Awesome Radical Gaming

I can’t wait, I don’t know what else to say.

I doubt it can be as radical as the old Street Fighter movie. I can’t think of who any of these people are, honestly, because I’m pretty bad with celebrities. What I do know, however, is that this movie has a 95% chance of not being awesome. Video game movies just never seem to work out (Resident Evil wasn’t that bad though).

STAR-STUDDED CAST ANNOUNCED FOR CAPCOM®’S LIVE-ACTION STREET FIGHTER MOVIE
2008 World-Release In Celebration of Street Fighter’s 20th Anniversary
SAN MATEO, Calif — March 19, 2008 — Capcom®, a leading worldwide developer and publisher of video games, is proud to confirm the main cast for its live-action Street Fighter movie based on the hugely popular video game series.

The story revolves around fan-favorite Chun-Li, who will be portrayed by actress Kristen Kreuk (of Smallville fame). Michael Clark Duncan, Neal McDonough, and Taboo of Black Eyed Peas are also on board to round out this all-star cast. The film will be made in conjunction with Hyde Park Films, and will be distributed by 20th Century Fox for a scheduled 2009 worldwide release.

The Street Fighter movie is only one of many projects Capcom has planned to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Street Fighter®. Summer 2008 will see the Japanese arcade release of the much-anticipated Street Fighter® IV.

Street Fighter was first released in 1987 to critical acclaim for its innovative features. This was followed up in 1991 with the smash hit Street Fighter® II, which broke records by being available in 500 thousand arcade cabinets and selling over 25 million units on home systems. These records cemented Street Fighter’s reputation as one of the most popular fighting game series of all time and ensured that the fighting genre would become a staple of the gaming world.

The cast so far includes:
• Chun-Li: Kristin Kreuk. Plays the role of Lana Lang in the WB television series Smallville .

• Balrog: Michael Clarke Duncan. The Island (2005), Sin City (2005), Daredevil (2003), The Scorpion King (2002), Planet of the Apes (2001), See Spot Run (2001), The Whole Nine Yards (2000), The Green Mile (1999), Breakfast of Champions (1999), Armageddon (1998)

• M. Bison: Neal McDonough. The Hitcher (2007), Flags of Our Fathers (2006), The Guardian (2006), Timeline (2003), MinorityReport (2002), Band of Brothers (2001)

• Vega: Taboo. Member of popular R&B music group Black Eyed Peas and recipient of three Grammy Awards.

• Charlie Nash: Chris Klein. We Were Soldiers (2002), American Pie (1999)

I’m curious about this game for two reasons. First, it’s a Square-Enix game, so I’m thinking it will turn out well. Second, the music seems really interesting. Overall, it just seems really different. More information about The World Ends With You is available here.

There’s all kinds of Atlus news today, first Persona 4, now this. Summon Night: Twin Age is an action RPG for the DS that fully stylus controlled. The email goes on to detail that the stylus controls are “precise controls (no excessive line drawing to attack or squiggles in the corner of the screen to roll, folks)”, which is good but I’m not a huge fan of touch controls in games. I mean, for menus it’s one thing, but to use it solely, I don’t know. I couldn’t get into Phantom Hourglass because of the touch controls, it just wasn’t fun for me. Just because the DS has a touch screen doesn’t mean you need to make things more difficult and use them as the sole movement mechanism just to prove that you can do it.

Summon Night: Twin Age does look pretty cool though, reminds me of like Secret of Mana or something, though I never played the first so I have no idea what it will be like.

Get ready to experience a fully-stylus driven action RPG with precise controls (no excessive line drawing to attack or squiggles in the corner of the screen to roll, folks)!

Summon Night: Twin Age is headed to a Nintendo DS near you (hopefully yours) on May 20th! Two playable characters get to experience the story from different perspectives, which means seeing new things the second time through. Trade items with a friend via local wireless. Oh, and the game looks gorgeous, too. How dare you doubt me! Perhaps the trailer below is the proof you need:

How radical is this news? I’d say, from 1 to 10, an 11. I can’t hardly breathe, the awesomeness is just too much. This week’s Famitsu has tons of information about the upcoming Persona 4, which will be on the PS2. Persona 4 is set in the countryside and the story revolves around a murder mystery. Persona 4 will also have an interesting new feature, a weather forecasting system and whenever there is fog…a murder takes place, which is interesting…different. There will be 60-70 hours of gameplay and 180 personas, which seems like a lot (I can’t find how many were in Persona 3, but I don’t think there were 180).

Persona 4 is scheduled to be released July 10th in Japan. Hopefully we will see a U.S. release soon after.

More screens here: Akayuki

Or about 120 units per minute (so says the press release, I didn’t do the math myself). Either way, it’s awesome news for Nintendo. 1.4 million may seem like a lot, but Brawl has a long way to go to catch Melee, which sold 7 million units over the lifetime of the Gamecube. The whole press release is after the link…
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I remember playing the 1942 arcade game when I was a kid, it was awesome. Now we’re getting a HD remake of the original. For years I thought this was exactly what the Pacific theater of war was really like.

I was at work searching for something on the internet last week and I happened to stumble upon a blog posting by someone which talked about a little game called Dwarf Fortress. They had a screen shot of the game in the post, and the ascii graphics alone intrigued me. So, when I got home I downloaded the game, thinking I would play it for a few minutes and be done with it. I was wrong…I played it a lot over the weekend…Dwarf Fortress is amazingly radical.

Basically, you start the game with a bunch of dwarves (little smiley faces on the map), some cats and dogs, and dig into the ground to build a fortress. It almost reminded me of The Sims. You don’t directly tell the dwarves what to do, you just create tasks, and dwarves who are set to do that task eventually do it when they have time. For instance, you can zone an area to be dug as a tunnel, and a dwarf who you set to mine and who isn’t busy drinking or attending a party or sleeping will eventually dig the mine.

As you progress, your goal is to accumulate wealth and try to make all the dwarves happy. They like their own bed rooms, for example, but at the start of the game you might not have enough materials to create a bed for every single dwarf so you can designate a common barracks and everyone will share the beds in that room (or sleep on the floor). Later, when you have dedicated dwarves chopping trees and dedicated woodworkers making beds 24/7, you can start creating the beds more quickly and accommodate all the dwarves.

Over time you get more and more dwarves, which allows for more specialists in the labor force. Instead of assigning one dwarf to mine and be a mason, you can have one dwarf be a miner and another be a mason, allowing mines to be created faster and the mason to create more goods because you don’t have one dwarf trying to do both things.

There is a huge amount of depth to the game, it’s really very impressive. The menu is very difficult to get used to at first, and the Z-Axis is confusing (you go up and down levels, for example you dig one level into the ground, then you create a staircase and dig out the next level and so forth), but if you give it time and get used to the hotkeys you’ll see that Dwarf Fortress is a very well created, fun game.

As a side note, winter came one year in my game, freezing the river, the dwarves only source of water really. The dwarves nearly all died of thirst…they would lie in their beds and other dwarves would try to bring them water but, since the river was frozen, they could do nothing…There were dead bodies scattered all around the fortress…it was horrible. The few that were left would throw fits and complain and wouldn’t work to gather food. Things started to get ugly and they began eating the cats. Once the cats were gone they started to go mad and eventually perished. Which was not awesome because I spent hours building my empire only to see it destroyed because of a frozen river. But it was sort of fun to watch still.

You can download the game here.

I’m not sure about this game now…it just doesn’t seem to have enough depth and it’s really short. Maybe if I saw it on sale somewhere, but I don’t think I want to pay $50 for it.

I always loved playing as the Zerg, something about beating an opponent by swarming them with tons of units was always fun. I can’t wait to hear “Spawn more overlords” over and over again…Starcraft was super awesome. Also, everytime I see a trailer for Starcraft 2 it looks better and better, I’m giving this game 5/5 Awesome Radicals right now.

Updated with a fact sheet about the Zerg units and a direct feed video (gametrailers posted a bunch of new videos) of some Zerg slaughtering Terran:
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