Just released are a ton of screenshots for the game Mercury Meltdown Revolution on the Wii.

Screens Via Comments ...

via joystiq

A tragedy befell a colleague yesterday. For the second time during his tenure of owning an Xbox 360, he experienced the red Ring of Death. This isn't some new system he picked up at the store inexplicably dying on him, this was a system he received directly from Microsoft after his original console kicked the bucket a month after launch.

Now, this blogger has his own personal problems with the Xbox 360's loading tray. The Microsoft Xbox 360 defense force said I must have messed with my loading tray to make it not work properly, because obviously when you own a $400 piece of equipment you try to break it and experience all the joy of warranty red tape. Well, as much as this blogger might try to keep his system out of harm's way, it in no way compares to my colleague -- he is über-tech-master-extreme. With a projection HDTV in his incredible loft, everything is neat and proper in a perfect place. Unless he has some form of technological Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome, he certainly didn't mess with his system.

So, last night he called up India (what, you didn't know Xbox support is in India?), and now he waits to receive the box from support which should arrive in 4 to 5 days, to send his Xbox 360, once again, to Texas for repair. We'll be tracking the progress of his system. Last time it took a few weeks for to get the console back, let's see how long it takes this time. It'd be more comforting to know these tales of Xbox 360 malfunctions were the stuff of message boards and YouTube videos, instead of people with one or two degrees of separation from each other having problems. ...

via joystiq

Capcom has come up with a great lunchtime distraction for the bored-at-work: a playable preview version of Gyakuten Saiban 4 in Flash. The DS version of what we'd call Phoenix Wright 4 is still a couple of months away from its Japanese release, so we can only applaud Capcom's generosity here.

GUILTY: the dialogue in this demo will be largely incomprehensible to most Western players, as its script is written entirely in Japanese. NOT GUILTY: the music is sublime and manages to convey (without lyrics) how the trial is progressing; this is also the first time we've seen Odoroki-kun (captured here) at the bar. Cheers!

More Info ...

via Dark diamond Network

There’s still about 5 minutes left of Tuesday at the time of writing this so yes its time for yet another Tuesday-tan update. Today we’ll pay a visit to the last of the this-gen console-tans, PS3-tan. I had a good bunch of pictures of PS3-tan but I cant reach most of them so these 3 will have to do, I might do an addendum to this post some time later.

PS3-tan is commonly depicted with the design you see above, with a tight short black dress or as a small gothic lolita girl as seen below. When as a grown-up she’s often bragging about her measurements to the rest of the console-tans, specially to Wii-tan, to whom she has a personal vendetta. The rest of the consoles usually tease her about having a huge bust size (again, as a sign of high specs). PS3-tan is also quite narcissistic and she’s usually seen staring at herself in the mirror (screenshot carnival anyone?) instead of playing with the rest of the console-tans.

More at link above ...

via kotaku

Going to school in Japan sounds great. Not that I could have had a DS in my youth, but if I had, the chances of Animal Crossing becoming my classmate's game of choice are somewhere alongside slim and none. In fact, describing the game's "objectives" would in all likelihood have gotten my head punched in.

But not in Japan. 4CR writer Vinnk works in a Japanese school, and there, Animal Crossing is big. Too big.



This morning while I was sitting in the teachers' lounge drinking a nice cup of green tea, an announcement came over the PA system. As usual I and the other teachers tuned it out, as these announcements are pretty much the same thing every day. Then I heard something I was not expecting, the words "Doubutsu no Mori" or as we know it "Animal Crossing". Now I started listening.

Since I missed the first part it didn't make much sense, all I got was that Animal Crossing was now forbidden.

Turns out kids just aren't doing any work on their computers, instead wasting their days hitting up Animal Crossing FAQs and fansites. And the teachers are not happy:

All the students care about is that stupid game, they don't study enough.

I counter that no other game I have ever played (Stroker aside) has so prepared me for the rigors of adult life. Busting your ass to pay off a mortgage, all the while performing menial tasks for a pittance is what life is all about, kids. Learn from Tom Nook. He'll teach you more about the real world than any maths teacher ever could. ...

via kotaku

Phone straps seem to be so very much a Japanese thing. As a matter of fact, I don't think I've ever seen one hanging from a phone in the U.S., but maybe I'm just hanging out with the wrong sorts of crowds.

If I were the type to clutter up my phone with tiny plastic characters or other bits of colorful nonsense, the Revolve strap would likely be the only thing that found it's way onto my mobile.

The Revolve strap is a tiny little DS knock-off that plays generic versions of classic games like Block Game, Shooting Game and, my personal favorite, Frog Game. Ah, that brings back memories of my misspent young: Drinking cokes at the Officer's Club in Yongsan playing Frog Game with my friends before riding home through the golf course on my bike.

Screen Via Comments ...

via kotaku

Ah, love hotels. Those by-the-hour Japanese establishments built soley for sex. When couples are feeling randy, they head on over to places like Shibuya's Casa Di Due. It's one of the most colorful rest stops in the area's love hotel mecca. Not only can customers rent costumes to entertain themselves, but PLAYSTATION 3s. Apparently all the PS3s were rented out! And that's not all, couples can game on PS2s, GameCubes and the Wii, no pun intended. The rooms also come equiped with 42 inch plasma televisions. And when you get hungry, the same hotel also had a food menu which range from Japanese to Western and South East Asian. Sounds like sex has some serious competition. ...

via kotaku

It's just my opinion a fact, Brain Age would never have appealed to the masses were the DS not played like a book. Now it's nothing special, as A-Ha videos everywhere (better known as Hotel Dusk: Room 215) are exploiting the 90-degree rotational axis of the DS.

So what did reviewers think of this playable paperplasticback mystery?

Game Revolution
From moving to talking to puzzle solving, everything in Hotel Dusk can be accomplished by tapping, dragging or drawing...By touching the screen with the stylus, your little dot will move in that direction. If you draw near something worth investigating, a little icon pops up, and by tapping it you shift to a first person view of that area. When you place your stylus over an item of interest, the item lights up and you can inspect it further by double tapping... clipping a segment of wire from a coat hanger or jimmying a lock, are handled with the stylus.

EtoyChest
it doesn't take a long time spent with Hotel Dusk to realize that besides weaving an intriguing mystery, the game was designed to confound, confuse, and even frustrate time and again...a design methodology that is sure to please hardcore sleuths, while...if a clue was missed or overlooked, a player could find him or herself wandering aimlessly about the available areas of the hotel, knocking on doors and clicking on anything...

Modojo
I was thrilled about the control and visuals but I can't say the same about dialog. Dialog between characters seemed very stilted and a lot of the conversation seemed superfluous. A typical interchange sounded like this:
Maid: "I'm also the cook in this joint."
Kyle: "You're the cook here?"
Maid: "I'm the cook here, that's what I said."
Kyle: "So you're the cook here?"
Repeat that three or four times each time Kyle has to talk to someone and you'll understand how annoyed I was about the conversation

MTV Multiplayer
So far, "Hotel Dusk" has been a welcome surprise... it presents a few other things I didn't realize I wanted...[like ] the player to hold their clamshell DS sideways...[which] allows "Hotel Dusk" another odd classification: sideways first-person-shooter-without-the-shooting....[it's also] the first DS game I'm aware of that enables the player to hand-write notes about what they're doing directly into the game....[and] scenes play in widescreen -- also known as the aspect ratio of every PSP game. So here's a chance to sort of see what Nintendo might do on a PSP, given the screen space.

Rocky Mountain News
I think the developers may have confused black and white crime drama with noir...When you bump into characters the scene unfolds in that moving sketch art we saw 20 years ago in A-Ha's Take On Me video...While this intriguing game's plot is almost accidentally oneiric, it certainly never delivers on the ambivalence, the cruelty, the eroticism that instills most film noir with its gut-wrenching frankness....Instead the characters' dream-like isolation is bogged down with generic characters...

I find it a little refreshing to see the point and clicks coming back into style. And the DS finally makes the idea work off the PC platform. ...

via kotaku

One of the most consistent game franchises around would have to be Insomniac's Ratchet & Clank series. Each progressive title has managed to add new elements while maintaining an excellent balance of humor and solid gameplay that define the series. Many fans were a bit disappointed that Ratchet: Deadlocked focused on shooting without platforming and puzzle elements, but I'm happy to say after spending quite a bit of time with a preview build that the series has returned to its roots with the upcoming Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters for the PSP.

Ratchet and his robot buddy are taking a much needed vacation, having saved the universe now on multiple occasions. They meet a cute little girl named Luna who is writing a report on heroes and wants to see them in action. It isn't long before Luna is kidnapped, a legendary race of inventors gets involved, and once more R&C are pulled into a dangerous plot that sends them on a universe spanning adventure that the two of them really should come to expect right now. These guys get sent on universe spanning adventures if they stop by a convenience store for a slushie.

Aside from the PSP controls and slightly lower-quality graphics, the game looks and plays almost exactly like its PS2 siblings. Developer High Impact Games has done a great job of capturing the distinctive R&C feel, which isn't really a surprise considering High Impact was spawned from Insomniac. All of the familiar elements are in place here. Upgradeable weapons and gadgets, exciting mini-games, and novelty levels to mix things up a bit. My favorite so far would have to be the space shooter featuring Giant Clank, blasting his way through swarms of enemies to rescue his fuzzy lombax friend.

New to the series is customizeable armor. As you play through the game you'll come across armor pieces. Once you collect a whole set you not only look amazingly cool, you also get to use a special power. Collect the Wildfire set and your wrench attacks set enemies on fire, for instance. While I only managed to collect pieces from three sets and complete one, there sure were a lot of empty armor set slots waiting to be filled. Can't wait to see what they all do!

While some of the levels in the game tread on familiar ground, I've run across a couple that were quite new and different, including one I won't go into too much detail on that completely blew my mind. Flying chainsaws FTW!

The controls are actually pretty tight for a PSP platformer. I miss the second analog stick for camera control, but the shoulder buttons do the job adequately, and there's always a first-person view you can swap to if you want to look around or do some precision shooting. The small screen keeps pretty close to Ratchet as he fights, leading to being shot at off-screen quite a few times, but with the PSP you really are limited with how far away the camera can be in third-person before you start crossing into isometric territory.

Sadly I didn't get to try out the multiplayer options, but honestly I've always enjoyed the series more for the story and the characters than for online skirmishes.

All in all I am pretty excited about Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters. It's shaping up to be one of those titles I can point to in order to justify my purchase of a PSP in the first place. Like Ready at Dawn's Daxter before it, this game looks to bring one of Sony's best franchises to the PSP in a big way. ...