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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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?

This week’s gaming news post covered Cave Story for the Wii, an independent game that’s recently hit it big. A lot of indie games are awesome like Cave Story, and even free to download or play online! Here are a few free indie games that are just as good as a lot of regular games.

• Spelunky – Maybe the best free game ever made. You explore randomly generated caves for treasure and adventure, and the game just never gets old. I could play this until the end of time.
• Knytt – Explore a new world with sweet platformer gameplay. Give it some time to grow on you.
• RunMan: Race Around the World – It’s been described as “what an even better Sonic game would be like.” That’s some high praise, there.
• Dino Run – Escape the apocalypse! Also, dinosaurs!

How to Train Your Dragon was this week’s big game. The game is based on the movie which was based on the book, so I’m going to give a quick list of recommended books about games for all the gamers on this blog. If you can find them in a bookstore, flip through and see if it’s something you’ll like.

• Guinness World Records 2010: Gamer’s Edition – Solid gold (not actually made of gold, that would cost too much). Let me just flip to a random awesome record here: “Most Popular Puzzle Game Series of the Century”: Bejeweled. Here’s a cooler one: “New Super Mario Bros. DS Fastest Completion”: 44 minutes, 2 seconds. Full of records and other awesome gaming stuff.
• High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games – A little old now (released in 2002) but fun gaming history with plenty of pictures. I’ll be your dad even played some of those old systems in this book.
• The Book of Games Vol. 2 – A little tougher read, but really awesome info on the gaming industry. Why Volume 2? ‘Cause it’s better than Volume 1.
• The Art of the Video Game – Nothing but awesome pics of great games. Beautiful book.

This week’s game releases include Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, and on the very same day, another game (one that’s not so kid-friendly) will be released based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. I decided that this should be a growing trend, games based on awesome literature, so here are some games I’d like to see that fit that mold:

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – There is a classic, hilarious 1984 text adventure based on this classic, hilarious 1979 book. But text adventures are a little hard to get into ever since games got, you know, graphics, so we need a new Hitchhiker’s Guide game. Besides maybe the Ratchet & Clank series, not enough games are funny nowadays.
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – This mixture of a famous Jane Austen novel and, well, zombies is getting a movie made of it pretty soon. So it’s the perfect time for a video game beat-em-up adaptation to go along with it!
• The Three Musketeers – This book’s due for a comeback. Lots of good combat actions between muskets and rapiers, and a good story to back it up.

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.

This week’s gaming news post covered Vancouver 2010, the primary game of this year’s Winter Olympics. But there are other games for the Winter Olympics out there, both from the past and present. Let’s go through them.

• When they say Vancouver 2010 is the official game of this year’s Winter Olympics, there is actually one more: Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games. If you’re playing the Wii, this is the only official game you get for these games, and if you have just a Wii, chances are you’d rather play as Mario, Sonic, and pals than generic folks anyway. I like Yoshi way better than “German Athlete #3.”
• You can go back to previous years of official games. My recommendation: Nagano Winter Olympics ’98 for the Nintendo 64. It was made by Konami, and somehow had more events than they include nowadays. You could play curling!
• Then there’s one of the few unofficial games ever released, 1986′s “Winter Games.” It was released on a ton of different consoles back then, and is about to be ported over to the Wii Virtual Console in the near future. There are some who say this game has the worst controls of any ever made. It’s, uh… Not that good.