You know, I do occasionally disappear from this site for extended periods of time, but, eventually, something will bring me back.

Case in point: Click this for a neat MM2 Cover.

http://kotaku.com/5012932/wii-castlevania-later-this-year]

 It would seem there is indeed a new Castlevania to show up on the Wii. I call firsts on how awesome it would be if you could used the motion detecting controller as a whip.

 Lets hope for the best on more good updates with this title.

 For those of you who live under a rock, or just don’t care about the Sonic series anymore “Like me”, you may not have heard about the huge leak on one of Sega’s public servers about their new Sonic game. It seems they will be adding some new elements to the game play…Finally. There is also a day and night system which can change your gameplay a LOT with some type of Werewolf change…Dunno the full story on that myself but it sounds kinda weird to have Sonic turn into a Werehog. Either way it’s still better than seeing Emo the Gothhog “You all know who i mean” show up in another Sonic game ever again.

More updates on this later.

 cue crappy VGCats game in 3….2….1…

If you liked the first two Black Mages albums, I think you’ll be pleased with part 3.

Download here.

Junichi Masuda explains some of the composition challenges and decisions he made in designing music for the Pokemon series in his blog.

Discussing Red/Green:

Above softwares were developed for the game
machine called “Game Boy.”
Game Boy allow us to use total of four notes.
Coordinated by two square waves, one triangle wave
and one white noise.
Not only I composed the opening theme,
but I also composed the game music,
sound effects and Pokémon cries. All of them.
The opening music was created with the image
of the battle scenes.
“Monster” was the image of the title scene music.
I follow a guide and composed about 30 fifteen seconds
music to confirm the direction.
After this, I started total music composition.
To make the sound gravely, I added one rather heavy
white noise as if sound like marching music.
By changing the volume of white noise little by little,
it expresses a leap sound of snare drum.

Follow this link for more discussion and sound clips. Masuda discusses creating voice samples in part two of the column.

This is either brilliant or a desperate attempt to cash in on the Guitar Hero license. It’s hard to say at this point. I can say that I’m intrigued. Click “read more” to watch a commercial for Guitar Hero: On Tour depicting gameplay. Watch for the “My guitar is on fire so I’m gonna blow on it” mechanic.

Source: IGN

(more…)

If you have a bunch of Brawl screenshots on an SD card, you’ll be pleased to know that the screenshot format for brawl was cracked nearly a month ago. The downloadable converter is available here. There is also an online converter tool available here.

Source: http://smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=142971

According to a bunch of reports across the web, some Nintendo Wii players are having problems getting Super Smash Bros. Brawl to work on their systems. It’s a big enough problem that Nintendo has posted a help page about it, telling those who are having issues to send in their machines to have them cleaned.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl utilizes a double-layer disc which has a large memory capacity. A very small percentage of Wii consoles may have trouble consistently reading data off this large capacity disc if there is some contamination on the lens of the disc drive. Nintendo has specialized cleaning equipment that can resolve this problem. (Please do NOT attempt to clean the lens yourself, as you may damage the system.)

Click here to read the rest of the form on Nintendo’s customer service site.

Scans from the Xbox World 360 Magazine article about the cancelled 360 port of the N64 classic GoldenEye are up at GAF and filefront.com. According to the article, Nintendo, Activision (current holders of the Bond franchise) and Rare/Microsoft had reached an agreement to provide Nintendo with Rare classics for virtual console and a Wii version of the GoldenEye 360 port in exchange for permission to port the N64 game to the 360. According to the article, Reggie Fils-Aime was in full support of the port, but Satoru Iwata pulled the plug on the project at the last minute saying that under no circumstances would the game appear on the 360.

This would have been THE BEST THING EVAR. Besides Brawl.