Kidzworld's Official Blog

This week, Split Second is pumping a ridiculous amount of adrenaline into the racing game genre. On May 25th, two more racers are coming out with very different approaches. Let’s just quickly compare the three.

Split Second: Race opponents and your friends over chaotic courses that anyone can blow to smithereens at any time, totally changing the course and taking racers out.

Blur: The only one of the three with real licensed cars, it’s more realistic than the others as well while still being arcade-y. Racers still try to perform stunts and use power-ups to take down the other cars.

ModNation Racers: Think LittleBigPlanet meets Mario Kart. It’s a kart racing game where you get to make the characters, the karts, and the tracks, all with incredibly detailed tools that anyone can use.

There wasn’t even enough room to describe everything in Skate 3 in this week’s post. So here’s a more complete list of all the cool new stuff.

• A new city! You’re not in San Vanelona or New San Vanelona, now you’re in Port Carverton! Plus there aren’t any security guards to beat you up this time…
• New tricks! You can now do probably the coolest trick ever, the DARKSLIDE. It’s like a boardslide, but with the board upside down. Along with that, you get underflips and stuff related to that.
• Teams! You create a skate team and your own skate company in Skate 3. You can invite your friends into your team, and have your team graphic on their boards and shirts and stuff.
• Board sales! Every objective you complete is to sell your company’s boards. You’re in big business now, and it’s about the sales just as much as your skating.
• Co-operative gameplay! Invite a friend to skate along with you, and you can complete single-player objectives along with him. He’ll get credit in his game, too.
• Create your own skate park! Pretty self-explanatory. It’s your team’s HQ.
• Easy mode! The physics are easier, and you get some help landing on rails.
• Hardcore mode! The physics are tougher, and you get no help at all on landing those grinds.

This week’s gaming news post covered the release of the Iron Man 2 video game. A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo, where they were auctioning off various props from the Iron Man 2 movie. None of the props were ridiculously cool, like the actual suit worn by Tony Stark or anything, but they sure went for ridiculously cool amounts of money. Here’s how much the stuff sold for:

• A battle-damaged and crushed Iron Man helmet: $11,000
• The left hand of the Iron Man suit: $5,500
• The right foot of the Iron Man suit: $1,900
• Iron Man suit butt plate (yes, really): $700
• A random boom box from a Humvee: $500
• A California license plate that reads “STARK6″: $900
• A newspaper that reads “WHO IS THE IRON MAN?”: $1,000

This week, we talked about the new FIFA World Cup game. Given my limited expertise in international soccer, I’m going to go ahead and predict the results of the entire World Cup, right here, right now. Not by simulating it in-game, no, I’m just going to guess. At least no one can really laugh at how terrible the picks are until July. Two teams advance from each group.

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The next season of Sam & Max adventure games starts this week, and in the Kidzworld gaming news post I mentioned that the company that makes Sam & Max, Telltale, has a ton of hilarious adventure games you can play.

• Tales of Monkey Island - actually sequels to a much older series of also hilarious adventure games involving pirates.
• Sam & Max – Dog and rabbit team up as freelance police. Regular police have a hard enough job, as it is.
• Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures – Great British humour, based on the claymation series of the same name. The dog, Gromit, never talks, but he gets more laughs than anybody on facial expressions alone.
• Bone – Based on Jeff Smith’s series of graphic novels.
• Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People – Strong Bad, from the online series called “Homestar Runner,” faces problems in the everyday life of a… Mexican wrestler-type guy?

Level-5 is the developer of our latest featured game, White Knight Chronicles. They’re an often overlooked RPG dev, with some amazing games for Sony systems in particular over the years. Here’s a quick rundown of them, and why you should pick them up if you see them for $5 in a bargain bin somewhere.

• Dark Cloud (2000) – PS2. Actually very similar to White Knight Chronicles in that it’s a regular RPG with city-building elements. A real under-recognized gem.
• Dark Chronicle (2002) – PS2. Sometimes it’s called Dark Cloud 2. It has the same city-building stuff combined with RPG stuff, and then adds in this odd photography system. It has awesome, stylish graphics.
• Dragon Quest VIII (2004) – PS2. Again, great cel-shaded graphics. Japanese magazine Famitsu called it the fourth best game of all time at one point.
• Rogue Galaxy (2005) – PS2. It’s pretty unfair to say it’s a sci-fi version of Dark Cloud 2, but I don’t have a lot of room to talk about it here, so I’m just going to say it’s like a sci-fi version of Dark Cloud 2.
• Jeanne d’Arc (2006) – PSP. A tactical turn-based RPG instead of an action one like the others, plus it’s (loosely) based on the story of Joan of Arc. One of my favorite PSP games.
• The Professor Layton series (2007-today) – DS. Not an RPG, but rather a game of puzzles set around a storyline, with some adventure-y elements. Definitely a must-have for DS owners, unless you’re really ticked off by brain teasers.

For this week’s game releases post, we talked about the new Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, Eat! Fat! Fight!, and Fast Food Panic. Eat! Fat! Fight! is a sumo wrestling game on Wiiware, and I thought that there had to be more sumo wrestling games out there. Well, there is an independent game called Sumotori Dreams on the PC, and it’s pretty awesome, especially if you have a friend to play against. There’s a demo, and then the full game is $4.50 beyond that. It won’t allow you the pleasure of training your own wrestler like Eat! Fat! Fight!, but it’s definitely worth downloading the demo.

For this week’s game releases, we got Guitar Hero Van Halen, Hotel Dash, and AiRace. Here’s the full tracklist for Guitar Hero Van Halen, so you can better decide if this one’s worth your money.

Another week of only three games coming out, but still some neat stuff. Pixeljunk Shooter is getting some insanely good reviews. The first thing I think when I see the game, though, is that it’s not exactly a “shooter” at all. It involves shooting, but that’s totally not the point.

It turns out there was a contest to decide the name of the game, back when it was a prototype and was only being called “Pixeljunk 1-4.” People got a look at this video, and got to decide what they thought it should be called. The leading name by votes on their website was “Pixeljunk Elements,” by a long long way. But the developers were afraid that the name wasn’t action-y enough, and that people might think the game was about the weather. Other leading contender names were “Pixeljunk Caves,” “Pixeljunk Depths,” “Pixeljunk Atlantis,” “Pixeljunk S.O.S.!,” and “Pixeljunk Blaster.”

The developers were planning on calling it “Pixeljunk Depths,” but they said that the name was too hard to say. So anyway, they picked “Pixeljunk Shooter,” which received only 8 votes, and said that that name won the contest, which ticked a lot of folks off, and me too a little bit. It’s not that much of a shooter, it’s more about the water/lava puzzles.

Regardless, great game, definitely worth trying for $10 on the Playstation Network.

This week’s game release post only had three games, all for the DS, but there was a big one: The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. The last DS Zelda game, Phantom Hourglass, let you steer a ship, and this one lets you drive a train, which was kind of unexpected for a medieval-fantasy-type game. So, based on that pattern of each DS Zelda game having a new type of transportation in it, here are my best guesses at what the next Zelda game’s title might be:

• The Legend of Zelda: Mysterious Biplane
• The Legend of Zelda: The Forest Halfpipe
• The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Pneumatic Tube
• The Legend of Zelda: Rally Car Rumble
• The Legend of Zelda: Segway of Truth