For the next week, online shop Play-Asia will be selling all of its in-stock items at a 20% discount, excluding weekly specials or anything released in the past 30 days -- cross Jump Ultimate Stars and Doki Doki Majo Shinpan off of your to-buy list. All of the import retailer's eligible products have been marked with the smoothie icon shown on the right, so it's easy to spot which games are on sale. We've picked out several noteworthy bargains that you might want to consider:
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Justice for All - $23.92
Naruto: Saikyo Ninja Daikesshu 4 - $15.92
Gyakuten Saiban 4 Limited Edition - $103.92
bit Generations: Orbital, Soundvoyager, Dialhex, Boundish, Digidrive - all $11.92
Urban Life Style Cases, White and Light Blue - $10.32
Headsets, Nintendo - $10.32, Dragon - $5.52
Play Stand DS Lite - $11.92
Though the sale doesn't end until next Friday, a lot of these items won't stay in-stock for long. Don't be that guy who has to leave a comment about missing out on a particular deal!
Pirated video games in the Philippines is certainly nothing new -- we remember seeing counterfeit Famicom carts being sold there back in the day -- but its ubiquity in the Southeast Asian country is startling. GameOPS' John Phillips Bengero sent us some pictures to illustrate just how dire the DS and GBA bootlegging situation is. Far from being confined to Manila's seedier markets, these shots were taken at a recently opened Toys "R" Us branch in TriNoma mall! Bring a pocket full of pesos past the post break for the photos.
Long hailed as one of the GBA's best puzzle titles, Kururin Paradise never landed on North American shores, preferring instead to limit its release to Japan. Play-Asia has taken pity on our Kururin-less souls, listing the 8ing-developed game at a dicount price of $9.90! This deal lasts until next Tuesday, so you'll have more than enough time to collect change on the sidewalk for this purchase. Pilot your spinning craft past the post break for a video preview of this simple-but-addictive game!
We'll admit we haven't been in Target for awhile, so this news comes as kind of a surprise to us. Sure, we like to use our DS Lite to play GBA games (even if they stick out some), but sometimes you just can't beat the feeling of pulling a GBA SP out of your pocket, flipping it open and playing some Omega Factor. Apparently, the GBA SP's time on this Earth is limited.
Of course, we can understand why Nintendo would discontinue the handheld, but it doesn't mean we're not a tad bit hurt to see the handheld leave our life so quickly.
The new program is called STAP-BOY (space-time adaptive processing) and the goal is to turn "any Soldier, any Marine [into] an advanced sensor platform." To do this, the military is looking to take "commercial Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) hardware and software of the type currently used for fast geometry computations in hand-held electronic games like Nintendo's GAME BOY," gifting soldiers in the field with a "technique that enhances the ability of radars to detect targets that might otherwise be obscured." Right now, this can only be done by the most advanced of supercomputers.
As of now, Darpa figures it'll be ready to hand the project over to the Army by the end of 2008. Personally, we wouldn't want to be the guy in charge of using the gizmo, since we're sure we'd just play Tetris on the thing.
Online import shop Play Asia is trying to lighten its stock of mega-robot guys, hosting a week-long sale on RockMan 3 Zero. Capcom's GBA action-platformer has been discounted to $9.90, almost a fifth of its original price! RockMan 2 Zero boasts a similar discount as a limited time offer, but you get an additional dollar off if you bundle the two games together for your order, bringing the total cost to $18.80.
With the World's Greatest Shmup Player Tournament coming up, now is the perfect time to try out Takayama Fumihiko's recently updated BulletGBA. The homebrew shoot 'em up simulator has over 300 bullet patterns picked out from genre favorites that you can test your dodging skills against. BulletGBA's 5.0 release adds some new "stages," a remodeled shooting mode, and music tracks from the chiptune champions, Nullsleep.
We've got a video of us attempting to last longer than a few seconds with one of the bullet hell patterns, so jump past the post break for a good laugh.
Fed up with Tetris DS's infinite T-Spin? Looking for a Tetris clone with a ruleset and play style that fits your specific needs? LOCKJAW aims to give you that personalized experience, providing over 20 configurable options. While this homebrew release doesn't have the visual flair of Nintendo's recent remake, you can customize nearly every aspect, from scoring methods to line clear delays.
Want to limit the amount of upcoming pieces that are displayed? Or try out a narrower well? Load up LOCKJAW, and fashion your tetromino experience to your heart's content.
Using the magazine scans that revealed Final Fantasy IV for the DS yesterday, NeoGAF forumer Speedpop cropped screenshots of the 3D remake right next to their respective scenes from the SNES and GBA releases. The juxtaposition gives you a good idea of how different Square Enix's updated game will look from the originals. Compare and contrast after the post break.
Rhythm Tengoku, the Game Boy Advance rhythm-minigame collection from the Wario Ware team, is headed to the arcade as a collaboration between Nintendo and Sega. And as an arcade game, it's even less likely to come to the US.
Rhythm Tengoku is a collection of weird minigames in the same style as Wario Ware, but all involving performing exceedingly random tasks in time with music. It appears to contain the same minigames as the original, with some new stages, as well as the welcome addition of simultaneous 2-player.
If this arcade game comes out somewhere we can play it, we'll take back every bad thing we ever said about minigames and recent Sega games. We'd also take a localized version of the GBA game. We're simple folks.
It's amazing what people are turning into computers these days, as this original Game Boy has become the case for one of the smallest Windows XP PCs we've ever seen. Complete with 2 USB ports, LAN and VGA outputs, the cartridge slot has even been turned into a Compact Flash drive. This thing is sick!
We won't look down on you if Tecmo's announcement for Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword was the first time you'd ever heard of ninjas sneaking onto a handheld console. The stealthy assasins carry out their orders so efficiently and silently, most people aren't even aware of a ninja's presence until they see their own blood on the wall sprayed from an expert slash across their necks.
Modojo has a lengthy feature tracking portable appearances by ninjas like Shinobi and Goemon, following their shuriken-throwing adventures from the Game Boy all the way up to the Nintendo DS. Our favorite game from the bunch is Ninja Five-O, a Bionic Commando-esque side scroller that was released for the GBA. If there's one thing terrorists fear, it's ninja cops swinging through their defenses!
This limited-edition Zelda Game Boy Advance signed by Shigeru Miyamoto is really damned cool. There's no controversy about that point. But is it $2,157.86 worth of cool? That position might be too shaky for us.
It was apparently okay with one eBay shopper, because that was the final selling price for the system. At a price like that, we bet the guy won't even play games on it. And a Game Boy Advance that doesn't play Super Dodge Ball Advance is worth far less than two thousand dollars to us.
Developer DHG Games poured its heart into completing Motocross Challenge. The small studio built the GBA title from the ground up, hoping to one day see the game on store shelves. Despite months of negotiation, however, Motocross Challenge's planned publisher backed out of the project, citing declining GBA software sales. After having invested three years into creating Motocross Challenge, DHG found itself with a finished game and no way to commercially release it.
Not wanting to see its hard work go to waste, DHG has made Motocross Challenge available to the public, offering the GBA ROM for FREE to anyone who will play it. We've already put a couple of hours into the racing game, and it plays a lot like an updated Excite Bike or Motocross Maniacs. There's a slight learning curve with figuring out how to land, managing your boosts, and memorizing the tracks, but it's all worth it when you start hitting ramps at full speed and racking up points with mid-air stunts.
The fact that Motocross Challenge's publisher dropped the game says nothing about its quality. If you are a fan of motocross titles and want to support independent developers who slave over a project for the sake of making a great game, it won't cost you anything but a few minutes to try this one out. Head past the post break for a trailer of the different tracks and game modes.
All this week, the DS Fanboy staff is letting you in on a few of their favorite titles. Each day, a different member of the staff will present their personal top five DS games along with a snapshot of their gaming paraphernalia and habits, in an effort to provide our readers with a little more information on the tastes and personalities of our writers.
When my afternoons aren't busied by hours of photoshopping cat heads onto pictures of my friends, I pass the time with puzzlers and plumbers on my DS Lite. But those kitten-free days are few and far between, so I end up being able to only fit either the most polished or the most eccentric games into my packed schedule. Wario: Master of Disguise? Sorry, I've got things to do and feline faces to retouch. Lost in Blue 2? I'll have to pass -- I'm already lost in trying to get these whiskers to look perfect.
My collection is a mishmash of AAA titles and niche releases, their cases piled atop one another like a Jenga stack of mismatched blocks, threatening to topple over at any moment. Just pulling a game from the middle of the shaky structure is an act preceded by hours of anxiety and self-doubt. Having my wife provide commentary during the ordeal, remarking "Oh god, it's going to crash this time for sure, I just know it. Why'd you even try, Eric?! Game over, man! Game over!" as I tug out my copy of Advance Wars DS doesn't make the challenge any easier.
So when I do manage to put aside the pussycat photos and secure a game to play, it better damn well be worth it. Journey forth and read which of those titles have captured a place not only on my top five list, but in my heart.
For the next week, online shop Play-Asia will be selling all of its in-stock items at a 20% discount, excluding weekly specials or anything released in the past 30 days -- cross Jump Ultimate Stars and Doki Doki Majo Shinpan off of your to-buy list. All of the import retailer's eligible products have been marked with the smoothie icon shown on the right, so it's easy to spot which games are on sale. We've picked out several noteworthy bargains that you might want to consider:
Pirated video games in the Philippines is certainly nothing new -- we remember seeing counterfeit 
Long hailed as one of the GBA's best 
We'll admit we haven't been in Target for awhile, so this news comes as kind of a surprise to us. Sure, we like to use our DS Lite to play GBA games (even if they stick out some), but sometimes you just can't beat the feeling of pulling a GBA SP out of your pocket, flipping it open and playing some Omega Factor. Apparently, the GBA SP's time on this Earth is limited.
The new program is called STAP-BOY (space-time adaptive processing) and the goal is to turn "any Soldier, any Marine [into] an advanced sensor platform." To do this, the military is looking to take "commercial Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) hardware and software of the type currently used for fast geometry computations in hand-held electronic games like Nintendo's GAME BOY," gifting soldiers in the field with a "technique that enhances the ability of radars to detect targets that might otherwise be obscured." Right now, this can only be done by the most advanced of supercomputers.
Online import shop Play Asia is trying to lighten its stock of 
With the World's Greatest Shmup Player Tournament coming up, now is the perfect time to try out Takayama Fumihiko's recently updated BulletGBA. The 
Fed up with 
Rhythm Tengoku, the 
We won't look down on you if 
Developer DHG Games poured its heart into completing Motocross Challenge. The small studio built the 
