Underground Gamer

Fancy pre-rendered sequences? HAH. Droning developer diariy talkovers? NO THANK YOU. No, this one’s pure gameplay. Enjoy.

View Source

If you hadn’t caught on when their boss resigned, they lost a ton of money or they started firing a ton of people, maybe we need to spell it out for you: once-proud publisher Midway are in trouble. Serious trouble. So much trouble, in fact, that on November 14 they got a letter from the New York Stock Exchange, threatening the company that they’d be removed from the exchange if they can’t sort themselves out in the next six months. Midway said, in a nutshell, “yes sir, we’ll sort ourselves out”, despite the fact they’ve spent the past 24 months doing little but making things worse.

CHICAGO — November 20, 2008 — Midway Games Inc. (NYSE: MWY) announced today that on November 14, 2008, the Company received notification from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) that it has fallen below the standard for continued listing of its common stock on the NYSE that requires a minimum average closing price of $1.00 per share over 30 consecutive trading days.

Under NYSE rules, the Company has a period of six months from the date of the notice, subject to possible extension, to cure the deficiency. During this cure period, the Company’s shares will continue to be listed and traded on the NYSE. The Company plans to notify the NYSE that it will seek to cure the deficiency.

The Company’s business operations and Securities and Exchange Commission reporting requirements are unaffected by this notice.

View Source

Filed under: Business

Industry folks have been joking that Midway is the new Atari; however, while Atari is finding redemption in rebirth, Midway continues to sink deeper into the Swamps of Sadness. The latest bit of bad news comes from the New York Stock Exchange, which has put the publisher on notice for potential delisting.

NYSE states that Midway needs a closing price of at least $1 over 30 consecutive days — the stock is currently trading at about 25¢. According to NYSE rules, the publisher has six months to save itself from delisting. At this time, the house of Booty has its financial future pinned on the performance of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe and Wheelman. Do you have the heart to tell Midway how this will end?

Midway receives delisting notice from NYSE originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

View Source

Pretty much every gamer thinks that in-game advertising is a load of old cock. As if constantly being blitzed in the real world by demands to buy more stuff wasn’t enough, the brazen pimping of products is now a well established business in the realms of the virtual citizen. Here’s a list of 10 in-game adverts that we think would actually work. View Source

To: Crecente
From: Luke
Re: A Challenge?

Don’t you patronise me. You want equitable, I’ll make a son. My new imaginary son. ChildBeard. Yeah, he’s four, but he’s got a flowing, braided, ginger beard, and he potters around the house in his pedal-powered toy longboat.

Anyway…did you see the trailer for the new Astro Boy movie? Been waiting on seeing it in motion for what feels like years now, and now that I’ve seen it…I wish I’d seen more punching, more butt-cannons.

Though the digging sequence was a nice tip of the hat.

Here’s what you missed:

Rumor: Yngwie Malmsteen, More Soundgarden Coming To Rock Band
GameStop Makes $1.69 Billion, Names Quarter’s Best Sellers
Sony’s Christmas Ads Are Hit And Miss
Waiter, There’s An Altair In My Prince Of Persia
Here’s What The NXE “Premium Themes” Look Like
PS3 Trophies Are Now MANDATORY
Toys ‘R’ Us Black Friday Deals
Ozzy Endorses, Then Battles The Lich King

View Source

Filed under: Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, Action

We don’t typically like to register our video game consoles with game publishers. After watching Enemy of the State, we like to stay off the grid, even if we don’t exactly understand what the grid is or why it should be avoided. This may just be enough to turn us though: Ubisoft says that those who register their Gamertags or PSN IDs with Ubisoft.com will be able to download a free Altair skin to use in Prince of Persia.

Is it a classic example of brand dilution? Sure! But is it a cool enough case of brand dilution to make us ignore that? Absolutely.

Pretend you’re Altair in Prince of Persia originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

View Source

The researchers at Electronic Entertainment Design and…Research have been looking at console game sales patterns. Looking at how long it takes a game to enter “price protection”, which is a term used for when a publisher - having noticed a game isn’t selling very well - lowers the wholesale cost of a game so that retailers can keep it on the shelves at full price, even when the public are ignoring it. What they’ve found is that this practice occurs for 7.5% of 360 games. And 9.09% of PS3 games. But the Wii? It happens for 15.1% of titles.

EEDAR speculates that this is due to a crowded release schedule full of samey, poorly-made casual titles that are pitching to “unpredictable mainstream and casual markets”. Common sense, as well as the mob’s opinion, will no doubt agree with EEDAR. Their advice to publishers?

For reference, we consider games targeting the core market to have a less competitive landscape as core targeted titles are typically spread out through the year and receive less competition upon release.

Whaddya know. Make better, realer games. I like these EEDAR guys.

Wii Games Discounted at a Faster Rate – EEDAR [GameDaily]

View Source

Don’t forget! Time is ticking away. So if you want to enter our DSi contest, you better do it sooner rather than later. This DSi right here is up for grabs.

Ash picked this bad boy up in Osaka and then popped open the box and got it lousy with fingerprints. After tinkering with it enough to do a few posts about the thing, he boxed it up and sent it my way. It now sits safely on my desk, away from prying eyes, and Tristan’s fingers. Click here to find out how to win it in my sadistic scavenger hunt.

Don’t forget to send your answers to the correct place, deleting all of those entries sent directly to me can be tiring.

View Source

Browse Digg and any other website while playing your PC video games!
Source

Dance your tails off–if you’re ready to get wild! Watch Video

Dance your tails off–if you’re ready to get wild! Watch Video

The wait is finally over, are you ready for the Remnants? Watch Video

Anyone who works with 1UP/EGM Editor-in-Chief James Mielke knows that the guy is pretty darn immersed in his job — he works as hard as he can to keep creating the coolest content that you see in the mag and on our sites. The past few weeks he was a bit distracted, though. Why? Because he was putting together the final preparations for his proposal to his awesome girlfriend (and now awesome fiance — she said yes!) Joy. It’s something he’d been planning for over a year (I remember when he first told me that he was going to do it), but he had been making all the preparations the past few months.

So what did he do to make the event extra special? He called upon two of the creators of the Final Fantasy series — composer Nobuo Uematsu and artist/designer Yoshitaka Amano — to help him out. Amano designed the ring for him and Uematsu composed a melody that played as he proposed. For James and Joy — two members of the videogame industry, both big fans of the Final Fantasy series — this was perfectly fitting and definitely a proposal in a league of its own. (Never mind that it was her birthday and he took her to Paris).

(The ring Yoshitaka Amano designed)

The best part was that he was able to get on film the process of asking both Amano and Uematsu for their help earlier this year. Here’s the video, including Uematsu playing the original melody for the first time on his piano (he titled the song “The Milky Way”).

Anyway, he detailed the whole thing on his blog, so definitely give it a read and tell him congrats!
View Source

Celebrate, homebrew fans — while Sony had managed to evade the attempts of hackers to crack into the latest iteration of the PlayStation Portable, the PSP 3000, it’s finally been accomplished. Sure, we knew it was inevitably going to be cracked since it was released in October, but with the talent of hackers these days, I’m surprised when things aren’t hacked as soon as they’re released.

Of course, this comes at a price — $30, to be exact. A new battery from the England-based maker of Action Replay, Datel, enables users to put the PSP in service mode, reports Maxconsole.net. From there, you’ll be able to downgrade the system’s firmware, thereby allowing you to access all of those wonderful (albeit typically illegal) tools, apps, and emulators you’ve no doubt heard of. The battery features a convenient switch to allow you to jump between service mode and normal mode and functions with both the PSP 3000 and 2000.

The Datel ‘Lite Blue Tool’ battery is being released on November 28 for $30 in North America and $20 in the UK. A technical explanation (containing fancy words such as “de-capsulated”) of how the feat was accomplished can be found at Maxconsole. Those interested in picking up the new battery can find it’s now available for preorder from Datel’s online store.

Your move, Sony.
View Source

At first glance, <a href=”Little Red Riding Hood’s Zombie BBQ looks like an awesome freak accident involving Ikari Warriors and Capcom’s Darkstalkers. Upon closer inspection, though, it’s just not as enjoyable as either of those classics. Zombie BBQ is essentially a vertical-scrolling shooter; quite an innovative one at times, but for the most part, it’s tedious and overly fussy. It casts players as one of two selectable protagonists: Little Red Riding Hood and Momotaro (bringing the bedtime heroine and the Japanese storybook character together for the first time). The premise is simple: Begin each level at the bottom of the screen, blasting everything that stands between you and the end of the level — which is always punctuated by some sort of boss battle or miniboss encounter. You use the DS stylus to direct your machine gun or throwing stars (which offer unlimited ammo, but require reloading); this does a good job of emulating 360 degrees worth of shot angles. Enemies — primarily zombies — erupt from the ground and march their way downscreen, which is where the bulk of the problems arise.

Since Zombie BBQ doesn’t feature a scoring system, you have very little reason to shoot the zombies at all, since most of them walk right on by without so much as glancing your way. Shooting them just gives you something to do as the screen slowly trundles by at a glacial pace. In theory, you could just press left and right and avoid the zombies altogether…at least until you progress deep enough to discover the more mobile skeletons who throw skulls at you, or the coffins that pop out of the ground to do the same. It’s mostly slow going until you reach the mid- to high-level stages, at which point almost too much stuff’s happening at any given moment. The zombies multiply in excessive numbers; they become too hard to dodge with all the crap flying at you, and it’s obvious that the developers implemented things like exploding barrels to help alleviate the chaos — except they’re usually too far from the zombies to offer much help at all. And — when you haven’t accidentally blown these barrels up with friendly fire meant for an incoming zombie — they inflict little splash damage, which makes them less effective than just shooting enemies head-on. Power-ups (like flamethrowers and shotguns) hidden in crates scattered around each stage offer meager variety, as none of them last very long and aren’t powerful enough to bother with.

View Source