Paul Brownlee

Shovel Knight out March 31 ⊟

Holy crap, y’all, this trailer. This is a trailer. It’s just two and a half minutes of full-frame gameplay footage, showing an incredible variety of levels, enemies, and moves. I went from “Shovel Knight’s probably going to be pretty cool” to “Shovel Knight is my dogg” after watching this.

Those air jellyfish! The Viking helmet dudes! That darkness effect! That Castlevania clock tower! This game! I am so down for this.

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Den Chu's Pikachu evolved into something wonderfully nightmarish somewhere on its journey. If you look closely, you can just make out the electricity-storage glands under its forked tongue. I would happily give over my office to a 10-foot-long fiberglass version of this thing. (via Neatorama)

Do you have two hours and fifty minutes to spare? Maybe you might want to sit down, relax, and watch all the opening title screens for every single Nintendo Entertainment System game ever (I think). Personally, I've been watching it for a bit, but I'm not sure if I will be able to make it through the entire thing in one sitting like I did for the complete story mode of Mortal Kombat 9.

If you can make it all the way through or only part of the way, make sure to share your ultimate stopping point below. Currently, I'm at Commando.



See more: Press Start for Every NES Title Screen

You're going to have to bare with me here... Okay, I'll admit that he "might" not know how long that roasted chicken had been sitting in that trashcan, but it was cooked. So it's not like he's going to be eating it raw. Geez... Besides that, everything else looked normal to me.



See more: Video Game Behaviors are Creepy in Real Life

Everyone remembers Nickelodeon's game show Nick Arcade, right?!

Want to hear me rant? Sure, we all do. So, back in summer of 1990 the Nintendo World Championships came to Norfolk, VA. I attended the event and actually did quite well in the competition. Technically I was in the top 5 for my age group in the area... technically. Problem being that when they called the top five players to compete on stage, I got shafted because they called someone with a lower score than myself up instead. Somehow my score got neglected and I never got a chance to compete for the top honor in the area. Nor against the master himself, Thor Aackerlund, if by some good grace I would have actually beaten the other four players in the area that scored higher than me.

I remember at the time being pretty upset, but in hindsight it does make for an interesting story to share.



See more: Nick Arcade’s Extreme Reboot

This warrants the return of Iwata Comics ⊟

Last night we learned that the 3DS kicked butt in 2013. Well, not really — we already knew it was kicking butt the whole time, from the release of Fire Emblem: Awakening all the way up until the debut of Sega’s 3D Classics Series games on eShop. The portable outsold all over consoles in the U.S. last year (same is true for Japan).

And then this morning we learned that those sales still weren’t strong enough to prevent Nintendo from cutting its projected numbers for the fiscal year (ending March 2014). The company now expects to sell only 13.5 million 3DS systems worldwide, compared to its initial 18 million forecast. Software sales have also been cut from 80 million to 66 million.

It’s even worse for Wii U — now 2.8 million console sales instead of 9 million, and 19 million game sales instead of 38 million. Ouch.

Despite continued disappointing sales results and annual losses for the company, Nintendo’s CEO and president Satoru Iwata says he does not intend to resign. “There will be no major management shake-up in the short term,” he told reporters today, according to Reuters.

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Shin Megami Tensei IV’s soundtrack will be released in Japan next month, Atlus have announced.

Read Shin Megami Tensei IV Soundtrack Out In Japan Next Month on Siliconera!

Before Monolith Soft created Xenoblade, many of the key staff including director Tetsuya Takahashi and composer Yoko Shimomura developed Xenogears with Squaresoft.

Read Xenogears Perfect Works Fanbook Getting Reprint In Japan on Siliconera!

Unsung Story, Yasumi Matsuno's next game, now has a Kickstarter campaign and is asking for $600,000 in funding.

Read Final Fantasy Tactics Creator’s Next RPG, Unsung Story, Is On Kickstarter on Siliconera!

Yoshiyuki Tomino & EFX studio behind Pacific Rim, Avatar, Iron Man films

Get 20 Bravely Default villagers without StreetPass ⊟

Even with the StreetPass Relay system, getting hits on your system can be difficult in some rural areas, so I’m always happy to post workarounds here. Especially when they’re for a game like Bravely Default (and its demo) that encourages you to get StreetPasses to speed up bonus unlocks.

Super Yoshi posted this cheat that enables you to pick up villagers in the demo without StreetPasses — you may need to turn off auto-saving and make sure you haven’t hit a certain point:

1. Play up to the point where you get the quest for killing the second boss, Adamantite. That’s when I noticed the extra villager being available from that one NPC, so it could work earlier too.
2. Save your game before talking to that NPC. He is somewhere between the spell shop and equipment shop during the day.
3. Talk to him, and then check that your villager count has increased by 1.
4. Go talk to the Adventurer and choose “To title”, and then load up your save file again.
5. Now just talk to the villager-giving NPC again, and you should receive another villager!

Nice! And don’t forget that you can transfer those villagers to the full game once that’s released. Credit to Sayo for the artwork.

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OlliOlli hits PS Vita on January 21 ⊟

Yay, another release date for January, which we need more of because the early 2014 schedule is looking thin. Both JC and I are pretty excited about this PSN release from Roll7, as it’s been really fun to play at trade shows.

OlliOlli will feature four modes:

• Career - 50 “handcrafted levels split between Amateur and Pro”
• Spots - “Every time you get to the end of a level you unlock the corresponding spot. Spots are also individually linked to their own online leaderboards, the difference being they require you to perform one stupendously large combo to reach the end! It’s going to be a case of working out the best possible combination of tricks and grinds that you can fit into the spot’s limited obstacles in order to get the best score.”
• Daily Grind - “Each day, everyone in the world gets the same spot to pull an amazing combo on. You can practice that spot as many times as you like, but you only get ONE GO to set your score.”
• RAD Mode - “alludes to the initial concept demo, and only allows Perfect Landings and Perfect Grinds”

Europe will get this a day later!

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Being an independent game developer sure has been a bumpy ride. After making Spider-Man 2, I quit my sweet gig at Activision to see if I could make games my own way, on my own terms. I’ve been through a lot since then! I founded a company with a friend. We built it up, had several employees, health insurance, and everything… only to see it come crashing down.

So now I’m on my own again, starting over from scratch. But maybe things are turning around? By revisiting the coolest thing I’ve ever done — swinging game mechanics — and launching an unorthodox Kickstarter for the game, called Energy Hook, my new company Happion Labs seems to be on an upward trajectory.

And the latest piece of good news: I’m going to be able to bring Energy Hook to PS4 and PS Vita!

So, what’s Energy Hook? Well, imagine a 3D swinging game like Spider-Man 2 had a love child with “points-for-style” game SSX. You swing from rooftop to rooftop, pull off mid-air tricks, run along walls, and rack up points and energy for doing it. Because: it’s the future. And that’s what the extreme sports of the future look like. You have gravity beams and gravity boots and jetpacks and can do awesome stuff.

PS Vita is my favorite handheld. There’s no handheld like it. Nothing else comes with dual sticks, and Energy Hook wants those dual sticks! It’s a very expressive game that wants precision controls. A touchscreen is not enough. I daresay it’s going to be the first, decent, 3D swinging game to hit a handheld.

And I’m also glad to be bringing it to PS4. Mark Cerny has been my hero for years; in fact, we borrowed from his playbook to make Spider-Man 2. So to see him be a frontman for PS4 warms my heart. I can’t wait to see how Energy Hook performs on the new hardware; I’m sure it’s going to be awesome. (I’m not sure what I’m going to do with all that power… but I’ll think of something.)

Energy Hook will be hitting Sony’s consoles before any others. I’m totally stoked. I’m looking forward to getting the game in your hands in 2014, and can’t wait to see what you think.

Tonight on Channel 4: an IT Crowd night, kicking off with the final episode at 9PM, then a behind-the-scenes documentary (I'm in it!). I've seen the final episode, and it's amazing. The perfect thing for your post-prandial food coma.

Join us for a special The IT Crowd Night, kicking off at 9pm with the last ever episode, followed at 10pm by The IT Crowd Manual, a behind-the-scenes documentary about the series. We'll also be showing The Fans' Favourite Episode - as voted by you lot - and finally writer Graham Linehan's Favourite Episode. See the full listings here.

The IT Crowd Night, Christmas Eve from 9pm

Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the very best there is, died today in Russia. He was 94. The BBC:

"It was employed by the armies of dozens of countries, and incorporated in several national flags. But the AK47 also became a symbol of revolution around the world. ... It's comparative simplicity made it cheap to manufacture as well as reliable and easy to maintain in the field. It became the most widely used assault rifle in the world.
 
Yet Kalashnikov, although honoured in Russia, made very little money from his gun and once complained he would have been financially better off designing a lawnmower."

Voxel engine for NES games ⊟

Check out this dope situation. Procyon has added voxel support to the NES emulator FCEUX, instantly turning NES ROMs (which you’ve legally acquired, etc.) into 3D games. This looks amazing!

Official emulation (Virtual Console and the like) have a lot of catching up to do – catching up that will never, ever occur. But whatever, let’s stare at some cool graphics!

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