I've never used the Pokémon compendium known as the Pokédex much in the Pokémon games, but the idea of having a physical Pokédex is still really cool. Sure, you could buy a toy Pokédex, or, you can put a decal on your red 3DS to make it look like one instead!
If you think the latter option is more appealing, here's a neat find via Tiny Cartridge: an Etsy shop that sells a Pokédex decal kit for your 3DS. 15 bucks a pop.
If you have some extra money you're itching to part with, you could even get the official Pokédex app, too. It's expensive, though (and not for the 3DS.)
Probably every animal species you can think of is playable or can be found in some form in video games, but today we decided to find those games where you can play as a cat. Any cat. Domestic cats or any one of the wild cats: tigers, lions, cheetahs, all included.
Cait Sith, a remote-controlled cat riding a robot moogle (that's still a cat right?) from Final Fantasy VII is the first one that comes to mind.
Given that the promise of delivering a console-quality first-person shooter on the PlayStation Vita has been broken by every studio that's released one so far, you'd think developers might be more careful about potentially painting themselves into that same corner. Not Guerrilla Games Cambridge, the team charged with shrinking the big-budget Killzone series into a palm-sized package.
Perhaps seizing the opportunity to raise the bar after Resistance: Burning Skies and Call of Duty Black Ops: Declassified dropped it so disappointingly low, Killzone: Mercenary director Mathijs de Jonge makes many of the same claims we've heard before. "When we got our hands on a prototype Vita, we knew this was going to be a great opportunity to deliver the full Killzone experience on a hand-held device. The Vita has roughly the same amount of processing power as a PS3, so we knew we wouldn't have to sacrifice on graphical fidelity. But more importantly, the dual analog sticks would allow us to finally make a game that plays the way first-person shooters are supposed to be played." Still having the bad taste of the "dual analog stick" Kool-Aid in my mouth from previous Vita shooter presentations, I'm skeptical of de Jonge's statements, but also cautiously optimistic because his boasts are backed by an invitation to actually play the game.
The first thing that strikes me about Mercenary isn't the controls, it's the visuals. The level is a pretty standard looking sci-fi industrial environment—lots of weathered metal and dark interiors—but a number of visual effects, such as lighting, shadows, and fog, stand out as some of the best I've seen on the Vita. Exploding barrels envelop the wide screen in smoke and fire. Draw-distances are equally impressive; despite the compact screen, the level's exterior sections feel big thanks to drop-ships, lightning storms, and artillery fire dotting skies that seem to stretch as far as I can see. While I hope the art style's a bit more ambitious in Mercenary's other levels, it at least seems they've got the hardware-running on a modified version of the Killzone3 engine-firing on all cylinders.
As I soak up the sights, I also pile Helghast corpses high. And I suppose this is one of the better compliments I can pay the controls; they feel so natural that they never pull me from the experience. The dual-sticks, as well as the two shoulder buttons, work exactly as you'd expect in an FPS. Nothing fancy or surprising, just comfortable and effective. Face buttons handle jumping, ducking, reloading, and environmental interactions with ease, and weapon-swaps and grenade-tosses are just a D-pad press away. Although, I actually find those latter actions better performed by touching optional on-screen prompts, positioned on the right of the display next to the face buttons.
Speaking of touch-screen shenanigans, Mercenary's keeping the gimmicks to a minimum. The one potential forced feature I encounter, melee kills, is actually implemented pretty well. When approaching enemies, a small prompt appears at the center of the screen; once tapped, a second, directional swipe must be traced to execute the target. I'd prefer snuffing out up-close enemies with a single tactile interaction, but still, the joy of driving a blade into the red-eyed bastards' brains and bellies has me playing Mercenary more stealthily than I would have expected.
The game's narrative approach is actually more interesting than the mechanics and graphics. Rather than presenting the usual portable prequel or sequel, Mercenary tells a tale that runs parallel to the previous games. The mission I play, for example, unfolds shortly before the ISA's Helghan invasion that opened Killzone 2. As a hired gun, I'm tasked with disabling artillery and clearing the area of infantry so the ISA can land. It's not a glamorous assignment, but Mercenary's protagonist is more interested in earning money than medals. This set-up also means players will get to fight alongside the Helghast, hopefully gaining a fresh perspective on the epic sci-fi saga in the process.
More than supporting the story, this contract-killer approach significantly serves the gameplay in a way that's totally new to the series. Players earn currency, dubbed Vektan Dollars, for every kill they perform. The amounts vary depending on how players choose to fill body bags: 50 for standard kills, 75 for death-by-exploding-barrel, 100 for stealth executions and so on. This adds some arcade-y appeal to killing sprees, as earned Vektan amounts pop-up on screen and provide some immediate gratification.
Of course, it wouldn't be much fun filling your bank account if there weren't any cool toys to piss away your riches on. Thankfully players can visit Blackjack, an arms vendor set up at various points in each level. In addition to an impressive selection of primary and secondary weapons, Blackjack offers armor upgrades, ammo, and grenades. Coolest of all—and new to Killzone—are Vanguard weapons. Equipped one at a time, these high tech toys include pilotable drones, homing missiles, cloaked camouflage, and other slick gear that wouldn't be out of place in James Bond's arsenal. These items, which operate on a cool-down timer, are also triggered with a touch-screen tap.
I don't get much time to fool around with the Vanguard system, nor do I earn enough money to enjoy a gun-porn shopping spree. Still, the merc-driven economy seems a welcome addition that suits the portable experience without defining it. It appears Guerrilla Games understands the importance of including such a portable-friendly feature, but unlike Zipper Interactive's approach to Unit 13, they're not sacrificing a console-sized story to showcase it.
Speaking of matching its console counterparts, Mercenary also includes, according to de Jonge, a "full-size" multiplayer experience. When the game ships on September 17th, it will feature three modes and six maps, supporting 4v4 matches. Replayability is also promised in the form of a "contracts" mode, which allows completed campaign missions to be re-tackled, but with more bite-sized, arcade-flavored objectives in mind.
While my time with Mercenary is too brief, it achieves the amazing feat of rekindling my hope of playing a console-rivaling FPS on the subway or in my dentist's office waiting room. Still, we'll have to wait and see if Guerilla's grand ambitions ultimately translate into consistent quality across Mercenary's three modes. Whether or not they deliver on all fronts though, they've at least made the act of peering down the iron sites and planting a slug between some thug's eyes feel satisfying behind the Vita's dual sticks. And based on others' attempts to achieve that same feat, that's saying a hell of a lot .
A veteran freelance journalist covering the video game industry for nearly a decade, Matt Cabral contributes regularly to a variety of enthusiast and print outlets. You can find his work on the web, in print, and, if you look carefully, in the foam of your latte. Find him on Facebook and follow him on Twitter @gamegoat.
Sony just posted this video on the PlayStation blog. Looks like a teaser for the next PlayStation (code-named Orbis), don't you think? It ends with a date: February 20, 2013. Will Sony announce their next console then?
We've heard bits and pieces about the next PlayStation for quite some time now, and rumors have been swirling that both Sony and Microsoft's next-generation consoles will be announced this year, likely before E3. Although Sony has kept quiet about plans for their successor to the PlayStation 3, released in 2006, the Japanese game-maker is expected to release a new console either later this year or in early 2014.
This event will take place in New York City on February 20 at 6pm Eastern. That's only five days before the company's annual Destination PlayStation event kicks off in Arizona, where retailers are shown the biggest and best games on Sony's plate for the year ahead.
Sony's president Shuhei Yoshida also seems pretty excited:
UPDATE: We've confirmed with Sony that the event will be livestreamed. More details to come.
UPDATE 2: The Wall Street Journalis reporting that "people familiar with the matter" have told them the next PlayStation will indeed debut at the event on February 20.
Last March, we gave you an early look at how the PlayStation 4-code-named Orbis-was shaping up. Nearly a year later, we're about to bring you a clearer, more timely update, including new technical specs and information on an upgrade to Sony's traditional controller design. More »
For the longest time, a tie was as good as a win in the final round of a Tiger Woods PGA Tour event. The game's career mode did not simulate playoff holes if your golfer finished in a deadlock with one or more others. The tournament simply ended and you still got credit for a victory. But it was a glaring shortcoming, and if it happened in a Major, the lack of closure was almost agonizing.
Well, that changes in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14. Playoffs, in all of their formats—aggregate, sudden death, or the palpable dread of a full 18 holes at the U.S. Open—will be a feature of the game when it releases in March.
Designers at EA Sports' Tiburon studio will be the first to tell you it's a long overdue inclusion. "It's been something we've always wanted to put in the game, but with all of the complexities involved, we just never really had the time," said Mike DeVault, a senior designer on the game. "It creates a myriad of opportunities for problems—and we knew that going in. But when you have features like those in the discussion, they're usually the ones that land on the cutting room floor."
Why? Overtime rules have long been featured in every other major sports simulation, even the complex sudden death of NCAA Football or the varying outcomes of a soccer match in FIFA.
The answer lies in two realms: one is that a playoff—sudden death anyway—shifts the golf simulation from stroke play, in which the focus is entirely on your performance, to what is effectively match play, in which your opponent's performance greatly informs the risks you both are willing to take. Let's keep in mind the possibility of playoffs involving three or more golfers, too. Accounting for these possibilities introduces a great deal of complexity into the design, for something that would typically be seen only a handful of times in a single mode of play.
The second reason is actually an issue of licensing. While Tiger Woods PGA Tour career events feature a full leaderboard stocked with recognizable, real-world names, the vast majority of these golfers do not appear in the game. There are only two dozen or so real-world pros you may play as or against. There is no group license for the likenesses of all the PGA Tour golfers, as there is in the NHL or NBA, and a name on a leaderboard only is the limit of fair use.
So a playoff can't show you your opponent unless he's licensed to appear in the game. "We looked into having players represented by shot arcs," said Sean Wilson, the game's producer, "but simulating arcs, even, is a licensing issue. Technically, [showing just the trajectory of a shot] would be considered a part of their likeness."
Rigging tour events so that the same 24 golfers were at the top of the leaderboard, just in case you tied somebody at the end, shatters immersion more than simply not having a playoff at all. Wilson called that "cheesy," and it is. So for years, the combination of complicated design and prohibitive licensing provided very little motivation to address a playoff issue, especially if it is supposed to be an uncommon experience.
Playoffs in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 will not show you your opponent's shot. You'll be informed of his result at the end of each hole you play, which does deprive the game of some of a playoff's signature tension but given the limitations involved, is probably the only way it could be handled. Wilson said it puts the focus on playing the hole as aggressively and as well as you can. (Of course, this is moot for a full 18-hole playoff).
"If you're tied at the end of a tournament, you'll get a message that you're tied, and then a rules screen explaining the rules of that playoff," Wilson said. 'Then you'll see a leaderboard of names of people in the playoff. After each hole, you'll get a loading screen showing what the other player did. You don't know what they did until you finish the hole.
"It was better, we thought, to show you the result afterward, so you would try to make the best score possible on each hole," Wilson said.
If you're forsaking the opportunity to see your playoff opponents play their holes, it seems like an obvious solution. So why did EA Sports wait until now to tackle it?
Again, there are two answers. This year the game will feature something called "Quick Tournaments," a single- and local multiplayer mode which essentially takes an event from the game's tour schedule and transports all the players to the final round on Sunday, with tournament atmosphere, galleries and commentary (said to be getting a strong upgrade).
"In years past, when you'd pick up the game and choose Play Now, you'd pop into essentially a practice round with you and a scorecard, or whoever you're playing locally," DeVault said. "But if you choose Play Now in something like Madden, you're getting the NFL on Sunday, with the crowd, and the commentary and everything. We never had that."
You might play the last round of the U.S. Open differently if a tie means going another 18 holes.
Quick Tournaments will pit a player against a full leaderboard, the same as a career event. "Golf lends itself still to being a party game," Wilson said, "so if you're playing this in a room with friends, if you get to the end of a round and you're all tied, you should have a playoff." If they were building a playoff for local multiplayer against an AI leaderboard, they may as well do it for the career mode too.
The second reason is that, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 will be the first golf video game to feature all four Major tournaments under their real world names. And bringing those in without playoffs—and there are three different formats used—would have made the omission even more glaring this year.
Not that it hasn't been noticed before.
"There was a pretty heavy emphasis on our presentation coming from the community feedback this year," DeVault said, "regarding how we can build more emotion and add drama. The playoff system is a very important part of that. And if we build up all of this drama of Sunday, and you're tied, and there's no playoff, then it falls flat on its face."
So in The Masters, if you're tied at the end of the fourth round, you'll go play the 18th and 10th holes until someone comes out a stroke ahead. At the British Open, playoffs are a four-hole contest determined by aggregate score, then sudden death if necessary. The U.S. Open, one of the last tournaments, of any magnitude, to require a full 18-hole playoff round, will put you up to that, too. Non-major tournaments will also use the preferred playoff tournaments of their courses. "Each course has a set of priority holes for a playoff," Wilson said. "So if you watch The Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass, they will start on No. 17, the Island Green, then play No. 18, then, No. 16, 17 and 18 until they get a winner."
But the historical presentation of The Masters, a feature getting top billing in the game, will not undertake playoffs by the old rules. Though you may play the tournament on the course as it appeared in 1934, any playoff there will alternate holes No. 18 and 10, by modern rules. In 1935, the second Masters, Gene Sarazen and Craig Wood dueled it out in a playoff—over 36 holes. This game won't subject you to that.
Though to most this would seem like a no-brainer inclusion, "it's not a small undertaking," DeVault said. "It was something we've been working on throughout the entire year. And it was one of the first features we were working on for this game."
Thing you probably don't know about me: I can't look at Peanuts without tears welling up in my eyes, especially the older stuff.
Sure, everybody knows Snoopy now. But, it's really the entire mix of characters—Charlie Brown, Lucy, Peppermint Patty et al—and their mix of adult prickliness and childlike naiveté that made Charles Schulz's iconic comics strips so timeless. The daily black-and-white comics were great but the full-color Sunday strips gave Schulz a big, beautiful canvas to let his expert pacing and amazing linework breathe in a rainbow of color.
So, it's great news that Fantagraphics will be collecting Schulz' Sundays work into an all-new series of hardcovers. Peanuts Every Sunday: 1952-1955 (Vol. 1)kicks things off this fall, featuring painstaking re-coloring that recreates how the strips originally looked. Maybe you didn't know that Charlie Brown's shirt wasn't always yellow. Sometimes it was red! Look how different Snoopy's nose is!
Look at this stuff. Just look at the cute, round faces, the body language, the framing. So damn perfect. Hurry up already, November!
There are games that I like. And then there are games that I like that I become obsessed with. Fire Emblem: Awakening falls into the second category.
What follows, therefore, isn't just a review. It's a warning. Play the new Fire Emblem on Nintendo's 3DS, and all of this could happen to you...
Some basics about the game: Fire Emblem games are essentially very fancy chess. You control a set of units—a fighting force of knights, archers, mages, women on flying horses and the like—and maneuver them around the grid of a battlefield.
As in chess, each type of unit has its own rules about how it can move and attack. Each has special weaknesses, too. Don't fly your Pegasus Knights near enemy archers, for example.
Now imagine if every chess piece had its own personality and gained experience every time you used it. Let's say you're good at slaying pawns and bishops with one of your rooks. That rook will go stronger and will eventually evolve into a much better elite piece that plays by a more favorable set of rules.
In Fire Emblem, those evolutions are thrilling, as the nearly-useless mage you've been keeping just barely away from the enemy's line of fire finally scores enough potshots to class up and become a horse-riding, magic-hurling "dark knight"—Gandalf with his horse, Popeye post-spinach.
Crucially, this suddenly-awesome sorceress isn't some no-named chess piece. Fire Emblem: Awakening calls her Tharja. She's the kind of video game character you send texts to your colleague about. It's not just because she, like most of the dozens of characters you can recruit into your army in Awakening, sometimes says funny things.
It's because, when your chess pieces have names and get better the more you use them, you become attached to them.
It's because older Fire Emblem games were some of the best games ever made about death (I will get into that).
And it's because this new Fire Emblem game is one of the best games I've played about friendship and companionship. Ever. (I'll get into that, too.)
Hence texts like this. I'm in blue. Kirk is in gray.
OK, not the most emotional text. But Kirk and I sent a lot of text like that over the past week. We're rooting for these little characters of ours. And we're comparing notes. Who did you keep alive?
Or, even better and a major focus for this game: who did you marry to whom?
I actually didn't keep Tharja with Libra (who looks like a woman, hence that text). I'd found a lowly villager named Donnel in one of the game's many optional sidequests. I figured out how to recruit him to my side and then I tried to take him—a character with horrible stats—and slowly, steadily, level him up to become an elite fighter. I made him start dating Tharja.
I didn't just tell Kirk about this.
I shot a video of one of Donnel's finest moments!
And just yesterday I got Donnel all the way up to level 21. If/when you play the game, you'll recognize that as an achievement equal to getting a parakeet to win a medal in Olympic powerlifting.
This is the core of the new Fire Emblem. It's not squarely a war game. It's a game about relationships. This was most unexpected.
There have been Fire Emblem games on many Nintendo systems. We've gotten a bunch of them in America. The Sacred Stones was back on the Game Boy Advance. Shadow Dragon was on the DS. Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn on the Wii and GameCube. All are marvelous and rival the likes of X-Com, Final Fantasy Tactics and Advance Wars in the turn-based strategy genre. Fire Emblems stood out. They stood out for putting the genre in a dark fantasy sword-and-sorcery setting and for daring players to enjoy one of the great sadistic design choices in video games: permadeath.
What the older Fire Emblems did for death, the new game does for relationships.
Going back to the chess analogy, imagine if any pawn you lost in a chess game was lost forever. The next time you played chess, you'd have one less pawn. This would be sad, sadder if that pawn had a name and was, under your direction, carefully being brought along to be a super-pawn (with claws, or something). The old rules for Fire Emblem forced you to live with the consequences of your bad decisions. Make a bad move and your Tharja or your Donnel would die. The game would autosave as soon as you made the move. The character would be gone from the game forever… unless you restarted the mission in which you got them killed. Missions could go on for a long time, so, inevitably, I and other players would learn to accept the deaths of some cherished characters. It always stung.
More recent Fire Emblems, including Awakening, let you play in permadeath "classic" mode, but they also let you play in a less torturous mode that lets you to revive killed characters for subsequent missions. That's for lightweights.
What the older Fire Emblems did for death, the new game does for relationships. In some of the previous games in the series, characters could "support" each other. By standing next to each other in battle—based on where you placed them, of course—they'd gain an affinity for each other. They'd receive a stats boost and occasionally chitchat during or between missions. That once-obscure system is now one of Awakening's most prominent features. Characters can pair up, occupying the same square and boosting each other's stats. One character takes the lead; the other attacks or defends in support. The more frequently the characters fight as a pair, the more they get along. They ascend from C to B to A-rank affinity. Stats improve; they help each other in combat more often. And, if the characters are different genders, they can rank up to S-level support, which means they'll get married. S-level teams back each other up nearly every time, turning into unstoppable sword-swinging, spell-casting duos. There's another wonderful consequence to marriage in this game, but that's a spoiler. Experience it yourself.
If you think, as I did, that it's weird and a bit disappointing that there's no same-sex marriage in the game, you can at least take solace that the game's wacky character-compatibility tester lets you generate images like this:
Friendships and marriage are essential to surviving in Awakening. Play this game at its middle difficulty level—hard, as I did—and your units won't survive if they're not pals or spouses. Prior Fire Emblem games made me cherish the little lives of individual characters. This game makes me root for my best pairs. Chrom and Sumia? A true power couple. Nowi and Gregor? A plucky pair. Donnel and Kellam? The unlikeliest friends, and a friendship long ago left behind when it was time to get Donnel hitched.
Fire Emblem: Awakening is a dense game packed with missions, side-missions, characters and lots of chat. As characters build their friendships, they talk. They talk about silly stuff that friends would talk about. They flirt. They propose marriage. There's more writing than you'll ever read, since you're shaping some relationships at the expense of forging others. You can head to the barracks, where characters just pop in and say more random stuff, like this:
and this:
and...
The game is nearly overwhelming in how much it offers. Most of the time it's not too much. You'd think, for example, that four art styles is, what, two or three too many? Not in this game. The slick anime cutscenes (that pop beautifully in 3D), hand-drawn character portraits, gameplay sprites and 3D models for battle scenes all blend together well. Sure, you're seeing four different versions of many characters, but all the art-styles serve the game's purpose well: the more illustrated-looking ones are best used to tell story; the sprites efficiently show units during gameplay; the 3D models are used to create terrific battles.
Yes, yes, it would be nice if the characters had feet.
But look how cool these battles are! This is a big step up for the series.
The bounty of content includes tons of missions and text, but also tons of options. Awakening is the closest Nintendo has come to making a PC game, in the sense that users are empowered to tweak a surprising amount of the game's settings. Switch from an English to a Japanese voice-over track. Those battle animations? Speed through them. Or skip them.
Or watch them in first-person.
Really, Nintendo never gives its customers this many options. There are two possible ways to display character stats, two ways to preview the outcomes of battles. The game's maps have three levels of zoom. The game's camera angle can be changed and the game speed can be tweaked. Various unit commands can be automated, the circle pad switched from digital or analogue, the HP gauges set in three different styles, the opacity of the game grid altered. Want to know what any of the piles of stats and powers are that are displayed in the game's dense lower-screen readouts? Tap them for tooltips.
WHY: Chess with sorcerers and dragon-borne knights is a good concept. Chess with sorcerers and dragon-borne knights whose lives and marriages you are responsible for is a great one.
Fire Emblem: Awakening
Developer: Intelligent Systems Platforms: 3DS Released: February 4
Type of game: Turn-based strategy mixed with… a dash of dating sim.
What I played: Reached mission 21, so not quite at the end. Played piles of sidequests. Played it on hard with permadeath. I restarted missions a lot. Thus: my successful-gameplay clock is 21 hours, 34 minutes, 28 seconds. My overall system clock time for the game? Um… 40 hours. 23 minutes. Average session: 3 hours, 21 minutes.
Two Things I Loved
The relationship-building. The biggest decisions in Fire Emblem: Awakening? Who is marrying whom!
The unprecedented amount of user-settings options, which give players the ability to configure this Nintendo game like none before it.
Two Things I Hated
What's with the lack of counter-attacks from range? Bah!
Where'd everyone's feet go?
Made-to-Order-Back-of-Box-Quotes
"The Ocarina of Time of Fire Emblems." —Stephen Totilo, Kotaku.com
"I'm not letting anyone die this time. [Has to restart mission.] No, this time I'm not. [Has to restart mission.] This time, it'll be different!" —Stephen Totilo, Kotaku.com
The generosity of content and service in Awakening veers toward feeling like overcompensation. This is one of the first Nintendo games with paid downloadable content, and yet this is the last Nintendo game you could accuse of skimping you on content.
Main quests and side quests not enough for you? The game fills its world map with chances for you to skirmish with random characters. If your 3DS StreetPasses with other Awakening owners, you can then buy goods from their main character or even battle with their character and a support army leveled up to challenge you. You can recruit up to 99 of these friend characters and fight regular battles. And as you win these battles, you gain renown, which unlocks in-game rewards.
There's free downloadable content, to boot. And paid DLC. (None of the downloadable content was available yet, as the game doesn't officially come out in America until next week.)
There's so much in this game you'll wonder what half of it is for. The weapon-forging system? We didn't really need that! The special powers that characters unlock? Who can keep track of this stuff?
People who don't understand video games often groan about the abundance of sequels, as if sequels could be nothing better than disappointing derivatives of greater works.
Gamers know better. Many sequels are iterations. They're improvements on core ideas and they're a layering of systems.
When iteration goes wrong, we get a mess.
When iteration goes right—when it is married to a platform change as was the case with The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time or Grand Theft Auto—a game series that was good can produce something that is great. Fire Emblem: Awakening is one of those great games. The core of Fire Emblem, the dark-fantasy persistent version of chess, is still captivating. But that concept, when married to a game that lets its chess pieces marry, results in something wonderfully surprising: an adventure in which it matters who lives, but it matters even more who they live that life with.
Sure, it's fun to play Minecraft with your friends. But what if you could play with your favorite metal band? Even better.
Tonight, the metal band Lich King will be playing Minecraft along with their fans, according to a post on their Facebook wall. Want to get in on the fun? They'll be sharing server information later today on their Facebook page.
To get you in the mood, here's "ED-209" from the band's album World Gone Dead. Hell yeah.
Now that everybody's buzzing about the sexy new BlackBerry Z10, mobile gaming giant Gameloft steps up to the plate to ensure gamers considering a switch that they'll be at least 11 games for them to play on their shiny new handset, including The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises and Modern Combat 4. Does this mean I have to start covering BlackBerry gaming too?
Here's what's hitting BlackBerry 10 in the near future from Gameloft:
• UNO
• N.O.V.A. 3: Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance
• Shark Dash
• Oregon Trail American Settler
• Ice Age Village
• Real Soccer 2013
• The Amazing Spider-Man
• Six Guns
• Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour
• The Dark Knight Rises
• Let's Golf! 3
I cannot afford another phone, people, so let's try to keep it to ports, okay?
If you head on over to iTunes and check out Glee's version of Baby Got Back, you'll find a swarm of unhappy reviews from Jonathan Coulton fans. That's what happens when you rip a song off, I guess.
Here is Coulton's "cover" on iTunes. It costs .99 cents, and has nearly 100 pages of five-star reviews, many with encouraging words. And many, naturally, reference the current fiasco with Fox. Check it out (click to see at full size/to view all the reviews):
Snarky stuff in there.
Glee's version of Baby Got Back, meanwhile? Things are ugly on that iTunes page. Thousands of awful reviews mean that it's currently sitting on one and a half stars. These unfavorable reviews are from Jonathan Coulton fans.
Does one and a half stars sound too charitable for a bevy of one-star reviews? Well, there are some Glee fans defending the song, even though they seem aware of the Jonathan Coulton situation. See, for instance:
"I am so glad that Glee decided to use Jonathan Coulton's version of the song instead of the original. It's such a unique version of the song," says one reviewer who seems to have missed that the two songs are nearly identical.
Unsurprisingly, many of these Glee fan reviews are being voted as 'unhelpful.'
Back over to Jonathan Coulton's page, we don't see any Glee fans fighting fire with fire. But you do see them there. Many Gleeks are rating Coulton's version of the song highly... but are defending Fox at the same time. Apparently Glee fans think JCo should be grateful for the 'exposure' even though Fox isn't crediting him at all.
I've never used the Pokémon compendium known as the Pokédex much in the Pokémon games, but the idea of having a physical Pokédex is still really cool. Sure, you could buy a toy Pokédex, or, you can put a decal on your red 3DS to make it look like one instead!
source: 
source: 
source: 
source: 
source: 
source: 
source: 
source: 
source: 
source: 
![Looks Like Sony Will Reveal The Next PlayStation On February 20 [Update]](http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18cbc82f92n2fjpg/medium_169.jpg "Looks Like Sony Will Reveal The Next PlayStation On February 20 [Update]")
Thing you probably don't know about me: I can't look at Peanuts without tears welling up in my eyes, especially the older stuff.
Hence texts like this. I'm in blue. Kirk is in gray.
Or, even better and a major focus for this game: who did you marry to whom?
I didn't just tell Kirk about this.
Yes, yes, it would be nice if the characters had feet.
