Nintendo DS

Take that, fog!

A cell-shaded Link, with blond hair and his green suit and cap, smiles and punches his fist into the air. Above his head, text reads: PWN! in big blue letters

I've been playing The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for forever—well, sort of. I got stuck and put the game down for a while, maybe a couple of months. But when I picked Phantom Hourglass back up again, I couldn't get unstuck. And I didn't even know why I was stuck in the first place.

Lego Batman Review

Why so serious?

Lego Batman

HIGH Getting to be The Joker is probably a dream most comic fans have—Lego Batman allows you to cross it off your list of life goals.

LOW Being stuck in an area for half an hour, unsure of how to progress because the game's awful platforming mechanics had me convinced that the jump I knew I needed to make (and failed at multiple times) wasn't the correct one—and it turns out it was.

WTF Killer Moth? The Mad Hatter? They really scraped the bottom of the barrel for some of these villains.

What happens when Mario fan forgets to take his meds?

A guy in a go-kart, on a highway, swerving through traffic, tossing banana peels in front of cars in adjacent lanes... You'd have be nuts to attempt this... or you could be none other than everyone's favorite French practical joker, Rémi Gaillard—I don't know who he is either, but he does a mean Mario impersonation.


Racial slur found in press copy of Animal Crossing

This is ironic and funny to us, but no doubt embarrassing for Nintendo. Here is a company that limits its games by way of complicated friend codes, weak online features and even its hardware like Wii Speak so as to keep the horrible realities of the online world away from its (apparently) fragile and corruptible userbase. But within one of the special press-only Animal Crossing: Wild World (NDS) cards, you find a racial slur... created by one of the people (its unclear who) hired to play the DS game.

Animal Crossing Wild World sports N-word

A pre-played version of 2005's Animal Crossing: Wild World for DS, sent out to media outlets to encourage connectivity with the recent Animal Crossing release for Wii, contains at least one shocking addition, reports MTV Multiplayer. Importing the saved data from the DS cartridge sent by Nintendo into Animal Crossing: City Folk introduces a host of changes into the game, including one, suddenly no longer E-rated character, Baabara, who now greets players with: "How are you, Ñ---á?"

Guitar Hero helps calibrate prosthetic arms

An article in the November 2008 issue of IEEE Spectrum Online describes how Guitar Hero is being used to help "train" artificial arms for amputees. It's part of the Revolutionizing Prosthetics (RP) 2009 project, sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). One of the RP 2009 project's goals is that:

[i]n four years, DSO [the Defense Services Office] will deliver a prosthetic for clinical trials that has function almost identical to a natural limb in terms of motor control and dexterity, sensory feedback (including proprioception), weight, and environmental resilience. The four-year device will be directly controlled by neural signals.

Line Rider 2: Unbound Review

Drawing a Line is About as Fun as it Sounds

Line Rider 2: Unbound Artwork

HIGH The aesthetic and core concept are pretty adorable.

LOW The difficulty of later levels is ridiculous.

WTF In a game all about drawing lines, why is it so hard to connect or erase them?

Line Rider 2: Unbound

Game Description: In Line Rider, the sled-stealing scumbag Chaz is up to no good and only you, as the clever and cunning Bosh, can defeat him. For Bosh to save his true love Bailey, players must solve over 40 mind-bending puzzles created by the #1 Line Rider player in the world, TechDawg.

Master of the Monster Lair Review

You Dug Your Hole, Now Be Bored in It

Master of Monster Lair Screenshot

HIGH Some of the writing elicits genuine chuckles.

LOW The vast amount of surprise-free grinding.

WTF Since when did cooking replace leveling up?

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