If you’re in the vicinity of a Best Buy tomorrow morning, you might want to stop in a grab a few games. Seems that they’re going to be slashing the bejeezus out of old game prices, for every console besides the Wii and PS3. Most of them are going for $1.99, with a few higher end titles going from $5-$10. Hit the link for the very very long list of bargains. Here’s a few highlights that caught my eye:
- $1.99 GAMECUBE – Legend of Zelda Four Swords Adventures
It’s Zelda for a buck ninety nine. Don’t be a fucking retard, just buy it. - $1.99 GAMECUBE – Legend of Zelda The Wind Waker
Ditto. - $1.99 DS – Advance Wars
If you own a DS, you must own this. I command it. - $1.99 Xbox 360 – King Kong
Yeah… I’m sort of kidding. The game may have sucked, but I’ve heard that it’s an easy 1000 points towards that Old Spice Challenge on XBL. Plus for a couple of bucks, you can have a game that is potentially really fun to mock while drunk or stoned. - $4.99 Xbox – The Warriors
Well worth your five bucks if you’ve got a friend to play through it with. Although I heard there was a very decent PSP port with good multiplayer as well.
There’s a lot of other great stuff in there that I didn’t mention, like the GTA’s, Castlevanias, and Beyond Good & Evil. This sale had better not be a bunch of bullshit, or I’m going to punch one of those tubby yellow shirted fuckstains in the kidneys until his pee turns red. I want Me and My Katamari for the PSP for five bucks, damn it, and I’m going to get it.
Also, for all of you 360 owners, Bongweasel let me know that the oldschool arcade port of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles showed up on PartnerNet (the developer’s very rad version of XBL, damn them) with a very odd frontend, but the same excellent action and online multiplayer. Let’s just hope that they bring this damned thing to regular XBLA users.
And if you’re waiting in anxious anticipation for the Halo 3 Beta to open up like I am, you’ll want to see all of the slick new leaked stuff that has been trickling onto the web. It looks a lot better than the last batch of fuzzy leaked screens. Time to finish up Crackdown post haste, methinks.
Well, that sale sucked ass. I went for the PSP stuff, since Sony refuses to lower the price of a for-all-intents-and-purposes dead system’s software, and they had a grand total of two games, both of which I wouldn’t have paid $1.99 for, much less the $9.99 sale price.
Ah well.
I found a few games, mostly ones for my little brothers, I did happen to find The Warriors, but there were no games for 1.99 except for the espn sports games, and generic crap like “Ford Truck Racing”. I was one of the first people in there too, before anything was picked up. OH well. I really wanted Four swords and Advance Wars: DS. boofuckinhoo eh?
We fight with our steel, we fight with our courage, but above all we fight them with our faith in Sigmar!â€
– Magnus the Pious
The greatest nation of men in the Old World, the Empire is composed of the human descendants of Sigmar, who united the tribes of men at the Battle of Black Fire Pass. Sigmar was deified after the battle and his promise of eternal aid to the kingdom of Dwarfs still stands today. This action solidified the relationship between men and Dwarfs and planted the seeds for the burgeoning Empire through trade. Today, the Empire is led by Emperor Karl Franz, who rules from his seat in the city-state of Altdorf.
The life of a citizen of the Empire is a perilous one, for there are foes within every shadow and enemies around every corner. Secret cults abound, or at the very least, there are rumors of them running rampant. No one is certain who is trustworthy, and fear and paranoia are omnipresent in the isolated settlements that dot the Empire’s provinces.
As the Empire rots from within, it is constantly under assault from without. Chaos Marauders from the north frequently mount massive campaigns into the Empire, pillaging and destroying all that they can. In the Age of Reckoning, such a warhost has attacked the Empire’s northern borders under the leadership of a powerful Champion. The timing of the invasion is particularly ill-fortuned, for the Empire is being ravaged by a mysterious plague that is transforming the populace into murderous fiends.
Faced with such desperate circumstances, Emperor Karl Franz has been forced to call upon the Dwarfs and High Elves for aid, lest his lands be transformed forever into a nightmarish domain of Chaos
The Bright Wizard is a master of destruction by magic, and a specialist in fire. Fire is at the heart of his every ability, and indeed at the heart of the Wizard himself. Using the power of the wind of fire, he can lay waste to swaths of enemies, or incinerate select foes with white hot energy. His magic feeds upon itself, upon the enemy, and upon the Wizard. Embracing the fires within his mind, the Bright Wizard himself is engulfed in flame. He directs this inferno against his foes, filling them with searing power until they burst, incinerated by arcane flames so hot they threaten to ignite the air itself.
Bright Wizard Specialty
There are secrets which only the Bright Wizards know… The Seven Keys, arcane talismans and techniques too reckless and destructive for the minds of humanity’s Elven tutors, are mastered by every Bright Wizard and afford him considerable power. Each key lends the Bright Wizard’s magic a unique aspect, and all of them expand his power. With his mastery of the magic of fire, and the power of the Keys, his spells burn his foes, and then burn their own magic, combining to create a deadly conflagration.
Playing as a Bright Wizard
As a Bright Wizard you will destroy the enemy with arcane fire, but you must do so with cunning intellect, or risk finding your own end despite your power. Your defenses are minimal, and you are nothing if not obvious. For you, the best defense is your own mighty offense and that can be a very powerful deterrent. Quick decisive action is pivotal to your fighting. You must unleash your spells on the enemy forth with so that they have the greatest possible opportunity to burn. Then you must take advantage of the opportunities this presents, using other powers to detonate your burning victims. If you are incautious, you may be slain before your enemy is defeated, only for him to fall to your lingering magic, but with skill and quick thinking victory will be yours.
Fighting the Bright Wizard
The only real solution to a Bright Wizard’s deadly power is his death, and even this may not save you if he has had time to do his work. His magic lingers and burns, so you must be prepared to withstand not only his powerful direct assault, but the aftereffects of your battle. Resistance to his spells is key in limiting his ability to destroy you outright, but offensive power is equally important for putting him to a quick end. Ultimately, against a Bright Wizard it will be a race to see who can kill who first. However, it is a race for which he is well equipped, and his tools make him more and more potent the longer that race goes on.
Piked up a bunch of games from best buy, then went across the street to walmart, returned them as unopened gifts and walked away with $200 and games I acutally wanted.
Rather than let it wait for weeks, I rushed to crop a bunch of pictures and write a bunch of commentary about IGF 2007!
It was a really great year and we had a lot of fun. It’s starting to feel like my life is an infinite loop of Comic-Con and IGF. Not to mention we’re going to our second PAX this year, so throw that one into the rotation. Wash, rinse, repeat! It’s always a good time, though.
I went to a talk by Koji Igarashi from Konami, the guy who makes the Castlevania games. He talked a bit about their challenges with sprite characters in high definition. One solution has been to make 3D games that play from a 2D perspective, while the other was to use traditional hand-drawn animation. However, Koji noted that traditional animators aren’t as experienced with animating for games. Sounds like there could be jobs out there for traditional animators who are…
There were related concerns from other companies I talked to, who were finding they couldn’t cram high-resolution art into the size restrictions of their games. We faced a similar challenge when it came time to turn Alien Hominid HD into a 50 meg game for XBLA, so we developed some cool tools that made it work.
Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers feature 100% hand drawn, high-definition art. There are tons of traditional animators right here on Newgrounds who are drawing with a Wacom tablet. After all this talk about sparking a 2D revolution, I feel like we really are on the cusp of something… With the release of the original TMNT arcade game on XBLA this week, I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like if they released the original game, but with hand-drawn art that was identical to the cartoon. It would have been pretty cool, right?
What I’m getting at is… Think about how your art can apply to gaming. I’d love to see a lot more artist / programmer teams come together the way many already have here on Newgrounds. I think there’s a lot of exciting stuff on the horizon. 😉
BTW… Don’t forget that Pico Day is less than two months away! This would be a good opportunity for some programmers and artists to team up and WIN CASH!