Badass PSP Game Rumbles To The Top Of Japan’s Bestsellers List [Sales Get]

Tough guy simulator Kenka Bancho 4: Ichinen Sensou is Japan’s bestselling video game, the latest entry in the series that has made its way stateside under the name Kenka Bancho: Badass Rumble. It dethrones Capcom’s Biohazard 5 re-release this week. While Biohazard 5 Alternative Edition (aka Resident Evil 5 Gold Edition) couldn’t hold onto first place again this week , it’s only bumped down to third, sitting behind Kenka Banco 4 for PSP and Super Robot Wars OG: Saga Endless Frontier Exceed for the Nintendo DS. That’s better than Heavy Rain and Dante’s Inferno, two PlayStation 3 games that quickly slipped off the chart. There are plenty of new releases in this week’s Media Create software chart, including the Japanese release of Borderlands, BlazBlue Portable and the budget priced re-release of Demon’s Souls. See all—make that thirty—of Japan’s top sellers for the week of February 22 to 28 in the list below. 01. Kenka Bancho 4: Ichinen Sensou (PSP) – 72,000 / NEW 02. Super Robot Wars OG: Saga Endless Frontier Exceed (DS) – 65,000 / NEW 03. Resident Evil 5: Gold Edition (PS3) – 48,000 / 191,000 04. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii) – 45,000 / 3,412,000 05. God Eater (PSP) – 45,000 / 514,000 06. Hot Shots Tennis Portable (PSP) – 45,000 / NEW 07. Fushigi no Dungeon: Fuurai no Shiren 4 – Kami no Hitomi to Akuma no Heso (DS) – 41,000 / NEW 08. Tomodachi Collection (DS) – 33,000 / 2,882,000 09. Wii Fit Plus (Wii) – 30,000 / 1,694,000 10. Dragon Quest VI: Maboroshi no Daichi(DS) – 26,000 / 1,244,000 11. Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kizuna: Dai Yon Kan – Kizuna (DS) 12. Demon’s Souls (the Best) (PS3) 13. Borderlands (Xbox 360) 14. Kiniro no Corda 3 (PSP) 15. Power Pro Success Legends (PSP) 16. Estpolis: The Lands Cursed by the Gods (DS) 17. BlazBlue Portable (PSP) 18. The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (DS) 19. Monster Hunter 2nd G Portable (the Best) (PSP) 20. Espgaluda II: Black Label (Xbox 360) 21. Wii Sports Resort (Wii) 22. Star Ocean: The Last Hope International (PS3) 23. Katekyoo Hitman Reborn! Kizuna no Tag Battle (PSP) 24. Pokemon Heart Gold / Soul Silver (DS) 25. Daikaijuu Battle: Ultra Coliseum DX – Ultra Senshi Daishuuketsu (Wii) 26. One Piece Unlimited Cruise: Episode 1 – Nami ni Yureru Hihou (Minna no Susume Selection) (Wii) 27. New Super Mario Bros. (DS) 28. Kiniro no Corda 3 (PS2) 29. Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s World Championship 2010: Reverse of Arcadia (DS) 30. Inazuma Eleven 2: Fire / Blizzard (DS) Media Create Weekly Software Sales [Gpara]

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Badass PSP Game Rumbles To The Top Of Japan’s Bestsellers List [Sales Get]

NSFW: Remember When Robot Games Were Promoted With Robots? [Japan]

In the 1980s, robot video games were sold with robots. It’s not the 1980s anymore and robots alone alone are not enticing enough for in-store retail displays, it seems. Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier EXCEED, the sequel to Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier, is another tactical role-playing spinoff of the Super Robot Taisen. The game features characters from Super Robot Taisen and Xenosaga as well as boobs and butts. Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier EXCEED was co-developed by Banpresto and Monolith Soft. Check out the game’s opening movie here . ここがおっぱいポロンティア！「無限のフロンティアEXCEED」発売 [AkibaOS]

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NSFW: Remember When Robot Games Were Promoted With Robots? [Japan]

Transformers: War For Cybertron DS Preview: Grimlock Goes Portable [UPDATE] [Impressions]

Don’t get excited about this screenshot. It’s from the console version of Transformers: War For Cybertron. But the game still might turn your head. [UPDATE: DS screens added below.] Transformers: War For Cyberton on the Nintendo DS is being made by Vicarious Visions, the veteran studio behind other, recent well-regarded portable 3D Transformers action games. Like the previous ones, the new entry will be sold in Autobot and Decepticon versions, though this time the games won’t link to a web-based meta-game war between the owners of each. What the games will do is offer Vicarious Visions’ take on the new Transformers fiction being introduced in High Moon Studios’ new console game , a new Cyberton-based re-imagining of the war between the Autobots and the Decepticons. The portable games will put players in the robot bodies of Transformer pairs, encouraging players to swap between two fighters as they tackle missions. A Vicarious developer chose Jetfire and Grimlock for a mission and explained that, while we could control only one character a time, we could swap the other in at any time. The player can deal different kinds of damage, tied to certain characters. The enemies will resist one for or the other, in a system balanced by the game’s artificial intelligence. The idea is to encourage character swapping. Let’s say one Autobot who delivers laser damage encounters a group of Decepticons resistant to that, then the proper strategy would be to switch to the other Autobot to deliver plasma damage. My look at the DS version of War For Cybertron was very brief, but the continued involvement of Vicarious Visions should give series fans a solid reference point from which to judge the prospects of this game. Built for people not interested in the current Michael Bay movie transformers and designed for gamers excited to collect a long list of playable Transformers, the DS War For Cyberton games will be available this summer.

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Transformers: War For Cybertron DS Preview: Grimlock Goes Portable [UPDATE] [Impressions]

Transformers: War For Cybertron DS Preview: Grimlock Goes Portable [UPDATE] [Impressions]

Don’t get excited about this screenshot. It’s from the console version of Transformers: War For Cybertron. But the game still might turn your head. [UPDATE: DS screens added below.] Transformers: War For Cyberton on the Nintendo DS is being made by Vicarious Visions, the veteran studio behind other, recent well-regarded portable 3D Transformers action games. Like the previous ones, the new entry will be sold in Autobot and Decepticon versions, though this time the games won’t link to a web-based meta-game war between the owners of each. What the games will do is offer Vicarious Visions’ take on the new Transformers fiction being introduced in High Moon Studios’ new console game , a new Cyberton-based re-imagining of the war between the Autobots and the Decepticons. The portable games will put players in the robot bodies of Transformer pairs, encouraging players to swap between two fighters as they tackle missions. A Vicarious developer chose Jetfire and Grimlock for a mission and explained that, while we could control only one character a time, we could swap the other in at any time. The player can deal different kinds of damage, tied to certain characters. The enemies will resist one for or the other, in a system balanced by the game’s artificial intelligence. The idea is to encourage character swapping. Let’s say one Autobot who delivers laser damage encounters a group of Decepticons resistant to that, then the proper strategy would be to switch to the other Autobot to deliver plasma damage. My look at the DS version of War For Cybertron was very brief, but the continued involvement of Vicarious Visions should give series fans a solid reference point from which to judge the prospects of this game. Built for people not interested in the current Michael Bay movie transformers and designed for gamers excited to collect a long list of playable Transformers, the DS War For Cyberton games will be available this summer.

Excerpt from:
Transformers: War For Cybertron DS Preview: Grimlock Goes Portable [UPDATE] [Impressions]

How To Do A Red Carpet Right: Add Video Games [Dice2010]

Attention, Joan Rivers. Heads up to the E! Network. Pay attention, producers of the upcoming Academy Awards pre-show. I am about to show you how to do a Red Carpet right. Because everything is better with video games. Last week, I consented to perform what I believe is the lowest act of journalism practiced in America. I agreed to work a spot on a red carpet. I had agreed to stand on the non-carpeted side of a red velvet rope and grab my five minutes with each person who traipsed down the carpet. I said yes, but I vowed I would not be a cliche. I would not ask people what they were wearing. I would not ask inane questions about how it felt to be nominated, nor would I flatter anyone by telling them how good they looked. Some of these pitfalls were not hard to avoid, because my red carpet was the red carpet for the Interactive Achievement Awards. A video game awards show. My kind of people would be walking down this aisle, video game people, people who might not have much to brag about what they’re wearing. On Thursday night, at the Red Rock Casino before the 13th iteration of these awards, I took my position, sandwiched between Wired’s Chris Kohler and freelancer John Gaudiosi, standing about midway down the length of velvet rope on top of a piece of paper marked “Kotaku.com.” I had my DS with me, because, I wasn’t going to ask these people many questions, not if I could help it. No, I was going to play a video game with these people, a who’s who of video game designers. Each designer would get one try to play before moving on. My game would be Scribblenauts. It was almost chess, which I figured I could play one side of, allowing these world’s finest designers each a turn to contribute a move to the opposing side. But chess is not really a video game. Neither, technically, is the menu screen of Scribblenauts — a virtually blank canvas upon which any concrete nouns you type into the system will -poof!- be rendered on that screen. But Scribblenauts would at least allow me to do something quick and easily comprehensible with these designers. Each developer would give me a word, contributing their noun-turned-virtual-object/being to the menu-screen landscape of the game. What strange menagerie would these people make? What would a session of a game played by a dozen or more of the world’s best gamemakers in rapid succession be like? 1) Denny Thorley First up was the tall, bald Denny Thorley, president of Day 1 Studios and a day one guinea pig for my experiment. I explained the concept and ventured into the start screen of Scribblenauts, which was populated just by a boy named Maxwell, some land and a blue sky. Thorley requested a “football.” And so it was that a football appeared next to the boy. That was it. I ushered Thorley along so he could answer someone else’s questions. I was done with him. 2) Don Daglow Next was a white-haired fixture of these video game red carpets, the affable Don Daglow. He is credited with making the first baseball video game and was one of the first Intellivision programmers. This gaming veteran eyed my experiment and requested a “car.” A car appeared, as inanimate as the football. Slow start. But, Daglow said, he would tell me the story of this game: “They are going on a big long drive, a drive to the football game!” 3) David Adams and Tim Campbell Two of the guys who run Vigil Games were next. They had just released Darksiders and, perhaps because I was beginning to doubt the entertainment value of my experiment, I actually asked these guys questions. That was a whole other kind of silliness . I think these guys had played Scribblenauts before, because when it came time to play, they asked me to summon Cthulhu. The winged, bipedal Lovecraftian monster appeared and began waving its clawed hands at Maxwell. The Darksiders guys had just made my experiment interesting. 4) Randy Pitchford I knew of Randy Pitchford’s absurdly high Xbox Live gamerscore. I had seen his company’s forest of arcade machines. This next man, owner of development studio Gearbox Software, makers of Borderlands and other games, was a gamer. Randy is a jovial man and for a reason I would not fully understand until the next day, he just about jumped out of his shoes exhorting me to add to this Scribblenauts scene: “George Washington! He won’t tell a lie!” The next day, Pitchford would end his talk at the DICE gaming summit, of which the awards are a part, by pondering the portrait of Washington that appears on the dollar bill, a notable merging of artistic and commercial success. George Washington was less successful in Scribblenauts. Cthulhu annihilated America’s first President. 5) Richard Garriott The man who made one of the most important massively multiplayer games as well as enough money to launch himself to space on a Russian rocket, Richard Garriott, was next. He asked for, surprise, a “rocket.” A tiny one appeared and clunked to the ground. Kind of a downer. But at least Cthulhu didn’t crush it. 6) Ted Price Ted Price runs Insomniac Games. The man plays. And whatever he asked for was so exciting that I forgot to write it down. I bet Cthulhu killed it, whatever it was. 7) That Game Company Jenova Chen, creator of poetic video game Flower, showed up with his colleagues. I had a gaggle of designers in front of me all at once. Jenova knew a flower wouldn’t stand a chance against Cthulhu. He asked for a sandstorm. Not in the game. Snowstorm? A cloud appeared and snowflakes dropped. Briefly, it appeared to calm Cthulhu. Mark Cerny The legendary designer who has played a hand in everything from Marble Madness and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to Ratchet & Clank and Uncharted would be receiving the equivalent of a lifetime achievement this night. I was making him play Scribblenauts. He asked for Clank. Doubtful, I told him. This was not a Sony-made game. So he changed his request and asked for a robot. And wouldn’t you know it, the robot that appeared looked like Clank. It wouldn’t be Cthulhu that destroyed this robot. It was Jenova Chen’s snow. A few snowflakes shorted circuits and the thing blew up. 9) Ron Fish Next was Ron Fish, who I didn’t know well. It was suggested I look him up later. And true enough, I know this man’s work. He makes music for lots of video games . Ron told me he’d be bad at this. He asked for a “snowball.” A snowball appeared. Nothing else happened. 10) David Crane The following towering presence, pictured higher up, was David Crane, a co-founder of Activision, the inventor of Pitfall and one of the all-time greats in so many ways. David Crane didn’t know Scribblenauts. But he knows how to play games. I explained the problem of Cthulhu running roughshod. David Crane summoned a T-Rex. The T-Rex fought Cthulhu. The T-Rex killed Cthulhu. 11) Garry Kitchen David Crane’s business partner in new venture AppStar Games, Garry Kitchen followed Crane. He wanted a “pumpkin” and so he got one. 12) Jessica Chobot IGN reporter Jessica Chobot was walking the carpet. Maybe if you’re an attractive reporter you get to do these things. Jessica wanted Siouxsie Sioux, lead signer of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Many spelling attempts later, it didn’t work. So she asked for a “goth chick.” I typed in “goth girl” and a little girl appeared. Jessica was thrilled. The T-Rex wasn’t and killed the goth girl. 13) Ken Lobb When you work a red carpet, public relations people help you out by ushering folks to you and whispering a hint about who they are (that second thing doesn’t happen if the ushered person is Harrison Ford, I believe). I was told the next person was Doug Lowenstein, longtime president of the Entertainment Software Association. But today, Lowenstein was looking an awful lot like Microsoft and former Nintendo game design exec Ken Lobb. Ken and I chatted about Perfect Dark, a game he’s been affiliated with in both his Nintendo and Xbox jobs. He wanted a pterodactyl. We thought it would fight with the T-Rex. Fate had other plans. 14) Jay Mohr The comedian and longtime host of the Interactive Achievement Awards, Jay Mohr was next. I asked for a noun. He asked for “terpsichorean,” which can mean “dancer.” Problem was, Scribblenauts had just frozen. I blamed Jay Mohr. That’s what he got for trying to be clever. We re-booted the game. No luck with “terpsichorean” and Jay was being pulled away. He had to get ready to host. He didn’t want to leave. I told him I needed a concrete noun. He wanted to know what that was. Something you can touch, I said. So he asked for anti-matter. Clever. We got a blob of blackness and Jay walked on. 15) Evan Skolnick Second to last was Evan Skolnick, lead writer of Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2. Time was ticking so he made it quick. “Zebra.” So I had a Zebra and antimatter. 16) Patrice Desilets and Corey May And finally we had two of the chief creators of Assassin’s Creed II, Desilets and May. Whatever they asked for is lost to memory. What I can tell you is this. It was sucked into the antimatter. So was the zebra. And as they walked away, Scribblenauts was left barren. —- And then, the awards show went on. My work at the red carpet was complete. I challenge others who work any red carpets for any awards show to find a way to have more fun or get better journalism accomplished. I don’t think it can be done.

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How To Do A Red Carpet Right: Add Video Games [Dice2010]

Kotaku Off Topic: Dig In [How Is This News?]

So, I hear some of you Kotaku Off Topic readers are having some lousy weather. How’s your internet connection holding up? If you can read this, we’ve got some off topic things to discuss. Let’s not talk about the weather, though. No small talk in this open thread, as we prefer idle chitchat and the occasional trivial conversation. Afraid there’s not much exciting happening on my end to spark up conversation, as much of my day was spent doing embargoed things over at Square Enix. I’m sure you can quickly guess what for. So, have along Kotaku Off Topic weekend thread to enjoy and be nice to each other. How vinyl records are made – a video! The Super Bowl, as directed by Tarantino, Anderson, Lynch & more – Stay for the Werner Herzog. Giant Robot is in trouble – Asian culture mag needs money! The Last Airbender Super Bowl TV spot – Oh, M. Night Shyamalan is directing this. I forgot. What a twist!

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Kotaku Off Topic: Dig In [How Is This News?]

Why A Man Plays Mario [Feature]

I’m 33 and, with mixed emotions, I play games that star Super Mario. The people who sell Mario games would say it’s great to play Mario games. Mario is for everyone. My gut tells me that playing Mario, the adventures of a fat plumber in a Mushroom Kingdom of warbling enemies and happy conflict, is juvenile. My mind tells me I’m a more ideal Mario player than any 8-year-old kid. Grown men play Super Mario games, so I feel that it is time for me, a grown man, to figure out why and whether this is a habit I ought to quit. Last year, as I have done for most of the years of my life past age 10, I played Super Mario games. I played new ones, such as New Super Mario Bros. Wii and, during plane flights and subway rides and while lying on a couch as my wife read a book, the Nintendo DS game Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story. Mario games are fun. They’ve been fun for me since the 80s. But I’m in my 30s. Mario games are in their 20s. They act young still. As I get older, I don’t always want to. And yet there’s joy in the gameplay mixes with the sensation of being an adult possibly playing with a kid’s toy. Bower’s Inside Story features Mario and Luigi exploring the cavernous — but cute, always cute — stomach and intestines of Mario nemesis Bowser. It’s all quite colorful and jolly. The bad guy has a fantastically bad way of speaking. He’s Fawful, one of those kids’-fiction bad guys. I don’t remember the specific moment when I felt I might be too old for this Mario game. It may have been while I made Mario use his hammer to smash little bad guys or maybe it was when Bowser accidentally ate something that made him sick. Possibly, it was during the many moments that the game’s joke-filled script made me laugh; not that I’m too old to laugh, but why am here to witness all those jokes and puns about beans and unbrushed teeth? This was kid’s stuff that I was enjoying — good natured, colorful, clever kid’s stuff, but, still, kid’s stuff. It was a cross-generational kind of thing, like a Pixar movie at best, but, well, not very adult. Mario’s not alone in not feeling quite right for me. I’ve thought in recent years that maybe Call of Duty is too Michael Bay for me and that, well, certain games aren’t enough Mario in the way they teach players their ideas. But as I played Bowser’s Inside Story, there was that reaction again: Maybe I’m too old for this. Then I remembered a kid I met at a party a year ago. This boy was one of the few children there, disinterred in the conversations of his parents and other adults there. He had a DS. In it, he had New Super Mario Bros., his first Mario game. I mentioned some of the older ones, ones made before he was born. He’d never played them, never heard of them. Maybe, I thought, he was too young to be playing Mario. What Kids Miss About Mario There was another moment while playing Mario and Luigi that I can recall specifically. I was in control of Mario and I encountered a character who gave Mario the ability to strap a blue shell to his back. Mario could crouch down, tuck his limbs into his shell and slide across the screen. This new power essentially make Mario into a turtle. That provoked a different reaction: This is something a kid couldn’t appreciate, not really, not completely. How could a anyone under the age of, I don’t know, 33?, appreciate the fact that when Mario obtains the shell power, the game shows blocks of power radiating to all corners of Mario’s world, a clear — obvious! — homage to the exclamation-point block-radiating in 1990’s Super Mario World. No child of the 21st century would understand that. How could a kid appreciate this marvelous twist of a Mario world’s power dynamics, this turning of Mario into the very kickable shell that gamers used to make Mario punt across the screen in most of his games since 1986’s Super Mario Bros? In this moment in Bowser’s Inside Story, Mario had become his enemy, had assumed the role of his turtle victims, an idea that was more than 20 years in the making. Oh, but the blue-shell-power was in 2006’s New Super Mario Bros., Mario experts might point out. The point still stands. It’s the discovery of the blue-shell-power that enriches me as a Mario-playing man. If one strives to experience fiction that possesses emotional maturity and thematic complexity, Mario games are not a form of entertainment that offer meaningful depth. That feeling of unease in my gut as I play a new Mario game might be the unease I’d have if I sat in the part of the bookstore that sells pop-up books and started reading one after the other. But the blue-shell-power discovery triggers my memories of older elements and abilities from older Mario games. It gets me thinking of variations and rule-changes. I’m suddenly a connoisseur of fine music recognizing how a new master performer has chosen to compose a classic slightly differently, maybe with an add instrument or new flourish. The making of video games involves yearly advances in the arrangement and physics of interactive worlds. Playing a series of well-made games designed across those years offers me the ability to enjoy nothing less meaningful than progress and the evolution of thought — thought in the context of designing an interactive Mushroom Kingdom, but layering, increasingly complex thought in that context nonetheless. That is what satisfies me and what I can’t imagine any child who didn’t start with Super Mario Bros. appreciating quite as much as I do. New Mario games, kids, feel as if they might have been made for old me. Other Men Who Play Mario I asked some other men who play Mario whether they’re ever conflicted about playing. The 46-year-old Michael Abbot, who runs the Brainy Gamer blog , has played Mario games since they were only made in two dimensions. He’s never beaten the eighth world of Super Mario Brothers, but he’s stuck with the series. He’s never been embarrassed to play the Marios, he said. Nostalgia is a big part of the appeal, but not all of it. “When I play a game like New Super Mario Bros. Wii, it’s like biting into a tasty cake made from a favorite recipe, but with a few surprise ingredients baked in,” he told me. “The older I get, I find I’m less hungry for ‘innovation’ and more appreciative of thoughtful, creative refinement. Mario games, especially the last two big ones, Galaxy and NSMBW, seem to embody that ideal.” Matthew Green, 28-year-old writer for Kombo.com and PressTheButtons.com knows there are other, non-Mario games targeted to him. “I’m part of a demographic meant for Modern Warfare and Madden, but I always look forward to a trip back to the Mushroom Kingdom,” he wrote to me. He told me he keeps playing because he grew up with the games and they make him smile. The Mario games also make these men feel young. Green: “There’s a sense of wonder and a spark of imagination at the heart of the Super Mario Bros. games, and as children we pick up on that right away.  Then, over time, most people lose that spark.  School, career, social engagements, relationship drama, mortgage payments, credit card debt, medical ailments, and other things that we pick up on our way to and through adulthood weigh us down and we forget the simple pleasures of saving the princess from a turtle despot with an eye for annexing kingdoms and galaxies.  Those of us who continue to play Super Mario games and who make them a part of our adult lives found a way to keep that spark alive.” Who Really Plays Mario? I asked Nintendo for data about who plays Mario games. They didn’t have any to share publicly, but I did get a range elsewhere. “The idea that Mario games are simply just for kids is foolish, and Nintendo knows that,” Jesse Divnich, vice president of research group EEDAR told me. “The dominant demographic for New Super Mario Bros. Wii are males and females over 24 years old.” Divnich said that a look at Nintendo’s commercials gives us a good idea of who the company believes is buying its products. “With Nintendo, nearly all of their commercials contain people of both genders and of all ages. They do that for a specific reason, because nearly every one of all ages, races, and creeds buy Nintendo products.” Specifically about Mario games, he added, Nintendo uses “the brand name of Mario to pull in the older crowd and the cute lovable graphics/gameplay to draw in the younger crowd.” At least Divnich gave me that out. It’s the gameplay that is there for some of us older players. “Dude Fights A Turtle” I found a man, a gamer who doesn’t try to play Mario. He’s no doubt seen those Nintendo commercials. He’s relented enough that he played a recent Mario game, Super Mario Galaxy, and “appreciated” it. But 36-year-old Chris Dahlen, an avid gamer and writer about games for Edge Magazine and his own Save The Robot blog , is immune to the marketing and has never seen the nostalgia. He grew up playing PC games, had a Colecovision, then missed most of the early Mario era. “Today, I feel like a kid in a fundamentalist Christian camp who’s never even read the Bible,” he told me. “Intellectually, I know the franchise, I can name the characters, and I’m aware of the new releases… But I do not ‘get it.’ I do not have the religion. I don’t know why everyone’s in love with this simple, paper-thin character or his cartoonish pals and nemeses.” Bear in mind, he’s played and appreciated the Mario games, but I can’t expect him to care about the blue-turtle-shell-power power and the 20 years of layered ideas. I certainly can’t expect him, a grown man, to be charmed. He gets, say, Spider-Man. “He’s a classic underdog hero,” Dahlen e-mailed to me. “But Mario?  There’s nothing. Nada.  Dude fights a turtle.” — Nothing is for everyone, and there are all sorts of things we outgrow as we age. I remember a news report about a police officer who was suspicious that any grown-up would play the cute Nintendo game Animal Crossing. I am aware of the people in my life to whom I will never relate the story or the jokes of a good Mario role-playing game. I know that as a 33-year-old man, I cannot consider Mario games to be the most natural fit in my life, the most appealing or relevant fiction. I’m not sure that they keep me young. I’m not sure their draw is nostalgia. I like them as progress-markers, as time capsules of thought about designing interactive adventure in a specific and unreal world. I like them despite the fact that their fiction is increasingly irrelevant to me, because, by contrast, their gameplay and their design is more relevant to me by the year. Sometimes playing a new Mario game is to witness the evolution of a thought, the advancement of a set of physics and rules that order a fictional kingdom. Other times, I am witnessing a bad idea, an evolutionary mistake. But always, I am witnessing living thought, tracked across the years, something a kid couldn’t understand, not until he’s older. Not until he’s, maybe, 33.

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Why A Man Plays Mario [Feature]

Why A Man Plays Mario [Feature]

I’m 33 and, with mixed emotions, I play games that star Super Mario. The people who sell Mario games would say it’s great to play Mario games. Mario is for everyone. My gut tells me that playing Mario, the adventures of a fat plumber in a Mushroom Kingdom of warbling enemies and happy conflict, is juvenile. My mind tells me I’m a more ideal Mario player than any 8-year-old kid. Grown men play Super Mario games, so I feel that it is time for me, a grown man, to figure out why and whether this is a habit I ought to quit. Last year, as I have done for most of the years of my life past age 10, I played Super Mario games. I played new ones, such as New Super Mario Bros. Wii and, during plane flights and subway rides and while lying on a couch as my wife read a book, the Nintendo DS game Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story. Mario games are fun. They’ve been fun for me since the 80s. But I’m in my 30s. Mario games are in their 20s. They act young still. As I get older, I don’t always want to. And yet there’s joy in the gameplay mixes with the sensation of being an adult possibly playing with a kid’s toy. Bower’s Inside Story features Mario and Luigi exploring the cavernous — but cute, always cute — stomach and intestines of Mario nemesis Bowser. It’s all quite colorful and jolly. The bad guy has a fantastically bad way of speaking. He’s Fawful, one of those kids’-fiction bad guys. I don’t remember the specific moment when I felt I might be too old for this Mario game. It may have been while I made Mario use his hammer to smash little bad guys or maybe it was when Bowser accidentally ate something that made him sick. Possibly, it was during the many moments that the game’s joke-filled script made me laugh; not that I’m too old to laugh, but why am here to witness all those jokes and puns about beans and unbrushed teeth? This was kid’s stuff that I was enjoying — good natured, colorful, clever kid’s stuff, but, still, kid’s stuff. It was a cross-generational kind of thing, like a Pixar movie at best, but, well, not very adult. Mario’s not alone in not feeling quite right for me. I’ve thought in recent years that maybe Call of Duty is too Michael Bay for me and that, well, certain games aren’t enough Mario in the way they teach players their ideas. But as I played Bowser’s Inside Story, there was that reaction again: Maybe I’m too old for this. Then I remembered a kid I met at a party a year ago. This boy was one of the few children there, disinterred in the conversations of his parents and other adults there. He had a DS. In it, he had New Super Mario Bros., his first Mario game. I mentioned some of the older ones, ones made before he was born. He’d never played them, never heard of them. Maybe, I thought, he was too young to be playing Mario. What Kids Miss About Mario There was another moment while playing Mario and Luigi that I can recall specifically. I was in control of Mario and I encountered a character who gave Mario the ability to strap a blue shell to his back. Mario could crouch down, tuck his limbs into his shell and slide across the screen. This new power essentially make Mario into a turtle. That provoked a different reaction: This is something a kid couldn’t appreciate, not really, not completely. How could a anyone under the age of, I don’t know, 33?, appreciate the fact that when Mario obtains the shell power, the game shows blocks of power radiating to all corners of Mario’s world, a clear — obvious! — homage to the exclamation-point block-radiating in 1990’s Super Mario World. No child of the 21st century would understand that. How could a kid appreciate this marvelous twist of a Mario world’s power dynamics, this turning of Mario into the very kickable shell that gamers used to make Mario punt across the screen in most of his games since 1986’s Super Mario Bros? In this moment in Bowser’s Inside Story, Mario had become his enemy, had assumed the role of his turtle victims, an idea that was more than 20 years in the making. Oh, but the blue-shell-power was in 2006’s New Super Mario Bros., Mario experts might point out. The point still stands. It’s the discovery of the blue-shell-power that enriches me as a Mario-playing man. If one strives to experience fiction that possesses emotional maturity and thematic complexity, Mario games are not a form of entertainment that offer meaningful depth. That feeling of unease in my gut as I play a new Mario game might be the unease I’d have if I sat in the part of the bookstore that sells pop-up books and started reading one after the other. But the blue-shell-power discovery triggers my memories of older elements and abilities from older Mario games. It gets me thinking of variations and rule-changes. I’m suddenly a connoisseur of fine music recognizing how a new master performer has chosen to compose a classic slightly differently, maybe with an add instrument or new flourish. The making of video games involves yearly advances in the arrangement and physics of interactive worlds. Playing a series of well-made games designed across those years offers me the ability to enjoy nothing less meaningful than progress and the evolution of thought — thought in the context of designing an interactive Mushroom Kingdom, but layering, increasingly complex thought in that context nonetheless. That is what satisfies me and what I can’t imagine any child who didn’t start with Super Mario Bros. appreciating quite as much as I do. New Mario games, kids, feel as if they might have been made for old me. Other Men Who Play Mario I asked some other men who play Mario whether they’re ever conflicted about playing. The 46-year-old Michael Abbot, who runs the Brainy Gamer blog , has played Mario games since they were only made in two dimensions. He’s never beaten the eighth world of Super Mario Brothers, but he’s stuck with the series. He’s never been embarrassed to play the Marios, he said. Nostalgia is a big part of the appeal, but not all of it. “When I play a game like New Super Mario Bros. Wii, it’s like biting into a tasty cake made from a favorite recipe, but with a few surprise ingredients baked in,” he told me. “The older I get, I find I’m less hungry for ‘innovation’ and more appreciative of thoughtful, creative refinement. Mario games, especially the last two big ones, Galaxy and NSMBW, seem to embody that ideal.” Matthew Green, 28-year-old writer for Kombo.com and PressTheButtons.com knows there are other, non-Mario games targeted to him. “I’m part of a demographic meant for Modern Warfare and Madden, but I always look forward to a trip back to the Mushroom Kingdom,” he wrote to me. He told me he keeps playing because he grew up with the games and they make him smile. The Mario games also make these men feel young. Green: “There’s a sense of wonder and a spark of imagination at the heart of the Super Mario Bros. games, and as children we pick up on that right away.  Then, over time, most people lose that spark.  School, career, social engagements, relationship drama, mortgage payments, credit card debt, medical ailments, and other things that we pick up on our way to and through adulthood weigh us down and we forget the simple pleasures of saving the princess from a turtle despot with an eye for annexing kingdoms and galaxies.  Those of us who continue to play Super Mario games and who make them a part of our adult lives found a way to keep that spark alive.” Who Really Plays Mario? I asked Nintendo for data about who plays Mario games. They didn’t have any to share publicly, but I did get a range elsewhere. “The idea that Mario games are simply just for kids is foolish, and Nintendo knows that,” Jesse Divnich, vice president of research group EEDAR told me. “The dominant demographic for New Super Mario Bros. Wii are males and females over 24 years old.” Divnich said that a look at Nintendo’s commercials gives us a good idea of who the company believes is buying its products. “With Nintendo, nearly all of their commercials contain people of both genders and of all ages. They do that for a specific reason, because nearly every one of all ages, races, and creeds buy Nintendo products.” Specifically about Mario games, he added, Nintendo uses “the brand name of Mario to pull in the older crowd and the cute lovable graphics/gameplay to draw in the younger crowd.” At least Divnich gave me that out. It’s the gameplay that is there for some of us older players. “Dude Fights A Turtle” I found a man, a gamer who doesn’t try to play Mario. He’s no doubt seen those Nintendo commercials. He’s relented enough that he played a recent Mario game, Super Mario Galaxy, and “appreciated” it. But 36-year-old Chris Dahlen, an avid gamer and writer about games for Edge Magazine and his own Save The Robot blog , is immune to the marketing and has never seen the nostalgia. He grew up playing PC games, had a Colecovision, then missed most of the early Mario era. “Today, I feel like a kid in a fundamentalist Christian camp who’s never even read the Bible,” he told me. “Intellectually, I know the franchise, I can name the characters, and I’m aware of the new releases… But I do not ‘get it.’ I do not have the religion. I don’t know why everyone’s in love with this simple, paper-thin character or his cartoonish pals and nemeses.” Bear in mind, he’s played and appreciated the Mario games, but I can’t expect him to care about the blue-turtle-shell-power power and the 20 years of layered ideas. I certainly can’t expect him, a grown man, to be charmed. He gets, say, Spider-Man. “He’s a classic underdog hero,” Dahlen e-mailed to me. “But Mario?  There’s nothing. Nada.  Dude fights a turtle.” — Nothing is for everyone, and there are all sorts of things we outgrow as we age. I remember a news report about a police officer who was suspicious that any grown-up would play the cute Nintendo game Animal Crossing. I am aware of the people in my life to whom I will never relate the story or the jokes of a good Mario role-playing game. I know that as a 33-year-old man, I cannot consider Mario games to be the most natural fit in my life, the most appealing or relevant fiction. I’m not sure that they keep me young. I’m not sure their draw is nostalgia. I like them as progress-markers, as time capsules of thought about designing interactive adventure in a specific and unreal world. I like them despite the fact that their fiction is increasingly irrelevant to me, because, by contrast, their gameplay and their design is more relevant to me by the year. Sometimes playing a new Mario game is to witness the evolution of a thought, the advancement of a set of physics and rules that order a fictional kingdom. Other times, I am witnessing a bad idea, an evolutionary mistake. But always, I am witnessing living thought, tracked across the years, something a kid couldn’t understand, not until he’s older. Not until he’s, maybe, 33.

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Why A Man Plays Mario [Feature]

Mega Man 10 Robot Masters Sprites Vs. Art [Gallery]

Here’s a closer look at all eight of Mega Man 10 ’s evil robot masters , showing us how the dynamic concept art fared in its conversion to sprites. As you can see, some of the Robot Masters made out better than others during the journey from cartoon art to pixels. Sheep Man, Nitro Man, and Strike Man translated pretty well, but Frost Man, Solar Man, and Blade Man seem to have lost something in translation. Blade Man just wants hugs. Chill Man is constantly urging people to relax. Commando Mando. Nitro Man needs speed. It’s just how he is. Pump Man is popular with the ladies. And the men. He’s just popular. The one and only. Solar Man is our sunshine. Our only sunshine. Strike Man didn’t want to come into work today.

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Mega Man 10 Robot Masters Sprites Vs. Art [Gallery]

How Gaming Helped Create A SexBot’s Skin-Deep Personality [Sex Robot]

If you can get past the skin-soft silicon, the over-sexualized mouth, the transparent nightie and uncomfortably-separated thighs, Douglas Hines latest invention could offer some interesting insight into the way games interact with people. But there’s no getting around the awkward facts of the former Bell Labs Artificial Intelligence researcher’s creations: Roxxxy and Rocky are a couple of talking, touch-sensitive, anatomically-correct sex robots. The thing that separates them from their inflated and silicon brethren are their personalities, Hines says. “What we’re trying to do here is replicate many emotional states,” Hines tells me. “Not just erotic, but also laughing, sleeping, you know, tired, all of those. You cannot create the intonations in a computer generated program to make it sound like somebody is tired, so we had to build a library of voice files that provide what is required to create the level of realism we are looking for.” We’re at the annual AVN adult entertainment expo, standing in Hines’ booth which is tastefully decorated with lace curtains and battery-powered faux candles, there’s a couch. On it rests the crown jewel of Hines research efforts: Roxxxy. She was created with the help of folks who have a deep understanding of animatronics and have worked with the likes of Disney and the Muppets. Roxxxy was modeled after a New York art student and then amply “improved” by Hines and his team. Both robots come with a set of five personalities, but Hines says that the key to Roxxxy and Rocky’s AI is the personality designed specifically for each customer. When a person buys one of the $7,000 to $9,000 bots they fill out a form listing their interests. It’s sort of like the application at a dating service, he says. “Before you receive her you fill out a profile of what you like,” he said. “We have a patent around our AI methodology that uses a profile as part of the data input. With that information she then knows that you like soccer, that you like U2, that you like The Beatles. She is then able to interact with you on those topics.” The robots come preloaded with recordings of the thousand most popular male names and the thousand most popular female names. If yours isn’t on the list they add it before shipping the bot out. “She carries on conversations, they’re not in-depth (Turing)-class qualifying where you can think it’s a real person,” Hines said. “No, let’s be real. “We tried our best to replicate a human interaction with as much conversational ability as possible with the physical attributes that people require.” And Hines’ robots aren’t just being crafted for sex, there is also a line being developed as personality-driven companions for the elderly or people unable to leave their home. “We actually have another product for elder care,” Hines said. “If she was able to talk with a loved one at home, a father, mother that is housebound, that is pretty cool. Everyone is working, everyone is busy and sometimes we feel bad that we can’t be with our loved ones to help them. This product will help us fill that gap.” The third product that Hines and his company, True Companion , are working on is a bit of a secret. But it’s tied to video games. “I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag, but there is actually something we are doing with a very big gaming company around her, a way of interaction,” Hines tells me. “I don’t know when they are going to make it public. It will probably be under True Companion’s banner, it’s really exciting.” Hines guesses that the news will hit in the second quarter of the year. “A lot of the virtual worlds are really cool, a lot of great work is being done there,” he said, hinting that the product will bridge the gap between online friends and someone you can game with side-by-side. “We are actually collaborating with a few of those companies. That’s exciting and we are looking forward to adopting their best practices and they’re looking at what we’re doing because we’re kind of where the rubber hits the road… literally.” Hines enthusiasm for the real-life potential of artificial intelligence seems to keep him oblivious to his surroundings. The tiny booth and its sex robot are sandwiched between the prostitutes of The Mustang Ranch cavorting on a saddle strapped to a saw horse, and a tanned, bleach-blond man hawking the latest in 3D pornography. Occasionally curious men roam into the booth to inspect Roxxxy. Hines seems perturbed when they touch her. “Don’t mess with the head or hair, everything else is fine,” he shouts at a man posing with his robot for a photo. Roxxxy’s arm, soft to the touch, is underlaid with what feels to be a steel skeleton. Hines interrupts our interview to explain to a man fondling the doll that she comes in either a hard or soft body. Hines says he likes the hard because it lasts longer. He then suggests that the man explore her anatomy. Roxxxy, packed with all of that trademarked artificial intelligence, silently looks on, mouth slightly agape.

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How Gaming Helped Create A SexBot’s Skin-Deep Personality [Sex Robot]

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