Posts by Brandon Daiker

I suppose it's not necessary for me to summarize this morning's new Nintendo Direct presentation, which focused entirely on Wii U a mere week and a half in advance of its American release—plenty of other websites have that useless task covered. But I think I should at least call attention to a few of the neatest little bits that other places probably aren't going to talk too much about.

Certain places still do it to me, the right intersection between smoking area and kitchen and just enough noise to block out my brain. Maybe an underground train station shop where they're frying food on sticks and there's two tables and four seats at the bar, a tiny set playing a Tigers game. Or a roadside rest stop, just outside the smoking room, a burger place attached and a couple people.

I bought this new HD remaster version of Okami that came out on PS3 a couple days ago, and I've been ripping into it just like I did back when I got the original PS2 version. It's comforting to me that it still holds up, still feels intelligent and well-made. It's less surprising as a game now though, which is a testament to its refinements—lots of games have since borrowed elements that Okami introduced.

Though Halloween (that's today!) seems like the ideal time to get all crafty and dress up in a homemade representation of your favorite geeky pop-cultural figure, one serious pixel-art fan says there's more to his work than just making costumes. Dan Cattell first made a splash in game circles with widely-viewed pictures of his work—life-sized video game sprites that are worn as suits and fully moveable by the people inside—last year.

In Japan, companies have to pay a certain amount of money, a small tax, to sell toys. For some reason, if their toy includes a kind of candy item, the item is classified as a candy instead of a toy, and the tax is either reduced or negated. It is for Precisely This Reason that the shelves of many Japanese grocery stores and supermarkets, despite lacking exotic items like "

Despite the gaming riches now available to me in this modern era, last week I spent a couple hours playing through the Sega Genesis version of Aladdin in its entirety and then for essentially no reason at all other than I felt funny in my brains, I popped in Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and played two cases in a row. Why do I do this shit? Well, first of all, it is no secret that I love small, short games.

For whatever reason, probably somewhere between misguided nostalgia for the SuperFuture of "multimedia" interactivity, an inexplicable attraction to city pop, and a love of all things cyberpunk, I've found myself recently venturing outside the realm of Nintendo to re(?)-explore those forbidden early-90s Sega waters. You might have seen the beginnings of my most latest spat of infatuation not so long ago with my long-ish love-letter to Snatcher, a bit of enthusiasm that got temporarily derailed by La-Mulana and a string of neat Wii U news but is now back on in full force during the pre-holiday games lull.

Despite the overtly slutty attire of the cover-adorning main character Solange, Code of Princess for the 3DS actually doesn't seem to have much to do with those perfectly spherical chest potatoes. What we actually have here is a seemingly-competent beater from Agatsuma Games, who you may (not) know for making almost a dozen Japanese Anpanman games and this. I went back and forth on getting it for a while, cause it's annoying to import Japanese games translated to English and released in America from America back to Japan so I can play them on my American 3DS.

I'm not gonna sit here and claim I invented rhythm games since I already kinda did that before, but get this, I totally invented rhythm games. I distinctly remember tapping out little songs on my Nintendo controller buttons and being like "hey why isn't this a game?" And then later it was. Even though I've played basically every one of them that's been released ever in history, I probably haven't ever had such a weird relationship with any of them as I do with the "

Did you hear about this? My lines and feeds and whatever are lighting up. Apparently the new "Nintendo" Wu system will be sold in stores one month from now. A single month! Hey, I gotta question for you. Do you remember when other systems were about to come out last time? That is exciting times isn't it. I remember quite specifically me and Cory talking on ICQ or whatever idiots used back in double-last-gen to talk on the Internet before YouTube, and the 360 was about to come out, and then the cases for the games started showing up in stores.