First off, a big thanks to commenter Chewyo for bringing this very sad news to my attention. Adam Adamowicz, concept artist for both the Fallout and Elder Scrolls universes passed away today after a battle with cancer. I’m not going to pretend I knew his name before today, but damned if his work hasn’t been incredibly important to me. Especially the Fallout universe, which he was pretty much solely responsible for visually recreating for Fallout 3 and beyond, is such a significant, tangible, real thing to me that it boggles the mind to think it was ostensibly crafted by one man.

Anyway who’s seen the art knows it is of the highest caliber both in concept and execution: iconic, beautiful, rugged, weird, and unforgettable. The people behind many of our favorite games are, for the most part, invisible. But, as the writer of Awesome-Robo points out in a wonderful and heartfelt post, its a time like this where the gaming community should acknowledge the unsung heroes of the field. Adam’s legacy will live on in both the enigmatic order of bits in a save file, and the retrofuture imaginations of a legion of devout fans.

I apologize in advance for being a total fanboy, but I’m gonna post two Double Fine/Tim Schafer things this week and that’s just gonna be something that happens. I already talked about how Markus “Notch” Persson, creator of Minecraft, was considering funding a sequel to Psychonauts. But what about the stuff Tim Schafer is really known for: my (and a lot of other people’s) beloved adventure games? Well well, it seems he hasn’t left those behind either.

Because he knows no major game studio will fund the new adventure game he wants to make, Schafer turned to his fans, recently starting a Kickstarter to fund a brand new game! Yay! They wanted $400,000, but with over a month left to go they’re already above $1,000,000, shattering Kickstarter records. Looks like this game will be even more awesome than they thought. Anyone who loves adventure games or having fun should donate. If you pledge $15 or more, you get a copy of the game anyway. SIDENOTE: notice how Tim points out that the doc crew filming him in above video is affiliated with Notch. Further evidence!!

When I was a kid, I used to have nightmares about the Cyberdemon from Doom. My fear of him was matched only by the creepy as fuck rendition of Satan in Passion of the Christ and Mel Gibson’s abusive phone calls to his ex wife. Now, bear witness to this nightmarish vision of hell that simultaneously empowers me and cripples me with fear.

Remember when Nancy finally figured out how to defeat Freddy? That’s how this video makes me feel: as if I’m stuck in my worst nightmare as 3000 Cyberdemons stalk me. Then, all of a sudden, the power is in my hands as I make them taste hot blasts of plasma from my BFG 9000. Perhaps I need to get out more. Anyway, shout out to all of my MS DOS posse.

Pyschonauts, which came out in 2005, was one of the most unique and beloved “cult” games of its console generation. The first release from LucasArts wunderkind Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Studios (Schafer, as you hopefully know, is responsible for basically all the very best adventure games) Psychonauts is a truly wonderful title, one that tried its damnedest not to be like anything else, and of course was rewarded with pretty apocalyptic sales numbers. Nevertheless, for those who played it, we got a real gift: a game with actual laugh out loud humor, lovable well formed characters, inventive level and mechanic design, and a story that was legitimately engrossing.

If you’ve never played it, please, go find a used copy for like $5 or just buy it on Steam. Or, hopefully, you can soon play a sequel! How could this be possible, you might ask. Isn’t Double Fine so broke that they can only make downloadable titles now like Stacking and Costume Quest? Well, you’re right. Except Double Fine now has it’s own angel investor. None other than Markus “Notch” Persson, creator of wildly successful Minecraft, has offered to finance a Psychonauts sequel. And he’s completely serious. Fuck yes. Please gaming gods, let this really happen.

Hmmm, guess a certain Fox animation domination program was feeling a little dominated by South Park‘s relatively recent announcement of their foray with Obsidian into the RPG game, and has just announced it’s own MMO. I haven’t watched Family Guy in years, so what really interested me about this was the fact that it’s a free-to-play browser based title. As much as I would like South Park to win this battle (and they probably will in game quality) I can’t help but think this is a really smart idea.

The quicker people learn to embrace these emergent gaming platforms, the better. For them. Not for us probably. Us being “hardcore” gamers. As much as I have issues with that term. But I do know I’m not one for playing things like Farmville. Though, to be fair, I have had fun with free-to-play rpg’s before (Lineage anyone?). I guess I’m curious to see how much this is a real gaming experience and how much is a thinly veiled advertisement delivery service. Either way, they’ll prolly make beaucoup bucks, free or not.

Zodos Bowling, oh how much time I spent at you. A mere 25 minutes drive away, the pilgrimage to you seemed endless, the rewards myriad and ethereal. But was it gutterballs and disco fries I was there for, my glasses-wearing 10 year old self? Oh certainly not. I was there for the arcade in the back, past the claw machine and the weird bathrooms. I was there for Time Crisis, Jurassic Park, and, most importantly, Simpsons Arcade. One of the finest beat’em ups I’ve ever player, and one of my favorite gaming memories, Simpsons Arcade is a true classic.

It is THE perfect game for a downloadable arcade market place. Which makes it so unbelievably stupid that it hasn’t been truly featured on one (dumb broken iPhone version doesn’t count). Until now. YES! FUCK YES! Konami has finally stepped up and adapted it for modern consoles, and I can’t wait to play it when it comes out tomorrow on PSN and XBLA. So soon! The bowling mini-boss, zombie level, dream level, head pump-up minigame: all available for you for only $9.99. It’s times like these when I really love downloadable games.

Downloadable titles are the perfect place to test out fun gaming mechanics. Though it was originally released on DS, I thought 2009′s Scribblenauts was one of the most fun “proof of concept as game” titles I’ve ever played. It’s a simple setup: anything you want to bring into the game world you can. Something that’s explicable in one sentence, but has endless fun permutations. That game’s developer, 5th Cell, has since been hard at work on downloadable shooter Hybrid, and there’s finally a new trailer.

Especially since I’ve been so damn fed up with shooters recently, this type of experimentation is just what I was looking for. The basic conceit is that you can only move between static points of cover, almost like an on-rails+ system. You can, however, turn 360 degrees while flying between cover, creating what looks like a novel hybrid between a shmup and a more traditional FPS. Also, when you begin the game, you choose which faction you’re a part of, and your victories and losses of territory are incorporated into a live online map that takes into account players worldwide, providing extra incentive to not be a loser. Hybrid is out on XBLA this Summer.

Valve has, to put it lightly, a very devoted and active fanbase. Over the holidays, there was a thread started in the Steam Forums where people posted Valved out lyrics to popular (and later not so popular) Christmas songs. Wanna bet a weighted companion cube that all of them ended up getting recorded? Because they did, and compiled into the album Goodbye Christmas Caroline. It’s like 25 fucking tracks!

Not only is there an album, but now there is a totally great music video for “This Is Aperture”, a Portal 2 flip on Nightmare Before Christmas standout “This Is Halloween.” It’s one of my favorite songs from Nightmare (I find myself humming it frequently… too frequently) and I gotta say it’s pretty fantastic in it’s GLaDOS/Wheatley/Cave Johnson version. Fuckin’ Valve fans man.

Forever. For-fucking-ever I have been waiting for this game. Shuffling through different developers since 2001 (!), Aliens: Colonial Marines is finally hitting the streets this Spring, coming from Sega and Gearbox. Gearbox are like the resurrectors of dead games recently, but please god let this be more on the quality level of Borderlands and not Duke Nukem Forever. That would be so very very sad. Though this isn’t a gameplay trailer, it does tell us some things about the game (as well as being awesome).

I’ve always hoped that someone would one day make an Alien game that truly captured the slow burn intensity of the original, where your character and perhaps a select few others have a long and extremely intense game of cat and mouse with one uber enemy. My dreams will probably never come true (maybe a downloadable title? Please?) and Colonial Marines is definitely embracing the plurality of its title. You’ll be putting Aliens down. You’ll also get the gun mounted motion tracker, the flamethrower, will be on LV-426, and will encounter a Queen. So I guess this takes place in the latter part of the 57 years Ripley spent in stasis after the Nostromo encounter. Do want.

This is Press Start!, the only weekly column guaranteed to feature my dumb ass sprawling on, and on, and on about the past seven days in gaming. I mash the sumbitch together in a chintzy Top 5 list, and then solicit you to share everything I missed. It’s a square deal, man. Or woman. People! Humans! Sentient electronics. Everything-one-stuff is welcome. Let’s party.

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#1: Microsoft Getting Rid of Their Virtual Currency. Fuck You, Gates!
Intellectually, I know that Bill Gates doesn’t run Microsoft anymore. He’s too busy (obviously) building his space colony on Mars. There him and the rest of the Illuminati will control our destiny before culling the majority of us and using the rest of us as feed-stock and slave labor. However it still feels good to kick him in the proverbial jimmy for every Microsoft ill. So fuck you, Bill Gates! Fuck you for Microsoft points. Thank God they’re going to be phased out. Forcing our asses to buy $5 in space points every time we want to snag a $1 equivalent avatar item – shut up, I need my Mass Effect gear – was wallet banging and I didn’t appreciate it. No sir. So while it may seem a bit trifling of an issue to some, I did a genuine fist-pump when they announced this.

Then I remembered I’m in line to till the Plutonium fields on Mars in twenty years once Billy and the New World Order unleash their master eugenics plan. What can you do, eh?

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#2: Resident Evil 6 To Feature Man-On-Man Plowing; Zombies
Technically this shit was announced last week, but I was busy blathering about the Super FX Chip. Capcom has announced that Resident Evil 6 is dropping this year, and it’s going to feature the mother of all team-ups. Leon Kennedy and Chris Redfield! Cyeah, boi! I’m really desperately hoping that they flood this installment of the game with an unprecedented amount of homoerotic posturing. We’re talking way, way more than the Fast and the Furious franchise. We’re talking Rocky III levels.

In-between stern Bro Looks and standing arm-locks, Leon and Chris get each other’s back and shoot a lot of death out of their metallic phalluses. (Yes I know they’re not going to be co-op partners, but maybe they’ll meet in Act 5 and provide my dreams with solidity.) In addition to my hope there’s a pretty fucking awesome trailer, and some co-op details.

My body is ready.

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#3: Blizzard Has Week of Failure, My Fanboy Ass Is Lost
Blizzard. Blizzard owns a good amount of the children in my testicles. They are consistently spilled over their products, splashing over keyboard keys and packaging alike. Or should I say were consistently. These days shit is rough!, rough man. All I want more than anything is to open my chasm to the glory of El Diablo Trey, which in French translates to Diablo III Wonder-Time. Last week it was announced that they were gutting the fuck out of Diablo III’s core systems. Alright, whatever. Maybe that means they’re simplifying it. Then this week with the subtlety of a jimmy-thwack the news dropped that the game’s senior producer quit.

I am Caffeine Powered’s concern for this game. I give him agita and make him more deeply tongue-kiss his Sarah Kerrigan plushie while dreaming of better days. As well, not that I would attend but the company isn’t even holding a Blizzcon. Which translates to “we don’t have shit to show you, fanboys and fangirls. Dig deeper into your bunker and pray for us.”

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