I think I’ve finally come to a decision on the Tube-Tuesday thing. It’s a stupid name and I don’t like it. I’m going to use Mondays to post the videos I find and spend my time on longer, more content-heavy posts for Tuesdays or later in the week, as to call more attention to them.

This week’s video feature comes from a Japanese rom hack of Megaman 2. Check it out (more details at the end)

So now that you’ve seen Megaman kick all of Wily’s robots’ asses at once, how would you like to do it for yourself?

Well, you can! Right here you can download the rom hack and test your own skill against all 8 robot masters from Mega Man 2. It seems they also allow you to switch out of Time Stopper before the energy runs out, which is something I am fairly certain you couldn’t do in that in the original game. But since Metal Blade pretty much kills half the bosses outright, I would really like to see this done to Mega Man 1, or maybe 3. Those would be some tough fights to survive.

Once again, you can get the rom hack right here: http://sites.google.com/site/spennlue/r2bbet

Have a good week, we’ll see you in a day or two with a review of a new dice game I think you’ll enjoy.

Class dismissed!

Consollection is a small German webpage that has cataloged known video game consoles from the Odyssey to the Wii with photographs and a short bio for each (in both English and German)

I would say “all known videogame consoles” because this site has things that even I’ve never heard of, but it doesn’t seem to contain much that was manufactured outside of American or Japanese companies (no Chinese Knockoff consoles here)

That being said, it’s pretty exhaustive, and definitely contains everything that played a role (major or vital) in the history of home video gaming.

Consider it a checklist.

Check it out here: http://consollection.de/

Class dismissed!

Round two of Tube Tuesday comes to you this week after a last Monday post (does that technically make this the Monday post?) Anyway…I like this segment, but I want to spread out the posts a little bit more so I’m not sure where everything is going to land just yet. Also I am trying to get a couple of new games played and reviewed for you all so please bear with me.

Today’s video is something I found a while back, it’s the Final Fantasy theme (not to be confused with the harp arpeggio) given lyrics much like the Dr. Mario bit.

It’s hilarious and nostalgic. Very nice work.

Enjoy!

Class dismissed!

Good morning, I have been thinking lately about additional segments to add to G.U. and here is one of them. Youtube Tuesday may stick around, maybe not. I’m gonna try it out. Anyway the point is there’s so much stuff out there (and not necessarily on YouTube) to watch that’s just fun and interesting regarding gaming, it’s much more effective to post them with some kind of order within the chaos rather than just throw them out whenever I happen to come across one (or six) at a time.

If you like this idea, let us know!

Today’s feature, was something that I liked a lot, because it features one of my favorite games of all time (of all time!) Zelda II The Adventure of Link. Also, it’s very well written and performed with minimal cheesiness; even though I don’t really prefer rap, there’s a lot of guitar in there too.

Please enjoy, the Zelda II rap…song…thing.

Class dismissed!

It equals this.

Some folks at the FPSBANANA community have created a fantastic, whimsical, and beautiful payload map for Team Fortress 2 based on the arcade classic Donkey Kong. (Youtube video of it can be found here)

Basically one team’s goal is to get Mario all the way to the top of the structure by standing within a certain proximity to him (a la your typical Payload map) while the other team’s goal is to prevent the Payload’s (Mario’s) movement.

This is incredibly inspiring, I would love to see other classic games re-imagined this way.  I wonder if any more already exist that I just haven’t seen yet.

Know of something fun like this? Sign in and comment!

Have a great week everyone;

Class dismissed.

No, you’re not drunk (or maybe you are).

First-person tetris has arrived! And by first-person we mean from the perspective of the bricks themselves. Comes complete with original music tracks and a “night mode” which essentially plays the game against a black backdrop.

If you think you’ve mastered Tetris, give this one a try, and try not to lose your lunch.

(I’ve gotten way too much enjoyment out of this)

Play First-Person Tetris here.

Have a great Friday everyone!

Class dismissed.

You read that right. If you act quickly, you can donate $20 to the rescue effort in Haiti and receive $1481.31 worth of downloadable RPG books from DrivethruRPG.

This kind of deal is absolutely unheard of, and it comes with the added benefit of helping out the victims of the disastrous earthquake that befell our fellow human beings in Haiti. It’s awesome of these guys to give so much away for such a small donation, and it would be a shame to miss out on it.

According to their page, “Funds raised will go to Doctors Without Borders Haiti Earthquake Response.”

For all the information about their Gamers Help Haiti program, visit their website right here.

(Thanks to Imperial Outpost for bringing this program to my attention!)

Hey everybody. Sorry if you ran into any errors trying to get here earlier this morning apparently Dreamhost found themselves to be under an attack of some kind, and shut down their servers until they could assess the threat…or something.

Anyway, I had the pleasure of playing two new games last week, and while I spend some more time on the quality reviews I owe a couple of folks that submitted their games to us, I thought I could touch on these other games briefly today.

Thunderstone is a fantastic new game from AEG that combines the competitive deckbuilding aspect of Dominion with the dungeon-crawling aspect and goal-driven gameplay of Tomb. It remains fun to play even through game after game of not even coming close to winning, and the added layers of strategy make the game hard to solve.

Basically your options are to go to the village and buy things and recruit new characters for your party, or to go into the dungeon and attempt to kill the monsters there, except there are three levels to the “dungeon” and if you don’t take Light cards in addition to your Characters and Weapons, it will be too dark to see and the monsters will get a bonus. Monsters are worth victory points and near the end of  the monster deck is a Thunderstone. Have the most points when a player claims the Thunderstone to win the game.

It’s awesome and clever in it’s design, and what I subconsciously yearned for when the Dominion experience was shown to me for the first time. This is a great game to try if you like card games at all.

I’ll be honest. Miniatures games typically frighten me. Even if I really enjoy them, they either don’t seem to have a strong playerbase (World of Warcraft Miniatures) or they are absurdly expensive to keep up with (Games Workshop minis games).

Malifaux is a game that creates a gentle medium. Yes you still have to assemble and paint your own figurines. But all you ever really need is about 5 of them. The theme is an amalgamation of different genres, your squad can be Wild West oriented, Steampunk, Zombie Hookers, or even Redneck Goblins. There’s something for everybody.

Another fun thing about Malifaux is how it’s played. There are no dice. Everything “random” in the game is determined by an ordinary deck of 52 playing cards, plus two jokers added. This creates a great balance in that everyone has the same spread of good results and bad results that have to be burned through before you get to shuffle again. I got to play this game once over the weekend and it looks like some really great things are going to happen with it. Our local shop has had to restock it three times already because of it’s popularity, so I’d say that means something positive.

More on that, and other things as time goes on. For now, have a great week everyone.

Yep, I went back to work on Monday and it sure is great. Back doing what I was doing when things weren’t absolutely insane is a nice comfort right now. Hopefully this new year will bring some new prosperity and companies will start hiring people again and commissioning work orders.

In any case, I posted so much last week that I didn’t leave anything significant for you all for today.

I have two new games sitting on my desk, one from The Game Crafter and another from a company that is new to me,  Realms Masters Game Forge, that I will be playtesting/reviewing here within the next couple of weeks. I also started playtesting my first project from Fantasy Flight games, and as soon as I’m allowed to talk about it, I will.

But, for today, I want everyone to have a great week and keep on keepin’ on.

Dragonkitty found this today on the interwebs. See if you can name all 100 games represented by these cupcakes, some of them are very easy, others are extremely abstract (seriously, if you guess the “Risk” one right away, you win.)

I got all but 14 of them. I had the most trouble with some the older boardgame ones that I’ve never played before.

http://www.steelheadstudio.com/100cupcakes/

(Mouse over the icon to the right of each image to see the answer)