New James Bond flick? No. A 22 carat casual gaming console for those who have £299,995.00 and no financial sense.

Who says the “days of conspicuous consumption are over”?

Scott Meyer has got a game related comic today. Take a gander…

I’ve been looking for an excuse to link to Basic Instructions. I check it out daily for a dose of hilarity.

Who wouldn’t want a mustache controller?

Skip ahead about 5 minutes and see a smashing serve.

Classic NES covered in piano and sax

Avast! It be upon us again, International Talk Like A Pirate Day Arrr!

For today only, Telltale Games is offering a free download of the first episode of Tales of Monkey Island

As my own means of celebrating I’ve put together a list of my favorite pirate games of all time. Or as I like to call it:

The Top Pirate games of all time!

Read the rest of this entry »

I never considered there being a voice actor for Mario. I guess I always thought his soprano Italian American squeal was the result of some sort of synthesized voice algorithm. It’s not like he’s had all that many lines.

But as The Daily Telegraph Reports…

Martinet is the voice actor behind the most famous character in video games - Super Mario.

In Australia on a promotional tour, Martinet has voiced gaming giant Nintendo’s quirky plumber for more than 20 years.

Martinet’s voice talents can be heard in more than 200 games which include other Nintendo favourites like Luigi, Wario and Toadsworth.

The article covers how he got the gig, and make sure to watch the video of him doing the voices. What it fails to mention is how much being the voice of this beloved plumber pays? Have I been beating my head against the bricks while this beach bum gets his coins reading a page or two a year into a mic?!!! Probably.

Hey wait a second they already had the same last name!

Ethan Trex over at Mentalfloss.com has just posted on how 16 electronic companies got their names. His list includes a few gaming companies and provides these amusing factoids…

Nintendo

…translates into English as “leave luck to heaven.” The name made more sense before Nintendo got into the video game business; it opened in 1889 to make hanafuda cards, a type of Japanese playing cards decorated with floral designs.

Sony

…in 1946, it had a decidedly less catchy name – Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo. Within a few years, the company’s founders wanted a new name, so they combined sonus, Latin for “sound,” with “Sonny,” the term of endearment for a young boy. The newly coined word captured both the superior sound quality and small size the company was shooting for with its products.

Sega

…in Hawaii in 1940 as Standard Games, a business that provided military bases with pinball machines to help amuse soldiers. In 1951, the company moved to Tokyo and renamed itself “Service Games” to reflect its business of importing coin-op machines for American military bases. In 1965, Service Games merged with another coin-op company, Rosen Enterprises, and shortened its name to Sega.

Atari

The video-game pioneer takes its name the board game Go. In Go, atari is a term that indicates that a player’s stone (or group of a player’s stones) are in immediate danger of being captured by the player’s opponent.

Coleco

The video game kingpins of the 1970s and 80s (and the people who brought you Cabbage Patch Dolls!), Coleco was originally a company that sold shoe leather. The name Coleco is a shortening of “Connecticut Leather Company.”

I came across this from DonHodges.com…

In 1983, the arcade smash hit Donkey Kong was ported to the Atari 400/800 home computer systems by Landon Dyer. It was at the time the best home computer/console port for this game.

Mr. Dyer, in between pulling his hair out while working on this game, included what is known as an “Easter Egg” in the game’s code. If a certain sequence of moves or scores were done correctly, the designer’s initials would appear somewhere on the screen. He writes on his blog, “There’s an easter egg, but it’s totally not worth it, and I don’t remember how to bring it up anyway (something like: Die on the ’sandpile’ level with 3 lives and the score over 7,000).”

The Digital Press web site has a whole section dedicated to Easter eggs, and they are even offering cash rewards to those who can find out how to trigger them. Even Landon Dyer himself did not remember how to trigger this Easter egg in Donkey Kong for the Atari home computers. It was suggested on the Digital Press site that the initials would appear in the bonus score box.

He goes on to explain how he performed this game archaeology by digging through the assembly code dirt. He also links to Landon Dyer’s blog entry on porting Donkey Kong to Atari. It itself is a geeky fun game folklore read.