It’s Friday!  You all know the day and you all know the drill!  Sit back, take a few minutes, and share with us any gaming related plans you have for the weekend.  Or tell us at the very least what could be so important as to inhibit you from playing any games during said weekend.  One has to ask, will Steve turn over a new leaf for the first of May, or will the consummate “Casual Gamer” have a few days filled with bouts of Hells Kitchen, Cooking Mama, and other varieties of waggletastic digital entertainment?  There’s only one way to find out!

Jon: Dave asked me to fill in for him this weekend, and provide a review for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which I’m really looking forward to playing.  I have to commend Raven fortaking a risk and crafting an M-Rated brawler to coincide with a PG-rated summer blockbuster.  Comparisons have already been made to Sony’s seminal God of War franchise, but honestly, outside of that one boss battle with the 250 ft tall Sentinal robot, Wolverine looks a little more like Ninja Gaiden 2 to me.  That’s not to say that’s a bad thing, as a bout of brainless hack and slash certainly never hurt anybody, so long as the ultra-hard “Broken Camera” boss battle hasn’t made a return.  That’s about it for me, unless myself and the guys throw some dice on Sunday; I’ve got a weekend of mutant gutting and cigar chomping to look forward to.  At the very least, I hope to discover the secrets of the Dismemberment Room.

Leaked footage of the E3 trailer for Shadow of the Colossus 2

Erich: Provided my wife doesn’t go into labor this weekend, I’m looking to log some more time with Pure, my bargain pick-up of the week. So far it’s tons of fun, and I think I’m getting the hang of the trick system (at least, I did before I played online against Dave last night and had my kickstand handed to me in both freestyle and race modes). I’ll probably play some more Chrono Trigger as well; I’ve got to be close to the end of that game, right? Right? Finally, if there’s time, I might play some Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. I’d like to finish the Banjoland events, and hopefully unlock more stages of Klungo Saves the World. Great game, and a steal at the $20 you can find it for these days!

Adam: Labor? Pssh. Talk about your lame excuses. There’s no rule that says you can’t be piloting the Epoch whilst in the delivery room, Erich.

Oh yeah. One of these. Right in the face.

My mother-in-law is in town, so if the wife allows me to get away for a few, I’m planning on throwing down for Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm for the PS3. Not sure why. Just one of those random things. I’m a fan of the manga, and I’ve recently caught up with it, so now I’ve got Uzumaki on the brain, or something. I tried the demo, and it’s definitely a lot of fun, so why not? NINJA ACTION here I come!

Dave: Wolverine. Oh baby.

Video game characters are infamous for their outlandish designs and physics defying architecture (ahem).  But any programmer worth his or her salt knows that if you really want to set your virtual creation apart from the poseurs you need one important thing: a killer ‘do.

Dave: Neo Zeed.  Or is it just Zeed?  I’m not sure, but if you played the heck out of Revenge of Shinobi for the Genesis like I did then you came to know and loathe this mightily-coiffured jackass as much as me.

He’s the final boss in the legendary side-scrolling ninja simulator and the weapon he used on you was his shuriken-proof, spinning hairpiece of death.  If you got smacked with this wig, it would do some serious damage, so you would have to get into the pattern-predicting groove.  Zeed was vulnerable when he tossed out his hair to kill you; the safest way to dispatch him was with shuriken to his stupid, bare face.  To add to the tension, your girlfriend is trapped in a room that is slowly contracting,  Death Star garbage dump-style.

Prell, my friend. Prell

Thing is, you really had only one shot.  Before you face off with him, there’s a hidden POW icon that will soup up your attacks.  Using your Roid Ninja Stars actually made short work of Zeed (once you mastered the hair dodge), but if you got hit, then it was back to the economy-grade shuriken and you were suddenly looking at a 90 percent chance that you wouldn’t be able to kill Zeed before your girlfriend got crushed to death.

The fight was exactly as lame as it sounds, surprising since Revenge of Shinobi is renowned for its awesome boss battles.  This is the game, mind you, where you fight the Terminator, Batman, Spider-man and Godzilla in a glorious display of copyright infringement.

But very few final bosses managed such a stunning combination of body and shine.

Erich: Battletoads for the NES was one of the best games of its generation. Devilish difficulty aside, it was fun, inventive, and looked great. It was also filled with all creatures slimy and gross—including toads, rats, pigs, and some sort of weird bird thing. They had quease-inducing names like “Pimple” and “Zitz,” and those were the good guys. The grossest of the gross, though, was the boss of the “Surf City” stage, Big Blag. This sweaty obsese rat tried to kill you by crushing you with its ample gut and awful hairdo. Well, the hair didn’t actually attack you, but it was certainly distracting. Luckily, there was an easy way to beat Big Blag. As long as you’d grabbed the leg off the walker robot you fought just before reaching him, all you had to do was get Blag in the corner of the screen and repeatedly hit him with it. Mashing on the attack button may have been cheap, but check out the radical ’90s coiffure in the Nintendo Power scan below and tell me he didn’t deserve it:

Steve: I submit: Albert Wesker, as he appeared in Resident Evil on the Playstation. Sure, his slick do remains pretty slick to this day, but in RE1, that mousse-job was nothing short of phenomenal.

Jon: I wore my hair like Wesker for two years after RE1, the razor sharp nature of my hair earned me the nickname “Jonic the Hedgehog”…Christ I hated high school.

There were several choices apparent to me when it came to awesome video game hair.  Solid Snake, with his Kurt Russell Ultimullet®, Heihachi from Tekken’s double mohawk, Dr. Wily, Millia Rage from Guilty Gear, who beats people up with her hair.  But in trying to find a decent (read: not pornographic) picture of Millia on the good old internet, I remembered this beauty.

What would possess a person to tie their hair in a ring?  Surely only Jam Kurodoberi, the only person in Guilty Gear so awesome that she doesn’t use a weapon knows for sure.

Adam: You guys are all so off, it’s hilarious. There can only be one winner for this contest, and here he is:

HOW is this even possible?

That’s right. Birdie from Street Fighter Alpha. Why? Because he has a mohawk with a hole in it.

This thread can be closed now.

The official work week ends for most of us later this afternoon; five days of toil and sweat, away from our video games.  Oh, ye cruel and merciless heavens how long you conspired to keep us apart!  Oh, tedious week-without-end!  Now that many of us have a couple of days to ourselves, what games are in the queue?  What are we looking forward to playing?  The guys can feel free to add their thoughts or gaming plans for the weekend, and readers; feel free to leave a post as well.

Jon: For the third week in a row, my Fiancée has some of our friends coming over for drinks and such; so I am hoping to try and clock in a little co-operative time with Resident Evil 5, I want to see if I can’t try to catch up with the rest of the guys after starting over so I can collect some of the weapons I hastily missed during my first week of playtime.  I am sure I’ll be showing off MadWorld, if nothing else, just to shock our company’s Wii-centric gamer values. We usually all end up playing a few rounds of Rock Band or SingStar together, and if I’m feeling at all awesome, you’d better believe I’ll be dropping some Europe! IT’S THE FUH-EYE-NUHLL COW-NT-DOWN!!

Saturday is calling for one last snowstorm here on the Rock, and it’s looking like it could be a doozy.  If so I’ll be hunkeirng down (post-shovelling) and cracking into my older games.  I’ve been jonesing to play through Thunder Force V and Einhander again after a short conversation I had with Dave earlier in the week.  Steve is still clutching my copy of Tales of Vesperia, so in lieu of that, I may try to finally get him off my case and play more than 2 hours of Final Fantasy XII.  Actually no…I’m probably just going to end up playing Street Fighter IV while my better half chides me for wearing my ricockulous Ryu headband.

Steve:  I’m guessing my weekend will consist of a hell of a lot of Demon’s Souls. Got my import copy in the mail on Thursday and promptly clocked in over 5 hours. I’m hopelessly enslaved to the point that everything else in my queue has been thrown right onto the backburner. Like Oblivion, i expect this game to own my soul for a couple of hundred hours.It’s a fantastic game for RPG-nuts like myself,  but it’s purely a hardcore exercise, like old school PC – RPG’s from the early/mid ’90′s. There is a review in the making.

I’ve also been playing a little bit of old school Street Fighter (spurred on by all the reading for the Save States column). 

It's like the guys at From Software said, "Let's make a game just for Steve!"

Newcomers Steve and Tim join first-time host Erich and a sickly Dave for an hour of game-related chatter that includes hot-off-the-press impressions of Resident Evil 5, Ninja Blade, and Halo Wars, as well as belated Braid talk and the continuing obsession that is Street Fighter IV. The boys then perform a delayed autopsy on EGM, take on the expanding used game business, and blow their own blog-related trumpets, before winding down with upcoming games they don’t think anyone else is excited about. This podcast comes with a 7-day warranty. If you’re not totally satisfied, let us know at feedback@pixelverdict.com.

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