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Filed under: Fan stuff

Theresa Murphy's intentions were well-meaning when she planned out this costume, dressing up as Kat, half of the WarioWare series' ninja-sister duo. There must have been some misstep during the creation process, however, some supernatural treachery, that produced this absolutely creepy paper mache head. Our best guess is that a dying killer snuck into Theresa's house and performed a voodoo ritual to imbue the mask with his evil soul, all while she was distracted by a Geico TV commercial.

Gone are our memories of Kat as a cute minigame ninja. In their place, we see a black and white scene of Kat pulling herself out of a well, her fingertips crusted with blackened blood and her skin sallow. She tramps toward us, and the only thing we can hear is the smack of her wet, sock-covered feet on hard ground. Our eyes are wide with horror, screaming, but we cannot move.

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A few days ago I tried my hands on doing some cutouts. Cutouts are images, pictures or photos that were carefully and cleanly (at least some are) cut around its edge, uploaded as a texture and placed on a prim. They are mainly used as decorations. I got the idea from AlphaQ Kidd who used to have a vendor at 3 Stars and a Sun.

This is not the first time I’ve created cutouts. I’ve been doing cutouts for some time now but all the cutouts I made before were all for my personal use.

Yesterday, I created 4 cutouts and they are all for decorative purpose only. You can use these cutouts to decorate your place (home, office, mall, shop, garden, beach, park, etc.) in Second Life. They are MOD/COPY so you can easily create more copies and change or modify their size and shape. You can even link them together or add your own script.

• Cutout - X-Mas Deco - Tree 01a
• Cutout - Garden - Mushroom 01a

• Cutout - Garden - Plant 01a
• Cutout - X-Mas Deco - Santa 01a

The one below was made a few days earlier. I used it to decorate 3 Stars and a Sun for Halloween but later decided to sell it cheap as a The Otso item.

• The Otso - Halloween Deco - Boo Boo

If you like any of them then you can get them at SLExchange and at OnRez or just click on their links.

Filed under: Virtually Overlooked

Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it a retro-speculative.

Even though Halloween is over, we didn't want to miss the opportunity to devote a Virtually Overlooked column to a thematically appropriate game. LJN's Friday the 13th is scary for many of the same reasons that the movies are -- sudden noises and scares from masked Jason Voorhees -- but it's also scary in a deeper way. Playing Friday the 13th is an exercise in hopelessness.

Every outward indication would suggest that Friday the 13th is an exceptionally terrible game. First off, it's a licensed game. That is usually the only tip one needs. And as if that weren't conclusive evidence, the box bears the LJN label. LJN, Acclaim's secondary label, was an abbreviation for "If you accidentally play one of our games, induce vomiting." LJN may well have been the worst publisher of NES games-- worse than Tengen, Panesian or the publisher of Street Fighter V Turbo 20 People. And it adapts a movie series in which the bad guy is invincible and the protagonists are generally helpless. Awesome!

And guess what? It is exceptionally terrible. As one of six identical camp counselors, you wander around Camp Crystal Lake performing the morning zombie removal, until one of the cabins containing another counselor or some kids sends out a distress call. Then you have 60 seconds to get there or Jason will kill the occupant. If you make it on time, Jason kills you instead. Should you manage to pick up a weapon stronger than a rock on your way to the cabin, you'll remove a slightly larger amount of Jason's health before dying. You repeat this process for all six counselors, and then the game ends in failure.

It is theoretically possible to defeat Jason (in the same way it's possible to leave the Earth's orbit if you can just get a good enough running start), but he just comes back, stronger and faster. It takes many different rounds of running into him and wheedling his health away, while pretty much getting slaughtered in the process.

To be fair, the game does have some neat ideas. The camp is fully explorable from the beginning (even if no area has any distinguishing features) and the game is fairly nonlinear in that Jason appears randomly in different cabins. But the sidescrolling parts are awkward, the first-person cabin segments useless (and, of course, that's where the majority of the boss encounters occur) and any gameplay segment is likely to make you feel like any effort to stop Jason or find weapons or do anything is completely futile. It's just generally a bad idea to make a game out of a movie in which the heroes are inert and the villain invincible. And, of course, it was a bad idea for LJN to make a game. We've actually heard of people tolerating this mess before, which is why we'd be curious enough to give it another shot.

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This is the thirty-fourth in a series of bad video game reviews by the Angry Video Game Nerd. This time he reviews Halloween on Atari 2600. This movie-based game was released back in 1983, made by Wizard Video Games, after the 1978 John Carpenter’s Halloween independent horror film.

On the spookiest day of the year The Nerd finds himself in a battle against a crappy game. Happy Halloween!

He also kind of reviews Haunted House and Frankenstein’s Monster.

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Filed under: Virtual Console

The internet has made it easy to find cheats for games, but we miss the tips pages from game magazines, when the discovery of a new code could inspire you to go back to an old game. These codes aren't exactly new, but oldness is the essence of the Virtual Console! We're bringing back the classic codes every week on The VC Advantage.

Today is the perfect day to look at some of the spookier games on the Virtual Console, and then help you face your fears and take them on. It would certainly have been a good day to talk about Ghosts 'n Goblins games, as well, but ... we already did that. Uh, as part of our Halloween special, here's a link to that old VC Advantage! It's ... uh, back from the dead!

Luckily, awkward backlinks aren't the only thing we can present for our Halloween edition of The VC Advantage. There are still some gruesome games we have yet to cover!

And that means that it's now totally scary time! Turn out all the lights and stuff! We're making weird "oooooo" spooky noises, but you can't hear it, because we'll have written this hours ago by the time you're reading it, and also we're not in the same room as you!

Splatterhouse (TG16)
Hard mode: What's scarier than a game in which the main character dies, over and over and over again, forced to relive the same horrific period of a few seconds before he's ripped apart yet again by disgusting, nightmarish monsters? Probably a lot of stuff. Dentistry comes to mind. Loneliness. But what's scarier in the context of video game alterations caused by input of preprogrammed button sequences? Probably still some stuff. To access hard mode, hold Select at the title screen until the word HARD appears.

Castlevania (NES)
Hard mode: Yes, it's another hard mode, but this one seems pretty notable. We had no idea that Castlevania even had one of these, and we doubt anyone else ever would have were it not for cheat devices and ROM hacking-- because you access Castlevania's hard mode by completing the game, and that is impossible. Of all the games to put a hard mode in. Also we heard that if you finish the hard mode, Koji Igarashi will ride a Medusa head to your house and give you a million dollars. And nobody will ever know if that's true.

Kid Chameleon (GEN)
Level skip: Kid Chameleon isn't really that scary, but it is about dressing up in costumes. And that is the true meaning of Halloween (also, candy, which is delicious, when eaten.) To skip straight to the last boss, find some blogs above the flag in the Blue Lake Woods level and jump to the last one. Then press down, right, jump, and special.

[Codes via GameFAQs]

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Filed under: Imports, Screens

GAME Watch is referring to D3 Publisher's Oneechanbara R as Oneechanbara Revolution now, solving the mystery of what the R means. We sort of assumed that it was "Remake," ourselves. Does this mean that the new Oneechanbara game takes significant steps forward toward becoming more than a ridiculous novelty game?

Probably not. The title is probably just a reference to the Wii, once called the Revolution itself. Oh, well. Let's not let the supposed terribleness of the games bring us down. Today is the best day of the year for browsing a bunch of screenshots of bloody zombies, and GAME Watch has obliged with a large collection of new screens.

Their post also reveals that the game contains not just the cowboy-hat-and-bikini-clad Aya, but also Saki, the other playable character from the first Oneechanbara game, just in case you'd like to choose which underdressed girl with whom to slash monsters.

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Filed under: Wii Warm Up

Happy Halloween to those of you who are into costumes and candy! To the rest of you, have a delightful Wednesday. Halloween is one of our favorite holidays, and the one we'd be most likely to hold a party in honor of (if only the cats would keep their costumes on.)

So we thought that today would be (a few days later than) a good time to discuss possible ideas for a Halloween Wii party. How could you add a layer of spookiness to a Wii-centered get-together? We would attach all the Wiimotes (securely, with wrist straps) to some fake disembodied arms and force all our guests to play that way. Or we could sit around and make up spooky alternate plots for Virtual Console games! Uh, or we could play Pac-Man ... and, uh, Samurai Ghost. Those have, you know, ghosts.

What kind of ghoulish twists can you think of? And before you admonish us, we realize that people don't need to play games all the time and can have social gatherings without them. It is just a fun thing to talk about.

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Halloween is nearly upon us and the Halloween spirit is in full force . . . both in the real world as well as the virtual world!

While Blizzard and Sony Online Entertainment have been bringing the seasonal fun to their MMO’s recently, NCSoft is just now getting in on the act. Here’s a list of what in-game changes you can see exclusively for this Halloween in the games: City of Heroes, Guild Wars, Lineage II and Tabula Rasa.

* City of Heroes — The festivities have already begun in Paragon City! As of October 22, jovial heroes and villains can access “Classical Costumes,” allowing them to briefly dress up as popular NPC baddies. New Halloween-themed monsters and badges will also be available for the next week.

* Guild Wars — From Friday, October 26 until midtarget=”_blank”night on October 31, two Guild Wars cities (the Tyrian port of Lion’s Arch and the Elonian port of Kamadan) will be home to the Mad King Thorn. This otherworldly royalty will run mini-games, tell jokes, and hand out prizes like candy.

* Lineage II — Again beginning tomorrow, October 26, the “Trick or Transmutation” event will kick off in Lineage. Players will be tasked with hunting down various Alchemist’s Chests that will offer extremely rare items, including some never before seen in Lineage II until now.

* Tabula Rasa — While the full game is not yet in release, Tabula Rasa’s head start for those who have pre-ordered will be in full swing during Halloween. Special missions will be offered culminating in receiving one of nine special Halloween masks. — Via 1-Up

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Just in time for Halloween is this tabletop wargame, WizKids announces the newest MechWarrior collectable miniatures and cards release: the Undead Lance Action Pack, which features a foursome of creepy new ’Mechs that promises destruction to anyone who opposes them! is a tabletop wargame

With their ghastly appearance and supernatural talents, the Undead Lance features a unique game mechanic previously unseen in the MechWarrior game universe: These ’Mechs become ever-more deadly as battles rage on. Some even go so far as to claim that these former prisoners of the Areseppi Correctional Facility have the devil himself as their unseen benefactor. Use the Undead Lance in the deadly Halloween scenarios “Trick or Treat” and “Night of the Living Dead.”

Each MechWarrior Undead Lance Action Pack (price $24.99) contains four new, ominous ’Mechs; four pilot cards and one exclusive map. — Via Evilavatar

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Filed under: Wii Warm Up

Yesterday, we saw some various gaming costumes that reminded us that Halloween is just around the corner. Will you be dressing up this year, and if so, will you be adopting a game-related theme? It's always fun to see someone pull off a good gaming costume.

We're off to a party this year, but finding round, pregnancy-friendly costume ideas has thus far proven a challenge, since the man of the house isn't too thrilled with the idea of his lady slapping on a fake mustache and taking advantage of the belly to do a Mario-drag thing. Or maybe it's just that he doesn't want to go as Peach. Oh well, back to the drawing board!

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