Well, they had to do something with all those low-poly renditions of Pokemon Ranchers, and so Pokemon Rumble was born.

Nintendo announced the WiiWare game over the weekend at the Penny Arcade Expo, where IGN reports that it played like a simplified 4-player Gauntlet, with simple two-button controls to melee or special attack invading Pokemon (with all the franchise’s rock/paper/scissors-like offensive/defensive weaknesses/strengths intact), collecting defeated enemies, and re-summoning those enemies as your own.

Apart from IGN, all of the on-site reporting over the weekend seemed to unanimously agree that the game was surprisingly well-received, and so it climbs the list of anticipated WiiWare games due out before the end of the year.

MEET THE ACTION FIGURES: JACOB NORAD’S TEAM FORTRESS 2 CUSTOMS

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9.7.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Jacob Norad’s got some unbelievable work going on over at his blog showing you how he’s piecing together the entire set of custom Team Fortress 2 figures, which have needed to be actual collectibles for like two years now.

Click through to find his Heavy and his paper-mask-donning Spy, not pictured above. [via Toycutter]

ONE SHOT: MASTERS OF THE HYRULIAN UNIVERSE

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9.7.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Illustrator Gonzalo ‘GENZOMAN‘ Ordóñez Arias (who’s also behind these official World of Warcraft card game illos) probably answers some un-asked hypothetical about how The West might handle the Zelda franchise, etc. etc. but more appropriately simply shows us the most invulnerable Link of all time. [via GamOvr]

ONE SHOT: VARIATIONS ON A SLIME

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9.7.2009

Brandon Boyer

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James ‘Harvey James‘ Harvey illustratively ponders the most basic of videogames enemies, Dragon Quest‘s iconic Slime. Click through for the full skyscraper version, and to see a hastily caught snapshot of an Akihabara sex shop’s Slime-themed tube of lube, the full implications of which are almost too much to ponder on the early morning of a federal holiday.

ONE SHOT: METROID IN LEGO

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9.7.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Lego arteest Benjamin ‘Moose Greebles/Prof. Mangrove‘ Butwin does Metroid in brick form, which makes me think TT Games should start drafting that prospective design doc soon. [via Super Punch]

Things the NES original Boy and His Blob did not include: an oversized, super-punching blob-mech-fighter, a eerily rendered blob-boy-clone, and, of course, hugs, but ahead of the game’s October 13th retail release, Majesco’s just-released ‘final trailer’ for WayForward’s update lets you see all three in action.

ONE SHOT: THE VISIBLE WII-MOTE

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9.6.2009

Brandon Boyer

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What it looks like inside, from freelance art director Angela Moramarco‘s proposed ‘anatoWii’ site that would help explain the health and physical therapy benefits of the Wii. [via Super Punch]

Stick with the first 19 seconds of awkward silence: though the subsequent teaser video only lasts long enough to show you the basic season shifting/hurricane summoning mechanics of Frontier’s upcoming LostWinds sequel Winter of the Melodias, it’s enough to make you ache to return to its world.

As predicted, Dean Dodrill has taken home the $40,000 grand prize in Microsoft’s XNA/IndieGames competition Dream Build Play for his previously mentioned beat-em-up Dust: An Elysian Tail.

The oft blogged CoinApp and their tiny-planet shooter Max Blastronaut has come in at second place, for a $20,000 prize.

The third place $10,000 prize went to Nivel21’s Rotor’scope:

And finally, ‘kong fu’ action game HurricaneX2 Evolution took home the $5,000 fourth place prize:

This year’s winners, according to the press release, will again be supported with the “opportunity to publish their games on the Xbox LIVE Indie Games Channel” and the extra promotional push the contest will give them — as with last year, there doesn’t seem to be a channel to promote the winner to a full Live Arcade release as Microsoft did with 2007’s Ska Studios winner The Dishwasher.

After a long gestation period and a number of rotated codenames, ngmoco have officially announced Eliminate (nee KillTest nee LiveFire), their WiFi-enabled online arena shooter, and, in so doing, have also officially solidified their microtransactional stance.

As you can see from the video above, the studio’s taken a page from the social-app/My Brute-ish playbook and set up a system in which players can only participate for ‘credits’ — the in-game currency which allows you to upgrade your player’s abilities — a certain number of times per day.

That is, unless they prefer to purchase additional “energy” via microtransactions to continue their credit earning — otherwise, you can play for as long/as many times as you’d like, but not earn any credit rewards.

It’s a more graceful and smarter solution than allowing for the rote real-money purchasing of upgrades — giving those more financially-abled a performance-enhancing edge — though no where have they outright backed down on their previous plans to do just that.

Either way, the addition of the trailer’s super-dryly ironic and slightly Portal-ish corporate backdrop humor is very welcome from what’s otherwise seemed like a fairly staid setup.