In today's slowly fading edition of Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter Professor Rickshaw wonders how many people still have locally-owned, "mom and pop" video game stores (like CC Gaming World in Kennesaw, Georgia, pictured above) in their area, and shares a reason why they are awesome places to shop.

Recently (just a few hours ago, in fact) I bought the Halo: Combat Evolved Special Edition (Original) Xbox Console. As a Halo fanboy I was thrilled to see it at my local game store (well not technically just a game store, they sell movies and music there, too). When I say "local", I mean locally owned, not Gamestop or any game store franchise. Best part of all, it was reasonably priced (<$50).

Do any of you have a locally owned game store (locally-owned chain will count) in your neighborhood/town/city/etc. that you still shop at? If so, was there any particular treasure you found that wouldn't be at a local Gamestop (such as my special edition Original Xbox console).

This highly educational Week in Gaming Apps is brought to you by the letter T, the number 10,000,000, the sounds of jazz and the culture of Mexico.

It's been the busiest Week in Gaming Apps ever, at least for yours truly. I've been steeping myself in Windows Phone 7, Android and iPhone games over the past few weeks, so whenever someone comes up short for a game to feature in our Gaming App of the Day segment, I'm up to bat!

I got to pick out three of this week's five gaming apps, playing a little pool and feeling bad about the plight of the cartoon animals, desperately wishing I were playing more 10000000 all the while.

But it's not all me. Kate took a trip to a Mario-tinged Mexico, and Kirk took a look at a game that was pretty much custom-made for him.

Can I pull off the five-day sweep next week? God I hope not.

If you have a suggestion for an app for the iPhone, iPad, Android or Windows Phone 7 that you'd like to see highlighted, let us know.

If Mario Were a Mexican Jumping Bean, This Would Be His Game

Imagine that you are playing Super Mario Bros 3. Now imagine that instead of Mario, you are a Mexican jumping bean. With a tiny little sombrero. And you have a quest. Bean's Quest, in fact. More »

The Most Exciting (and First) Game of Snooker I've Ever Played

It wasn't looking good. My erstwhile online opponent was sinking balls left and right. A red. A yellow. Some other color. After a seemingly endless run of the table he finally missed his mark, giving me the opening I needed. I lined up the green ball with the side pocket, pulled back my cue, and sunk it more tragically than the Titanic. More »

This Game Lets You Leap Your Way Through A Swinging History Of Jazz

On my iPad's home screen, the title of Jazz: Trump's Journey is just one word: "Jazz." More »

There Are 10 Million Reasons You Won't Be Able to Stop Playing This Puzzle RPG

My latest run through the pixelated dungeon of EightyEight Games' iOS dungeon puzzler earned me a score of a little more than 800,000 points. Freedom costs 10 million. I'm half-hoping I never make it. More »

And Then the Mr. T Duck Drives His Purple Motorcycle to the Fish Market

Are the colorful cartoon animals of Happy Street truly happy, or are they just incredibly nearsighted soulless consumer drones with no real purpose other than purchasing virtual products and being shit upon by low-flying seagulls? Can they be both? More »

Earlier this week, I shared my story of falling in love with playing video games (and working) at a standing desk.

In this video found via Reddit, YouTuber Happy Jack enthusiastically shows off his standing desk, which he made out of an art easel (nice call!) and actually uses an Ergotron monitor holder (Ergotron makes the standing desk attachment that I use). He talks about standing gaming with an enthusiasm that I know well—it's such an easy way to feel so much better every day.

This reminds me that I need to get on finding a stool—that's the one element missing from my setup at the moment. Anyone out there tried a temporary standing desk yet? If you are, how are you liking it?

A Whole New Way To Play Video Games: Standing Up

It's not every day you discover a whole new way to play video games. Yet over the past month, I've done just that-I've found a way to play games that makes me feel better, more alert, healthier, and more involved. More »

One of the things that makes Telltale's The Walking Dead video game tick is choice. Players get to make a series of both time-critical and leisurely decisions as the chapters go by. Everything from "who is Lee polite to" to "who gets to live and who dies horribly" is up for grabs, and the game tracks those choices from chapter to chapter.

More fun than making choices, though, is arguing about them. You picked who to live? You did what with that axe? But I thought it was obvious what was the right choice there, you mean you didn't take it?

Some decisions in episode two, "Starved for Help," clearly had more universal outcomes than others. Players seemed more in agreement than they did in Episode one, but some decisions were closer to split.

The one I'm most glad to find myself in the majority on? Being in the 65% of players who warned Clementine in time. I think she'll probably grow up scarred enough as is; no reason to add that one to her plate.

The Walking Dead: Episode Two Stats Revealed and an Episode Three Update [Telltale Blog]

There's a blood-stain on the logo atop the Team Fortress 2 website. A reader at the message board NeoGAF noticed today that it links to a letter. And in that letter is a story, a story that reads like a tease, a tease that seems to be pointing to something new for Team Fortress... a third faction?

The letter describes a heretofore unknown sibling to the owners of the game's Blu and Red teams, a person named Gray. Well, if Redmond and Blutarch are the owners of the multiplayer shooter's Red and Blu teams, could Gray have a team of his own? And what/who is the eagle?

Some of the folks on NeoGAF think a gray team could all be robots. (A Kotaku reader speculates the possibility of Red and Blu teaming up in a horde mode against Gray. Hmm.)

We know about as much as you do. Note the date of the sons' birth: September 2, 1822. September 2 of 2012 will be a Sunday, the final day of PAX, the big tradeshow that occurs in Valve's neck of the woods, Seattle Washington. On September 2, in Benaroya Hall in Seattle, Valve will host the final day of a tournament called The International. The tournament is for DOTA 2, Valve's upcoming MOBA-style game. It presumably has nothing to do with TF2, but, as with all things Valve, you get teases... you get hints... and we'll all find out soon enough.

(I've asked Valve what's up. I tend to think they won't say just yet.)

Gray couldn't have gone off and changed his name to Gordon, right? Nah...

Gray [Team Fortress 2 official site, via NeoGAF]

Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, and even Super Pac-Man... all video games. But not Super PAC—despite its similar name, a Super PAC is in no way related to Pac-Man. It's a term for a controversial type of political action group that's able to accept an unlimited amount of campaign donations and in so doing get around some campaign finance laws.

A Washington Post/Pew Research Center poll reports that when given four choices as to what a Super PAC was, only four in ten of those polled answered correctly.

Some wrongly thought it was a Congressional committee, others a Governmental clean-up project. And one percent thought that a Super PAC was in fact Super PAC, a "popular video game on smartphones." At least it was the lowest percentage!

The article suggests that it will be very difficult to get the public to care about Super PACs given that the term itself is jargony and unfamiliar to a lot of people.

What all the numbers above prove is that, for all the hue and cry - particularly among Democrats - about how a small group of very wealthy donors are exerting undue influence on the 2012 election via Republican super PACs, that argument shows basically no political traction among the broader electorate.

Real-world examples affirm this fact. In 2010, Democrats from the Obama White House on down sought to make the heavy spending by American Crossroads, the biggest and best-funded conservative super PAC, a major issue in the midterms. It didn't work - at all.

If a game designer (Molleindustria perhaps?) could come up with a newsgame about campaign finance, it could likely help people understand what everyone's talking about. The closest I could come up with was this classroom game about campaign finance, though I'm about to play The Political Machine 2012, so we'll see how that game does with PACs and Super PACs.

In the meantime, there's always Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. It's not topical and has nothing to do with Super PACs, but it is a lot of fun.

Why attacking super PACs won't work [Washington Post via Kyle Orland]

For Neo, moving faster than bullets was a matter of realizing the Matrix's rules could be bent. For most of our video game heroes, bullet time is a popular mechanic that has appeared on titles like Max Payne, Red Dead Redemption, Vanquish and more.

It's not possible to slow down time and perform amazing feats—not yet, anyway. Still, most of us have probably experienced that feeling of time slowing down. We know it as the result of a severe adrenaline rush. It's the closest we have to approaching bullet time in real life, and arguably what bullet time is based on. And there's a reason it happens.

Our adrenaline starts pumping when we're in danger, or when we're scared. What follows is that more information is committed to memory by the brain (the amygdala to be specific) in an effort to help us keep safe. This memory overload makes our recollections seem richer and denser than they actually were.

It's an illusion that tricks your brain into thinking that the more memory it has of an event, the longer it took to pan out. Time slows down for you, only it doesn't in reality.

When we get older, time seems to fly. This is based on a similar phenomenon to the one drawn above. We store more memories from childhood because every experience is fresh, and there's more information to soak up. Experiences we have when we're older are at risk of being lost in the fray, because we've racked up so many similar-looking ones already. This is why childhood seems to take forever and adulthood seems to zip by.

Giving us false memories, deceiving us into thinking time moves slower (or faster!) than it actually does: the brain is pretty crazy amazing, eh?

I play a lot of role-playing games. You know this already. You read Random Encounters every week. You understand my fascination with this strange and quirky genre.

So hopefully you won't be too angry when I tell you that my shelves are overflowing with the cartridges of RPGs that I've opened, launched, and immediately given up. As I've opined before, many of these games make bad first impressions. They're not great at getting you hooked from the get-go. They're slow burns.

So when I picked up Growlanser Wayfarer of Time, which Atlus released last week for PSP—yes, PSP!—I was surprised to find that I couldn't put it down.

Some history. Wayfarer of Time is the fourth game in the Growlanser series. It was released in Japan for the PlayStation 2 way back in 2003. It was then remade for PSP last fall. And released here in the U.S. last week. Though some of the other Growlanser games have made it to America, this is the first time we're seeing the fourth one. History over.

Now let me give you five big reasons I can't stop playing:

1. The story grabbed me immediately.

I'm a sucker for quirky characters, emotional resonance, and stories that take themselves seriously without taking themselves too seriously. That's all here. There's betrayal, death, love, fairies, angels, monsters. Good and evil. Pretty-boy warriors. Animated women with comically oversized proportions that make me glad the game is on PSP so I don't have to worry about anyone else watching me play. The usual.

Here's the story in one sentence: There are a bunch of angels and for some reason they're destroying towns and slaughtering people you love—yes, angels are killing the people you love—and you're the hero born to defeat evil and kill all the angels and all that jazz. It's spunky and entertaining and I like it a lot so far.

(Now here is where I bring up the most annoying part of Growlanser Wayfarer of Time: As far as I can tell, you can't toggle subtitles during the frequent anime cut-scenes. So you won't know what's going on unless you can hear what they're saying. This is downright unforgivable for a portable game. If you're playing on the bus, be prepared to either A. miss important dialogue or B. wear headphones.)

2. Branching dialogue.

Many JRPGs are stuffed with what fans have dubbed "But Thou Must" loops, recurring prompts that give you fake or misleading choices. (Would you like to rescue the princess? No? But Thou Must!)

Growlanser gives you genuine dialogue choices. Often. Some of them are quite funny. Others are quite serious. But they all seem to trigger different responses, and from what I hear, some of them might even change the ending.

3. The combat is really interesting.

It's sort of like a blend between a turn-based role-playing game (ie: Final Fantasy) and a grid-based strategy-role-playing game (ie: Shining Force). You bark orders at your party and send them to attack monsters. Once you give each character an order, he or she will keep executing it until the target is dead or you give him or her new commands. To spice this up (and kill enemies faster), you can tell your party members to cast spells or use special abilities or circle the battlefield looking for treasure. You probably shouldn't tell them to circle the battlefield looking for treasure.

What's neat is that sometimes monsters will do smart things. Maybe they'll go after villagers you're trying to defend. Or retreat to flank one of your isolated party members. Position plays an important role here, and if you split up too much in a large battle, you might find yourself dead fast.

4. NPCs talk to you in hilarious ways.

In most RPGs, you can go into a town, enter buildings, talk to civilians, and make a mess of their pots and pans. In Growlanser Wayfarer of Time, you can go into a town, knock on the doors of buildings, and get civilians to come outside just to talk to you.

So you'll spend a great deal of time bouncing from house to house, knocking on doors and watching as NPCs come out and say NPCish things like "I wonder what's for dinner tonight!" before backing up and closing their doors. This is hilarious. Especially when you knock on a door and watch a child come outside, say "I can't talk right now!" and immediately go back inside.

5. It's tough.

Growlanser Wayfarer of Time is difficult! It's challenging! It ain't easy!

This is good. You will die. You will see the game over screen. You will like it. You will lose progress. You will beat yourself up trying to get your characters in better shape. Trying to make smarter decisions. Trying to be faster. You will continue playing and playing until you enter a Rocky montage. Motivational music will pump into your ears. You'll train harder than you've never trained before. And you will win. You will win hard. You will defeat those monsters. You will save those villagers. You will protect your friends and family. And you will lean your head back and scream a bloodcurdling scream, the type of scream that echoes through the caverns and mountains and leaves your enemies terrified. Terrified of your wrath. Of your power. Of your Rocky montage. You're the best.

While I haven't yet spent enough time with the new Growlanser to feel comfortable definitively telling you to go play it now, what I can tell you is that I am enjoying it quite a bit. And I haven't even gotten to the part where you get to build your own base, Suikoden-style. Stay tuned.

(I can also tell you that XSEED just sent over a copy of The Last Story, out next week for Wii, and that after playing it for an hour, I can already tell it has more charm and personality than Xenoblade did in 40. More on that next week.)

Random Encounters is a weekly column dedicated to all things JRPG. It runs every Friday at 3pm ET.

If you played Homefront, the new trailer for the remake of 1984's Red Dawn is going to seem like déjà vu all over again.

When THQ's ambitious but shallow 2011 first-person shooter first started its hype machine, the comparisons to the 1980s Cold War action movie rampant. Part of that is because the movie and the game shared the same core premise, where a foreign power invades and occupies American soil.

The two projects shared a creative contributor, too, in the form of John Milius, who wrote the screenplay for Red Dawn. Milius helped Kaos Studios shape the dramatic scenario for Homefront, which also had an ordinary town torn to shreds by the army of another country.

In Homefront, the invaders were from a unified Korean army. The villains in the new Red Dawn trailer are Korean, too, led by Will Yun Lee, who voices the lead character in the upcoming Sleeping Dogs game. The remake, like the game, has America invaded by the Koreans (who were, as with the game, supposed to be Chinese). The remake was in the works before the game, though.

Not surprisingly, you'll see some motifs repeating in the trailers for Homefront and the new and old Red Dawn films. Armies marching down suburban streets, swarms of enemy aircraft hovering ominously overhead, a ragtag rebel force fighting back… all of those plot points get trotted out in game and movie teasers.

The new Red Dawn comes out in November. We'll see if they go as far as Homefront did in its depiction of an American occupation.

I adore The Walking Dead. So when I heard about this drag of a Facebook game Kate wrote about, I worried. This is a game that represents one of my favorite graphic novels, so I worry that the experience of the franchise will be tarnished for a horde of perhaps non-gaming Facebook users. We can do much better than just a series of microtransactions that neglect one of The Walking Dead's strongest features: interactions.

Interactions, social dynamics. The Facebook game is missing what makes The Walking Dead so good: the drama of how people treat each other while in a crisis. And how drastically that drama changes the social dynamic.

In the history of The Walking Dead, social interactions are not exactly typical compared to those we're accustomed to in this the-dead-stay-down world. They're far more exciting. And for a game to be based on a platform that boasts millions of users, that spans continents, gamers and non-gamers alike, social interaction shouldn't be a problem.

Here's how I propose we solve the problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place.

We're all survivors. Every Facebook user starts off as a survivor. Or maybe there are factions—the survivors versus the walkers—if we agree that that'd be cooler.

Since we all already have our own circle of friends, it'd be easy to abide by my fictional game's request to band together in groups. As for the odd ones out, they'd be randomly shoved into groups, just to spice things up a bit. After all, The Walking Dead communities are always composed of strangers who meet even more strangers along the way.

You pick a city, pick an assortment of limited weapons, items, and a starting zone. A house, a farm, a prison, a grocery store. Maybe, if you're lucky, you get a vehicle and minimal gas. Then, you fight to survive. The game throws obstacles at you like road blocks and herds and encounters with other surviving groups. Will you attempt to steal this new group's supplies? Can you lead the herd astray and sneak away to safety? That's up to you, your group, and the game.

You'll undoubtedly have conflicts. People who think taking a left turn is better than the right turn you suggested. Maybe your own group member decides to abandon you. Or worse, they decide to feed you to the dogs (or, you know, walkers). The game will guide your steps, creating drama where its needed, but mainly you'll be meeting other groups and deciding how to react to that. You'll face devastation and have to make on-the-moment decisions. Hard decisions.

And if you get attacked by a flesh-eating fiend, you join the ranks of decomposing soldiers and set out in new group, with a new mission.

What kind of a game would this be? My immediate thought is a text adventure. The game would give you a prompt, set up your particularly morbid situation. You might be the group that has a psycho waiting to be born. Maybe the game would even give each of us particular roles to play. Or maybe each group would have AI. Some are helpful, some are not. It'd send waves of roamers and lurkers your way. Maybe each new event would be associated with an image to be more immersive. They could zombify your profile pic if you end up turning! Nifty.

The downside is that the genre is considered outdated or too unfamiliar for non-gamers. The beauty of The Walking Dead is that it captures a very real scenario in a fictional environment. You have groups of people trying to survive, each with their own story, but with different levels of morality. You watch good people driven to the brink of insanity, committing horrific real-world crimes out of desperation. It's an interesting topic that's been popularized into a successful, mainstream TV show. And any chance we have to get non-gamers involved in our favorite hobby is a good thing. That shitty Facebook game out there right now? It's a slander. It's a missed opportunity.

So maybe it shouldn't be a text adventure, if we want the game to be as accessible to as large a group of people as possible. It should be easy and fun enough for every Facebook user to grasp, but intuitive enough as a game to actually work. Role-playing is a definite must. I'm open to suggestions.

Thinking about that Facebook game that is now mucking up a non-gamer's gaming experience, and a non-The Walking Dead fan's zombie experience, I ask you: why can't we just take a hugely social environment and set zombies loose in it? Then we'll see where the Facebook users take it. Just like how The Walking Dead panned out. It didn't take much to make those fictional characters crazy. Throw an epidemic and a little disaster out there, and the people will do the rest. And sometimes that makes for a worse apocalypse.