Gamertell

With the holiday season upon us, residents of Meadowhall, Sheffield,  with friends and family who enjoy the occasional match of Team Fortress 2 or 6-hour World of Warcraft marathon — that is to say, the gaming-inclined — will be pleased to hear that Gamestation is about to open a new store in their vicinity.

The store hallmark is scheduled to open to to the public at 9 a.m. on Friday (November 28, 2008), with a special launch weekend set to follow. Local radio station Hallam FM will be on hand to offer prizes to lucky shoppers taking part in the Blender drinking contest, which will feature cocktails aplenty.

The world’s most famous plumber and blue hedgehog (as in Mario and Sonic) will also be joining the celebrations on launch day, offering the store’s first fifty customer a…

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I bet many of you have this vision of Nintendo sitting back eating some mystical golden cash turkey and spending Black Friday sleeping of massive amounts of tryptophan (the stuff that makes you sleepy after eating turkey) on mattresses stuffed with cash, dreaming about the holiday shopper circus frenzy in retailers across the country. Well, you’re probably right especially since Nintendo is offering up two new limited edition DS bundles for which shoppers will have to compete for in some form of death ring.

The first of the bundles will be offering up a fully crimson red painted DS with a Mario M logo stomped on the system’s top cover. It will also come bundled with a copy of New Super Mario Bros., a game which I watched go out of stock more than any other DS game…

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While dashing through my nearest Target store, I passed a rack stacked with tins in the underwear, er, pajamas section.

The tins, priced at $9.99 each, include a set of colorful men’s boxers that reflect the packaging: a Wii (as in the console), a red Guitar Hero guitar, black Guitar Hero speaker, an Xbox 360 controller, Super Mario Bros. 3 with Mario, the Superman logo and the Batman logo.

I did find a few listed on the Kohl’s and Sears web sites…

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All right gamers, we all know tonight is the best holiday ever (aside from maybe the December holidays) because you get to dress up as fictional characters or strange permutations of everyday things (zombie nurse, anyone?) and eat tons of candy. And we all know gamers love to dress up as game-related things. However, a few costumes just don’t have their luster anymore, after countless iterations every year, and I am naming them officially cliched. Folks, if you’re dressing up as one of these characters this year, please try to do something new with it, or you deserve to sit in a corner and play terrible Wii games all night. You’ve been warned…

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Now, this is just funny. GameDaily has a very funny - and possibly painful - list of the very worst Nintendo games of all time. Sure, the company makes some of the greatest games (arguably of all time), and it pumps out classics every year, true to form. But they’ve certainly had their share of stinkers, too - alongside titles like Super Mario 64 and Zelda: Twilight Princess, there are also duds like Teleroboxer (on the Virtual Boy - remember that one?), this year’s broken Donkey Kong Barrel Blast, and first generation shlock like Vollyball on the NES.

Take a look at Ninty’s sordid past on the site, and let us know if you think of any omissions - surely, there are a few. Perhaps, a little Mario’s Time Machine or the entire power glove debacle might make nice additions to the list.

Read [GameDaily]

• Walmart’s Cyber Monday 2008 video game deals
• Nintendo DS taps into e-reader market
• Aonuma will not stop until he makes a game better than Ocarina of Time

The NPD report has been released for September 2008 and Star Wars fans sure made a Force-ful impact.

Along with the positive news that total game sales were $1.27 billion, Star Wars fans had the pleasure of seeing their games place high on the charts. The console iteration of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed placed in 3 of the top 10 spots in this month, totaling 1.16 million in individual sales. The Xbox 360 version of the game accounted for 52 percent of those sales, with the Playstation 3 version taking 28 percent. Other notable games that appeared on the software side of the NPD charts included Wii Fit, Nintendo’s “exercise simulator,“  the latest iteration of Mario Kart, the ever-present Wii Play and…

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Title: Mario Super Sluggers
Price: $49.99
System(s): Wii
Release Date: August 25, 2008
Publisher (Developer): Nintendo (Namco Bandai)
ESRB Rating: “Everyone” for comic mischief.
Pros: Plenty of enjoyable Mario Party-style baseball minigames. Great utilization of both the WiiMote and the Nunchuck attachment or the option to play sans Nunchuck. Can play many modes as your Mii.
Cons: Often irritating ferris-wheel style background music, sometimes touchy Wii controls and depth issues makes fielding unnecessarily difficult. Not the a pick-up-and-play game it promises to be.
Overall Score: One thumb up, one sideways; 80/100; B-; * * * out of five. 

If you’ve played a Mario-themed sports game, you have about half of an idea of what to expect with Mario Super Sluggers. It’s far more wacky, cartoonish and fun than your standard baseball sim but not nearly as simplistic or arcade-y as most Mario sports-based games. Even so, a few important fundamentals have unfortunately been benched…

Click through for the full review.

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Check out the gallery: Mario Super Sluggers for Wii screen shots

A recent ad for the Toys R Us retail chain shows several discounted games as well as a free Star Wars: Clone Wars backpack offer. The sales started August 17, 2008, and continue through August 23, 2008.

The backpack, likely meant for kids (but that doesn’t mean you can’t have one too), retails for $10.99 but is free if you spend more than $30 on Star Wars stuff by August 23, 2008.

As for the game offers the list from page 4 includes:

• Xbox 360 Arcade System (5 Games Included Boom Boom Rocket, Uno, Pac-Man CE, Feeding Frenzy & Luxor 2) for $279.99
• Wii Game System Console for $249.99
• Save $25 on Nintendo DS Value Pack for…

Click through for the full list of sales items!

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With all this coverage of the Olympics, both on television and online, I have seen several sources that have stated that Japanese Olympic swimmer Kosuke Kitajima, after he had won the gold meal for the men’s 100 meter breaststroke, had some very interesting, very videogame-related things to say:

See, Mario does the breaststroke.  And thus, it’s perfect mental training for envisioning the actual Olympic hall.

Say what!?  Did he just say that videogames can actually do more than…

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Who says Nintendo has forgotten its hardcore fans? According to an item at GameDaily, top-dog designer Shigeru Miyamoto is working closely with teams on new titles in the Mario and Zelda franchises, and a new Pikmin game is also in the works.

From the post:

“Making these ‘traditional’ games is what I am best at. Because games of that nature take upwards of two or three years to make, we always have to keep the teams working on those projects going. At any given time, the team could be five to ten people, or it could be 50-plus. People are always switching in and out of those teams”

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