‘Atelier Meruru: The Apprentice of Arland’ Trailer Sure is Pretty

Via Scoop.it — Shezcrafti

Let’s gush over the cute new Ate­lier game!

Ate­lier Meruru: The Appren­tice of Arland, part three of Gust’s Ate­lier tril­ogy, is cur­rently being local­ized for west­ern audi­ences and prepped for launch by NIS in North Amer­ica and Europe this May. NIS also pub­lished the first and sec­ond entries in the series, Ate­lier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland and Ate­lier Totori: The Adven­turer of Arland.  Via www.joystiq.com

Meruru is the princess of Arls, a lit­tle king­dom sit­u­ated in the far north of the Arland repub­lic. After her father and Gio, the leader of Arland, dis­cussed the merg­ing of the two lands, she met Totori, the now-graduated alchemist. Daz­zled by the power of alchemy, and with a desire to help her coun­try pros­per, she forced her­self on Totori as her first student.

Check out the game’s very pretty, very girly trailer here:

The Big List of Horror-Themed Adventure Games

If you’ve been read­ing here lately, you already know that I’m on a big Pin­ter­est kick right now.  One of the things I love about Pin­ter­est is how eas­ily you can cre­ate and share curated lists about very spe­cific top­ics.  Horror-themed adven­ture games, for exam­ple (talk about a niche within a niche).

(To go straight to the list, click here.)

Scary point-and-click adven­ture games rank among my most favorite types of games to play; many of my most mem­o­rable gam­ing expe­ri­ences can be attrib­uted to this genre.  To that end, I’m always on the look­out for new adven­ture hor­ror games, scour­ing forums for rec­om­men­da­tions, and cruis­ing Google news feeds to get my fix.

That’s why I decided my first Pin­ter­est project would be to put together The Big List of Horror-Themed Adven­ture Games, to keep track of the games I’ve played or have an inter­est in play­ing.  Each of the games on my list includes the game’s title, cover art, plat­form, year released, and a link to its Wikipedia article.

I know there are oth­ers out there who love these types of games as much as I do, and so I thought this list might become a use­ful resource for dis­cov­er­ing sim­i­lar games.  Plus, I love how Pin­ter­est turns the games’ box art into an awesome-looking collage.

Do you know of any other great scary, horror-themed or dark adven­ture games that aren’t on my list?  Please leave a com­ment and let me know.  I’d love to keep this list growing!

First In-Game Screenshots of ‘The Last Of Us’ are Beautiful, Amazingly Detailed

Via Scoop.it — Shezcrafti

Game Informer has the lat­est new screen­shots from The Last of Us, Naughty Dog’s upcom­ing sur­vival hor­ror action/adventure game, and they are absolutely breath­tak­ing.  It’s hard to believe these are actual, in-game screen­shots. It’s clear that Naughty Dog is really step­ping up their game with this release, push­ing PS3’s graph­ics proces­sors to the limit.  Head on over to Game Informer to see all four of these beauties.

The Last of Us is set in a post-apocalyptic world where fun­gus has infected humans’ brains and turned them into zom­bies, but Naughty Dog insists that it’s not another mind­less “zom­bie game.”  The game will focus on the rela­tion­ship between the two main pro­tag­o­nists, sur­vivor man Joel and his 14-year old daugh­ter, Ellie.

The Last of Us is due for release some­time in the last quar­ter of 2012.

Via www.gameinformer.com

Power Mushroom Social Media Icon Set Inspired by Super Mario Bros.

I’ve been want­ing some new social media icons for my blog to match the 8-bit theme I have going on, but couldn’t find any­thing decent.  So I decided to cre­ate my own!  The power mush­room from Super Mario was an obvi­ous choice.  I only needed a few icons, but I loved how they turned out so much that I decided to make a whole match­ing set—and give them away for free to you, the good peo­ple of the interwebz.

The Power Mush­room Social Media Icon Collection

(scroll down for down­load link)

Details & Terms of Use

My col­lec­tion con­tains 20 dif­fer­ent designs in trans­par­ent PNG for­mat, in two dif­fer­ent sizes:  large (80 x 80) and small (40 x 40).

Here’s what’s included:  Blog­ger, Deli­cious, DeviantArt, Face­book, Flickr, Gmail, Google+, LinkedIn, Pin­ter­est, Red­dit, RSS, Skype, Spo­tify, Stum­ble­Upon, Tech­no­rati, Tum­blr, Twit­ter, Vimeo, Word­Press, and YouTube.

Please feel free to use these icons how­ever you wish!  If you want to fea­ture this col­lec­tion on your site or blog, all I ask is that you please link back to this page. I also love com­ments, tweets, +1’s & Likes. ;-)

Down­load

Down­load the Power Mush­room Social Media Icon Col­lec­tion from RapidShare

Amateur Documentary ‘IRL’ Tackles Online Game Addiction

Via Scoop.it — Shezcrafti

Count­less doc­u­men­taries have inves­ti­gated gam­ing addic­tion and the sup­posed dan­gers lurk­ing in mas­sively mul­ti­player titles, but it’s not often that some­one who’s expe­ri­enced an addic­tion talks about it him­self. Third year film stu­dent and ex World of War­craft junkie Anthony Ros­ner looks back on his six years in the game in a new short doc­u­men­tary on the effects of MMO addic­tion. With help from friends Dave Novis and Arron Amo, Anthony pro­duced, directed, wrote, and edited the film him­self, ensur­ing that he had the oppor­tu­nity to tell his whole story and tell it from his own per­spec­tive.
Via massively.joystiq.com

TERA’s Closed Beta Signup Opens

Via Scoop.it — Shezcrafti

En Masse has offi­cially opened closed beta signups for its upcom­ing MMORPG TERA.

Via www.mmocrunch.com

‘Yesterday’ unveils itself a bit more through exclusive screenshots!

Via Scoop.it — Adven­ture Games

Yes­ter­day, the new adven­ture game from Pen­dulo Stu­dios, today unveiled a series of 4 new images! After leav­ing its mark in adven­ture gam­ing with its million-selling tril­ogy Run­away and, more recently, The Next BIG Thing, Pen­dulo has given up com­edy for once and is offer­ing an orig­i­nal and dark thriller.
Via www.gamasutra.com

Coming Soon: ‘The Art of Video Games’ Exhibit (Or, Why I’m Glad I Live Near D.C.)

The Smith­son­ian Amer­i­can Art Museum will explore video games as art in its upcom­ing exhibit, The Art of Video Games.  The exhibit will show­case 80 video games, from the early days of Atari and Cole­co­V­i­sion to today’s next-gen con­soles like Xbox 360 and Playsta­tion 3.

Among the famil­iar titles included: Pac-Man, Pit­fall!, The Leg­end of Zelda, Final Fan­tasy VII, Rez (pic­ture above), Por­tal, Heavy Rain, and holy shit is that ChuChu Rocket I see on the list?  Here is the full list of fea­tured games.  The selected games were cho­sen by pub­lic vote, and were whit­tled down from a list of over 240 titles.  (Which helps to explain why some obvi­ous choices didn’t make the cut. Braid and Grim Fan­dango come to mind.)

If you don’t live near D.C, you may still be able to attend.  The exhibit will be trav­el­ling to sev­eral other major cities, includ­ing Boca Raton, Seat­tle, New York, Toledo, Flint, and Mem­phis.  Click the link for details.

The Art of Video Games exhibit will debut March 16 and remain open until Sep­tem­ber 30, 2012.

MUST WATCH: Amazing Live-Action Short Film Based on ‘Portal’

Por­tal: No Escape is a live-action short film based on the game Por­tal and I promise you it is AMAZING!  It was directed by Dan Tra­cht­en­berg, a Los Ange­les film­maker who, hon­estly, I had never heard of until this project, but will be sure to fol­low closely from now on.

The film is about seven min­utes long, and chron­i­cles the expe­ri­ence of Chell (played by Danielle Rayne) as she wakes up in a bleak,  unknown, pre­sum­ably Aper­ture Science-controlled facil­ity and what she does from there.  Por­tal fans will rec­og­nize all the famil­iar props, includ­ing the blue and orange por­tals, the Por­tal Gun, even a glimpse of the Com­pan­ion Cube toward the end!

(I won’t spoil any­thing, but the end­ing was really well done.)

Watch Por­tal: No Escape:

New ‘Asylum’ Trailer — Welcome to Hanwell Mental Institute

Asy­lum is the upcom­ing first-person hor­ror adven­ture title from from the cre­ator of Scratches, that to this day, I still con­sider the scari­est game I have ever played. Last year when I heard Sen­scape had a new game in the works, it imme­di­ately went to the top of my Most Wanted list.  Because I already do enough of it on Twit­ter & my favorite adven­ture game forums, I will spare you the copi­ous amounts of gush­ing I am capa­ble of doing when it comes to Sen­scape and just get straight to the point:

There’s a new Asy­lum trailer out that includes actual game­play footage. Check out this dis­turb­ing new glimpse into Han­well Men­tal Institute: