The 10 NES games that are suppose to ready for download tomorrow September 1st, can be downloaded today.  Go to the e-store and click on the menu button in the left hand corner the scroll down and click on the Settings/Other button.  Now look for the your downloads button, once you click there you should see the free games on the list and all you have to do is redownload them.  Of course you never downloaded them the first time but Nintendo must of added them to this list a day early. If clicking three buttons is to much work then you could wait until tomorrow when you would probably only have to click two buttons to download.  Enjoy.

After weeks of going on and on about how much I like Alice the Madness Returns from the gameplay to the levels and even the story, I sent it back to Gamefly only halfway through the game.  Why send it back without finishing it you ask, maybe the levels got boring or the gameplay got repetitive or maybe the story started lacking, nope none of those.  The reason I sent it back was the lack of achievements.

I know that sounds bad, not finishing a game because of achievements but that’s the true.  Beating one of these levels would take two hours and for that two hours of jumping and fighting enemies would net you 10 achievement points.  After spending about five hours with the game I didn’t even have 150 achievement points and still had another 10 hours with the game.

I have gotten to the point that I love being rewarded with that little blink sound followed by a graphic showing me that I am special and have unlocked some achievement.  Not sure when achievements became such an important part of gaming for me even if I’m not achievement hunting but it has.  That’s why a game that I think is really well done like Alice the Madness Returns goes back to Gamefly but a game like Transformers the Dark of the Moon gets my playtime.  I know it’s sad that’s why I am telling you it’s not you Alice, it’s me.

After recording our podcast tonight I got to looking for some more information on the 20 free games and what you had to do to get them. According to this letter from Nintendo all you have to do is sign onto their market once before 12:59 August 11, 2011. August 12th is the date when prices of the 3DS are scheduled to drop however Wal-Mart is rumored to drop the price August 9th. So if you want the 3DS at the cheaper price and the 20 free games you have between August 9th and the 11th to pick one up and sign onto the store.

Nintendo 3DS Ambassador Program

To our loyal customers, we would like to offer you 20 downloadable games from the Nintendo eShop at no charge. These free games are available to Nintendo 3DS owners who connect* to the Nintendo eShop at least once before 11:59 p.m. Eastern/8:59 p.m. Pacific time on Aug. 11, 2011. You will be registered as a 3DS Ambassador.

Starting Sept. 1, Ambassadors will be able to download 10 NES Virtual Console games at no charge and before they are available to the public. These games, including Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong Jr., Balloon Fight, Ice Climber, and The Legend of Zelda, are slated to become paid downloadable games. but Ambassadors get them early for free. Later in the year, once the paid versions of the games are available in the Nintendo eShop, Ambassadors can download any of the remaining games or any of the updated versions at no cost.

By the end of 2011, Nintendo will provide Ambassadors with 10 Game Boy Advance Virtual Console games like Yoshi’s Island, Super Mario Advance 3, Mario Kart Super Circuit, Metroid Fusion, WarioWare, Inc: Mega Microgame$ and Mario vs. Donkey Kong. These games will be available exclusively to Ambassadors, and Nintendo has no plans to make these 10 games available to the general public on the Nintendo 3DS in the future.

More details about this program will be announced in the future.

*Wireless broadband connection required to access the Nintendo eShop.

Nintendo

 

Sounds like a pretty good deal. Here’s a link to the Wal-Mart story

The end of the year is going to be an exciting one to be a gamer. There are so many good games coming out, it’s going to be hard to choose which ones to buy. Best Buy is making it easier, if you pre-order 5 games they will give you a $100 gift card. Of course you have to buy the games before you get the card but that’s giving you $20 discount per game.

My closest Best Buy is about 30 minutes away but this deal is so good it’s worth the drive. Here’s a list of the games you can buy for the deal.

NCAA 2012
Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Madden 2012
Resistance 3
Gears of War 3
FIFA Soccer 2012
Forza 4
Just Dance 3
Batman Arkham City
Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception
Battlefield 3
Elder Scrolls Skyrim
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
Rage

Best Buy

If you have been thinking about getting the PS3 move now is the time. Amazon has the move starter kit, which is normally $99, for $92.75 and you get a $25 Amazon credit. That brings the total cost to $67.75 plus free shipping with the Super Savers shipping or free 2nd day air if you are a Prime member. Here’s the link.

For those of you who haven’t heard K-Mart is running a great deal on L.A. Noire. Buy L.A. Noire in stores and get any game $19.99 or less, plus a coupon for $20 off your next game purchase. I was able to get Alan Wake for free. If you are picking it up L.A. Noire and have a K-Mart around you it’s worth the trip.

K-Mart link

I had started to hear the talk about L.A. Noire but really wasn’t sure what kind of game it was going to be. I knew it was set in the 40′s or 50′s and thought it was going to be a Mafia II type game but I was wrong.

L.A. Noire is set in the 40′s or 50′s but it is a detective game. You play a detective that just got promoted up to homicide. The case I saw had you going to the murder scene of a woman who was in a park naked, yeah completely naked. When you get to the crime scene you talk to the officers on the scene and then start to look around. The more clues you find here the easier it is to solve the case. All of the clues you find are kept in a notebook. Thought out the game you will be using the notebook for all of your information about the crime.

From the crime scene you figure out that she was at a bar, so you take a trip to the bar. You can either drive yourself or have your partner drive. By letting your partner drive you get there faster. Next at the bar you interview the owner of the bar. This is were things get interesting. In the interview process after asking a question you have three choices, you can either believe them, doubt them or flat out say they are lying. The way you tell is by their facial gestures. That is if they are looking you directly in the eyes they are probably telling the truth, however if they are looking around then you have a reason to doubt them or even call them a lier. If you do say they are lying you better have proof. The proof you need is in your notebook, that is if you have proof. Even though we didn’t see it in the demo I was told that if you make the wrong choices it will take you long to find out the information needed to solve the case.

I watched about 20 minutes of game play and it looked very interesting. It did have some Heavy Rain feel to the game but also had the GTA style fighting. I’m almost positive I heard the guy say that the game was on five or six discs and each disc had at least on case on it. Cases could take you from half an hour to a couple of hours to complete. From what I saw this game is a day one purchase for me.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m wasn’t hyped up over the 3DS being released later this week. In fact with the Sony’s NGP coming out at the end of the year, I wasn’t even considering picking one up. I did want to get a chance to try one out though because Nintendo usually strikes gold when they put a new system out. I got my chance at PAX to spend some time with it and here’s what I think.

I was interested in seeing how the 3D worked and after seeing it, I was less than impressed. I know there is a “sweet spot” but I couldn’t seem to find it. The screen just looked blurry. There is a slider on the side that allows you to turn the 3D part down or completely off. Even though the 3D part wasn’t that great, there is plenty to like about Nintendo’s new handheld.

The first thing I noticed was the analog control. I don’t think that is what they are calling it but that’s what it is. It works great and makes you wonder why they haven’t added it long time ago. Like the DSi the 3DS has a camera, which it uses for several games. One of these games allows you to take a picture of your face and then puts your face on balloons that you have to shoot. The cool thing about this game is that it uses the gyroscope, so to aim you had to move the device. Sometimes you had to turn you body completely around to shoot the balloons. While it was fun because of the movement I don’t see people playing this out in public, well without getting funny looks.

Then there was the card game. With this game you place a card on the table and use the camera to focus on it. Then things would start popping up that you needed to shoot. What you have to be careful of is not moving too much because the card must stay in the camera’s focus. I asked the one of the guys working the booth if the information for the game was on the card or in the 3DS and his answer didn’t clear things up. It sounds like there is a basic code in the 3DS that the card needs to work off of but most of the game is on the card. I’m really not sure how that works because the card is about as thick as a regular playing card. If it is stored mostly on the cards though I could see McDonalds and other places starting to give this cards out.

Also there is going to be a game store that you can download games to your 3DS like Apples app store. I asked about this but they said they could say much about it yet.

Overall I walked up to the Nintendo booth not even thinking about purchasing a 3DS and left wondering if I should pick one up. The only real game that I played was a Lego Star Wars game and it was fun It looks like the 3DS has many tools that developers could use and I image there will be a learning curve until we start seeing some games that take advantage of the features. It will be very interesting to see how well the 3DS does when it is released later this week.

So I’ve been back for a little while from PAX and I had a blast. My flights were all pretty much on time and I got in at a good time. I did have some problems checking into the hotel. For some reason they wanted to keep my gift cards, which wouldn’t work because that was all the money I had. After about thirty minutes of talking to them I finally got it worked out.

After getting check in I met up with JD, Tilt, and JMcWild at Jacob Wirth. I walked in looking for them before I thought about the fact I had no idea what they looked like. Luckily I was wearing a Jaguars hat so I was easy to spot. We hung out there for several hours and was waiting on Victor to get there but I got tired before he got there so I went back to the hotel. Shane’s plane was very delayed and he didn’t get in until 2 in the morning.

The next day we got up and ate breakfast at Dunkin Doughnuts. No joke there is a Dunkin Doughnuts on every corner in Boston. Then we went to PAX. Shane already had his badge but I had to go pick mine up. The line wasn’t too bad and I was able to get it pretty quickly. When we started to talk the floor it was overwhelming. There was so many booths and they were all packed in pretty tight. Over the weekend I was able to play with a Nintendo 3DS, and play the following games: LA Noire, Duke Nukem Forever, Portal 2, Brink, Socom 4 and Gears of War 3, none of which had been released yet. SOG Duncan drove down and met up with us. He ended up staying with us all weekend.

Friday night we hit the SFX-360 party and it was a blast. We hung out with VicJo, The Aceblack, Scarefinger, Bluemanrule, JMcWild, and several others. We also met Cliffy B there and Carlos, who does the voice of Dom in Gears of War.

Saturday night we went to the Frag Doll party and it was ok. I would of rather of been at the Westin where most of the guys were hanging out but we had fun.

Sunday it was time to leave and I got to the Boston airport at 3:00 and my flight didn’t take off until 7:45. Well it got delayed until 11:00. I guess I was lucky because I was flying standby and there was no way I was going to make this flight but because of the delays many people went home. Because of this I was able to get on the flight. However I had long missed my Atlanta connection and had to spend the night in the Atlanta airport. I think I slept about two or three hours that night and finally got home about 2:00 pm the next day.

Overall it was a blast and something I hope to do again someday. I doubt I’ll be able to pull it off again next year but hopefully I’ll go again.

It’s been a busy first two days here at PlayStation. The first day I took care of cross game chat by integrating Skype on the PS3 much like it is on the PSP. Then day 2 I fixed the system updates by having the PS3 cut on at 5 in the morning to download and install updates. Now what to do for day 3? This day I might not have as many answers as the first two days but today I want to tackle the PSP.

The PSP is one of the greatest if not the greatest handleheld but it doesn’t seem to get much love. I think there are a couple of reasons for that and I’m taking care of all of them today. First thing I’m going to do is introduce a friends list for the PSP. This should be a two step process, first the PSP friends list should be able to tell which one of your friends on your PS3′s friends list have PSP’s and add them to your friends list. However since all of your PS3 friends will not have a PSP you don’t want to add them all so it would just add the ones that own a PSP.

This has been one of the huge elements missing from the PSP. Now you will be able to invite friends to play with you on the PSP instead of random people or having a friends list for every different game. Then since I fixed cross game chat day one and the PSP already has Skype, you will have cross game chat and in game chat. I love it when a plan comes together.

Now we have chat and a friends list so the next step is trophies. Why doesn’t the PSP already have trophies? I don’t know but after my third day on the job they will. The trophies will be added into your PSN total so both PS3 and PSP trophies will be under one account.

This might not be possible but it how awesome would it be to be able to play on your PSP with friends playing on their PS3. I know not all games would be able to do this. However multiplayer Mini’s or some of the downloadable stuff there could be that option. This would probably never happen though because of all the work it would take and the limited titles you could make it work well or be fair.

That would about do it for my third day on the job. I’m afraid I maybe working myself out of a job here. Well if I am then maybe I can go out for the Tester Season 3 since I just missed Season 2.