Starmen.net does what Nintendon't

It is an auspicious day in videogaming. After over a decade of begging, pleading and petitioning, starmen.net and the bustling Earthbound/Mother fan community's pleas for Nintendo to release Mother 3 in English for all of North America (and Great Britain, Australia, etc, etc) to enjoy have continuously fallen on deaf ears. Soon after the 2006 release of Mother 3 in Japan, Nintendo made it clear that they have no intention of releasing Mother 3 in any English-speaking markets. Starmen.net and the EB fan community had been strictly against the use of ROMs, but this statement forced their hand and nearly two years ago a group of programmers and translators, all Earthbound fans, got to work at translating the Japanese Mother 3 Gameboy Advance ROM.
Today marks the end of their mission to release Mother 3 in English. The Mother 3 English ROM patch is now available for download. Below is the link for the patch, now you just have to track down the ROM (*cough*BitTorrent*cough*).
Now if you don't mind, I'm going to go play the hell out of Mother 3.

Nintendo Embraces Online Gaming

[Obviously an April Fools Joke. Nintendo still hates the internet.]
In a Nintendo Press Conference held today with Nintendo of America COO, Reggie Fils-Aime, it was revealed that Nintendo is regretting their limited integration of online features into their games. Fils-Aime says:

"We've seen the market for online gaming growing exponentially and, in the interest of maintaining our position of being an innovative, cutting edge industry leader, we will be reinventing the Nintendo brand to embrace the online market rather than avoid it."

Some changes Reggie goes on to mention include:
•The abolition of "Friend Codes" for a more user-friendly Xbox Live interface.
•Online multiplayer for all First-Party and Virtual Console games, including ones that have already been released via updates.
•Voice chat compatible with all previously released and future games via a microphone attachment to the Wiimote.
•DLC including new minigames for Wario Ware: Smooth Moves, new levels for Super Mario Galaxy and new playable characters for SSBB - including one that Reggie would only say is a "diminutive blue-clad android who fights simplistically named robots, doctors and, occasionally, people named after greek letters with an arm cannon."

Video of Reggie's full appearance can be found here.

Milk It 'Til It's Dead: Guitar Hero: Aerosmith announced

Activision announced that their next Guitar Hero will have a lot less musical selection and a lot more, well, Aerosmith. The aptly named Guitar Hero: Aerosmith will feature nothing but Aerosmith song after Aerosmith song and GHIII owners will be treated to free Aerosmith DLC on Xbox Live or Playstation Network. You can download "Dream On" for free between 02/16 and 02/18.

Despite the free dangling carrot DLC, I can't say I'm very thrilled about this upcoming release. Not that Aerosmith songs wouldn't be fun to play, but I like selection. Also, they didn't exactly do a bang up job with their last Guitar Hero throwaway title, "Rocks the 80s" which was a repackaging of Guitar Hero 2 with a meticulously selected setlist of 80s songs that successfully ignored every possible 80s song anybody would actually want to play and, instead, replaced them with some of the most forgettable 80s songs ever written and then proceeded to charge full price for it.

We can only hope this Aerosmith game turns out better than the abysmal shooter-on-rails "Revolution X" or Guitar Hero: Aerosmith's developmentally disabled cousin, "Quest for Fame" where you used a bright purple pick on this thing that looked like a broken auto-harp to kinda strum out songs when the pick actually worked. Seriously, that game was so traumatically bad that my memories of it kept me from ever wanting to play Guitar Hero when it was first announced.

Smash Bros Brawl Tournaments Are Coming

Nintendo announced today that they will be holding tournaments for their highly anticipated Super Smash Bros Brawl across the country. Each location will allow for the first 256 people to participate in the tournament free of charge.

Each participant will receive a $10 Best Buy gift card. Regional winners from each tournament will go to New York City for the finals.

Grand prize:
A crystal-coated Wii with a design from Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a home theater system from Best Buy and a copy of the game.

2nd Prize:
A Wii, Wii Remote, a copy of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and a $1,000 Best Buy gift card.

3rd:
A Wii, Wii Remote, a copy of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and a $500 Best Buy gift card.

4th
A Wii, Wii Remote, a copy of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and a $250 Best Buy gift card.

The bad news is that if you don't live in the Northeastern US or California you're screwed unless you really like driving/flying. Dates and locations are as follows:

Feb. 16
Doors open at 3 p.m.
Orpheum Theater
842 S. Broadway
Los Angeles, CA 90014

Feb. 23
Doors open at 2 p.m.
Ten15 Folsom
1015 Folsom St.
San Francisco, CA 94103

March 1
Doors open at 3 p.m.
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Olden Hall
100 Institute Road
Worcester, MA 01609

Finals:

March 8
Doors open at 5 p.m.
Best Buy (NOHO)
622 Broadway
New York, NY 10012

Since it's close by I'll probably be trying my hand at the Worcester tournament, failing miserably to the nerds that actually have strategies and tactics for this game and going home a $10 Best Buy card richer (and $30 in gas poorer). Anybody else thinking of attending?

Wii Games: They're Just Not Very Good

Next-Gen recently did some scouring around gamerankings.com and came to a conclusion that won't be too startling to people who have been paying attention to game releases over the past year - Wii games are horrible. How horrible? 64% horrible, to be precise. That's the average score for games on the Wii. Pretty terrible compared to Xbox 360's 70% and, surprise winner, PS3's 73%.

The article goes on to say that the Wii's low score is likely due to it being a more desirable target for shovelware (Jenga anybody?) and also because reviewers and developers don't fully understand the Wii yet. Though I do agree that the Wii is positively drowning in shovelware and that developers are having a hard time making games that feel like they were made for motion control rather than having motion controls shoehorned into a game that would be perfectly fine without them. I can't say I agree with the argument that reviewers don't understand the Wii though. The whole gameplay-over-graphics philosophy of the Wii is something a lot of reviewers agree with and were happy to hear about. The problem is that outside of a few titles (mostly first party) very few are any that I would recommend as must-haves.
[Next-Gen]

Virtual Custom Bestio-Sodomy Rape Not As Common As Previously Thought

The ESRB has released a stats breakdown for the 1563 games they rated last year. In 2007 a whopping 59% of games were rated E for everybody.

The ever-controversial "Mature" games? A paltry six percent.

So, for those of you counting on Fox News and The US Government to do your parenting for you, now you can pick a random game, flip a coin, heads you let your kids play it, tails you don't, and you'll make the right decision 94% of the time. That's a pretty good average and you don't have to do any of that tedious "parenting" or "paying attention to your children". Bullet, consider yourself dodged.

[ESRB]

Gerstmann Gate: The Revenge

The internet at large never got any closure on the late 2007 incident where Gamespot.com writer/editor Jeff Gerstmann was fired, allegedly due to him not playing ball with advertisers and giving Kane & Lynch: Dead Men higher scores.

Today, I heard from many sources that Gerstmann would be on G4TV's X-Play tonight discussing his dismissal from Gamespot.com. Here's a quick retelling of that interview:

Adam Sessler: "Can you tell us more about your dismissal from gamespot.com?"
Jeff Gerstmann: "Nope."

Aaah - sweet, sweet closure.

At least we did learn that Gerstmann is going to be launching his own blog very shortly (Edit: my mistake, it's already up) over at www.jeffgerstmann.net. Poor bastard obviously doesn't know he's going up against the 3,596,826th Alexa ranked website on the internet - slothbot.com.

New Issue of Gamecola Available

The newest issue of monthly online videogame newsletter, Gamecola, is available. It's my last issue writing with them (I contributed a review of Alex Kidd and The Lost Stars and "Poor Players Paradise") so I can focus my attention on this blog and other projects. It's worth checking out and has a good variety of different columns and reviews.
The link is here: Gamecola.net

Smash Bros. Brawl to Offer Demos for Classic Games

Smash Bros. Dojo is reporting that the ever-elusive Super Smash Bros. Brawl is going to have yet another new feature called "Masterpieces" - playable demos for classic games.



According to The Dojo the North American release will include:
Super Mario Bros.
Ice Climber
Legend of Zelda
Kid Icarus
Kirby's Adventure
Super Metroid
Star Fox 64


Fire Emblem and cult favorite, Earthbound (Mother 2) were also listed as being playable on the Japanese version of the site but were omitted from the North American release page. However, fans of these games (and others not listed), don't lose all hope - it was also mentioned that this is not a complete list of games and others will be able to be unlocked.

This new feature raises some questions for me. Namely, "Is this new feature awesome or kind of lacking?"

It's a nice new feature and unlocking new demos will add some replay value to the game, but after playing the Gamecube version of Animal Crossing where you could unlock full versions of classic Nintendo games - don't demos feel a little bit like going from filet mignon to half-eaten Big Macs?