The character for this week is:

Samus Aran

The right woman in the right place for the wrong reasons. When Samus was a child, her family was killed on a Space Pirate raid on the colony they lived in. Luckily she was found by group of Chozo, a wise and friendly alien race, who brought the orphan on their planet Zebes, where she received her training and her Power Suit. Samus swore an oath olf revenge against all Space Pirates, which would lead her to become one of the most revered bounty hunter of the galaxy, devoted to freeing the universe of the pirate menace. Little does she know that this quest will pit her against some of the fiercest aliens in existence, to border the undoing of her own will, and eventually saving the galaxy.

Games: Metroid (series), Metroid Prime (series)

Trivia: Samus was originally intended to be a man, but developers decided she would be a woman after deciding to loosely model her after Ellen Ripley from the Alien movies. Strangely enough, one of the main villains in the series is called Ridley.

LOL @ Vader being a jerk.

Link

This Week's character is:

Max Payne

The man living the american dream: a nice house, a beatiful wife and a sweet little daughter. What if this delicate balance changes? What if his wife and child were killed by a murderous gang of drug addicts? What if his best friend gets killed in front of him and he is blamed for it and chased by half the NY police? In this case he would experience the real pain, the maximum pain.
Embarking on a solo crusade to seek revenge on the ones who stole his life, former policeman Max Payne gradually loses himself in a spiral of hate and madness that even he knows will lead nowhere except to his undoing. Let alone silence the pain.

Games: Max Payne (Series)

Trivia: The original texture used for Max's face in the first game was designed after the game creator Sami Järvi (aka Sam Lake)'s facial features.

In the jungle of despair Nintendo has entangled us in, a couple games seem to shine:

^^ Fragile looks promising. Very promising. I don't particularly like JRPGs, but I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic settings. Let's wait and see.

^^ Disaster: Day of Crisis should it ever be released seems to be something new. From this screen it even seems to feature cover mechanics (^_^) Hopefully we'll hear about it soon.

On the other hand, I have to confirm my impression on the two Star Wars games: Force Unleashed and Lightsaber Battles. While the Wii port of SWTFU looks like a completely different game from the 360 version, but still appears decent...

...Lightsaber Battles looks like a (bad) PS1 game, I smell a very lousy product. See for yourself:

Yuck... Better think about Fragile...

See it here. Made me laugh like crazy.

I'm still laughing now lol

This week's character (as requested) is:

Agent 47

A man with no past and no future, the grim figure only known as 'Agent 47' is a ruthless contract killer with no memory and a barcode tattooed on the back of his head. Lonely, imposing, silent, unable to quit his job even though he would. He never loved anybody, the only friend he ever had was a rabbit when he was young. He has nothing in his life but murder and evil, that's what he was trained for, or maybe... created for.

Game: Hitman (series)

Trivia: Agent 47 has no facial hair, which won't even grow on him, except his eyebrows which, oddly enough, do grow.

It's rant time...

I saw part of the Nintendo conference at E3, and... please, tell me that was a gigantic prank. They let us get overhyped during the last months, dreaming of Zeldas and Marios and Starfoxes and Pikmins and Kid Icaruses and Caslevanias... and what they gave us was a dog chasing a frisbee. That, and one of the most beloved and respected men in the gaming industry playing an imaginary saxophone like a clown, I'm talking about Shigeru Miyamoto.

Who thought humiliating Miyamoto was a good idea? Former Yahoo marketing officer Cammie Dunaway or former Pizza Hut marketing director Reggie Fils-Aimé? Was it one of them? Seriously: these people are the new faces of Nintendo management and this embarassing gameless situation we are experiencing today is the result of their work. They want to turn the Wii into a family computer? A Famicom? Let me tell you about the Famicom...

To me, Nintendo always had a face, the face of a man called Hiroshi Yamauchi. This man...

This man was Nintendo. He was president of the company for 53 years. If you, like myself, enjoyed Nintendo games in the last 20 years, you owe this man. Under his direction, the company produced the Famicom, or NES, and later the Super Famicom, or SNES, which were intended to be played by the whole family. And they succeeded: they made a lot of games that could be played with your mom or dad, but they didn't forget about those players who wanted something more serious to test their skill. That was the golden age of Nintendo. That is how things used to be done and how they still should be.

Yamauchi retired in 2002, a new administration took his place... (Satoru Iwata & C.) and they are killing Nintendo. They are killing it with their Dogz, Catz, Miis, Cooking Mamas, which represent 90% of their market. They are killing Nintendo with their disorganized distribution of consoles and games and their bad online service.

This E3 showed us what has become of our Nintendo: some kind of cardboard hypocrit sugartop kindergarten. And it's not bringing smiles on my face, Cammie. Not one bit.

This week's character is:

Garret

An orphan making his living as a street pickpocketer gets caught in the act by a Keeper, a guardian of the world's balance, which recognises his talent and trains him to become part of the Keepers order himself. The boy then leaves the order to pursue a more selfish way, using his newly acquired skills to become the most known and feared master thief in The City. Little does he know, though, that his fate will eventually lead him back on the Keepers' side and even push him to put his very life at stake for the sake of others...

Game: Thief (series)

Trivia: The Thief series is said to have been the first to introduce a full stealth mechanic, based on both vision (hiding behing objects and in shadows) and hearing (enemies can hear your footsteps and other noises you make), which has become common in today's stealth games.

After nearly a decade of activity in the field of independent games, Gamehippo.com, one of the best freeware websites, has been sold. In its place, a sad template page. Symptoms of this event were in the air as the site stopped being regularly updated, more and more ads started appearing on its pages and many links were not working anymore.

Farewell Gamehippo, you will be missed. Hoping that someone buys you back and makes you rise from your ashes, we say:

Thank you.

This blog now updated on sunday.

This week's character is:

Gordon Freeman

The wrong man in the wrong place. One of the most unlikely hero you could imagine, unless a geeky theoretical physicist turning Rambo sounds normal to you. After a failed (sabotaged?) experiment, Gordon has to fight for his life out of a high tech scientific lab and eventually becomes another pawn in an intergalactic race for power involving powers beyond his imagination. A man with a sharp instinct and a surprising gift for leadership, which lets him become the symbol of hope for the citizen of the dystopian world of Half-Life.

Game: Half-Life (series)

Trivia: Gordon freeman is the definition of the silent protagonist in games: he never speaks a single word, not even a grunt of pain when hurt or sigh of relief when healing. Developers say it's meant to make immersion easier.