OMG Nintendo

This actually happened down in Florida, so check your packages carefully next time you buy big-ticket electronics at your local Wal-Mart. Jodi Wykle wanted to give her son a new Nintendo DS Lite and Guitar Hero for his birthday, but when he opened the box - still "factory sealed," of course - he actually found a wad of Chinese newspaper and rocks waiting inside. 

Wykle attempted to return the DS and was pretty much told it was Nintendo's problem, but Nintendo couldn't do anything about it either. After her local TV station ran a report about it, though, Wal-Mart suddenly discovered the box o' rocks masquerading as a DS had been returned before. Wykle got a refund and a $20 gift card, which means that all you have to do in order to get good customer service from a Wal-Mart is shame them on television. 

Consumer electronics boxes being stuffed with rocks after some thief makes off with the actual good are not exactly common but it happens-- a lot of stories involving Best Buy laptops and other nefariousness popped up in the wake of this one. It may irritating the snot out of the clerks, but make them open up your box for you before you leave the store. That momentary awkwardness is less painful in the long run than having to get on TV just to get a refund. 

Mario knows what you did.

This shot, and the others I've put up behind the link, were submitted to Kotaku by a faithful reader who spotted a legendary piece of copyright infringement at the Florida State Fair. They capture the bootleg glory of Mario Land, a ride-like amusement contraption that's been traveling around to different state and county fairs on the east coast for about fifteen years now. I'd heard of it before this, but never gotten a chance to see all of its hideous glory. Now I have, and my life is complete.

More behind the cut. Now your life can be complete, too.

I just finished playing Rygar: The Battle of Argus. It is a near-ditect port of a six-year-old PS2 game that has been plopped onto Wii with minimal changes to... well, anything. Everything about the game is dated: the graphics, the localization, and especially the gameplay. It's not dated in a fun retro way, either, but in that sort of depressive creepy way you run across when you're digging through a GameStop bargain bin.

Being forced to run this gauntlet of turn-of-the-century B.S. made me realize that there are certain things that games just shouldn't be allowed to do anymore. If someone submits a game containing one or more of these elements for certification, someone at Nintendo should have the duty of screaming at the developers in question until they feel very bad about themselves.

Failing that, I guess I'll do it myself behind the cut.
 

I almost didn't cover this because I wasn't sure what to say, other than "Honey, it's time for break-up."

Heath Blom of Portsmouth, New Hampshire wanted a $1000 RC toy airplane from his grandparents for Christmas, and when he didn't receive a luxury children's toy, he was apparently very angry indeed. He decided to take it out on his girlfriend, Randi Young, who had given him a new Wii console for Christmas that he apparently hadn't much wanted, by loudly "disparaging" the gift to her. Everything gets super-trashy from there, as Young's attempts to leave the house early erupted into a fistfight that left both sides "bruised and battered", and got both people arrested when the cops showed up.

He dragged me down two flights of stairs, by the hair, Young claimed on Friday.

But Blom said, I stood in the doorway trying to block her. She punched me in the eye. She punched me three times. I said Thats it. And I pulled her hair.

Classy. Don't worry, though: Blom told his grandparents they could buy him the $1000 toy plane for his birthday in April.

Sonic Unleashed is a game that kind of belongs to the Wii by default. With its DIMPS-designed daytime levels, the Wii SKU has managed a whopping... 72% Metacritic average! And that's seven points ahead of the 360 SKU. Sadly, the Wii's higher score is coming from the game being shorter, which means less time spent in Werehog levels hunting down medals.

Since everyone hates this slow-paced collecting crap in Sonic games, why does it keep showing up? I asked Sega about this at E3 and got a "well, it's for gameplay variety!" answer that sounded pretty fishy. It turns out that is, in fact, a complete and total lie. David Clayman at IGN got a real answer, and mentioned it offhand in the Three Lights Xbox 360 podcast. Indoor Heroes has a handy-dandy transcript of the comment I'm going to quote verbatim here:

"I asked one of the developers at TGS, you know I was like, come on everybody just wants Sonic running, like whats up with the werehog? And he was like, well, heres the deal... he runs at this miles per hour, kilometers per hour, and he laid out all of the statistics on how fast this hedgehog goes, and he was like In order to make a game where Sonic is running and everybody enjoys the whole thing we'd have to design this many miles of level, and it was some ungodly number. And he's like and that would be like maybe a three hour game and I was like wow, well that kinda stinks and he's like yeah, so we gotta do this other stuff."

There you go. Modern Sonic games will always suck until Sega is brave enough to release a title that is short and awesome, instead of long and hurtful.

I haven't had the heart to cover much of the more recent news about Castlevania Judgment. It's all just so dire, from the laughable redesigns to the poor E3 gameplay. Still, I had thoroughly underestimated just how hard Castlevania Judgment could fail. With the game out in stores now, movie clips and new information about the game's story are flooding the 'net. Most of it is the harmlessly stupid fluff you expect from a crossover dream-match fighting game, but then... then there's Maria's storyline, which is basically... basically...

*sigh*

It's basically about Maria's enthusiasm for large breasts. That is, apparently, the best plot for Maria that Konami could come up with.

How do you publish something this freaking sad and the utterly excellent Order of Ecclesia in the same franchise, in the same quarter?

You know, I thought the worst of this was in the past, but this may the stupidest of all Stupid Wii Accessories. Yes, these gloves are very nicely made (being official Everlast manufacture), although they will contribute exactly nothing to your gameplay experience. No, what makes the Wii Everlast Boxing Gloves monumentally stupid is the bizarre write-up they received in the New York Times article announcing their availability:

For gaming enthusiasts, the Wii Everlast Boxing Gloves fulfill the promise that the Power Glove for Nintendo offered in 1989.

The Power Glove initially generated a huge buzz, before people found it difficult to use  especially to simulate boxing in games like Mike Tysons Punch-Out!!

While the standard Wii remote was a major improvement in interactive gaming, the gloves, created by Everlast Worldwide and Company X Accessories and priced at $30, offer a much better virtual-boxing experience.

No it doesn't, you stupid, stupid person.

There was a lot of news about Square-Enix's Wii and DS lines of products yesterday, and for the most part I was glad to report it. Anyone who played Ring of Fates should be stoked for Echoes of Time, My Life as a King was a brilliant concept, Crystal Bearers looks potentially interesting... but all of these games have one thing in common that drives me crazy.

It's that stupid Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles branding.

At some point in the past, probably back when Square-Enix and Sony were total BFFs and Final Fantasy would be a Sony platform exclusive forevar omg, Square-Enix seems to have decided that every original project for Nintendo hardware needed its own special title brand. For whatever reason, they settled on Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for that branding.

This decision has never made any sense to me. The original Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles may have been the first Square-Enix title for Nintendo hardware since the two companies had their infamous falling-out over the N64, but the fact remains that the game wasn't that popular. Yet I still had to type its title approximately one kerjillion times in the course of talking about completely unrelated games.

Why on Earth did publisher Lexicon Entertainment fake screenshots in their original batch of PR materials for the upcoming Wii/DS shooter Ocean Commander?

CVG was the first to pick this up, but anybody examining the two batches of screens closely could've done it. The two fake DS screens - the ones showing "gameplay", ugh - are just Wii screens shrunk down to DS resolution and attached to a possibly-legit DS top screen HUD interface. Lexicon had the gall to issue the Wii screens used in the fake DS shots in the same batch of Ocean Commander PR materials!

Every games writing outlet has to take a PR team's word for it that screens issued for a given title are authentic. We already have a term (via Penny Arcade) for shots that abuse this trust with Photoshop, but Lexicon's stunt here is so incompetently flagrant that it hits a new low.

Evidence of the dirty deed lies behind the cut-- the two faked DS shots, and the two Wii shots used to create the fakes.