Target has been my Black Friday store of choice over the last few years, but I don’t think I’ll be visiting them this year. It’s not that they have a bad overall selection, but in terms of game deals, things are a little bit barren this year. Anyway, here’s what they’ve got.
Consoles and accessories
PSP-3000 with The Karate Kid UMD, LittleBigPlanet and 1gb memory card: $127
PS3 160gb with Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II and Prince of Persia Blu-ray: $299
Xbox 360 4gb with $50 gift card plus another $10 card if you buy between 4 and 10am on Black Friday: $199
Black Xbox 360 controller, DualShock 3 and WiiRemote Plus (with Fling Smash) are each $39.
Games (applicable consoles, unless stated)
$35
Fable III
Halo: Reach
Medal of Honor
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
Super Mario Galaxy 2
$27
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: Reflex
Lego Harry Potter (Wii)
NBA Jam (Wii)
New Carnival Games
Shaun White Skateboarding
$17
Dragon Quest IX
Final Fantasy XIII
Games that are full price but come with $10 gift cards
I think we might have a winner here in the video game Black Friday wars. Maybe. Well, ok, not for everyone. K-Mart is the winner for me, though, because I am not reviewing Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood. I want to play it before we do our end-of-the-year features here at FF, though, and so I’ve been waiting to see which retailer offers me a good deal on it.
So far, the answer is K-Mart, unless ACB is one of the unannounced titles Wal-Mart is selling cheaply. They’ve also got a bunch of other cheaply offerings, but they don’t really have the quantity offered by other outlets. K-Mart is also notable for being the only place I’ve seen offering PSP deals. Here you go.
Consoles
DSi orange and green with Mario Party: $149.99
PSPgo: $149.99
PSP-3000 with Karate Kid UMD and LittleBigPlanet and 1gb memory stick: $129.99 (Amazon will also have this, I believe)
Games (applicable consoles unless specified, no PC)
Hidden throughout the immense gameworld of Assassin’s Creed are a variety of secret locations that will test your platforming and puzzle-solving skills as you attempt to access them. There are trophies and achievements associated with their discovery, but a lot of the fun lies in the satisfaction you’ll feel after completing the challenge of tracking down the secret locations, and the side-quest style content that lies hidden within.
Check back after release; we’ll have a complete list of all the secret locations — along with direction — posted as quickly as humanly possible.
It’s been ten days since Kinect went on sale in the US and five days since it went on sale in Europe, and yet a million Kinect sensors have already been sold. That’s what Microsoft says, anyway. Furthermore, they also say this means they’re defs on track for their five million-sold projection.
Well, I’ll be damned if I can provide any sort of legit analysis here. The key, I think, is knowing how many Kinects were sold on day one, because staying power is what matters for these types of things. The press release makes mention of the fact that it hit this milestone before Black Friday, but I can’t help but wonder if Kinect will have a good Black Friday considering no Kinect deals have been announced by any retailers thus far. There are Xbox 360s that come bundled with free games (Best Buy and Wal-Mart are both doing this), and so you have to wonder if frugal shoppers will gravitate to Kinect during the crush on Black Friday when they could actually save money on Kinect-free Xbox 360 that comes with extra games.
Paul Weaver, director of product development at Warren Spector’s Junction Point studio, has been in the bidness for a little while. He’s worked at Rare and Acclaim and first teamed up with Spector at Ion Storm back in 2003. They parted ways after Ion Storm shut down in 2006, because Weaver rejoined Spector at Junction Point in 2007, and now the studio is ready to unleash Epic Mickey on the world just two weeks from tomorrow.
We had the chance to chat with Weaver about Epic Mickey, and you can read the resulting giant block of text below. Enjoy.
FileFront: As artists, what do you hope to accomplish with Disney Epic Mickey, and how does the Wii console further that aim?
Paul Weaver: Mickey Mouse has been so important in all forms of media for over 80 years, be it cartoons, comics or movies and while there have certainly been some great video games along the way that have starred Mickey, we don’t feel that he’s really been done justice in this medium… yet. Nintendo and Disney’s relationship goes back a long way and we’ve been very happy with our partnership. Wii is definitely a very family focused console and we’ve really strived to make a game that can be enjoyed by everyone.
FF: What type of story are you looking to tell with Disney Epic Mickey?
PW: We’re telling a story about the importance of family with Disney Epic Mickey. We consider Mickey Mouse and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit to be half-brothers who are both beloved children of Walt Disney’s imagination that fate kept apart for over 80 years.
FF: At PAX, Warren Spector said gamers should “demand more from the games you're offered.” That statement also carries an unspoken mandate for developers; in what way does Disney Epic Mickey “deliver more?”
PW: I think the biggest area that Disney Epic Mickey "delivers more" is with our implementation of Warren’s mandate that "Playstyle Matters." Most — but more encouragingly these days, not all — games are designed in a very linear fashion, so the player is walked through the story by the designer who specifies what they will encounter, how they will deal with the situation and what the pre-determined outcome will be. That’s not a bad thing, but we believe it does limit the amount that a player can express themselves and really feel like they’re part of the story. In our game, the player has the choice of how they will deal with almost every problem they encounter in the game. However, there’s also the matter of there being a consequence for making these choices, or else why bother? We’ve created an experience where people will get a very different experience depending on their playstyle.
FF: You’ve been working in the industry for some time. Are there particular games you’ve worked on in the past that you find have influenced your work on Disney Epic Mickey?
PW: I would have to say my time working at Rare at the start of my career was the biggest help to me in making the game. We learned a lot from Nintendo in the 90s about how they design games and that led to a succession of fantastic successes for that company. Having that knowledge helped a lot, particularly with the platforming elements of the game. Having previously worked with Warren at Ion Storm, I knew what "Choice and Consequence" in game design meant, as well as its possibilities, which is why when he first approached me to work on this game, I jumped at the opportunity.
FF: Steamboat Willie aside, what previous Disney works have influenced the game/ are you paying homage to in the game?
PW: I can’t give away too many specifics, but we have dozens of 2D levels in the game that are all based on famous Mickey cartoons going all the way back to the roots of Mickey, Oswald and Disney. These were directly inspired by those cartoons and it’s very cool to see the art style change decade by decade as you adventure through this world. With regards to the 3D adventuring that you do, you really need to look closely in every world that you encounter, as we drew our inspiration from literally everything: Mickey cartoons, Mickey comics, the Parks, Disney movies, Disney merchandise (Pins) and the list goes on. For the Disney fan, there’s a game within this game by walking through it slowly and discovering all of the inspiration– some are very obvious, others are much, much harder to find.
FF: Disney Epic Mickey is part of an effort to sort of rebrand the Mickey Mouse character. Do you feel that puts a lot of pressure on you? Is that more pressure than would be on you making some other AAA title?
PW: We’re not "re-branding" Mickey Mouse with this game. I think we’re celebrating 80 years of Mickey’s adventures and being given the opportunity and the trust from Disney to do that has definitely made this an exciting project to work on. Everyone here at Junction Point are huge fans of Disney and everyone wanted to create something really special.
FF: We haven’t seen a lot of AAA titles, Bethesda aside, make use of the Gamebryo engine. What makes that engine more suitable for Disney Epic Mickey than other, more popular engines?
PW: In pre-production of Epic Mickey, it was important to us to be able to spend our time prototyping gameplay mechanics and to get up and running as quickly as possible. Not only that, but we needed an engine that would work specifically on Wii. After evaluating a number of options, Gamebryo was the middleware solution that gave us what we needed.
Wal-Mart may be a horrible and despicable entity, but they’re also open all the time except for after 5 on Christmas Eve (making my life difficult every year) and all of Christmas day. And on Black Friday they are unique in that they are the on store at which you can wait inside and grab all the s**t you want before the sales start at 5am. The downside, of course, is that you have to get there far earlier than you would at every other store and then once the sales go live, you’re gonna end up stuck in a really long checkout line that’ll take an hour to get through.
This year it’s even more confusing, because Wal-Mart is having two Black Friday sales: one that starts at midnight and another that starts at 5 like normal. As far as I can tell, all the individual games listed below can be purchased at the advertised price after midnight, and the game console deals won’t be available until 5. I think.
Consoles
Xbox 360 4gb with Modern Warfare 2 and Mass Effect 2: $199.99 (derp)
PS3 160gb with Medal of Honor and Uncharted 2: $299.99
Red Wii with two Wii Remote Pluses and nunchucks, Epic Mickey and New Super Mario Bros.: $249.99
Nintendo DS Lite: $89
Games (assume all applicable consoles, but the ad does not specify)
$29
Major League Baseball 2k10
NBA Jam
Toy Story 3
Transformers: War for Cybertron
Modern Warfare 2
Smackdown vs. Raw 2011
Red Dead Redemption
Medal of Honor
Madden NFL 11
NBA 2K11
and “many more video game titles available at this price”
$10
inFamous
God of War Collection
Killzone 2
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Transformers: The Game
Tetris Evolution
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Prototype
GRAW 2
Reed Steel 2
Up
Wheel of Fortune Wii
Ad also lists of a bunch of random old games for $7
Other games:
Halo: Reach for $35
Band Hero full band bundle for Wii, PS3 and 360 for $75 (this is $105 off regular price)
They’ve got a pretty nice selection so far, and maybe we’ll find out a little later what some of the other $29 titles are. That, combined with a pretty nice selection of $5 blu-rays means Wal-Mart might actually be the place to go this year.
Most of you old timers know this, but for those of you who weren’t gaming during the Clinton Administration, Hexen is one of the earliest 3D FPS games – it came out the same month as Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, which means it’s older than the Pentium Pro1. Based on a modified version of the Doom engine, it eshewed the normal guns Guns GUNS model that has forever typified the FPS genre, in favor of magic. Sadly the term First Person Spellcaster never caught on, but it remains a beloved classic to this day.
We bring this up because, via Kotaku, it looks like those of you who experienced the awesome computational power of a 4862 can rejoice: Your nostalgia gland is about to be stroked by Hexen: Edge of Chaos, a fan made Hexen mod for Doom III.
So there’s gonna be another Silent Hill movie, and it’s gonna be in 3D, and it’s gonna be an adaptation of Silent Hill 3. The star of Silent Hill 3 is Heather Mason, and so this week’s big ole gallery is of Heather Mason cosplayers. We’ve got the full spectrum here, from the good to the hilariously awkward and everything in between. Enjoy.
For old-school PC gamers like myself, the Baldur’s Gate series represents the pinnacle of the fantasy RPG. It was developed by this little company you may have heard of called Bioware, who apparently went on to make games about spaceships and whatnot.
Baldur’s Gate 2 hit the market about 10 years ago, winning multiple Game of the Year awards, as well as appearing on nearly every PC gamer’s all-time greatest hits list. In 2001, a sequel hit the market, titled Baldur’s Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal. All in all, the game represents the best of the games based on the Dungeons & Dragons rule set (it was built around the 2nd Edition AD&D rules, if you’re wondering).
If you weren’t into RPGs back then, didn’t have a PC that would run it, or just plain weren’t old enough to get involved in it, you’ve got a second chance now, thanks to Good Old Games.
GOG has just made Baldur’s Gate 2 Complete available on their DRM-free store. For $9.99, you’ll get all of the following:
Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn
Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal
2 manuals (181 pages)
15 HD wallpapers
soundtrack
13 avatars
87 artworks
Map
Throne of Bhaal reference card
It’s a great deal for a game that still holds up pretty darn well. Heck, it’s worth ten bucks to me to not have to dig out my old discs to play the game again.
Microsoft has announced the first DLC packs for Fable 3. Due out on XBox Live on November 23, the most interesting of the DLC packs is the Understone Quest Pack.
For 400 MS Points, you’ll get 3 new quests in the mysterious town of Understone, which is located beneath the streets of Bowerstone. According to the press release,
This full scale town is bustling with new houses and stalls to own, novel creatures to battle and a major mystery to solve. As added bonuses, you’re invited to explore the Mercenary Shooting Range and the Wheel of Misfortune, for chances to win in-game prizes.
Here’s what you can expect in the Understone Quest Pack:
“The Voice”: In the main quest, explore the mysterious underground land built by Montague Hummes in fear of the Spire in “Fable II”
Discover the origin of the voice that controls the people of Understone
Features a moral decision that will lead to two drastically different outcomes in Understone
“Shooting Range”: After defeating Saker during your quest to become King, the remaining Mercenaries have turned their camp into a tourist attraction. The main attraction being the replayable shooting range mode
Beat the high scores to win three prizes that can be used while playing the mini-game: the Marksman 500 (gifted to players for downloading the pack), Money Shot (prize) and Black Dragon (prize)
“The Wheel of Misfortune”: After Reaver vacated his home, he set up a venture for budding heroes to replay the thrilling arena-based challenges within his new dwellings
Beat the high scores to win three new weapons that can be used while playing in the mini-game: The Full Monty (gifted to player upon downloading pack), Dirty Harriet (prize) and Dead Ned’s Revolver (prize)
There are also a number of other DLC releases set for Fable 3 the same day, including all of the following:
Exclusive Hair Pack (160 Microsoft Points) with corn rows, afro and asymmetrical bob styles
5 Star Dog Potion (80 Microsoft Points) that gives your canine companion the full 5-star ability for digging, diving and tracking down hidden chests.
Reaver Industries Hero Outfit (160 Microsoft Points)
Dye Pack (80 Microsoft Points) that includes black, cream, hot pink and turquoise
All of this will hit Live next Tuesday, so if you’re a Fable 3 fan, it’s time to stockpile some MS Points.
“You must tell no one that I’m actually six years old,” Warren Spector joked as he stood with a mess of journalists in Walt Disney’s former apartment, hidden over the Main Street, U.S.A. fire department in Disneyland.
A few moments earlier, Spector, the creative director and president of Junction Point Studios and Disney Epic Mickey‘s main brain, had teared up as he was guiding a tour of journalists in Disney’s private studio apartment, preserved from the days when Walt lived there. One got the impression that visiting a place that had been so important to Walt’s life was pretty close to (if not exactly) the fulfillment of a childhood dream for the game designer. More than once, Spector expressed his excitement to have a chance to move through Walt’s personal spaces.
Warren Spector isn’t just a Disney fan — he’s more like an apostle.
It was clear from the outset of the day, in which Disney Interactive Studios brought journalists to Disneyland for some hands-on time with Epic Mickey and to wander around the park with Spector, that the man has a deep respect for the works of the famed animator. The game itself, which is heading to Wii on Nov. 30, is part love-letter to the Disney universe, part dark and irreverent reimagining of the lore of the world’s most beloved cartoon character.
Spector talked a lot about the inspiration for many of the game’s levels and zones, but it only became clear during his presentation in the Lincoln Theater just how deeply Junction Point researched Disney history to create the game. Just about everything has a real-life counterpart: the locales, the side-scrolling cartoon-based levels, every character — even the very conception of the plot.
One of the first slides Spector put up during his presentation showed a contract Walt Disney signed back in the late 1920s. It was the contract studio execs employing Disney pointed to when he asked for more money to fund the creation of additional cartoons featuring his extremely popular character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit — Disney’s first real cartoon creation, and Mickey Mouse’s precursor. Oswald appeared in 26 cartoons over about 18 months, starting in 1927, Spector said.
The contract said the rights to Oswald belonged to the studio, not Walt, and the animator was fired. Disney went on to create Mickey and a global entertainment empire, while Oswald slipped into obscurity. Disney the company only recently reacquired the rights to Walt’s first major animation success.
Spector explained that Disney Epic Mickey is the first big story for the mouse in half a decade, and the first story returning Oswald to the Disney fold for more than 80 years. Those are two major animation milestones, and they’re occurring in a video game — demonstrating how far the medium has come in just a few short years, and Disney’s confidence in Epic Mickey.
“Ten years ago, that wouldn’t have happened,” Spector said.
It might have something to do with the kind of game Spector and his team at Junction Point are trying to make. Talking about Junction Point’s purchase by Disney Interactive, Spector said he was taken with the philosophy of Disney and its various companies and studios.
“One of the first things that happened when I signed on with Disney is, I started walking around the Disney studio lot in Burbank and talking to people, and I saw this movie, Enchanted,” Spector said. “I remember sitting in the theater watching Enchanted with my wife and I turned around and saw a family of four — mother and father and two young kids. I saw a grandfather with a grandson, looked like to me, and an elderly couple sitting behind us, and I said to myself, ‘Why can't a game do this? Why can't a game appeal to that broad an audience?’
As he spent more and more time speaking with people at Disney, one phrase kept popping up: “Entertainment for families.” Spector said the abridged version he heard at Pixar, “Entertainment for everyone,” became his goal for Junction Point.
And that’s where Epic Mickey shows up again. Listening to Spector talk about the inspiration for every pixel of the game, it’s as much an homage to the animation, cartoons and family experiences that Spector grew up with as it is anything else. The Disney universe is rich ground to till, but Junction Point spent its time digging for the lost portions of that universe. Wasteland and Disney Epic Mickey feels familiar, but Spector’s creation is, in its way, something wholly different.
Part of trying to appeal to a broader audience with Epic Mickey, Spector said, is encouraging creativity in play. Like Spector’s other games, player choice plays a big part. “Play style matters,” Spector kept repeating, and he meant it — how players move through the game and the way they deal with problems, either by choosing to erase elements with Mickey’s paint thinner, or create elements with this paint, will actually influence the game world on several levels.
Creativity on the part of the player has also shown that Disney Epic Mickey is more versatile, and perhaps more groundbreaking, than even its creators believed. Spector related anecdotes in which testers discovered ways to deal with problems that Junction Point never intended, just by using the tools they’d provided.
He told one story in which a player hit a situation in which they had to choose to solve a problem either using Thinner or Paint, with a specific reward given for either path — and discovered how to unlock both.
“For most developers, that would be a bug,” Spector said. But for Junction Point’s president and his team, it was the best development they could have hoped for.
Disney Epic Mickey is supposed to be a canonical work by the company, considered as important as any of its film properties, and Spector and Junction Point worked hard to make sure it fit those criteria by spending hours in the Disney vaults and trying to capture the Disney spirit, he said.
And more than anything, the hope is that Epic Mickey will also also function as Epic Oswald, bringing the long-lost character back to popularity after almost a century of obscurity.
“The thing I hope you take away from this game is, Oswald's a terrific actor and a terrific cartoon character,” Spector said. “He deserves better than he's gotten — he deserves to be a star as much as Mickey, so I'm hoping we can help make that happen for him.”
We were lucky enough to take a walk through Disneyland with Junction Point Creative Director and Disney Epic Mickey mastermind Warren Spector earlier this month (along with about 40 other journalists).
Along the way, Spector offered a few words about each of the attractions that appear in a sort of twisted, bizarro-world form in the game’s Wasteland. We caught some (frankly terrible) video of what Spector had to say, which you can check out below. His insights are pretty interesting.
Please excuse the sound quality — it was loud in the park — and the random shakiness. I was a little unfamiliar with the camera (as in, I wasn’t always sure if it was actually working).
Spector Talks About Walt Disney’s Last Attraction
Among the first places we hit with Spector was the New Orleans Square section of Disneyland, elements of which made it into Disney Epic Mickey in the form of Bog Easy and Ventureland. We’re standing outside the entrance to the Pirates of the Caribbean.
Spector Explains the Haunted Mansion and Lonesome Manor
Up next was the Haunted Mansion (which is difficult to distinguish in the background), which appears in four versions in all the Disney theme parks. Spector explains how those designs were incorporated into Disney Epic Mickey’s Lonesome Manor’s look.
A Boss Fight Atop Space Mountain
Tomorrow Land, home of Space Mountain and the Moonliner Rocket (which is what is being discussed at the outset of this video), makes it into Disney Epic Mickey as Tomorrow City. And when Spector talks about a boss battle “on top of that building,” he’s talking about actually fighting on top of Space Mountain.
Warren Spector and Mickey’s First Boss Battle
Gremlin Village is the Wasteland version of Small World, which Spector is standing in front of in this video clip. He also explains how the creepy clock face on the front of the huge animatronic contraption is also Mickey’s first big boss fight.
Sleeping Beauty’s Castle — The Beginning (and End) of Epic Mickey
The tour ends with Spector talking about Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and how Disney’s iconic structures make it into the Wasteland as the adventure’s starting point, and the final destination for the endgame.
Via, of all places, The Frisky, if you needed a stark reminder not only that the Nintendo generation has firmly transitioned into adulthood, but that the bar for truly epic parenting is HIGH, look no further than this amazing photo album. It records, for all posterity, the process by which a couple of very awesome parents spent 2009 decorating their baby’s room in full-tilt Yoshi’s Island regalia. The photo above is sufficiently wonderful, but in addition to essentially nailing the look and feel of the game, Dad also contributed some delightful, original comic art to hang on the newly-amazing walls:
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