Just when you thought all the raving about Spore had subsided, EA and Maxis infected Nintendo’ with Spore Hero for the Wii and Spore Hero Arena for the DS. These two latest editions to the Spore family where engineered from scratch to take advantage of the Wii and DS control schemes.

Spore Hero is a story driven action adventure which gives players 250 parts to design a hero that is destined to save its planet from mysterious dark forces. Gameplay includes solving puzzles, running missions and battling opponents for the preservation of your race. Spore Hero Arena sounds like Pokémon in outer space with the player designing their own Spore gladiator to battle from planet to planet.

Both Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena are slated for release this fall. Further details follow the break.
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Nintendo has announced its early 2009 game line up which kicks off with Pokémon Platinum. the popular DS title will hit shelves March 22, 2009.

Other familiar games among the over 100 planned releases are New Play Control! Mario Power Tennis and New Play Control! Pikmin are coming out for the Wii with edutainment title Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, Personal Trainer: Math and Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars headed for the Nintendo DS.

More games from the Q1 2009 Nintendo line up follow the break.
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Pokémon fans have reason to rejoice. Nintendo is offering a limited edition Pokémon DS pack including an Onyx Nintendo DS emblazoned with Dialga and Palkia from the Pokémon Diamond and Pokémon Pearl games with matching carrying case. An exclusive animated special, Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time and Darkness is a never before released bonus. A collectible mini-poster tops the bundle off.

Pokémon fans can catch the Limited Edition Pokémon Pack starting August 17th for the same $129 as a regular DS.

For the curious that want to get a look at Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness before buying into this RPG, there’s a video review of the game to help you make an informed decision. Once again players will take on the role of a human who has been turned into a Pokémon. Which one of the sixteen different types is determined by your answers to a personality quiz. After you’ve got your Pokémon persona figured out, your in for RPG style dungeon crawl.

Today I’m looking at Pokemon Mystery Dungeon – Explorers of Darkness on the Nintendo DS.

Not a bad dungeon crawling RPG and certainly attached to the right franchise to do well at the tills!

Pokemon fans will love its cutesy charm, but non-Pokefans can still find a pretty decent game underneath the cuddly, motivational, suger-coating. Maybe play it with Blue Velvet or somesuch on in the background to balance you back out?

via ChannelFlip

The Spore Creature Creator has been out for a week now, and with over one million monsters created and counting, it looks like there are going to be millions of crazy creatures running around once the game gets its official release.

During the week we have seen everything from phallic monsters, ones with large charms on their chests, and monsters that are nothing short of pornographic – but creations like that do not take much imagination. Work, yes, but not imagination.

With the Sporepeida growing by leaps and bounds everyday, really creative monsters are getting lost a bit in the shuffle so we here at Gaming Today decided to list what we feel are the top ten Spore monsters created thus far. Since there are indeed millions of these things, it is hard to list all of the cool ones, but we tried. Feel free to point us in the direction of some really cool ones that we can feature in a future post.

Here they are in no particular order:

1. The Viking Ship

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Nintendo fans should be keeping their eyes on this page on Amazon throughout the day today. There’s an all-day sale on Super Smash Bros. Brawl for just $26, which is a damn good deal for a Nintendo game that released a few months ago. Also, as I write this, Yoshi’s Island DS is available for $20, $10 below the standard price of $30. Aside from the Smash Bros. deal, side deals will be popping up throughout the day — the next deal will replace Yoshi’s Island at 8AM PDT, with a new one every two hours after that until 8PM tonight.

From the teaser text, it looks like Mario Kart and Pokemon Diamond/Pearl will be among the games on sale today, so keep checking back so that you don’t miss out on any good deals. (It’s also worth a bookmark for the future, as they have good deals on there from time to time, including videogame-related stuff.)

Anyone who’s played GTA IV remembers that infamous rape scene in the game, which allowed to accumulate points and…what’s that? You…you don’t remember that? Oooooh, that’s right, because there wasn’t one. Well, try explaining that to Connecticut Senator, Gayle Slossberg (D). She’s apparently convinced that the rape scene is there, she just has to get far enough along in the game to access it. At a press conference last week, she stated a law requiring clearer warning labels was needed to curb the corruption of youth. She doesn’t seem to know quite what the labels should read though, considering this statement on them:

“I mean what would it say? ‘This game will make you a sociopath’?”

Yeah, they really need to label those games better to make sure parents know about all the wild and crazy scenarios that aren’t actually in the game itself. Like how in Pokemon Snap, Pikachu would sometimes sell you drugs in exchange for sexual favors. That got you bonus points from Professor Oak, as I recall.

Via New Haven Advocate

XBLA Hors D’oeurvres are a weekly feature where I play the latest Xbox Live Arcade game – in trial form – for no more than 10 minutes, and then summarize my impressions of the game based only upon that.

Pokemon Snap was never something I enjoyed. I remember being forced to play it and I found it to be as dull as could possibly be. But, it garnered its fans because it worked well enough and anything with the Pokemon named attached to it is guaranteed to sell a million of 76 million copies — it’s a simple statistical fact.

Sea Life Safari is a lot like Pokemon Snap for obvious reasons, with a sort of Finding Nemo-ish vibe to the whole thing. The trial of the game is quite brief, but it does give you an excellent look at what the game has in store. Perhaps more than any other Arcade title (with the possible exception of something like Buku Sudoku), you already know whether or not you have any intention of playing the game.

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Two new 800 Microsoft point games were released today on Xbox Live Arcade today: Sea Life Safari, the Pokemon Snap sans Pokemon clone, and Elements of Destruction, a game based around the one aspect of SimCity that everyone can enjoy — unleashing natural disasters.

As Jonathan said earlier this week, both games sound interesting, although I’m personally not all that interested in taking photographs of digital sea creatures. Maybe it’s just me, but I simply don’t find the concept all that appealing. (I’m not looking forward to writing tomorrow’s XBLA Hors D’oeuvres story on it, I’ll tell you that much.)

On the other hand, Elements of Destruction sounds nothing short of rad, even if the game’s title sounds a lot like a subtitle for “Unoriginal Game 78.” Playing as a mad scientist who can blow stuff up with lightning, tornadoes and earthquakes, among other things, sounds incredibly fun. Multiplayer also sounds like a blast, with a versus mode (try to cause the most damage) and co-op mode (work together to take down the corporations, man! Sounds a bit like a hippie’s dream.).

Both games are now available for $10 a pop. Expect the Hors D’oeuvres love to come sometime tomorrow.

I’m usually hesitant about weeks when the XBLA offers up two games at once. Half the time this tends to mean that one or both of the games aren’t worth your time at all. Surprisingly though, both titles this week sound kind of interesting. Elements of Destruction will have you playing a mad scientist with the power to control the weather. You’ll use tornadoes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters to decimate whole cityscapes across the globe. Sea Life Safari sounds kind of like Pokemon Snap, except with real-life creature to photograph. As the title suggests, you venture into the oceans to explore and document as many creatures as possible. Both of these games should be available on Wednesday for 800 MS points each.

Via Major Nelson