Brentalfloss put this up on YouTube yesterday. It's kind of a schtick with him (see Mega Man 3, 6, first Dr. Wily level of Mega Man 2, all more than two months old ) But this title has a special place in the hearts of many, so sit back and enjoy.

This probably is also a good place to mention that, over on Capcom Unity, they're teasing the Mega Man 9 soundtrack as available soon through the Capcom store. (See left:)

I'm gonna have this shit stuck in my head all day. Megamegamega Mannnnnn ... now backwards you would say: Man Mega!"

Mega Man 2 Title with Lyrics [YouTube via GoNintendo]

Well since retro-revival's as much the rage in cinema as it is gaming, there's a Death Race remake coming to the screen in a couple of weeks. And the movie's history as the inspiration for a hot-button game controversy is something any marketer would exploit. So the film's official web site has a flash advergame — top down racer with some weapons thrown in. It sucks.

I was 3 in 1976, so I can't speak for the state of people's thinking at the time. But I really do wonder if its level of violence is indeed trivial, even for its age, or if I only feel that way because I've seen so much more, and so much worse. It's hard to consider Death Race as the first pebble trickling off a slippery slope, and definitely makes it more important than it deserves to be.

Death Race Movie Game [Death Race Movie, via Water Cooler Games]

Rob Zacny has a thought provoking piece up at the Escapist: on the whole, we're the worst genre when it comes to preserving our history, even the great classics acknowledged as 'great.' In a society — never mind technical area — where progress and marching forward is the name of the game, it's not exactly surprising, but a problem nonetheless. And not just for the history buffs among us:

Gamers are used to this problem by now, but that doesn't make it any more tolerable. Imagine if nobody could listen to a Duke Ellington record, or watch a Hitchcock movie, or read a Yeats poem. Not only would that rob us of our cultural inheritance, it would eliminate the influence that these artists have on contemporary culture. The same principles should apply to games. As gamers, we need to recognize that some games are more than disposable diversions, and that their relevance endures even as the technology that created and supported them falls into obsolescence.

Preserving and promoting classic games is vital to the health of the entire industry. In gaming, as much as any art form, "merit" is not always self-evident. Anyone with a passionate interest in game development should have a sense of what has already been achieved, and that cannot be developed if gamers are only playing "the latest and greatest" titles.

Zacny suggests a concerted effort at rereleases, a 'classics revival' of sorts. I'm personally quite excited by the fact that several institutions are making a concerted effort at planning for and undertaking archiving of games and consoles — I hope, much like my beloved books that were out of print by the middle of the 19th century but were lovingly reprinted in the 20th, we see a trickle down effect from that. A more concerted effort on the part of publishers would be fabulous, but that will require an audience hungry to purchase this stuff.

Excellence Never Goes out of Date [The Escapist]

Microsoft has announced plans to release six classic Atari titles over Xbox live, starting this January. Missile Command. Battlezone, Tempest, and Warlords are in the works, along with dual releases of Centipede/Millipede and Asteroids/Asteroids Deluxe.

All the games will come in two flavors - original and extra-pretty. Warlords and Battlezone are both to feature online multiplayer, with the latter even supporting the Xbox Live Vision camera. As much as I loved the original Battlezone, I feel it sorely lacked in the people broadcasting videos of their penis department. Technology is truly a wonderful thing.

Personally I cannot wait to be able to download classic games from my childhood, play them for a half-hour tops, then get bored and forget I ever purchased them. Let's face it, we were very easily amused back then. Michael Fahey

Six Atari Classics to Launch on Xbox Live Arcade For Xbox 360 [Game Infowire]

PGC: Do you fly the ship, since there are multiple planets this time around? Do you have any kind of shooting stages or anything like that?

Pacini: Samus doesn't directly fly her ship. You do go to different planets with your ship, but you don't have direct flight control over it. However, we are using the ship for gameplay as a tool for Samus. She has a new visor called the Command Visor, which will allow Samus from the third-person to control her ship remotely. So you can call it in to do air strikes, you can have it come in and lift large things out of your way or move them around in the environment, as well as use it as a platform, things like that. It's another tool, a unique way to use the ship rather than just fly it around, diluting the gameplay.

Calling in air strikes in Metroid? That's the bee's knees. - Florian Eckhardt

INTERVIEWS: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption E3 Interview [Planet Gamecube]