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So a fifteen-year old took his dad's guns and murdered his entire family; with no solid discernable reason. This one's bound to be kind of a fiasco for us since he apparently spent most of his interrogation talking about how much he loves violent video games.

It might only be superficially similar, but Mainichi reminds me of Auntie Pixelante's Dys4ia. It's and almost Warioware-esque take on the memoirs of a transwoman undergoing hormone replacement therapy. Also, just since Queen of Pain and Sean's girlfriend came up in this episode again, I've been meaning to ask: Why doesn't Sean just play with headphones?

I'm not sure if that's a pisstake at the "fake geek girl" concept or not.

Looks like I was wrong about the 30 cent thing. You keep the game forever, but the sale only lasts 30 days. So, uh, you can get Balloon Fight for 30 cents right now if you want!

It's been called Warawara Plaza since day one, it just doesn't come up much. And although they haven't specified what they mean, they've stated that they want to "tune up the overall game experience." I'm thinking the best-case scenario is finishing a scrapped dungeon; worst-case is making the Triforce hunt less stupid.

Earthbound hitting Japanese Wii U Virtual Console in March. 9/10 chance it doesn't hit the NA one.

I've been sick since Saturday. This is the fourth day of work in a row that I've missed, and I'm bored out of my skull to boot. I know that I made bonus in December, so my paycheque on Friday will be far bigger than normal, and now I can't even enjoy it since I know that my next one's going to be a disaster.

So there was a surprise Nintendo Direct this morning. Highlights: Virtual Console coming in spring. Everything playable on the gamepad. You don't have to rebuy the games you already own from Wii VC, but you do have to pay $1.00-$1.50 to upgrade them. GBA games coming eventually. Famicom 30th Anniversary sale on Wii U VC: certain games will be available for a rental of 30 days for 30 cents, starting with Balloon Fight, available RIGHT NOW. Finally fixing the awful load times between menus New features being added to Miiverse. New Iwata Asks where he speaks with some of the heads of Platinum Games New 3D Mario game from the Galaxy team, playable at E3. New Mario Kart, also playable at E3. New party game actually looks pretty neat New Yoshi game with the same visual style as Kirby Epic Yarn from the director of Yoshi's Island There will be new information about the new Smash Bros. games at E3 this year. Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem whaaaaat New Zelda with an emphasis on nonlinear exploration and some kind of multiplayer Wind Waker HD holy shit Monolift Soft has a new game that plays very similarly to Xenoblade, but with vehicles (including mecha). So yeah. Wii U has been justified.

Making people feel old is what makes me feel young. I feed on it, like a vampire. Metroid Prime came out nearly half my lifetime ago! Jurassic Park was the first film I ever saw in a theater! I have never seen a Sega console older than the Dreamcast in person! I take the internet for granted! When the last Harry Potter book came out, I was still younger than Harry was in the novel! The Simpsons is older than I am!

At the risk of being shunned; my first console was the N64 and my first handheld was the Gameboy Advance, both in Christmas of 2001. I'm fairly young by most standards of the good part of the internet, and wasn't allowed to play most video games as a kid, so most of the classics are new to me. I only played Super Mario World for the first time in summer of 2009. I have two copies of it now (an original SNES copy and a GBA cart), but since I have no 2D platforming chops whatsoever, having done most of my platforming in a post-2D world, it's way too hard for me. I hope to finish it one day, though.In a weird bit of anachronistic fortune, I did have a hand-me-down 486 computer as a kid, along with a hand-me-down copy of The Secret of Monkey Island, which came out before I was born. So I did play that! I didn't beat it until I was in high school playing it on ScummVM though.

One of those attachments is the Sega Cleaning System, which is just a double-ended cartridge with two sets of cleaning pads rather than electrical contacts, so no. Even without that component I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't work, though.I'm still waiting for someone to make the everygame. ie: You start with an old Gameboy cartridge with a minigame on it. When you beat the game it prompts you to plug in the Gameboy Printer, which prints out a QR code. Viewing the code with a 3DS gets you a download code for another minigame, which you can share via DS download play to an original DS, which then unlocks something on a GBA cartridge. This goes through several stages like a Kinect picking up your motions while you play a Playstation Move game, using a Blockbuster Pokémon Snap sticker printing station to make e-reader cards, and using a Wiimote to track the light emitted by a Virtual Boy headset. At the end you get a postcard from J Allard or something. It would be glorious. I'm also waiting for the music peripheral game that uses everything, from the DJ Hero turntable to the Samba De Amigo maracas. The only song you can play is "Wildcat" by Ratatat and it's pretty boring for everyone involved.

The secret to beating the levels with the purple anti-Mario is to not run. It's significantly easier to avoid him if you just go at a relaxed pace rather than actually trying to outrun him. Super Mario 3D Land is the only Mario game I've ever 100%ed apart from Super Mario 64 DS. That is to say, it's pretty damned good.

Related:

I listened to most of this last night, and now that I've had some time to digest it... while his resulting argument about how we've bureaucratization has slowed technological advancement to a crawl is interesting, his initial premise of "kids in 1900 got everything from science fiction by 1950, but kids in 1960 didn't get anything from science fiction" is full of crap.For one thing, they didn't. Although it's quaint to think that the only things they envisioned were submarines and television, they wanted all of the same insane shit that we wanted in the 1960s, just with a certain Victorian sensibility to them. Second: his examples of saying that we got submarines but not flying cars is very odd. We got both. It's true that flying cars aren't available for the public sector, but they certainly exist. But apart from sheer quantities, that situation is absolutely no different from submarines. In fact, most of the things he touches on are either existing technologies or in development. NASA began development of a faster-than-light warp drive last year. A Japanese robotics firm started mass-producing , as well. Although I'm not aware of a robot that does laundry, we most definitely have robots that do chores. I'm not familiar with the tech behind Siri, but by all accounts it's a pretty damned advanced AI for something intended for the average consumer, and I'd say it (only just) fits the description of an AI that you can talk with.Yeah, it's disappointing that I'll probably never get my Wipeout car or Iron Man suit, but the idea that we don't get any of the things that science fiction has promised us is bullshit. Saying that the internet is simultaneously the most important invention of the last few decades and also unimpressive as shit is true, but no less so than television or the automobile. The important, world-changing inventions have always been defined by being utilitarian and accessible to the masses. They will always be, by necessity, boring. (I'll cut him some slack, though, since that talk seems to be from around 2011 and would have just barely predated most of those counterexamples I just posted)

This was the case, but the ESRB changed their process for digital releases a few months ago. Now it's much easier, it's free, and if your game was previously released for another platform and has already been rated, you don't have to resubmit it as long as the content hasn't changed (ie: most Virtual Console games can now skip the rating altogether).

If we're thanking people for stuff, I'd like to thank Chris for his exemplary work in keeping up the recording quality of Idle Thumbs. I don't know how much it gets touched upon here, but I'm a bit of an audiophile and it's easily the most professional-sounding podcast I've ever listened to.

Just as a side note, since I had spoilered this earlier: You can totally remap nearly every input in this game guys. I mean, triangle for jump? That way lies madness. Also, syntheticgerbil... holy shit.

This is kind of a weird fascinating thing, for me. Apart from the "America go democracy too early" explanation posted earlier, can anyone provide an explanation of this phenomenon to me?It's something that seems to basically be unique to America. For example, when I someday meet the Lara to my Skipper Croft, I'll be able to get married because the major gay marriage debate in my province lasted for four months (with one month of that being a waiting period for paperwork and such), even with a conservative premier who opposed the idea.

General game spoilers: Massive game ending spoiler: Do it.I wanted to do an alternate version that replaced Mono lying on the altar with Jeff Goldblum being found after the T-Rex attack in Jurassic Park, but I couldn't get a good enough Goldblum screencap.

I got dragged into seeing Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs and wasn't looking forward to it until I learned it was made by the Clone High guys. I ended up loving it, even though I never would have thought that they could make a kids' movie using the exact same style of humour.

Unless I'm mistaken, it's Homura from Puella Magi Madoka Magica. It's a pretty good deconstruction of the Sailor Moon magical girl archetype and it's only twelve episodes long. That particular character gets a backstory episode near the end of the series that reveals -among other things- why she uses actual modern firearms and incendiaries when everyone else uses nebulously magical weapons and why she seems to be weighed down by an overwhelming sense of nihilism.

If I recognize it correctly, the character depicted on that handle uses her proficiency with firearms as a metaphor for her ongoing mental breakdown that resulted from a relentless need to protect her loved ones, which failed until it was replaced with a non-violent solution. Nice choice. (I watch like one anime a year and it happened to be that one in 2011. Cut me some slack)

I'm all caught up now! First colossus (Valus) thoughts: Second colossus (Quadratus) thoughts: I hope that, if they do end up producing the movie, that they keep Dormin's voice as being both a male and female voice together. It really adds a lot to the character for me. Next week: BEST COLOSSUS EDIT: Had to.

What if the recently redesigned Move patent is the new controller? You know, this one: Perhaps it could attach to some manner of inflatable horse bag.