after I got a Kinect. So, I plugged it in, thinking "This will be a silly kids' game for sure," and what did I get but one of the two or three funniest games of the year. It worked great with the Kinect tech, it was hilariously written, and it was really fun to play. As it turned out, the origin story for the game was a hilarious case of last-ditch improvisation. I can only say I'm glad the guys at Twisted Pixel faked it like they did—the result was a game that all but proved that the Kinect could have super-fun games.
Saints Row: The Third
This one certainly snuck up on me—I'd liked the first two Saints Row games fine, but I was most certainly not expecting the third one to be as polished, smart, hilarious, and balls-out fun as it was. I tried to articulate that as best I could in my review of the game—this was a game that was generous, funny, and would go to almost any length to show the player a good time. At times, I couldn't even figure out how they were getting away with the things they were, but there ya go. Saints Row: The Third was easily one of the most welcome surprises of the year.
But those are just a few of the things that surprised us. What games pleasantly surprised you this year?
This clip from next Tuesday's winter premiere of NBC's drama Parenthood is really only delivering the sort of common sense knowledge every parent already knows: If you turn off the game before your son or daughter completes the level, you're a total bitch.
I've never watched Parenthood myself, preferring to learn my latest trade the old-fashioned way (About.com), so I have no idea if Max calling his mother Monica a bitch is a common thing or simply the result of interrupting generic Xbox 360 game number five before the end of the level he'd been working on all week long. HE LOST EVERYTHING!
Man, I'm really feeling for the sexually ambiguous little tyke right now. How's he ever gonna find himself if he can't finish the level? Perhaps I need to tune in Tuesday night to see what happens.
When asked what his goal for 2012 was, Blazblue producer Toshimichi Mori told Japanese game mag Gemaga it was to make BlazBlue 3. A good goal, indeed. [Japanator]
On Dec. 17, Sony released the PS Vita, its PSP successor. The PS Vita is a fine machine (read Kotaku's review). In its first week, Sony sold over 360,000 Vitas.
But during the machine's second week, sales plunged to approximately 72,000 machines sold. That's fewer than the PSP, which came in second in hardware sales with over 100,000 units moved.
The Nintendo 3DS, no stranger to sluggish post launch sales, sold a whopping 482,000 units, thanks to a strong game line-up.
The sales week, Dec. 19 to Dec. 25, coincided with the country's Christmas—meaning that far more people were getting 3DS handhelds than Vita ones.
To put things into context, the Wii (91,176 units) and the PS3 (75,479 units) took third and fourth place.
If the Nintendo 3DS is any indication, don't count any of these handhelds out.
Nintendo not only gave its 3DS "Ambassadors"—early adopters of the device—10 Virtual Console classics for free, it also didn't let anyone else buy them. That exclusive privilege appears to be headed to a close, as the Japanese eShop has already listed Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, and will get Super Mario Bros. next week.
The super-old collection of HyperCard stacks Myst will be published as Myst 3D on the 3DS, with a release date scheduled for March 27.
Say this for George Leutz: that man is determined. Undaunted by the 70 hours of nonstop gameplay it is estimated to take to beat the 28-year-old all-time world record in Q*Bert, Leutz is at this moment 25 hours into his third assault on the record.
I'm trying to see what the real news is here: On one hand, a Salvation Army bell-ringer stole a BB gun, two video games and a vibrator from a Kmart. On the other, Kmart sells vibrators?
This clip from next Tuesday's winter premiere of NBC's drama Parenthood is really only delivering the sort of common sense knowledge every parent already knows: If you turn off the game before your son or daughter completes the level, you're a total bitch.
On Dec. 17, Sony released the PS Vita, its PSP successor. The PS Vita is a fine machine (read 
