Kidzworld's Official Blog

Welcome back to school everyone! Whether you love or hate school, I hope you all wrapped up your summer in style. Myself, I represented Kidzworld.com at the Penny Arcade Expo 2009 over the Labor Day long weekend. It was amazing, you can read my quick recap of PAX 2009 here.

Nintendo was the first booths I hit, they always had great swag to pick up. This year, they had red, green and dark grey toques for Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story and an awesome t-shirt of Samus. To get the Metriod shirt, you had to line up and try out the new Metriod Prime Trilogy game for awhile.  I watched as some people struggled with the bosses, thinking that, if only they had access to our boss guide for the game.

There were many Rock Band stations set up throughout the convention center, including the new Beatles: Rock Band game and LEGO Rock Band. The new game is pretty cool, but I really liked the atmosphere of the free play area near the back of the convention, where people were lounging and eating until 3am.

There were lots of free to play games being shown, as well as indie games and download only games. I did not see Mini Ninjas anywhere, which was too bad since I was hoping to get some comments from the exhibitors since I was reviewing it this week. I did manage to pick up a bunch of beta invites for games like Dungeon Fighter and Hello Kitty Online. We may be consolidating these for a contest later on, keep an eye out for it!

Like always, the show was great and I enjoyed it a lot. I got tonnes of t-shirts and bought myself a few new board games. I also got to meet Steve Jackson, the man behind Munchkin, and got him to sign a few cards that I conveniently had. To Tycho and Gabe, thanks for the great show, I hope you recover soon!

I wrote a review on the Metroid Prime Trilogy and an article on Madden NFL 10 this week. Both games are enhanced versions of a very similar previous game.

I could go off on another rant on shovelware and lazy developers and publishers but, truth be told, I really liked both of these enhanced remakes. Along with Guitar Hero 5, if these are the kind of shovelware that we’ll be getting forever, then I would not mind suffering it a little.

With music, some artists actually do not like to get a record deal. That is because they are constantly reworking their creations. Sometimes, that desire for perfection makes a true artist. Like the stubborn musician, some game developers are not happy with the end product that they created under tight deadlines and pressure. When said game is already near perfect, it can be hard to imagine that it can be better and, yet, here we are with these great remakes.

So developers, there are some people that still appreciate what you are doing. As long as you do not waste your time trying to push terrible stuff back at us again.