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I’m very much looking forward toFighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Readers will know that I have fond memories of the book upon which it is based, and so it is with much delight that I spread the word of the game’s nifty preorder bonus — a copy of that very same book. Preorders will come with a reissued copy ofThe Warlock of Firetop Mountain. For those unfamiliar withFighting Fantasy, it’s basically a dungeon crawler nerd’s version of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book....

Remember when commercials forFinal Fantasy VIIwere airing and nerds were up in arms over their complete lack of actual gameplay footage? Yeah, I was one of those nerds. But oddly enough, I’m totally okay with just seeing loads of gorgeous CG footage in Square-Enix’sFinal Fantasy IVremake trailer, first shown at the Square-Enix Party 2007. Something about seeing the Tower of Babel realized in gorgeous, shiny CG just hits me. Y’know,here. [Points awkwardly at heart....

According to a post over at1UP, GameStop locations have started receiving copies of this coming week’s Blu-Ray release ofFinal Fantasy VII: Advent Children Completeto toss into 80Gb PlayStation 3 unit boxes. An internal memo for GameStop employees states there’s no plan for a pre-packaged bundle, which is leading to speculation that this may be a GameStop exclusive sort of deal. The deal is only good on 80Gb PS3 purchases and limited at that....

The Sherlock Holmes series has been more or less off of my radar completely, and they’ve been around for several different iterations (six games in total). The series has always been strictly PC, though the most recent title was also a late port to consoles. I love adventure games and have fond memories of many of the really old ones, but it’s rare that we see many examples of the genre with its generally slower pacing and plodding story development that turns off many console gamers....

I haven’t spent a huge deal of time with this, but I am yet to find the challenge in this. Or any real reason to find it compelling. Yet, I can completely understand why somebody would be totally absorbed by inanely tapping a map to get treasure that has no inherent meaning. Treasure Storyis free today. It’s about treasure. More specifically, it’s a colorfulMinesweeper, only without the challenging part of Minesweeper....

Yeah,Castlevania: Harmony of Despairis deeply flawed — and yet, I cannot stop playing it. Conrad, and a good chunk of people on my friends list, would probably say the exact same thing. Six-person runs are clearly where the fun is at, so hopefully everyone can experience the magic that is kicking absurd amounts of ass only to have your team turn into skeletons at the boss fight. PROTIP: dying as a skeleton does actually have a negative side effect; your timer runs down with each death....

Last week‘s debate had us all rocking out to our own tunes, then South Parkcalled usfags, and then we rocked out some more. The results are in, and it looks like there’s a clear winner in Dtoid’s Battle of the Bands 06 debate: Next year we’ll haveRock BandandGuitar Herogo head to head, but this week we shift the focus to another game series that started slow and then caught on like wildfire....

Last week’s debatewas insane. I’ve been doing these debates almost every week for three years now, and it might be the closest to the perfect game debate we’ll ever witness. The ways in which the two contenders were varied was so useful for comparing and contrasting them, and nearly every single comment did the topic justice. I’ve never in all these years seen so many people say “I signed up just for this debate” and you have no idea how happy that makes me feel....

Kairosoft has become a mobile darling after releasingGame Dev Storyto widespread critical acclaim, and it would appear that the team won’t stop there. Japanese iTunes users can now downloadWaiWai! The Game Dealer(name sussed out byTouch Arcade), and we’re crossing our fingers for a localization. Game Dev Story was a cute sim about the making of games, so what do you think The Game Dealer is about? That’s right, it’s about selling those games to miserable, ignorant punters like you and me....

GDC is great for award shows, and its always killer to see games you loved getting the kind of nods that you feel they deserve. It was much that way with the announcement of Microsoft’s Xbox Live awards, in which the best of the best were put in the spotlight.Bomberman Livetook home the top award, which has absolutely nothing to do with the fact thatMr. Destructoid was a playable character, but still somehow rocks by coincidence....

We all know that Twisted Pixel’s‘Splosion Manis a great game. But do you know how it was made, what went into it, or what mistakes were made during its development? I didn’t either, until I attended Mike Henry and Sean Riley’s postmortem on the game at GDC Austin. There, they dished out the story behind it all, with lots of ‘splosions and meat throughout. Hit the jump for a summary of Mike and Sean’s thoughts on‘Splosion Man‘s journey from an unpolished project to one of the most critically acclaimed games on XBLA today....

Venga,venga,venga! Today, Ubisoft and Midway dropped a demo for theWheelmanon Xbox Live Marketplace. The demo gives you the taste of two side missions, a story mission, and some of the open-world roaming as Vin Diesel. Color me impressed. The story mission sets a hell of a frantic tone. A young woman triggers an alarm while robbing a bank and it’s your job to get her to a safe house while fighting off some kind of rival crime organization and the police....

ZodTTD, the developer behind a PlayStation emulator for the Android OS, was shut down recently. The software was pulled down off the Android Market. Now another developer follows, possibly pointing to Google’s desire to keep things clean and legal on their Market. Yong Zhang, an Android dev that had several emulators lined up for the OS, has been locked out of the Android Market.Arssays that his applications were removed from the store and his account was terminated by Google without warning....