Each week throws off several new video game lists ranging from the humorous to the trivial. What's better? A list of those. Here's a roundup of the rundowns out there.
•Advertising 101: 10 Awesome Game Trailers to Learn From [The Bits, Bytes, Pixels and Sprites] Game trailers have emerged as a kind of art form to themselves, the same as theatrical trailers did around the late 1980s and early 1990s, when people lined up to see Batman's. The BBPS rates the best hype-builders, as a model of effective advertising. Really though, most of these are relying on past reputation for impact. Fallout 3's trailer (No. 8) was just a re-edit of the game's opening cinematic. Probably took about 20 seconds to make.
•Top 20 Mario Power Ups [Official Nintendo Magazine] There are more than 20? ONM's ranking covers pretty much every performance enhancer in the Mario continuity, beginning with the hammer from Donkey Kong. No. 1 is The Tanooki Suit. No-brainer. But just because I'm a contrarian old school bastard, I'd have thrown in the POW bumper from original Mario Bros.
•The 5 Best Console Wars [GamePro] Son, let me tell you about the old wars. Genesis versus Super Nintendo was epic, sure. But in my day, it was Intellivision vs. Atari VCS. It was 5200 vs. ColecoVision, right there on the pages of Consumer Reports. It was Commodore 64 vs Apple ][. It was fistfights in the recess yard. It was Bill "Dynamite" Douglas tossing a missile at Tom "The Bomb" Bethea's face and knocking his mouthpiece into Madison Square Garden's third row. Wait, wrong nostalgia. But let's not pretend console wars started in 1991. It's been around as long as there's been consoles. And wars.
•Five Consoles We'd Like to See Get Slim [MTV Multiplayer] MTV lays down a wildcard with "Capcom's CPS-2 Arcade Board." But for consoles currently in production, there's only one that can take a rightsizing, and it's the 360, and Microsoft's shot that down. Everything else before it - including original Xbox - can have its architecture jammed into 1/5th the space, sure. You can play Genesis games on an iPhone. How's that for slim?
• Top 10 Best Video Games for Couples [SF Weekly] I like anything that gets the qualifier "for couples" because it usually means porn. Man, this one time in my Rocky Mountain News days, my girlfriend and I were driving back from a date and she suggested we get "a movie," and then I had to waste 15 minutes pretending I didn't know where the porn store was, when if I had let go of the steering wheel the car could have probably driven itself, like goddamn Knight Rider, to the nearest spank booth and parked in my assigned space out front. Where was I? The selections here are mostly cute, non-core stuff, with Contra on the NES as one counterintuitive pick and House of the Dead: Overkill as a surprising No. 2. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved gets No. 1.