Posted on 14 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in Site updates | 1 Comment

Update: Game night is now over!

Hey guys, it’s time for yet another game night! If you don’t know, we’re playing Monster Hunter Tri tonight, so if you want to join, just hop into the IRC above (no sign-up required) and tell us! Simple as that!

Posted on 14 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in Site updates | 3 Comments

If you’re like me and you picked up Monster Hunter Tri last week, chances are you’re also like me and haven’t been able to put it down since. I am, in fact, playing it at this very moment (anyone wanna hop online with me?) and have been letting it take up far too much of my precious free time. That being the case, what better way to celebrate the launch than to have it be our next game for game night!?

Therefore, this week’s game night will be on Friday at 7PM CST (8PM EST, 5PM PST) and will work just a little differently than most.

Being as Monster Hunter is a game that is only playable by 4 people at a time online, we’ll have to divide up into teams (if we get enough players, that is!). We’ll have team leaders, one of them being myself, and (permitting they have the game) other staff members will be other team leaders. If none of them have the game, I’ll call upon some people on the night of the game night to take over.

Every few quest victories/failures, we’ll switch groups so everyone gets a chance to play with everyone else, and we’ll just keep repeating that until we get bored!

If you have any questions/comments, feel free to ask away! Otherwise, just let me know via e-mail, the comments, or the forum if you plan on playing!

Posted on 14 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in DS, News | 2 Comments

Posted on 14 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in DS, News | 1 Comment

These new details come straight from the game’s developer, Level-5:

– The game takes place in Hotroit, a white-bread industrial city that looks a bit like Anytown, U.S.A. as envisioned in the 1950s. Oliver and his friend Mark are both pre-teen tinkerers, retiring to the garage in their spare time to work on a secret car project they’ve been puttering around with for a while.

– One night, Oliver waits until his mother Allie is asleep, then sneaks out in order to test out the racer with Mark at the riverside. Allie, noticing that her son is missing, arrives at the scene just in time to witness Oliver crash the car and get thrown into the river, thrashing about helplessly. Allie dives in to rescue the boy as eyewitnesses look on, successfully bringing him back to shore uninjured. Just then, however, Allie is struck down with a heart attack and very suddenly passes away.

– Distraught, Oliver holes up in his room all day in mourning, clutching the doll that his mother made for him. He’s rather surprised to find that the doll comes to life before his eyes. It calls itself Shizuku, a spirit from the world of Ni no Kuni, and claims that Oliver’s tears are what freed him from a curse laid upon him by Jabow, an evil wizard. Shizuku wants Oliver to help him defeat Jabow and rescue the great sage Alicia — who apparently shares souls with Allie over in the “real” world. If Oliver saves Alicia, Shizuku says, he might be able to bring Allie back to life as well.

– The pair proceed through a magical gate to Ni no Kuni, a fantastic world filled with strange characters — many of whom bear an eerie resemblance to people and things Oliver knew in Hotroit. For example, the kingdom is run by Nyandahl XIV, a despotic ruler who looks quite a lot like a neighborhood cat named Frank that Oliver runs into now and again near his house. Nyandahl is extremely angry about something — what, nobody knows for sure — and refuses to help Oliver or even see him.

– Realizing that Ni no Kuni and Earth are more connected than at first glance, Oliver returns to his home world to find that Frank the cat is also acting rather annoyed — he likes having the neighborhood dairy-shop owner clean his ears, but the lady hasn’t done it lately because she’s lost her special ear-pick. Oliver tracks down the pick, Frank is happy, and before long, our hero finds that this has changed things for the better in Ni no Kuni as well…

Source

Posted on 14 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in Features | 0 comments

Every week Nintendo puts out a press release talking about all the great new downloadable titles that are coming out, but never something showcasing the occasionally-decent games that come out in retail. Well, I’m gonna change that. This week, Nintendo gamers are treated with world cup soccer, free running intensity, ruthless romans, and fighting extinction.

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Posted on 14 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in Features | 6 Comments

The last article I wrote, “What do YOU think? Wii is the best console for third party ‘core’ titles?”, discussed the idea of sales comparisons from the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 to the Wii as being unfair, because developers were comparing top-quality titles to mediocre titles and expecting similar sales. In that article, I stated that a game needs 2 things to sell well: Good reviews, and good advertising. Of course, it helps if the game isn’t a niche genre, but that is the least important of the three. In the last 2 months, two big Wii titles have been released, both of which have gotten pretty good review scores and a good amount of advertising; Monster Hunter Tri, and Red Steel 2. The latter of these two titles supposedly sold just 50,000 copies in its first month. Now, some people say that Red Steel 2’s first month wasn’t really a full month (12 days), and other sources report that the game has in fact sold more than 100,000 units, but based on the official numbers given to us by Ubisoft, it’s a solemn start for an (apparently) very good game.

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Posted on 14 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in Site updates | 0 comments

Update: Game night is now over!

Yea, that’s me right there. Pretty cool, huh?

All you have to do to play is add my friend code and join the game I’ll be hosting starting at 7PM CST (8PM EST, 5PM PST)! Also, there’s no sign-up required to chat with us in the IRC below!

Name: Austin
FC: 2664-9883-4616

Posted on 14 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in Site updates | 0 comments

I just wanted to pop in to remind everyone that tonight’s game night will be at 7PM CST (8PM EST, 5PM PST), and that we will be playing The Conduit. There’s one slight change, however, from how last week worked: You do not have to send me your friend code/tell me you’re playing before the game night starts. When we post up the IRC, I’ll have friend codes of everyone who has signed up posted along with it, and I’ll edit it as time goes on. All you have to do is show up when you want to play, and shoot me your friend code via the IRC! Additionally, you really only have to add my/Valay’s friend code because of The Conduit’s nifty “Friend of a friend” feature. This will allow you to play/talk with everyone in the match, even if you aren’t friends with them.

What you should do right now:

Add my friend code for The Conduit, to be sure that you’ll at least be able to get into the match if for some reason you can’t add others’.

Name: Austin
FC: 2664-9883-4616

See you all in a few hours!

Posted on 14 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in News, Wii | 2 Comments

“I think a Wii version could happen. It’s all about the fans – if the fans speak up and continue to buy and play the second one like they did the first one, I don’t see why we couldn’t make a case for a Wii version.” Scribblenauts creative director Jeremiah Slaczka

I would be completely in support of a Wii version of Scribblenauts! I think the game would lend itself really well to the IR pointer, and think of how many items you could hold on a Wii disk!

Source 1, Source 2

Posted on 14 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in General Nintendo, News | 5 Comments

Nintendo is always on the lookout for pirates, and just last week they shut down a Japanese game store for advertising that they sold R4 cards. Once again Nintendo is trying to fight pirates by revealing that (according to them) a 50% drop in European game sales is due to people using flash cards and such to illegally obtain games. Apparently Nintendo loses trillions of yen every year from pirates, and have also discovered 238 million cases of software pirating in just June of last year.

I’m not sure if I’d believe that there was a 50% drop due to just piracy alone, but I guess Nintendo probably knows more on the subject than I do!

Source