Whaaaaaaat?! You haven’t played Gamma Bros yet? The awesomely retro and most pixelacious entry in the Independent Games Festival of 2007? You haven’t doom surfed in Dino Run? And what about helping the cutest pixel rodent you ever saw locate every last crumb of cheese in Rat Maze? TWICE? Pixeljam, cats — learn well this dev because not only have they done great things in the past, their pipeline seems bursting with future win.

Jonathan Zungre and I caught up with Rich Grillotti and Miles Tilmann during GDC to talk of many things, and no, not all of them were as ridiculous as the headline indicates (just nearly). These guys are a great case study for any aspiring developers (as they managed to make the jump from hobby to full-time), and also…hilarious! Savor every unintended pun and crazy tangent… Read more…

Diner Dash must be really popular to warrant three new ports five years after its original release, since Hudson has announced that it’s coming to WiiWare, PSN, and XBLA. They’re even throwing in some multiplayer. Read more…

After announcing Onslaught earlier this year, Hudson unveiled a second WiiWare FPS during their GDC meetings: Water Warfare. It’s about as family friendly as you can get, with players running around a playground (beach, Venetian city, and or dessert) as a kid with a squirt gun and a wetter and wetter t-shirt representing their health bar. Read more…

Way before Advance Wars, there was Military Madness for TurboGrafx-16, and now, here it is again, only for XBLA, PSN, and WiiWare. Hudson is doing a full 3-D remake of the original campaign, but also throwing in a brand new multiplayer mode.

Obviously a classic turn-based strategy game is going to play like one, so you’ll be hoofing your infantry around a hex grid map to take bases, or fulfilling kill all missions. Tanks and other vehicles play their roles in the color-coded faction war as well.

Four player local (including hot seat) or online multiplayer battles, though, that’s where the excitement is this time around. You can play free-for-all or on teams, with a turn or time limit set to however long a match you’d like to squeeze in. Plus, in multiplayer only, they’ve introduced a commander unit with special abilities — a bit of a modernizing touch.

Military Madness is expected to appear on at least one of the platforms by this summer, with the other two to follow shortly.

What’s the value of a used game? From now on, it’s whatever someone is willing to trade you for it. SwitchGames is a new website with the power to change the way we handle our used game transactions — like we need an excuse to not get ripped off by GameStop! Yesterday I got a chance to talk with founder Jason Crawford about how the site works and the new features they’ll be rolling out soon.

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So here’s the plot of the latest City of Heroes mission: Samantha is really upset–so upset she has a blue emo tear stain–because her cousin Jimmy died last year and the crew of same whack-job TV show called Voices from Beyond claims he has a message for her. Your job is to go to the studio offices and get to the bottom of things. Sure enough **spoilers!!!!11!!!1!!** the Grips and Supposed Psychics are holding the ghost of Cousin Jimmy hostage so they can make big bucks shelling out secrets of the departed.  Free Jimmy so he can RIP, take out the Producer of the show, Roger Hackleby, and you have effectively saved the day.

Does that sound totally lame or what? Yeah it does, and I’ll tell you why—I wrote it. Read more…

“A little Japanesey, way off kilter,” is how Pit Crew Panic was initially described to me at Hudson’s event last week. I just sort of blinked as the six creepily babelicious, bobble-headed gals busied themselves about a giant wedding cake. It needed fixing. Read more…

Annnnnnd we’re sky diving! The babies are crying, the cows need milking, the shirts need ironing, and you had better for God’s sake waggle that skillet before the frying food bits burn. What the heck does a CEO do in the context of a Wii game, anyhow?

Deca Sports has Hudson pretty happy, so they’re ready to throw their next mini-game compilation at you, this time in the form of the occupation-to-mini-game distillation system, Help Wanted. You can go head-to-head at 15 of the 50 jobs, although we’re not sure which. Astronaut? Haunted house monster? Sumo referee? Check the full list after the jump and look for Help Wanted next summer, unless you’d rather make a couple bucks actually working. Read more…

You want to know something random? You can hook up seven controllers to a PS3. Seven is a lucky number, but it seems like sort of a random one to be the local simultaneous multiplayer limit. In any case, Bomberman Ultra will take full advantage. Read more…

Do you like to roll marbles? How about marbles shaped like ADORABLE ANIMALS? Then perhaps you’ve heard of Kororinpa: Marble Mania, which came out last year for Wii. I took a look at next spring’s sequel the other night at a Hudson event. Read more…

Do you remember Matt Hazard? Yeah, his prime is definitely past, but the action hero is coming back in Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, a sequel to a series of games that never actually existed. D3Publisher showed off some pre-alpha of their new third person shooter, and it actually looks worthy of misplacing some nostalgia over. Read more…

When Neil Gaiman’s young adult novel, Coraline, hits the big screens in February, it will be accompanied by videogame for Wii, PS2, and DS.

The videogame iteration will obviously not be painstakingly done in stop-motion animation, nor shot with stereoscopic 3-D in mind, but the console versions will contain unlcockable full motion video clips. As is often the case with tie-ins, the plot follows the book/movie, but will also allow players to explore further. Read more…

20,000 years in the future mega corporations control the galaxy–and we mean the whole galaxy! There will be a lot of sci-fi flavored puzzle questing to be had, via many warp gates, when Puzzle Quest: Galactrix drops in Q1 of next year for XBLA, DS, and PC.

If you missed our E3 hands-on, check that out, but read on for an updated impression and a few details on crafting and other mini-games. Read more…

It’s not a teddy bear, it’s a dog! Ok, yeah, the puppy is sporting an anthropomorphic tummy like a teddy bear would, and the overall effect is very similar, but even I can tell the difference! On the whole, though, I think I prefer the son in his school uniform, but the ears are so cute!

Welcome to the character selection screen in Family Party: 30 Great Games. Not only is it a party game for you to play with you family, it’s a party game to play as a bunch of cute blood-relative (or at least adopted) characters. Read more…

Rome wasn’t built in a day, it was built over 100 levels of match-three, casual yet crack-like gaming frenzy! At least, that’s the case in D3 Publisher’s Cradle of Rome, where you’ll take the city from a field to the ancient capital decked out with famous landmarks such as the Parthenon and Coliseum. Read more…

Thursday night Blue Omega showed off their vertically bent steampunk shooter, Damnation, to the press at Bourbon and Branch in San Francisco. After loitering a bit in a pseudo-secret side room (the venue is prohibition-era themed) we settled in to the Xbox 360 system-link set-up in a semi-adjoining back room, where the fuse promptly blew… Read more…

You know what makes me happy? Quality 2-D animation instead of crummy 3-D.

So even though I may not be a Ben 10 super-fan (read: I’ve never watched the Cartoon Network series, a sequel set five years after the original Ben 10 show, where Ben comes out of Omnitrix retirement to save his missing Grandpa by transforming into a new bunch of aliens with superpowers…) I can appreciate the look and feel of Ben 10 Alien Force for DS. Read more…

Aux hai! Just here to prove that viral marketing works by making sure you’ve seen this nifty Wario Land: Shake It! promotion on YouTube. It’s more fun if I don’t tell you all about it, so just click the link already!

To cease our pining for Wee awesomeness between now and the launch of the DS tower defense game Ninjatown, SouthPeak Games provides us with the Wee Ninjatron. The best part about it, though–the stroke of sheer genius– is that after you’re done picking the facial expression, clothing, and accessories of your Wee Ninja, you get to mad lib together a Legend detailing key biographical information. Link us to your creations in the comments section. I want to see more ninjas!

You know, I kinda like Infinite Undiscovery. Despite being the “latest” from Square Enix and tri-Ace, it is not the “greatest,” and when I started playing I was sort of disappointed.

Though it sets aside the old school menus in favor of a more active, action-RPG style of gameplay, I found the Connect Action system clumsy and the on-the-fly inventory navigation an unmitigated hassle. As neat as it is to be assisted by your party members, battles often turn into a button-mashing “clusterfight”. I could go on complaining (and probably will) but I still kinda like Infinite Undiscovery. How can this be? Read more…