That’s right folks, you can own your very own copy of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World for the amazing price of 10,000,000 dollars! I know each an every one of you wants to help the movie make up for the lack of box office income in DVD/BD sales, so now you can make a major contribution and be the coolest kid on your block! So go buy this amazing movie right now, MoneyBucks Megee.

http://www.amazon.com/Scott-Pilgrim-vs-World-Blu-ray/dp/B003ZW1ENW/ref=sr_1_2?s=gateway&ie=UTF8&qid=1285073790&sr=8-2

Or you could just wait until November 9th and get the official DVD/BD of the movie for 20 bucks, BUT WHO WOULD WANT TO DO THAT?

[update] It seems Amazon took down the product because apparently nobody wanted to pay 10 million dollars for a movie, although I still don’t see why anybody wouldn’t want to pay that much money.

This is I have pondered for a fair while, but have only just recently questioned. What exactly are my out-of-game motives for putting up with some of the extremely frustrating challenges some modern games present to us, and why do some developers try to use unfair difficulty as a way of extending a games playtime?  Starting just a few years ago, there has been a massive boom in creating games that have a retro visual style, and general appeal to prey on innocent Gamers’ sense of nostalgia through their rose-tinted goggles.  However, along with any good faux-retro game, not only does the art style have to be fitting, but there has also been the need to up the difficulty to extreme levels.

Over the years, while many gamers have complained about the current state of games as becoming “far too easy.”  With the release of these more challenging games, are we really getting what we wanted?  I won’t deny the fact that I love a good challenge, and I’m sure many of you do too, but is there a limit to just how difficult games will get?  With the mindset of creating a difficult game, some developers might even overlook some of the more basic questions they should be asking themselves “Is this even fun?” In my opinion, that’s exactly what a good amount of developers are currently getting themselves into a rut with. Merely trying to cook up a tough-as-nails and slap a retro visual style on it, and hope that through our rose-tinted goggles we will see these games as long, drawn out adventures that we remember from when we were children. Upon re-examining most of the games we thought were so long or amazing when we were kids, they are really just extremely short games that relied on cheap methods of increasing the games difficulty so you would be forced to spend an absurd amount of time and willpower just trying to get through a small section of the game.

One of the main games that really brought this issue up with me was VVVVVV. While it isn’t necessarily trying to cater to nostalgic fans viewing this as an incredible new 8-bit title with some cool gameplay mechanics. As I finished VVVVVV I quickly realized just how short the game was, but was relying on some very difficult platforming sections of the game and some loose controls to throw players off and have them just grind on the same section of the game for a good amount of time. I won’t lie, I did have a ton of fun while I was playing VVVVVV, and I completely think it was worth the 4.50 I paid for it on Steam. Keep in mind though, the game cost 15 dollars when it first came out, and a good player good easily beat the game in about half an hour, but the developers cheaply extended the playing time by making some of the sections extremely difficult so they would take you a fair amount of time to get past.

I can’t quite say if the devlopers truly intend to increase the playing time by adding in an extremely harsh, and cheap difficulty and slapping a “retro” label on it, or if it is just a side effect of having a fun and original new game present us with never-before-seen challenges.

With all thought about difficulty in games, I also wondered exactly what are motives are in the first place for playing the game. Sure, the initial reaction is that this is a fun new experience. Although once you plow through the initial game and the fun wears off, a good amount of games will provide us with further options to play the game in an even harder setting or giving us near impossible menial tasks such as fetching a completely unimportant item. Why exactly would we want to punish ourselves like this unless we are masochists. Should we do this for a sense of self accomplishment, or should the game give us some sort of compensation in the end. The game could provide us with achievements or trophies to show off our massive e-peen for beating that extra thing, or possibly unlock some interesting secret content for us to mess around with. I believe that the newer generation of gamers will likely be turned off the more difficult games that don’t really give them any sort of major compensation for beating them, and while I still enjoy the difficult games and extra mode, I too would just like a little to show off my amazing accomplishment.

This was more of just a musing rant about a few things I’m noticing myself in the industry, and almost all of this content could be classified as incomplete thoughts and my own opinions, I hope this has made you think just a little about all of the newer faux-retro games coming out with a steep difficulty.

Also released a few days ago for PSN and to be released on August 25th for Xbox Live is the Scott Pilgrim video game. Now before you just play it off as another lame old licensed game, keep in mind that this was made like a swan song to video games. It is a game made by gamers, for gamers to make you have an extremely fun time while laughing it up at some of the zany humor in the Scott Pilgrim world with three other friends in this co-operative brawler. The game plays a lot like some of the extremely popular beat-’em-ups such as River City Ransom, Castle Crashers, or Double Dragon. You and your friends can run around through a world designed by the extremely talented pixel art crew “Mechafetus” containing one member who I should hope you all know, Paul Robertson. You may recognize him from his animation “Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006.” And scored by the super awesome chiptune band “Anamanaguchi.” The game has a fun visual style, awesome soundtrack, solid controls, and super fun four player brawler action. It is definitely worth picking up if you own a PS3 or Xbox 360.

Also, Kim Pine is extremely cute <3 you should totally go see the movie and buy the game just for her

Check out Anamanaguchi here: http://www.anamanaguchi.com/ and Mechafetus here: http://www.mechafetus.com/

The real meat and bones of the magazines are the original doujin chapters featured.

Issue two will feature chapters 2 of Reversible, Sazanami Cherry, I-mistress young tinny?, Sometimes Otokonoko Onnanoko, Secret baby Devil. There is also a new series introduced called Pasutofyu Cha and they are publishing the one-shot special Only man’s daughter could use her arms.

Issue two will also featue:

[[Special Wallet's Hey girl! 』]
School life as a girl [daughter of our Guide Otoko, illustrations and short stories!

• Illustration & Character Design: Sky Narusawa
• Statement: city, try and cloth

[Onnanoko want to be! Travel Edition]

• Second: China Dress

[Illustration]

• Oh you Giripenta
• Makoto Makita 記
• Snow and rain
• eco *

You can expect to see this on newstands everywhere starting today for 950 yen. I know I’ll definitely be picking up an issue to read chapter two of Reversible.

Is this the end of /b/ as we know it? Or even the whole site. if this is such a big deal, why haven’t 7 and 12chan been shut down yet? Tune in for all of these answers today on Good Morning America. No matter what happens, I just want to say, the ED forums were always better.

The other day Valve had so nonchalantly announced that it would be releasing a remake of the Unreal Tournament: 2004 mod “Alien Swarm”  running on the Source engine for free via Steam. Alien Swarm will be a four player co-operative, top-down shooter created by the original team who has been busy in the meantime working on future Valve blockbuster titles such as the Left 4 Dead games and the upcoming Portal 2.

That’s not all you have to be excited about though, Valve has also announced that along with Alien Swarm, they will be releasing the Source SDK for free, so for those of you who don’t already own a Source based game such as Half-Life 2 or Team Fortress 2, you can create your own game mods or design maps, along with a plethora of other things to create.

Valve lists the following content as such:

Alien Swarm is a game and Source SDK release from a group of talented designers at Valve who were hired from the Mod community. Available free of charge, the game thrusts players into an epic bug hunt featuring a unique blend of co-op play and squad-level tactics. With your friends, form a squad of four distinct IAF Marine classes. Plan your attack using an unlockable arsenal of weapons with countless loadout configurations against a wide variety of aliens. Blaze your way through an overrun, off-world colony, eradicating the alien infestation in environments ranging from the icy planet’s surface, to a subterranean lava-flooded mining facility.

- Tactical, 4 player co-op action game with a top-down perspective
- Complete game code and mod tools
- Unlock persistent items by gaining levels
- Over 40 weapons and equipment with countless loadout configurations
- 4 unique classes and 8 unique characters
- Matchmaking, Steam Cloud, Steam Stats
- 64 achievements
- Tile-based map generation tool
- Powered by Source and Steam

You can expect to see these up on Steam for free download later today. You can also check out www.alienswarm.com to watch the trailer right now.