Club Nintendo of Japan’s Totally Sweet Mario Bros. Totes

Another day, another chance to curse our local iteration of Club Nintendo while coveting the goods offered to Nintendo fans in Japan. Take these lovely Mario and Luigi toned totes, which proudly celebrate Super Mario Bros. 25th anniversary. Update: Oops! These Club Nintendo prizes are being given away to members via lottery, not by cashing…

Garry’s Mod Brings Source Powered Insanity To Macs

Garry Newman’s crazy physics sandbox for the Source engine, the one that lets you manipulate, animate and torture characters from Half-Life, Counter-Strike and Team Fortress, has joined the list of Mac games on Steam. “What’s Garry’s Mod?,” you might be asking yourself, dear Mac owner. It’s the playground with which hilarious and spectacular videos like…

Halo: Reach Was Second-Most Popular Xbox Live Game In Its Launch Week [Corrected]

Xbox Live’s Major Nelson released data on Thursday showing that Halo: Reach was the No. 2 game on Xbox Live in its launch week, trailing only Modern Warfare 2. It had four times as many players as Halo 3. Hyrb notes that Halo: Reach, which released on Sept. 14, was available only six of the…

Stars

To: Luke From: Crecente Stars! You love em, I love em. Soon we may have more of them. Mysterious! What you missed: Peter Molyneux’s Son Calls Out Valve On Half-Life 3 Delay Taking a Hockey Stick to Wii Party Swords Review: It Slices, It Dices, It Sucks Facebook Malfunction Spawns FarmVille Panic, Schadenfreude Teaching Our…

Rock Band Proves Its Mettle With More METAL Next Week

Harmonix is making Rock Band’s already massive song list a little heavier next week, adding a fresh injection of thrash metal, thanks to Anthrax. That’s just a small slice of the rock band coming to Rock Band soon. Portions of Anthrax’s “Among The Living,” released in 1986, will join new tracks from not-quite-as-metal acts The…

NBA 2K11’s Player Ratings Bring The Heat

Operation Sports today got the player ratings for all 30 starting lineups in NBA 2K11. Unsurprisingly, the Miami Heat have the league’s top rated starting five, though they are tied with the Los Angeles Lakers for that position. The Heat, who added Chris Bosh and LeBron James to Dwyane Wade, average to an 82.2 rating…

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Teaching Our Schools To Up Their Game

In this Finding Your Science video from the National Science Foundation Arizona State University linguist James Paul Gee discusses how schools kill the joy of learning and how video games can bring it back to life. James Gee is a strong supporter of learning through interaction. He believes that learning is one of life’s foremost…

Donkey Kong Country Pre-order Bonuses Are Bananas

Wii owners who have already earmarked funds for Donkey Kong Country Returns for the Wii may want to fork over some of that cash to GameStop, especially if they want to encase their Wii Remotes in banana pouches. GameStop is offering the Wii-owning banana fan something cute and clever with which to dress up their…

There’s A New Convertible Keyboard In Town

When peripheral manufacturer SteelSeries bought out Zboard creator Ideazon in 2008, everyone wondered what would happen to the Zboard. The SteelSeries Shift is what happened to the Zboard. Ideazon’s Zboard was a keyboard with interchangeable keysets tailored to different popular PC titles. If one wanted to play EverQuest 2, they would slap in the EverQuest…

Let This Be The Lone Uncharted Kart Racer

Thanks to the PlayStation 3’s ModNation racers, game developers who might dream of detouring their best series into the Mario Kart genre can instead just make, say, an Uncharted ModNation track. The official Uncharted mods are now available for all. Developers from Uncharted studio Naughty Dog have made an official bundle of ModNation DLC: ModNation…

Super Meat Boy Creators Say ‘Fuck You’ To The DLC System With ‘Teh Internets’

Team Meat, the makers of upcoming Xbox Live Arcade release Super Meat Boy, have devised a way to deliver downloadable levels to their bloody, meaty indie platformer, all for free. They call it “Teh Internets.” This unlockable chapter in Super Meat Boy grants players of the XBLA game the option to download future chapters, to…

Sackboy Invades The Kingdom Of Dotnia

On the same day LittleBigPlanet 2 is delayed a feature update for Atlus’ 3D Dot Game Heroes brings a special guest to the retro land of Dotnia. From one creativity fueled PlayStation 3 exclusive to another, LittleBigPlanet’s Sackboy makes his Dotnia debut in today’s feature update for 3D Dot Game Heroes. Sackboy is not alone…

Facebook Malfunction Spawns FarmVille Panic, Schadenfreude

Facebook is not working well right now. It’s down for a lot of folks. That means FarmVille crops may be dying. And that means some people are upset. Others are laughing. Let’s go to Twitter to survey the immediate reaction:

A New Halo Game Every Three Years Is Not Enough

Microsoft wants key entries in the Halo series to make their way to your Xbox 360 a little faster, increasing the frequency of the standard three year cycle developer Bungie was known for. But just how frequent? Phil Spencer, VP at Microsoft Game Studios, tells IGN that “one Halo game every three years – which…

Halo: Reach Armor Lock Not Quite As Useful In Real Life

If you could have any of Halo: Reach’s new armor abilities in real life, would you choose armor lock? Watch this video before answering. I would have chosen active camo myself, but then I am the sort of suspicious character who could benefit from being invisible once in awhile. Jet pack would finish second, followed…

Ninja Gaiden Developers Have A New Vision

Ninja Gaiden 3 is coming, under the direction of Yosuke Hayashi, a Team Ninja veteran who now heads the Japanese development studio responsible for that series and the latest Metroid. His team has a vision. This is it: In a new clip, partially screencapped here, Hayashi introduces fans to the new Team Ninja website. He…

Oh No It’s A Mr. Bill iPhone Game

Capcom resuscitates a 34-year-old Claymation Saturday Night Live joke in Mr. Bill for the iPhone. One would think that after more than three decades being abused by Mr. Sluggo and Mr. Hand the Claymation family man Mr. Bill would have wised up. Sadly that is not the case. The hero of the clay has fallen…

Swords Review: It Slices, It Dices, It Sucks

Of all the ways to play using motion-detecting video games, swordplay seems to offer the most potential for fun. The give and take of fencing and Kendo seem like easy rules to mimic in a video game and the slashing motion of using your sword to attack and block seem like the sort of big…

‘Replayability’ Might Be A Bad Word

I wish people would stop using the word “visceral” when they talk about video games. It conveys nothing to me. Writer Ben Abraham is enraged by a different word: “replayability.” In a recent essay his essay he tears into “replayability” a word, he says in a semi-ironically, is “what is fucking wrong with videogames.” He…