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Steam cuts price of The Secret of Monkey Island to $5

In leui of International Talk like a Pirate Day (9/16) Steam has announced that they will be cutting the price of The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition by 50%, dropping the tag down to just $5.

For those of you who aren’t aware, this is a remake of the 1990 hit classic originally developed by LucasArts. That means, all of you who weren’t able to get in on the action back then, now’s your chance.

Readt (Steam)

Punch Out Game Review–A Serious Pain in the Shoulder

Again Nintendo prevails on my deeply ingrained sense of nostalgia by bringing a game that I actually recognized from my original straight-eight days of gaming. See, way back when, before Mike Tyson was a gigantic practical joke / train wreck, he was a professional boxer. And a good one, too! So good that Nintendo commissioned a game around him, dubbed Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. As time went on and Iron Mike’s career went wildly off the rails (and his contract expired, unrenewed), Nintendo then sought a way to re-release their game without paying Tyson. Thus, the game was shortened to Punch Out and Iron Mike was replaced with a no-name called “Mr. Dream”.

And now, Nintendo has once again released its Punch Out line, this time for the all too appropriate Wii. You’ll once again step into the role of the Bronx’s boxing sensation Little Mac, looking to make a name for yourself along with your trainer Doc Lewis. You’ll take on a series of outrageous characters with a series of different boxing styles until you face your final opponent. You’ll also be able to completely replay the game in a whole different way by selecting the Title Defense mode, in which you’ve already won the title but are now out to hold onto it against every boxer you defeated. And they’re none too happy about the loss.

The first thing that I have to tell you, if you’re going to try this game is, for the sake of all that’s holy, STRETCH FIRST. It may not be intuitive—stretch before playing a video game? Preposterous!—but you’re going to save yourself plenty of hurt if you stretch your arms and shoulders before playing. The way this game is set up, there’s two ways to play—with the Wii controller horizontally inclined like a normal controller, or using the motion sensitivity features of the Wii to make regular air punches, and believe me, you will be throwing a LOT of punches. The boxers you’ll face are downright turtles in their capacity for blocking, and you can pretty much count on one in every two or even three of your punches landing. That is, of course, unless you’ve studied a walkthrough or videos or even practiced in advance so you already know each boxer’s pattern.

Each of the boxers you’ll face does have a pattern, and generally, it won’t take too long to learn just where to lean and where to block and where to throw punches like a lunatic, but still, in the intervening space you will be wasting PLENTY of motion. All of this can do horrible things to your arms and shoulders if you’re not careful. Trust me, I still ache from my bout with King Hippo.

But still…I’m pretty satisfied with this game. It’s got decent graphics and excellent background musical effects and fun gameplay that’ll actually be a halfway decent workout. That’s the one really interesting thing about the Wii, really—a lot of their games make good workouts. And this is a workout that’s surprisingly plenty of fun, too, making it one of the best kind: the kind where participants will come back.

A Boy and His Blob remake for Wii

It was recently announced via Nintendo Power that there will be a Wii remake of the popular NES game, A Boy and His Blob.

Don’t know what A Boy and His Blob is? You’re probably not alone; it was a side scroller for the original Nintendo Entertainment System in which players take control of a boy and a blob named Blobert. Blobert likes jelly beans and tends to turn into different shapes when fed them. Yes, an adventure ensues.

A Boy and His Blob will hit the Wii at a currently unannounced date and is being developed by Way Forward Technologies. Want more info? Go pick up the latest edition of Nintendo Power!

Read (GoNintendo)

Riddick Remake Packs Sequel

Making quite a splash, Atari has announced that the upcoming remake of The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena will feature new content that amounts to a 10-hour single-player sequel.

Joystiq reports that the new campaign packs “new game mechanics, full game production values… the works,” with Big Download noting that it is a direct sequel to the original and will be immediately accessible upon booting the game.

Apparently, the game’s delay has been the cause for the new content. When Sierra dropped the game and Atari picked it up, it gave them nine months to work on new content.

The upcoming title will feature a new multiplayer mode and an enhanced version of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. It is due out on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in Spring 2009.