Week In Review

In this week’s edition: weird packages come to the office, and a British kid spends nearly $1500 on Farmville.

Pokemon Goes Monochrome

Hold on to your Mudkips, because Nintendo has announced a new set of Pokemon games for the DS. Titled Pokemon Black and Pokemon White, the games are set to be released in Japan this fallm which would mean that we in the west will probably see them early 2011. Nintendo has promised that “every aspect will be reborn innovatively.” What this actually means isn’t really clear, but it certainly sounds impressive. (link)

Fourteen Large for Farmville

A 12 year old kid in the UK managed to rack up a $1400 bill for the free-to-play agricultural simulator Farmville. He burned through his own savings, and then added nearly another $1000 dollars on to his mother’s credit card. Amazingly, his mother seems – and the key word there is seems – to be taking all of this pretty well, and doesn’t blame Zynga or Facebook. The young farmer was apparently ‘very shocked’ at how much he’d managed to spend. (link)

Game Design, Suda51 and Poop

Anyone who has played No More Heroes or Killer 7 knows that Suda51 makes some pretty unusual games, but you might not be aware that even the metaphors he uses to refer to them are pretty strange. “What we are hoping to do now with No More Heroes 3 is probably to digest everything we eat, and then purge absolutely everything in our guts, just like diarrhea!” Yeah, thanks for that mental image Suda, thank you so very much. (link)

A Strange Package Arrives at the Office

The Escapist office often receives weird things in the mail; sometimes it’s rickrolls for Yahtzee, sometimes it’s crates filled with plush toys, and one time, we even got sent the beard of Zeus. But a solitary flash drive in an unmarked envelope? That’s a mystery and we love a good mystery. This one was a especially good, it had codes and everything! Hit the link for our findings so far.(link)

CNN’s RapeLay Coverage Gets Angry Response

RapeLay continues to spark controversy, after news network CNN discovered the game and decided to cover it. In a follow up article, CNN then tried to explain why Japan has such games, which rubbed a certain Japanese citizen up the wrong way. Manga artist Takeshi Nogami wrote an open letter to the network, saying: “We Japanese enjoy one of the most safe and peaceful societies on Earth. Naturally, that is not to say that our society is without problems, but to be honest, I frankly do not think that you are the ones to tell us.” CNN has yet to respond to the letter. (link)