John Paul Titlow of ReadWrite has a compelling idea.
Nintendo should stop being a bunch of fuddy-duddies and make its NES and SNES games available for smartphones.
Posts Tagged ‘nintendo’
Woman buys collector’s item game worth $15K for $7.99
It appears the art of thrift shopping is not without its fringe benefits.
A North Carolina woman uncovered a gamer’s gold mine when she purchased an old Nintendo game for $7.99 at her local Goodwill.
The game was Stadium Events, released in 1987. The game was premiered to a test market in North America but later pulled after Nintendo bought the rights to its Family Fun Fitness mat which became the prototype for Nintendo’s Power Pad.
“This was found here in Charlotte for basically nothing! This game in this condition can go for 15k+. I nearly fainted and was too dazzled to make a legitimate offer. She will be getting it VGA graded and you might see it on eBay sometime soon. I’m humbled to have even laid hands on it. Don’t lose hope game hunters, the gems are still out there!” (Facebook)
The woman made her way to Save Point Video Games, a retailer in Charlotte, N.C., to see if she could grab a decent price on her prize.
Owner Wilder Hamm couldn’t contain himself when she revealed it.
“Oh my God!” he told gamer blog Kotaku. “She knew exactly what she had.”
Saving the best for last, the woman revealed the game after presenting 10-Yard Fight and The Karate Kid as smaller gems.
“Normally in this business we try not to show our cards,” Hamm said. “We’re not in the business of ripping people off but you show that kind of excitement, they start expecting a mountain of money.”
Anyhow, Hamm had to turn her away since the store did not have enough money to purchase it outright. He did offer to sell the game on consignment but the women wanted keep all the proceeds herself.
In 2010 a sealed copy of the game went for $41,300 on Ebay. That’s a lot of proceeds.
New Castlevania delivers the goods
“Great to see you, Ted. You’ve really lost weight!”
Any new release in the Castlevania franchise is a pretty big deal, and fans have been especially eager for Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Mirror of Fate, which lands on the Nintendo 3DS today.
Our resident video editing/producing guru James Groome somehow overcame the technical barriers of capturing gameplay footage off a Nintendo 3DS screen, and put together an awesome standalone video review. Check it out here.
Insert quarter for Extra Life
If you have a charitable gamer in your life, you probably know this weekend marks the annual Extra Life fundraising drive, a 24-hour gaming marathon in support of the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.
Tons of gamers, including myself and fellow Button Masher Matt Dykstra and his sprawling team of Edmonton-based players, will be playing games straight through from this morning until tomorrow morning to raise money for our chosen kids’ hospital charities. (I’m backing the SickKids Foundation, Matt and the Extra Life Edmonton crew are supporting the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation.)
I’m about to get settled in for what could be a long day and night — I’ve got a nice big coffee and egg n’ peameal bacon sammich to get the engine running, and tons of food, caffeinated bevvies and Visine for later on. It’ll be fun, at first. But I have a feeling that even by this evening this is going to feel like a bad idea. And at 3 a.m…. well, we’ll stagger across that bridge when we get to it.
Disney takes video games to the silver screen
Video games being adapted to the big screen is nothing new. Resident Evil: Retribution just hit theatres five days ago, and Silent Hill: Revelation 3D is expected to be out in time for the Halloween-minded crowd.
But Disney has taken video games and their characters one step further in their film Wreck-It Ralph, due out Nov. 2, 2012. Featuring the voice talents of John C. Reilly, Jane Lynch, Sarah Silverman and Jack McBrayer, the story focuses around a vintage arcade game’s “bad guy” who wishes to reform his ways after 30 years of being Fix-It Felix’s antagonist.
A humourous self-help group features reprobates from the video game world — M. Bison, Zangief, Dr. Robotnik, Bowser, PacMan ghosts — helping Wreck-It Ralph (Reilly) be okay with his badness. Instead of returning to his game, he joins “Hero’s Duty”. Lynch provides the voice of Sergeant Calhoun, a Commander Shepard-like character (Mass Effect 3) who leads troops into battle.
Expect plenty of humour geared towards gamers, and cameos by Ryu, Sonic the Hedgehog and Q-Bert.
New Super Mario Bros. 2 review
Chris Vandergaag - August 23rd, 2012
Good? Sure. But “new”?
New Super Mario Bros. 2 for the Nintendo 3DS arrived in North America this past weekend (why does Nintendo release its stuff on Sundays, rather than industry standard game-drop Tuesdays? It’s always creeped me out) and the latest Mario entry—a follow-up to 2006’s New Super Mario Bros. for the DS and 2009’s New Super Mario Bros. Wii—has sold nearly a million copies in Japan since its release there July 28.
As the first ‘full’ retail Nintendo game released day one as a digital download on the 3DS eShop alongside in-store copies, NSMB 2 should put up big numbers here, too. Read more…
Miyamoto speaks
Shigeru Miyamoto kicks off Nintendo's E3 media briefing. (REUTERS)
Last week marked the 11th time I’ve attended the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, the annual convergence of game developers, publishers, retailers and grubby media folk like myself who get paid to write and talk about games. And one of the highlights of each year’s E3 is getting to sit down with game creators and game company executives and talk to them about what they do.
E3 2012 – Ubisoft steals the show
Watch Dogs is one of several Ubisoft games blowing minds at E3.
The French are good at making many things. Cheese. Wine. Sweet, sweet love.
Know what else the French excel at? Making video games.
