Luke Plunkett

Gears Scans

There’ll Be No Barrel Rolls For This Star Fox

As seen on Threadless

Medal of Honor Kicks Your Door Down This October

Electronic Arts’ reboot of the Medal of Honor series will be out this October, the publisher announced this morning. The game, set in Afghanistan and with a realistic slant, will be out in the US on October 12. And Europe? October 15. The game will be available on the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. Medal…

Star Wars, In Two Minutes, With LEGO

So yesterday was “Star Wars Day”? Well that’s stupid. Every day should be Star Wars day. To punish you for your shoe-horning, you must now watch this clip, which tells the original trilogy’s story in 2 minutes. With LEGO. I wish the LEGO Star Wars game had been this canonical and to the point. And…

Classic NES Game Gets Its Action Figure Dues

River City Ransom, one of the more fondly-remembered side-scrollers on the Nintendo Entertainment System, isn’t the most obvious choice when it comes to commemorative action figures. Which is probably what makes River City Ransom action figures so great. Shown off at the Treasure Festa show going on in Japan at the moment, this custom kit…

The Prettiest Gaming Magazine This Month

This is EXP., a new magazine that smartly rejects “the idea that a video game magazine has to be be comprised of reviews and previews of the latest games”. What’s it do instead? Look pretty, and be interesting. Not to be confused with exp magazine, it’s far from the first publication to walk this path,…

Where Does GameStop Make Its Money?

It makes it selling video games. Used video games, especially. But if you’ve ever wanted to break that question down a little more, and see where it makes its money both in the US and overseas, here’s your chance. Gamasutra’s Matt Matthews has broken down the multinational retailer’s latest fiscal year results and translated them…

The Best Nintendo Games That Never Were

Is it that time of year already? Time flies when you’re waiting for the latest instalment of Famicase (fake-Famicom-cartridges-as-art), an annual treat hosted by Japanese game store Meteor. Here are the pick of 2010’s crop. The deal with Famicase is that artists come up with a cartridge for a game that doesn’t exist. That’s basically…

George Lucas Said No To A Wookiee Superhero Game

The story propelling Lucasart’s Force Unleashed is one of apprenticeship, Imperial cleavage, good and evil. It could have been about a Wookiee superhero, which would have been awesome, but no, George Lucas nixed that idea. In the latest issue of GamePro, developers Haden Blackman and Julio Torres remember the heady days of 2005, when the…

The PlayStation Move Won’t Wear A Condom

For most of its life, the Nintendo Wii Remote has been sheathed in rubber, its native form factor obscured over fears of death and destruction. Sony’s Move controller, on the other hand, will breathe the free air. Raising the prospect of smashed TVs with Sony Computer Entertainment’s studio boss, Shuhei Yoshida replied “What’s good about…

So, How Are You Finding The Halo: Reach Beta?

While some us got our jetpacks dirty last week, for most, the Halo: Reach beta began in earnest on Monday. Meaning many of you are probably knee-deep in teabags by now. Which begs the question: what do you think? I know it’s a beta, and it’s still early days, but first impressions are also the…

FIFA World Cup 2010 Review: I Got 199 Teams, But Vatican City Ain’t One

As has been customary with every World Cup and European Championships since the year 1998, EA Sports has this year released a video game to cash in on the planet’s biggest sporting event, the 2010 World Cup. Being, you know, the planet’s biggest sporting event, you can hardly blame EA as a business for wanting…

There Will Be A Pro Evo Soccer This Year

There will be a 2010 release of Konami’s venerable football series Pro Evolution Soccer. It will be called Pro Evolution Soccer 2011. If you need a moment to compose yourself, now is the time. New features promised are a new animation system, new AI, new commentary (FINALLY) and, most promising, an online Master League. In…

More “Hollywood” Mega Man Art

Oh boy. Remember those professional Mega Man renders we showed you last month? Turns out there are more of them. The first batch were by pro artist David Espinoza, but it turns out his friend Yoshi Vu has been working on some as well (the pair were hammered playing Mega Man 2 when they came…

The Building Blocks Of Video Games

Like movies, the design of games can often be reduced to a set of “building blocks”, various elements that you can combine to form the final product. It’s an abstract concept, but one that’s perfectly illustrated in this…card game. Put together by Christophe Berg, Niki Smit & Liselore Goedhart, “Game Seeds” is part of the…

Aussie Politician Wants Government To Buy Wii For Sick Man

A state minister from Victoria, Australia has been publicly rebuked after personally campaigning – in parliament – for one of his constituents to be given a Wii. Gordon Rich-Phillips, a member of the Liberal Party and Victoria’s Assistant Opposition Treasurer, got up in parliament and asked that Victoria’s WorkCover Authority (ie the worker’s comp guys)…

THQ Founder Passes Away

Jack Friedman, the founder of publisher THQ – the guys behind UFC, Dawn of War & Company Of Heroes – passed away yesterday at the age of 70. Friedman had been involved in the game business for decades, first by forming toy company (and later video game publisher) LJN in 1970, and then by founding…

Netflix Used By “Almost” One Million Wii Owners

Proving that owners of Nintendo’s current home console are perfectly happy with “Wii Definition” visuals, it’s been disclosed today that “almost” one million Wii users have “participated” in the Wii’s Netflix streaming service since its launch last month. That figure comes directly from Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aime, and while “participated” is a vague,…

EXP.

IBM Builds Its Own SimCity Game

Computing giant IBM will later today unveil CityOne, which is basically SimCity, except IBM made it instead of EA, and the focus is on sustainable cities instead of rampaging UFOs and reticulated splines. I like where this is going. It’s a 21st century SimCity, substituting worries over train stations and airports with more modern concerns…