Here’s your chance to wow all those Alpha males and the cheerleaders who shot you down.  The limo rolls up, the gymanisum door opens and the assembled crowd gasps as they see you, a shocking image of uber-confidence with the following draped on your shoulder:

Dave:

Steve:

Adam:

Jon:

The new year is upon us and as 2009 withers away and dies like the geriatric old man that our clip art catalogs dictate, let us welcome in 2010 with a nod to babies, that universal symbol of newness and poop!

Dave: Technically, it’s Bonk from Bonk’s Adventure, but he looks like a baby.  I am of course talking about the bald-headed bastard from Saturn Bomberman, the greatest iteration of the greates multiplayer game ever made.   Being the Bomberman savant I was, I found victory in many of the matches I played and there was nothing sweeter than to savor triumph as “the baby” (as he was derogatorily referred to by the plethora of losers that met fiery death at his hands).

"I bring death."

Erich: Well, if Dave doesn’t have to pick an actual baby, then I don’t either. I will, however, pick a character whose baby status is determined by being a child, and not just bald and short. I’m going with Little Nemo from the Capcom classic, Little Nemo the Dream Master. This game was great for lots of reasons—and not just because it was one of the few NES games I owned. Clever and challenging (okay, frustratingly difficult), Little Nemo had fun, varied level design, and animals you could both ride and wear. Say what you will about this game borrowing the suit idea from Super Mario Bros. 3, but as far as I know Mario didn’t actually climb inside a living frog to get his power up. Oh, and how does Nemo subdue his animal assistants? By feeding them candy until they fall asleep and start blowing giant snot bubbles (at least that’s what it looked like to me). Cutesy or not, I can’t think of any other game that uses candy as a weapon. Okay, maybe Hershey Presents Choco Carl and the Fudgeblaster Bunch, but c’mon—that doesn’t count.

And no this isn’t some disgusting euphemism, gutter-brains.

So you’re headed off to war or a horribly dangerous mission against overwhelming odds and brutal, painful death is almost certain.  But here’s the rub: you can draft any video game character you like to mount up with you and take it to the bad guys.

Your choice?  Choose wisely!

Dave:

Steve:

So you and your buddies decide to party hard at the local drinking establishment, a dive well known for attracting a mix of real and virtual characters, all there looking for a good time and a few drinks, not necessarily in that order.  As you pound back the Koopa Ale and regale your pals with stories of high school football accomplishments and office politics, your inihibitions loosen and your judgment begins to abandon you and you start to mingle with a steady stream of video game inhabitants.

Six hours later, you come to, sprawled in your bed and there’s someone next to you and you think “Oh…no…no…no” and you peek over the sheets and, mouth agape,  take a good long look at…

Dave:

Erich:

Steve:

Your alarm clock goes off.  Still in a sleepy haze, you groggily rise out of bed, yawn, stretch, emit an odor or two and stand–only to feel something odd.  There appears to be a foreign object in your sweat pants, you pull the elastic, glance down and scream in terror when you see…

Dave:

Adam:

Tim:

Erich:

Jon:

Video game makers draw on a variety of creative licenses to build their code on. Most of the resulting creations, of course, suck.

So let’s add to the pile–your choices for a TV show that would not work in the least as a video game.

Dave: I’m a fan of the show, but Mad Men would make a pretty lousy game.

I guess you would have a stealth level as Don Draper attempting to have as many affairs as possible without his wife catching him, you could foster an active user-generated content community with obtuse marketing plans for cigarettes, have a secretary verbal abuse minigame and, inspired by this season’s tomfoolery, pump up the riding-lawnmower related gore.

Mainly there would just be a lot of smoking.

Adam: Okay, I’ve got one. A sitcom from the nineties that nobody would ever want to adapt into a videogame. It was barely palatable at the time in television format, and adapting it to a videogame would be lunacy. I mean, what would the plot be? You’d use tools, like a nail gun, a blow torch and a chainsaw to fight.. what? Dinosaurs? Acid-spewing mummies? Robots? That’s crazy talk.

I’ve got two words for you, folks: Home Im–

uuuuUUUUHHHHuuuUUHHH?

… Oh. Umm. Hmm. Okay, apparently that’s a real game. Boy, is my face red. Yikes.

Whether it’s a game expresly designed to facilitate cars and trucks smashing into each other or the mayhem is simply the by-product of an open-world game, what are some of your favorite examples of Gratuitous Destruction of Conveyances?

Dave:  I’m tempted to bring back the Vigilante 8 References again, but who wants that? So lets take it to a simpler, more innocent time and talk Mario Kart 64.  This was my introduction to the legendary franchise  and what debut it was for me.  With four-player split-screen all the rage in back in the day, Mario Kart devoured my time (and my dumb friends’ time, two of whom are represented on this site).

While we were spared from the disturbing images of the karts exploding in an orgy of flame of and intestines, it sure was satisfying blasting Toad to kingdom come with a well-placed green shell.  Or running the @#$%#$#% off the road as Donkey Kong.

Still lots of unresolved anger I’m dealing with.

Adam: It’s tempting to go with Twisted Metal 2, a game I hold in very high regard when it comes to vehicular combat (Grasshopper FTW!) but I’m going more old school, more arcade with this one: Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Super Off Road.

You'd smile too if you knew how many quarters I fed him.

A simple premise, but a fiendishly addictive execution: three people, elbow-to-elbow, driving steering wheels and jamming on floor pedals in a desperate attempt to get to the finish line first. No bullets, no bombs–but you could always toss an elbow into your opponent’s kidney in order to snatch up that last nitro. You had no hope of winning a match clean. You needed to slam, bump and dump your opponent into a wall in order to pass them, or be eating digital dirt.

This game will get you into a knife fight in the arcade.

I can’t remember a vehicle game that inspired more hatred and animosity in my heart than Super Off Road. The furious anger after being cut off by an opponent and losing the match by microseconds, or having someone steal your turbo still makes my blood boil to this day. And if a game doesn’t make you want to murder your opponents, well, how can you call it vehicular combat?

I have little else to offer here.  The subject line speaks for itself.  Ninjas in video games.

Also, I promise no mention of Ninja Gaiden, at least not from me…

Dave:  One of the first games that truly enamored me to the smacking around virtual enemies as a ninja was Revenge of Shinobi.  This, to me, still stands out as a great little side-scrolling action adventure, packed with cool set-pieces (the truck chase, the airplane fight) and ridiculous, copyright-infringing boss battles (Godzilla, Spider-man, Batman, the Terminator).

Thankfully, our hero has plenty of 16-bit methods of violence at his disposal–shuriken, swords, knives and, of course, his fiery dragon magic, always helpful in a pinch.

We’re all about the nostalgia on the PV, so here’s a soft-ball for all you flower children who grew up cutting your teeth on the SNES or Genesis (sorry, the TurboGrafx doesn’t count).

What beloved 16-bit hit would you love to see given a current-gen treatment on the system of your choice?

Dave: I am resisting the urge to go with Streets of Rage, which is the correct choice, obviously, so how about one of my other favorite games from the era: Pit-Fighter.

Granted, this proto-digitized brawler objectively sucked in all value categories (gameplay, graphics, sound), but if you went in with the right attitude and had a like-minded cohort willing to go the two-player route, there was much entertainment to be siphoned from this fighter.

Let’s get an updated version that retains the brutality (you hit people while they’re down, throttle bystanders in the crowd, suck down “Power Pills,” piledrive fools on the hoods of cars) and anything-can-happen tomfoolery, which was more or less a byproduct of shoddy coding, and add top-tier graphics, bloodletting and a costume for The Masked Warrior that leaves a bit more to the imagination.

Your time has come.

Steve: Gotta go with what was probably my favorite game for Super Nintendo - SHADOWRUN. Yes, i was a pen-n-paper geek who had played the dice-rolling variety a few years before the SNES even existed, but the game was everything i could have wanted in a videogame based on that particular property. You play amnesiac Jake Armitage, who awakens on a Morgue slab after being gunned down by former employers and healed at the last minute by the shapechanging fox/pop singer named “Kitsune”. You’re tasked with regaining the fragments of your memory, finding out what the data in your head is, and taking down the powerful Drake Corporation. But first you have to get that damn cortex bomb in your head disarmed, learn the ways of the Dog Shaman, and kill everyone in the Caryard arena. Fun Times! It was a pretty deep and involving RPG that managed to engage and tell a pretty awesome story with some trippy music, intelligent puzzles, and awesome dialog.

Might not look like much , but it's got it where it counts...

A modern day re-make, or hell, direct sequel could be amazing given the right treatment. Look at Mass Effect or Alpha Protocol as your guiding lights, and somebody, somewhere, give us a real Shadowrun video game for the current gen systems (instead of that Counterstrike rip-off that Microsoft tried to push on us a few years back… ugh.)

In honor of Zombieland‘s impressive box office take, how about a little something something about our favorite shambling-undead-slaughtering memories in the virtual world.

Lord knows there are plenty to choose from.

Dave: The allure of singing the praises of Typing of the Dead calls to me, but I’ll cede that to Erich.  I’m going with the zombie cannon fodder in the early stages of Altered Beast.

Remember these clowns?  They first show up after the legendary “Wise fwum your gwave!” announcement, shambling slowly to your pre-roid-raging character.

Pop them in the face and their head falls off but deliver a swift kick to the shins and they explode into a bushel of blueberries.

Kick him in the shins!!!!!!