This Mario Gun Will Shoot You in the Awesomeness

Custom toy genius Kody Koala is back. This time he’s turned a Nerf gun into a Mario gun. According to Kody Koala (aka Donald), “I used a Nerf Nite Finder, Mag lite mini flashlight, a PVC pipe, and an old Super Mario Sound Drop key chain that I had lying around.” Kody Koala is thinking…

Here’s Everything I Learned About Borderlands Legends

Have you heard? One of this year’s most exciting releases—Borderlands 2—is getting an iOS complement…sort of. The mobile game—called Borderlands Legends—is part shooter, part RPG, part action, and part strategy. Yes, all those things. And somehow, except for the occasional clutter, it works pretty well. From an angled projection, top-down view, you’ll control the original…

Project X Zone is Far More Than Just a Crossover Gimmick

Project X Zone is a new strategy RPG that takes famous characters from Capcom, Namco-Bandai and Sega franchises and combines them all into one mega-crossover adventure. There are characters from everything from Sakura Wars to Darkstalkers. But this crossover gimmick is far from all there is to the game and it easily holds its own…

Teacher Dresses Up as a Maid to Reward Her Students

It started with a promise: “If the class’ test scores this month are the highest for this grade in school, I will teach in a maid’s outfit,” a teacher in China apparently told her students. According to Xinhua, the teacher stayed true to her word, showing up in a frilly maid outfit and teaching a…

PS3 firmware (4.30) is causing Monster Hunter Portable 3rd HD Ver. to freeze, Sony said. An update to fix is incoming.

Why So Many Games These Days Are “Japan-Only”

Tales of Xillia is a great game—perhaps the best JRPG on the PlayStation 3. It was the second best-selling PS3 game in Japan last year (ninth best-selling in Japan overall), with 660,000 copies sold. And in a country where anything over 100,000 copies sold is considered a financial success, Tales of Xillia was a run-away…

You’ll Never Guess Where Burger King’s Pumpkin Burger Hides Its Lettuce

In the press image Burger King Japan released of its new “Bomb Pumpkin” burger, you can see the lettuce sitting atop ten slices of Japanese squash. In reality, however, it’s a different story. Japanese site Gigazine ordered the pumpkin behemoth burger, which didn’t appear to have any lettuce whatsoever. Oh, but there is lettuce—a solid…

This Pikachu Hairstyle Is Utterly Terrifying

Spotted in a Japanese men’s fashion magazine, this hair and make-up job is Pikachu themed. It’s also frightening. The ears look like clip-on decorations—they were supposedly made with what’s called “sukige” (すき毛), which is fake hair that’s sometimes used for more volume. These were then colored yellow and black. The look is completed with face…

Tokitowa Has the Best Characters of Any JRPG This Year

What roleplaying games have that separates them from other types of games is their focus on story more than gameplay. And with this deep exploration of the story comes a game far longer than other genres. While you will spend an average of ten hours on most single-player titles, RPGs can easily last triple that…

Browser Sengoku Basara, the browser game version of Sengoku Basara, is going offline after debuting this summer.

Chinese Grandma Tries to Shut Down a Microsoft Event, Then Things Get Ugly

To kick off Surface, Microsoft held big launch events in China. At the midnight event in Beijing, there were dancers, loud music, and one pissed off grandma. That’s when things got ugly. According to Sina, the noise was apparently keeping her grandchildren awake—a problem since the next day was a schoolday. So the grandma and…

Time to Overdose on Awesome Plastic

This Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Bandai’s annual Tamashii Nations figure event steamrolls Tokyo. Do you like collectable, plastic friends? Then this might be the event for you. On display were an array of Japanese figures, ranging from super heroes to heroines, as well as robots and monsters. Websites Moeyo and Gigazine were on hand to…

Seven Misconceptions about Vampires To Keep In Mind as You Kill Them

The author of The Zombie Combat Manual Roger Ma is back with a new guidebook: The Vampire Combat Manual, which dispenses advice on how to battle vampires. In the excerpt below, Ma tackles misconceptions about the imagery beings—just in time for Halloween: MISCONCEPTION #1: VAMPIRES ARE METAPHYSICAL BEINGS Of all the falsehoods that exist regarding…

Charizard Sets Japan Ablaze with a Special 3DS XL

This isn’t a matter of having enough badges to train Charizard—you’re going to need to win a raffle to snag this limited edition 3DS XL. Between November 3 and November 26 at Pokémon Center retail shops across Japan (or via mail-in), you can enter to win the chance to buy this very special 3DS XL…

They Pirated His Game, But This Developer is Giving Tech Support Anyway

Jonatan Soderstrom, one of the duo behind the fantastic Hotline Miami, should be the last person on Earth giving advice to people pirating his games. So it’s weird/nice to see him actually being one of the first. On the game’s thread at torrent site The Pirate Bay (and spotted by PC Gamer), Soderstrom has dropped…

Forget Wallpaper, This Art Deserves a Good Frame and a Spot on Your Wall

It’s all just so…beautiful. Where most game artists have a palette that starts at “violent” and ends at “dark”, Theo Prins’ work here has a warmth and colour to it that’s as refreshing as it is a pleasure to look at. Theo works at Guild Wars 2 developers ArenaNet, on whose site you can read…

Hey Samsung, Don’t Drag Video Games Into Your Apple Pissing Match

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 12 months, the epic legal battle between Apple and Samsung has been one of the biggest tech stories of the year. It’s a bitter fued, with billions at stake, so it’s sad to see poor little ol’ video games dragged into the fight in…

Square Enix is Spying on You (But It’s To Make Better Games)

When you blindly click “agree” on Square Enix’s online terms & conditions, you probably didn’t notice that you’re saying you agree to allow the publisher to record the way you play a game. While this sounds nefarious, it’s actually part of an operation run from an office in London—and detailed in this MCV report—whose job…

We Are One Step (And Short Jump) Closer To Real Metal Gears

Terrifying robot watch update: in the video above, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) robot called “Pet-Proto” is locked in a corridor and presented with two obstacles. The first is a step it must climb onto. The second is a gap it must inch across. It’s like a video game tutorial. Only instead of…

Team Fortress 2 Gets Zombies in Halloween-Themed “Scream Fortress” Event

Just a few months after cold, unfeeling automatons came to Valve’s hit co-op shooter in Mann vs. Machine, the publisher’s unleashing waves of the undead on Team Fortress 2 According to Polygon, an update to the Team Fortress 2 website announced a two-week Scream Fortress event that will herald the return of necromancer Merasmus, who…