RPGs: Stop Making Bad First Impressions 
Is Hitman's Next Target Assassin's Creed? 
Why Kotaku Australia Should Never Work With Children... Or Robots 
Three Words I Said To The Man I Defeated In Gears Of War That I'll Never Say Again 
New Doom 3 For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 Supports Head-Mounted Displays 
Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land Watercooler Games saw this earlier in the week and gave a detailed deconstruction of how a Free the Falklands! concept would be graphically impossible on the Atari 2600. I took one look and knew it was satire because one of the writers for this site, Jason Torchinsky, is a comedian and a name I remember as the editorial cartoonist of The Daily Tar Heel back when I was at N.C. State’s Technician in the early 1990s.
But play along, because it’s funny. Why look, his site, the Van Gogh-Goghs, have unearthed from some New Mexico landfill documented evidence of 11 scrapped projects for the Atari 2600! The casualties included such licensing/adaptations as Bosom Buddies (a cross between Kaboom! and Donkey Kong, and Kramer vs. Kramer (like Pong with children). My favourite, because I like poop jokes, is Gunther Gebel-Williams’ Cage Cleaner. The bogus rationale for the bogus game sounds like pure pre-video-game-crash self-b.s.ing: “You can’t blow up asteroids in real life, but you sure as [expletive deleted]can clean up [expletive deleted] “.
The Best Atari 2600 Games You Never Heard Of [The Van Gogh-Goghs, via Water Cooler Games]
Factor Five’s Julian Eggebrecht, following what’s started as a shaky response to Lair, has reassessed his position on licensing IPs. Addressing a crowd in roundtable discussion, here was his experiential advice.
A couple weeks back Hasbro worked a deal to buy back their casual game licences from Atari, leaving me wondering what big plans they had in store for their classic board game titles like Scrabble, Monopoly, and Yahtzee. Well now we know. Hasbro has now entered into a licensing agreement with EA, granting them the exclusive rights to develop titles based on several of the company’s intellectual properties for consoles, mobile, handheld and PC platforms. Not limited to board games, the agreement also includes popular children’s properties like Nerf, Tonka, and the Littlest Pet Shop. “Our toy and game brands have been family-favourites for decades, and aligning ourselves with EA will result in broadening the reach of our brands through the ‘re-imagining’ of these beloved entertainment icons in all key digital categories,” said Brian Goldner, Hasbro’s Chief Operating Officer.
There’s a scary word. Re-imagining. “What if the Monopoly pieces had guns?” No re-imagining please!
