Was There An Earthquake Last Night?
To: Fahey
From: Ashcraft
RE:
So last night (after a panic attack, mind you), I woke up at around 3am and the entire apartment was shaking. Felt like an earthquake, — though I didn't really see anything about it in the news. Then again, I didn't check.
I've only been in a few minor quakes here, and they were enough to give me quite the jolt. They always talk about the big one hitting... Well, bigger than the Great Hanshin Earthquake, and that one was pretty bad.
What you missed last night
Euro 360 sales double
Club Nintendo SNES controller unboxed
Trackmania Nations Forever
Celebrity Miis
XBLA Ikaruga is "horrible"
GTAIV funnies
Have we seen this? I sure haven't! Here's what's apparently the box art of the multi-platform Ghostbusters. It's the Xbox 360 version, but all the other ones seem the same. The Ghostbusters logo — this is pretty much what we were expecting. And that's what makes it so damn great. 
Tim to carry the Olympic Torch. Who are you going to choose? Pro gamers! That's right, famous pro Warcraft III gamers Jae Ho "Moon" Jang and Li "Sky" Xiaofeng will be carrying it and will be joined by StarCraft players Junchun "Pj" Sha and Lei "Leilei" Shen. No clue when these gamer luminaries will be carrying the torch, but probably sometime before it reaches Beijing.
Besides featuring SNK characters with big jubblies (old hat!), DS title and romance sim Days of Memories 2 offers things like EAR CLEANING and CAT CUDDLING scenes. Sure, Days of Memories 2 is a repackaging of previous Days cell phone games, but hey! There's ear cleaning and cat cuddling, and even if there're not mini-games (they're not), stuff like that gives us a warm fuzzy feeling in our bellies.
Pandemic are putting their shoulder to the wheel for Mercenaries 2. Don't doubt that for a minute. But at the same time, they're probably sick to death of all the palm trees and blue skies and threats from the Venezuelan government that have marked the game's development. So it's understandable they they just want to get it done and move onto the next Mercenaries, right?:
We're speechless, so let reader filip fill us in:
Earlier this week, according to Bloomberg, Enterbrain president Hirokazu Hamamura predicted a new DS would be unveiled at E3. You'd think he'd be the kind of guy - what with his company publishing Famitsu and all - to get that sort of thing right. But Nintendo quickly came out and, rather than say "no comment", went so far as to say "no dice". Now, Enterbrain themselves have felt the need to issue a statement, denying that Hamamura predicted any such thing.
Infinity Ward have sorted the PS3 version of Call of Duty 4's downloadable content out, and have announced a pair of release dates for the new maps. North Americans can expect them next Thursday, April 24, while it'll be turning up in Europe a little later, on May 1. PC owners...still nothing, I'm afraid. Maintain your vigils.
Revealing! Taken advantage of! SNK has licensed out Samurai Spirits character Iroha for the Queen's Gate art books. Titled On wo Kaseu Mono Iroha (Debt Replaying Iroha), the book is fully licensed by SNK and illustrated by 
That price cut seems to have done the trick. Microsoft are reporting that, in the weeks since they slashed the prices on all three 360 models, the console's sales have doubled. Sorry, "more than doubled". I'd just love to tell you how many consoles that actually equates to, but this being Europe, sales data trackers ChartTrack don't think you need that kind of information, so a "more than doubled" statement is all we're going to get. And while we can assume the console has indeed sold in healthy numbers, without real numbers to back that up, or to show how many it was selling before the cuts (and how many the PS3 and Wii are selling), it's all a bit pointless, isn't it? A celebratory presser entirely devoid of hard sales data follows.
Back in the 1980s, folks in Japan didn't really play erotic computer games. They were busy doing other things, 1980s things like making cassette mix-tapes and wearing Ray Ban Wayfarers. So like, it shouldn't come as a surprise that only 22 erotic games were released. That's nothing! There were probably 22 erotic games released this month alone. As website Canned Dogs points out, the big boom didn't happen until visual novels Shizuku Kizuato and To Heart were released in 1996 and 1997. By 1999, the number of ero releases spiked to 400 games. Last year, almost 550 erotic games went on sale. Compare that to the 360 games released on Japanese consoles last year. There are more ero games! That doesn't mean the erotic game market is bigger, just smuttier.
Ladies and gentlemen: WiiMan. He won't save the day, but he will at least bring a smile to it, with his shiny white cape, rampant Nintendo fanboyism and snappy Zorro mask. Oh, and his super powers: the suit's a fully-functioning Wii Remote, complete with Bluetooth, IR cam, accelerometer and even working face buttons. All that, and not a single dwarf or urine joke in sight. Well done everyone involved.
Feast your eyes! Here's an unboxing of the Japan-only Club Nintendo Super Famicom (SNES) controller. Like with the Classic Controller, the controller plugs directly in the bottom of the Wiimote. Cue bitching about it being Japan-only. Who hates Club Nintendo now? C'mon!
When the Wii finally launches in Korea next week, one of the games available will be Zack & Wiki. How do you sell a game like Zack & Wiki to the Korean market? With mousepads. Oh, and the promise of riches. Everyone who preorders the game will get two bits of merch: a mousepad and a small treasure chest filled with treasure-shaped candy. Except not all the chests contain candy. One hundred of them will contain a pearl necklace. A real, pearl necklace. This would be the part where I'd say I wished we could have gotten pearl necklaces with our preorders, but...hrm. I won't.
The dust has settled. Long ago. HD DVD is way dead, way dead. But Micrsoft Game Studios boss Shane Kim hasn't given up! The man is an optimist. He can see the bright side of a train wreck. Bless him. According to Shane Kim:
Never played TrackMania? If you own a PC and answer yes, get out. Get out of my sight. Those still here, good news! TrackMania Nations Forever was released today, and is a 500MB, downloadable version of TrackMania Nations that gives you most of what makes the series so awesome, only it's free. You get 65 tracks, you get multiplayer, you get a new track editor, and yes, it's free. Quit reading, start downloading (5x download links in the presser).
Sit down folks, Square Enix has announced a new mobile cell phone game called ELLARK. It's a "free online RPG" and is launching in Japan this June on all three major Japanese carriers. Not many details, but we're betting nice hairdos are involved.
Yes, celebrity Miis are done. So 2007. 2006, even. But putting celebrity Miis into context, and onto real-world bodies, that's a little fresher. Slobs of Gaming are running 14 pictures using just that premise, and while most of them range from sucky to very sucky, a handful shimmer, like Jesus rays poking elegantly through a night-black stormcloud.
While there was a lot to look at at the Namco Bandai Editor's Day, there were a couple things that were announced that weren't available for checking out.
You know, I could have sworn Sony 
Well, this is certainly an eye-opener.
Enjoy that XBLA Ikaruga? The current top-rated numero uno player Kingoro58k totally hates it. While he seems to put up with the XBLA port enough to reclaim his spot from a Finnish gamer, Kingoro58k writes:
There was only one XBLA/PSN game on display at yesterday's Editor's Day, but boy was it a doozy. PowerUp forever is what Namco describes as a "fractal shooter". You fly your ship around an open space taking out the wild enemies all around you. As you destroy the enemies, your ship starts growing larger as the enemies and space around you grow smaller. But, being big isn't all it's cracked up. The larger you get, the more enemies realise you are there and soon you may find yourself overwhelmed. Avoiding enemy bullets and contact with the enemies themselves becomes a harder and harder task the bigger you become.
Yes, yes, GameStop/EB Games are a cold, soulless, ruthless international corporation. But sometimes, just sometimes, someone gets into their system with a little spark. A sense of what it is to be truly human. That person's started writing up the site's legal disclaimers regarding pre-orders, with 
Uwe Boll sure as shit knows how to promote a movie. (Bummer he doesn't know how to make a movie.) With Postal coming out May 23, he's already got a 200,000 signature strong internet petition to get him to stop direction. Think Boll will stop directing? Never! About that petition, Boll says:
Didn't much like the Smash Bros Dojo. Thought it was kinda stupid. Drip-fed, inane PR at its very worst, even. Nothing wrong with the format itself, though, which is much better suited towards cataloguing a clusterfuck, like the one 
Anthony over at 
