Not content with releasing just one line of shirts this month, the friends of Kotaku at Meat Bun have released a second, and this one's all about souls.
That means shirts based on Ghosts'n Goblins and... well, a ton based on Dark Souls, like the awesome anatomical cut-away of a Mimic and the awesomer Alvina propaganda shirt.
demons'n darkness collection available now! [Meat Bun]
A seedy underground of Russian criminals has gotten so brazen it's taken to posting advertisements offering the services of its expert "bank robbers".
These crims, who mostly employ "cyberheists and tax fraud" to lift money from US banks, even go into detail about the kind of things they can offer prospective employers, as listed on the site of security expert Brian Krebs:
We provide convenient service to our partners:
Unique administrative interface – fast response
We will react momentarily to any new task
Adapt every action of a money mule to client's requirements
Timely payments via WebMoney/Liberty Reserve/Western Union, cash conversion with WU/MG
Cashout of tax return, D + P (dump & PIN, cashout of debit cards stolen via skimming)
Receive over mail or expensive merchandise pick up in a store
Mules are available for other interesting transactions
We work only by reference.
Amazing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the background and field these guys are "working" in (and I guess the fact Eastern European crooks gotta stick together?), what do they use as the enormous illustration on the ad? Some Grand Theft Auto IV fan art, of course, by none other than internet-famous Rockstar fan artist Patrick Brown.
Online Service Offers Bank Robbers for Hire [Krebs on Security, via Boing Boing]
Taking inspiration from a treatment on the latest GTAV trailer, reader Adriaan has wonderfully gone through YouTube comments on the latest Vice City iOS clip, presenting them in isolation for our enjoyment.
Some are touching. Some even contain a sliver of truth. Most, though, are hilariously bonkers, just like you hope/expect YouTube comments to be.
GTA Vice City Trailer Coments [Tumblr]
When you play Minecraft, it's in your face, it's blocky, and it's all rather immediate. You rarely get the sense of scale, or even wonder, that an entire world can contain from any single vantage point. The game's simplistic graphics don't help things.
But, as PC Gamer explains, when you convert a Minecraft world into a 3D model then pass it through some rendering...wow. Just...wow.
The software you need to do something like this yourself is free, and relatively easy to use.
These images, of the PC Gamer server and taken by Graham Smith, are what you get at the other end.
Minecraft renders: Azeroth, the PC Gamer server, and how to make your own [PC Gamer]
It's sort of been unofficial Lord of the Rings week here at Kotaku, hasn't it? Guess everyone's just excited about The Hobbit.
This amazing video shows a weatherman in New Zealand going into full cosplay and reading the weather… in Elvish. He's not exactly Liv Tyler, but his accent sounds pretty good! This is some real dedication.
Do you understand Elvish? Do you think that if there had been a looming tropical storm in New Zealand, the guy would have reported that in Elvish, too?
Feel free to discuss any of that or anything else, in English or Elvish, here or over in the Talk Amongst Yourselves forum. Have good conversations, and as always, le hannon a tholel.
(Via Geekologie)
Brotherhood Workshop return with another LEGO Lord of the Rings video, this time about Helm's Deep.
An epic battle deserves an epic recreation in LEGO, and this clip doesn't disappoint.
LEGO The Battle of Helm's Deep [YouTube]
On a long drive back yesterday evening I heard over the radio that President Obama, using the White House bully pulpit in deficit negotiations, had opened a social media campaign designed to pressure Congressional Republicans. If tax cuts set to expire on Jan. 1 do so, middle-class families would take a cash hit of around $2,000 in 2013. So the president's media folks created #my2K as a Twitter hashtag. Use it, he said, to tell everyone what #my2K means to you and your family.
"Well, #my2K means My Player in NBA 2K13," was my first thought. And I wasn't alone.
My2K is indeed the shorthand for the single sign-on account in NBA 2K from NBA 2K12 to NBA 2K13 this year. It hasn't trended like other NBA 2K hashtags have, but it has come up. Still, there's the 2K branding, and the fact that President Obama has appeared in NBA 2K since NBA 2K11, either in the game's championship cinematic or, amusingly, as a coach after 2016 in the game's career modes.
So, write your elected representatives. Tell them what #my2K really means to you.
On the left, the cover of the final issue of Nintendo Power magazine, a publication that's been running since the 80s. It's great on its own, but when you remember what the first issue of Nintendo Power looked like, on the right, it's enough to bring a tear to the eye.
Nintendo Power's closure was announced back in August.
Oh, and if you're wondering who did the sculpture work in the new cover, it's the work of Leslie Levings!
Bill Mudron [Twitter]
No one was sure that XCOM: Enemy Unknown would please fans of the original X-Com. The remake's lead designer Jake Solomon counts himself amongst the devotees of Microprose's sci-fi strategy game and even he wasn't certain the team at Firaxis could recapture the appeal of the original.
So, Solomon was understandably chuffed when he heard that X-Com creator Julian Gollop offered praise for the new game. Word of this approval comes from a Eurogamer article, where Gollop says:
"I think Firaxis has done a great job… The game is addictive and absorbing, not to mention quite challenging on the classic difficulty setting."
And Solomon's response is pretty much what you'd expect:
"That's good, man. The guy's a legend. It's a weird situation. You know he's still out there, you know he's going to end up playing it - and you just admire the guy so much."
Gollop finds himself in a similar position as he's working on a new version of 1985's Chaos. Remakes will come and go and quality will vary but it's nice to see creators of different eras able to appreciate and build off of what happens in the past and present.
Music is, as I've written here so many times I've lost count, a part of the soul of any good video game. The beats and melodies that propel us forward are more than just aural decoration, they're a vital aspect of the character and feel of a game.
Last weekend, after 65 hours, countless battles, and a metric ton of steak, I completed Persona 4 Golden. It was a bittersweet end, the conclusion of an utterly wonderful game that I'll never get to experience for the first time again. (For more wide-ranging thoughts, see our lengthy, wandering but hopefully illuminating review.)
Of all the things it does so well, Persona 4 has a musical soul. Composer Shōji Meguro's tunes run to the very core of the game, and without his work, complemented so perfectly by vocalist Shihoko Hirata, Persona 4 would be incomplete; an engine without wheels, a tin man without a heart.
I've written about Meguro's music in the past; his soundtrack for Persona 3 was also outstanding. When I wrote that article, a lot of you guys piped up to say, "Wait until you play Persona 4." You were right. This has immediately become one of my very favorite game soundtracks: Iconic, beautiful, goofy, fun, hip, and organically tied to the game it accompanies. And in a nice bonus, the new tunes added to Golden are just as good as the original pieces from the PS2 game.
Most of the pieces aren't just fun on their own, they fulfill important… hmm, "rhythmic functions" is the best I can come up with. The way the cues repeat in certain circumstances, the drop of the happy socializing music, the creepy piano of murder mystery, the swing and wheel of the battle music, and all the others. It gives the game a feeling of ritual that Jason described so well.
Here are some of my favorite pieces of music from Persona 4 Golden. I've written a little about a couple of these individually, but it feels worth collecting them all together.
I don't know how anyone could not like this tune, which plays every single time you and a friend meet up to hang out. My favorite is when you call the Fox and it plays as the Fox jumps onto the roof of the shrine. Makes me smile every time.
This is easily my favorite of all of the dungeon jams, though Kanji's dungeon music is a close second (that bassline) and Yukiko's music (those synths) is great too. "Striptease" channels something dark and sexual, with a drugged-sounding Shihoko Hirata asking, lazily, "Could you make the music louder" before bizarrely responding (singing and inhaling?) It's just a weird, groovy, haunting bit of music that makes Rise's dungeon my favorite of the bunch.
I like a lot of the city-exploration music, but "Your Affection" is my favorite. Like a lot of Meguro's music, it's idiosyncratic, and as a result took me a little while to get my head around. That weird, angular intro with the shimmering, climbing synth and grunty bass didn't make me think the song would end up with something as triumphant as that lengthy chorus. But there it is. This song also has some of the best misheard lyrics in the game, which is saying something, considering that I make up my own lyrics to just about everything Persona 4.
Man, not many games have tunes this hip on their soundtracks. A flipped 7/4 groove with a legit hip horn melody twists and turns through all manner of turnarounds, both rhythmic and harmonic. Yet another tune that, like a lot of my favorite Chris Potter tunes, has a groovy 7/4 verse with with a bridge in regular ol' 3/4, just in case you were getting comfortable with the counting. Meguro's jazz chops come to the fore in tunes like this, and I love it.
As "Home music" goes, I'm not sure if "Signs of Love" outdoes Persona 3's amazing "Iwatodai Dorm", but it's close. Which is saying something. I like the breakdown in the middle where Hirata says "Bro."
This one, I believe, is also new to Golden, since I'm not sure you were able to do as many things at night in Persona 4. And it's definitely one of my favorite tracks—just a lovely jam throughout. But it really comes into its own when the piano and electric guitar take the lead and carry it out halfway through. This is the one to have playing every time I walk down a sun-dappled street.
This one's a new addition to Golden, apparently, and I am a huge fan. I've come to the game from the unique perspective of one who didn't play Persona 4 on the PS2, so I don't notice a lot of the new stuff (Chie's new voice actor, most of the new recorded dialogue). But the minute I heard this song, I was a huge fan—I'd say I like it even more than the babybabybabybaby battle theme from Persona 3. (Heresy, I know! But there you go.) It's flashier than any of the other battle music (the also very good "Reach out to the truth"), but I'm okay with that. The tempo of the song pairs really perfectly with the rhythm of Persona 4's combat. It sort of reminds me of Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" (aka the video where Christopher Walken dances in the hotel), in a good way.
This song. Gah. This song that plays near the end of the game, as you think back to all the good times you had with these characters that have become your friends. Few pieces of video game music get to me like this one does. And given its name, "A corner of memory," it knows exactly what it's doing. It'll take up a corner of my memory for a good long while now. The tune "Never More" that plays over the credits, as well as the oh-so-melancholy new song "snowflake" are both icing on the cake. The cake of sadness.
Just about every piece of music in the game is grand, but those are my favorites. If you've got any you love, I hope you'll share 'em below.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a new game+ to work my way through. These social links aren't going to build themselves.
