And if shooter creation fame isn't enough to light a fire under you, Kongregate is handing out cold hard cash to the best shootorials-based user created game. Play Shoot! if you want — the fun lasts many, many seconds — but then read on to learn about Flash game development with handy illustrated examples. We're hard at work on our own "Dude Huge" shmup, currently known as Cliffydius. Watch for it!

Kongregate Labs [Kongregate]

It's not like we're lacking in DVD and Blu-ray ports of Dragon's Lair, so if you really want to give it a go and use the guide, now's your chance.

Dragon's Lair Complete Strategy Guide - With Annotations [YouTube via Waxy]

Pixel Cookies [SeattleJonman's Flickr photostream via Wonderland]

The only thing holding you back might be a friend who has access to a deserted movie theater.

But if you feel up to the mini-challenge of building your own wireless, portable sensor bar, check out the "how-to" at Jon Peck's blog. Michael McWhertor

Wii-diculous
Wii - Now Playing In Theaters [Kotaku]

The cool kids at GameVideos put together a handy compilation of their attempts at famous Mii characters, featuring the likes of everyone's favorite Nintendo character Adolf Hitler, smirking veep Dick Cheney, main man J. Christ, grief capitalizer Jack Thompson, funnyman Conan O'Brien, Nintendo prez Satoru Iwata and so many more. The dashing Mark MacDonald also gives you a quick rundown of how each one was created, for your copying or perfecting pleasure. Enjoy! Michael McWhertor

One of the cheap bastards at Cheap Ass Gamer has compiled an amazingly informative guide to importing. CAG forum member Chacranajxy originally wrote this how to for Gamespot, but has dumbed it down for all of us! He gives us the lowdown on how to mod consoles, a full list of import recommendations, which games are actually import friendly and how to buy them. Think of it as "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Importing (But Were Too Afraid to Ask)." Brian Ashcraft

More Here [CAG]

We've heard musings from those joystick-jigging arcade gods that there is a zen to Pac-Man. There's a clear, cold logic to making that yellow half-moon gobble dots and obliterate ghosts, but not all men can see it. Billy Mitchell, World Pac-Man Champion, was just a regular shmoe like me, until a bullet passed through his head in the Gulf War, leaving him miraculously unharmed but triggering a strange cerebral hemorrhage that gave him an uncanny intuition in labyrinth weaving and ghost dodging.

We here at Kotaku do not advise drilling holes in your head to get better at Pac-Man, unless you're one of the guys who keeps on writing emails telling us to "stick to the news, idiots", in which case, yes, we jolly well do. But if you'd like to get better at Pac-Man without aerating your grey matter, why not drop by Mameworld's Pac-Man guide? Using the guide, I was finally able to get to level two, so I can testify that it's a winner! And so can the lovely ladies over at Lifehacker! Florian Eckhardt

Pac-Man Guide [Mameworld] (via Lifehacker)

How To Get Your Girl Into Gaming, Florian Eckhardt Edition. Offer your girlfriend a clear choice: either she can spend a couple hours on the couch making little virtual men prance about in a brightly colored mushroom kingdom, or she can see you naked. This is a type of Pavlovian conditioning. If you're feeling vindictive, offer her the choice of either watching your corpulent strip tease or playing Battlecruiser 3000 A.D. — you will notice in her eyes the same look that people trapped in burning buildings get just before they hurl themselves out of the tenth story window. Rinse then repeat with the next girlfriend when your current one inevitably dumps you.

My technique has flawlessly converted dozens of girls into lifelong gamers, but it's not for the faint of heart. And you're S.O.L. if you look better naked than I do. Which your probably do. So if you've got a girlie who clucks her tongue, rolls her eyes and wonders aloud why you never go out anymore when she sees you jumping up and down on the couch thrashing along with Guitar Hero, you might try Cheap Ass Gamer's practical guide to converting your loved one over to the gaming fetish. It's written by a REAL. LIVE. GIRL. so there's got to be something here you can use to brainwash your spouse or significant other into a more convivial pastime. Florian Eckhardt

How To Get Your Girl Into Gaming: Advice From A Gamer Wife [Cheap Ass Gamer]

Depressingly, Gina's feature does not recommend donning a bright red hat with your first initial stitched across the front, ingesting a plateful of hallucinogenic mushrooms and then flushing yourself down the toilet straight to the magical world of the Mushroom Kingdom. But it's still filled with her usual brand of great, practical advice.

Make it to the next level

Break your task down into chunks and track your progress to completion with a level-o-meter. Similar to a fundraiser thermometer that rises with red marker the more money raised, draw yourself a personal progress bar to track your own progress.

Say you ve got a 10 page paper due for class. Before you start writing, on a nearby whiteboard or poster board, draw out a progress bar split into 10 sections. Each time you write one page, color in one section of the bar. It s completely mental, but getting to the next level can be a huge motivator.

Gina's so cool. We love her from afar.

Geek To Life: Turn To-Dos Into Game Play [Lifehacker]

By Brian Crecente

Last month I was working on a story for Playboy Magazine about all the cool music games that have come out lately with neat controllers. I was playing all of the games back-to-back when I noticed that both Guitar Hero for the PlayStation 2 and Karaoke Revolution Party for the Xbox have the song "I Love Rock and Roll" on them. Thus, a really bad idea was born.

The idea of trying to play both games at the same time has been in the back of my head since, but I didn't have the time or alcohol to test the theory. I call this a how-to article, but it's almost too impractical to be worth doing almost.

First you have to make sure you have the equipment. You'll need:

Playstation 2
Xbox
Xbox Headset
Guitar Hero Guitar
Guitar Hero for the PS2
Karaoke Revolution Party for the Xbox
Two televisions
A forgiving wife
Plenty of free time

(Hit the More for the Video)

Once you've assembled the necessary goodies and distracted said loved one, it's fairly simple to play both games at the same time.

I used a 12-inch television and a 32-inch television. I set the small television on top of the entertainment center, which houses my 32-incher. I decided to hook Guitar Hero up to the top one because I figured it would be better to have the screen showing the timing for the guitar at eye-level.

One of the minor annoyances during set-up was my realization that I had to have the Xbox controller at about waist level, mostly so I could start the game, but also because the damn cord to my headset didn't reach the floor.

Once I figured out all of the gear, I tried starting both games to see just how hard this was going to be. Fortunately, both games seemed to use songs that were played at almost the exact same tempo. Even though I was going to play the same song, the tune was played by different cover bands, so even a slight difference could cause issues.

Watching the intro for both games a couple of times, I realized that while Karaoke Revolution Party jumps straight into the guitar intro for the song, Guitar Hero has a lot of screwing around before the song and the guitar starts — 13 seconds to be exact. Actually, it's not exact; it was more like 12 and 9/10s of a second.

On my first attempt I started up Guitar Hero with my stopwatch going and then waited 13 seconds to press the start button for Karaoke Revolution Party. I flubbed it a few times, but even when I pushed the button right on 13 seconds it was still a hair off. And there's nothing worse in music than trying to play a guitar a half beat behind the tempo, especially when you're trying to sing.

It took about a dozen attempts before I got it nearly dead-on.

It was amazing to (try and) sing through "I Love Rock and Roll" while playing the guitar. At first I had some trouble doing both at the same time, mostly because I had just a casual acquaintance with the lyrics (as in just the chorus). But once I got past that it was really neat. Certainly something that anyone could do with a little practice.

Really, I'm surprised that Harmonix isn't already working on this obvious cross-over title.

My favorite bits were churning through the sweet solo while singing and cranking out the power chords. My least favorite bits were the parts that involved singing. I kid. I can't sing, but that's more the problem of everyone else in my house than my issue.

As the ultimate sign of my faith in you, our readers, I give you now the totally awesome video of me totally wailing away on Guitar Hero and Karaoke Revolution Party at the very same time without the influence of alcohol or a single singing lesson.

Luke tells me that I should warn readers not to be imbibing any form of liquid or chewing food while watching said video of my musical sucktitude. Now enjoy, or something.

Oh, one word of warning about the video, besides the fact that it features my atrocious singing, I started this little project when it was light out. Unfortunately, dusk had firmly set in by the time I landed the timing. Kinda dark, sorry about that.

Gaming Steve is a fan of Blizzard's World of Warcraft, but his friend Clapperoth is an even bigger one. So big, in fact, that Clapperoth came up with an excellent guide to leveling your fishing and cooking to 300. Click over, check it out and get out there and open that damn wall.

World of Warcraft Guide to Cooking and Fishing [Gamer Steve]

Crecente did his superb HD TV buying guide last month and today, Team Xbox put out one of their own. I don't know what kind of consumers you all are out there in Kotaku-land, but when I'm ready to sit down and buy an HDTV (sometime after I find a 360 in Detroit) I'll end up returning to these helpful links and reading, jotting down notes studying like it was college again. Erm, like it would've been college, had I been a good student, rather.

The Team Xbox Guide to HDTV [Team Xbox]
How to Buy the Ulimate Gaming TV

After a few cups of hot coffee or cocoa to rewarm your hands after you sat outside last night waiting in line for the white box of 360 now sitting on your dining room table, what better thing to do than unbox the system and take it apart? Well, you and I may not think that way, but Seth at Informit does and took his Xbox 360 apart as soon as he got home with it. There's a detailed write-up of the surgery at the link ot watch the video.

Xbox 360 Exposed [Informit]
Xbox 360 Exposed: The Movie

Thanks Myke for the tip!

Sidney Shuman over at Games.net sure thinks so. Shuman outlines five no nonsense suggestions to developers for fixing the video game industry.

Shuman's suggestion that games shouldn't be "cinematic experiences" is his most interesting point. From the piece:

In the vast majority of cases, there's no reason to mimic the presentation, style, or conventions of a Hollywood film.

What Shuman could be overlooking is that video games are still a new medium, and the methods for telling stories within the medium are still aping existing media (i.e. film).

Ars Technica has posted their second Gaming Box System Guide. The update to their first game computer walk-through guide adds write-ups for a budget gaming box and performance gaming box. While these are very helpful, the problem with guides like this is that they don't date very well. I've always liked Geek.com's system which has is updated quite frequently to include the latest components.

Ars System Guide: Gaming Box [Ars Technica]