Indie Games Radar: To the Moon, Owlboy, EDGE

Indie Games Radar is a pre­view of new and upcom­ing inde­pen­dent games that I’m really excited about.

Some really inter­est­ing picks this week:  To the Moon is a seri­ous JRPG-style game that explores death and regret; ver­ti­cal plat­former Owl­boy is a soar­ing adven­ture with gor­geous 2D graph­ics, and the award-winning iOS game EDGE finally gets a Steam release.

To the Moon

Devel­oper: Free­bird Games
Plat­form: PC
Release Date: Fall 2011

To the Moon is an RPG/adventure game about two doc­tors tra­vers­ing through the mem­o­ries of a dying man to ful­fill his last wish.  There exists a tech­nol­ogy that allows doc­tors to weave arti­fi­cial mem­o­ries, such that a patient can request attempts to alter their mind and wake up with mem­o­ries of things that didn’t actu­ally hap­pen.  This par­tic­u­lar story fol­lows Dr. Ros­a­lene and Dr. Watts’ attempt to ful­fill the dream of an elderly man, Johnny, whose dying wish is to go the moon.  With each step back in time, a new frag­ment of Johnny’s curi­ous past is revealed.  And as the two doc­tors piece together the puz­zled events that spanned a life­time, they seek to find out just why the frail old man chose his dying wish to be what it is.

Owl­boy

Devel­oper: D-Pad Stu­dio
Plat­form: PC, XBLA (& Steam?)
Release Date: Demo Avail­able August 12, 2011

Owl­boy is a ver­ti­cal platform-adventure game.  You play as Otus, a young Owl, who sets out on an adven­ture when his vil­lage is attacked by sky pirates.  Fea­ture a deep sto­ry­line, emotion-based dia­logue, open envi­ron­ments, mas­sive dungeons…oh yeah, and gold­fish with tophats!

EDGE

Devel­oper: Mobigame
Plat­form: iOS, Steam
Release Date: August 11, 2011 (Steam)

EDGE, the award-winning, retro-styled plat­form game pre­vi­ously only avail­able on iOS is now com­ing to Steam!

iOS-Exclusive Games = Mac Envy?

Today I saw a post over on the Adven­ture Gamers forums about a new indie adven­ture game for iOS that sounded like some­thing I’d really enjoy, so I got all excited—until I remem­bered that I can’t play it because I don’t own any iOS devices except for an old iPod Nano that I barely use.  Lately I’ve been hear­ing about more and more iOS-only games, many of them horror/adventure titles that, on any other plat­form, I’d have pur­chased and played in a heart­beat.  Deflated, I began to won­der how many cool games I might be miss­ing out on just because I don’t have an iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch/iWhatever.  That’s when it dawned on me:

Could this be (gasp!) Mac envy?

I’ve never been much of a Mac fan (for many  rea­sons that I won’t delve into here), even though I do have respect for Apple and its prod­ucts.  So, I’m going to con­sider this blog post a kind of exper­i­ment.  What I want to do is make a list of all the iOS-exclusive games that really inter­est me, and see how long I can go before I break down and do some­thing silly, like go out and pur­chase an iDe­vice  just to play some frig­gin’ games on it.

So here goes:

The Secret of Chateau de Moreau

Descrip­tion: In The Secret of Chateau de Moreau,  you are Antoine, the step­son of the Rich Count Moro.  Your Step­fa­ther was killed by poi­son­ing and now you are enti­tled to an enor­mous inher­i­tance but have also been named as a sus­pect of his mur­der.  Now you must prove your inno­cence and dis­cover who mur­dered your Step­fa­ther through this excit­ing adven­ture thriller.  Every deci­sion counts!  Make game-changing deci­sions through bone-chilling questioning.

Infin­ity Blade

Descrip­tion: In the world of Infin­ity Blade you take up the ances­tral sword of your fore­fa­thers to fight foes threat­en­ing to destroy your home, and as a heroic knight, you rise up against the sin­is­ter God-King and his brutish Titans. Epic boss bat­tles and daz­zling weapons and armor all await you in this thrilling iOS gam­ing experience.

With just a few basic swip­ing com­mands, you can spar with a wide vari­ety of chal­leng­ing oppo­nents, upgrade skills, and cast spells. Not to men­tion, there’s plenty of loot to be had. As you build your stats and unlock a vari­ety of achieve­ments, you can get more pow­er­ful items to help you in your quest to defeat the God-King and free the kingdom’s cit­i­zens from an end­less legacy of darkness.

Super­broth­ers: Sword & Sworcery EP

Descrip­tion: S:S&S EP is a 21st cen­tury inter­pre­ta­tion of the arche­typ­i­cal old school videogame adven­ture, designed exclu­sively for Apple’s touchtronic machin­ery.  It’s a mix of laid-back explo­ration, care­ful inves­ti­ga­tion & mys­te­ri­ous musi­cal problem-solving occa­sion­ally punc­tu­ated by hard-hitting com­bat encoun­ters. S:S&S EP is an unusual genre-bending effort with an empha­sis on sound, music & audio­vi­sual style that has been posi­tioned as ‘a brave exper­i­ment in Input/Output Cinema.

The Dark Meadow

Descrip­tion: In The Dark Meadow, you wake in the bed of a hos­pi­tal long ago fallen to stun­ning ruin, not know­ing or under­stand­ing why you are here. You are greeted by the only nor­mal look­ing per­son in this world, who sends you on a quest to gather what you need to track down and defeat the evil pres­ence that has you trapped in this never-ending par­al­lel world. The decay­ing hall­ways and rooms are haunted by crea­tures relent­lessly hound­ing your every move. As you explore, you learn more and more about the mys­tery from the world and what you find in it, evi­dence to be gleaned from the envi­ron­ment, snip­pets of the past of this for­saken place, words and writ­ings from oth­ers who have been trapped here, and you look for clues of how to get out.

To Be Continued…

Do you know of any other great iOS-only games? Tell me about ‘em in the com­ments.  I’m espe­cially inter­ested in any adven­ture or hor­ror titles, which I will gladly list here if they’re exclu­sive to iOS.

‘His Adventure’ is a Cute, Hand-Drawn iOS Game Developed by 17-Year-Old

Meet Oliver Pezzini.  He’s an iOS devel­oper with two mobile games to his credit, and pres­i­dent of his own game com­pany, Pezzini Games.  He’s also only 17 years old.

This Thurs­day Pezzini will be releas­ing his lat­est cre­ation, His Adven­ture, a ridicu­lously cute touch-driven plat­form game for iOS devices.  The object of the game is to use touch com­mands to guide “Him” (intrigu­ingly, the main char­ac­ter doesn’t seem to have a name) to “his” home through 70+ chal­leng­ing lev­els of sharp, spin­ning saws, mov­ing plat­forms, and other dan­gers to reach the goal, all while col­lect­ing as many stars as pos­si­ble.  With built-in leader­boards, you can even com­pete against your friends to see who can col­lect the most stars.  The game’s light, whim­si­cal music is another high­light, and seems to be a per­fect match for the adorable hand-drawn visu­als that recall the doo­dles you used to sketch in the mar­gins of your math homework.

Here, have a look & listen:

“I have always been inter­ested in gam­ing like most teenagers but unlike most was also intrigued by the devel­op­ment and the­ory behind the design­ing process of games,” Pezzini states on his web­site.  “After watch­ing many videos and read­ing arti­cles on the sub­ject I decided to invest in an Apple devel­oper account and get some expe­ri­ence first hand.”

Sadly, I don’t have an iPhone or and iPod Touch, so I won’t be able to play His Adven­ture any­time soon.  But I can’t help but be impressed (a lit­tle inspired, even) by what Pezzini has already achieved at such an early age, and what is clearly just the begin­ning of this young man’s success.

I mean, how many video games did your lazy ass develop when you were in high school?

Our First Look at ‘The Witness’ — Upcoming Adventure Game from the Creator of ‘Braid’

Jonathan Blow, cre­ator of the award-winning, hugely suc­cess­ful indie game Braid, today unveiled pre­views of his upcom­ing game The Wit­ness, a 3D puzzle/adventure game.

Kotaku is already hail­ing it a modern-day Myst.  Indeed, the com­par­isons to Myst seem well-justified.  Set on a mys­te­ri­ous, unin­hab­ited island, the player assumes the role of The Wit­ness, a silent pro­tag­o­nist who roams about the island in search of—well, what exactly, we don’t know yet.  The game­play seems to be an inter­est­ing mix of first-person explo­ration and labyrinth-like puz­zle solv­ing in the form of  locked “key” pan­els that grow increas­ingly more com­plex and open paths to new areas of explo­ration as the game progresses .

But Jonathan Blow is quick to point out that there’s much more to the game than sim­ple puzzle-solving.  The Wit­ness is about “[using] the senses as a gate­way to under­stand­ing the uni­verse,” he says.  Any­one already famil­iar with Braid will know that Jonathan’s games have much more in store than meets the eye.

Here are some beautiful-looking screen­shots (image cred­its: Kotaku):

I wasn’t all that inter­ested when I first heard about The Wit­ness, but after see­ing these screen­shots and some actual game­play footage, I am really get­ting excited about it now.  Kotaku had me at “modern-day Myst.”  As a huge fan of adven­ture games, I’m thrilled we’re expe­ri­enc­ing an adven­ture game revival era of sorts.  Unfor­tu­nately, we’ll prob­a­bly have to wait at least a year for this one; The Wit­ness won’t be released until some­time in 2012 for PC and consoles.

(Update: The Wit­ness totally just usurped Jour­ney on my Most Wanted list.)

Retro Blast: The Power Glove Instruction Manual from 1989

Over the week­end, my boyfriend was at his parent’s house dig­ging through some boxes of old junk in the base­ment when he unearthed some­thing that could prac­ti­cally be con­sid­ered an archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­ery by gamer’s stan­dards: the orig­i­nal Power Glove Instruc­tion Man­ual from 1989!  And in almost per­fect condition!

As soon as I got over my imme­di­ate jeal­ousy that he owned the Power Glove as a kid and I didn’t, I began to won­der if it might be worth anything—not nec­es­sar­ily in terms of money, but worth the infor­ma­tion and nos­tal­gia.  After all, only 100,000 Power Gloves were sold in the U.S, and how many of them still have the instruc­tion man­ual intact?  Although I’ve played with a Power Glove before (and was thor­oughly dis­ap­pointed by the expe­ri­ence), I can’t recall ever hav­ing seen an orig­i­nal instruc­tion man­ual.  So I did a few Google searches to see what was out there.

To my sur­prise, I couldn’t find a com­plete scan of the man­ual; only this text ver­sion, and a few scanned images of ran­dom pages.  And that’s really too bad, because the Power Glove man­ual is a ver­i­ta­ble gold­mine of lulz.

I knew what I had to do. (Skip Ahead to Down­load)

Lucas is a Lie

Just from a casual glance through the thirty-five page instruc­tion man­ual (yes, thirty-fucking-five pages!) it is read­ily appar­ent how com­pli­cated the Power Glove is to use.  Can you imag­ine giv­ing this thing to an excited lit­tle kid and then wit­ness­ing their sheer dis­ap­point­ment when they couldn’t get it to work because GOD DAMMIT you have to pro­gram it first using a series of com­pli­cated ges­tures and button-pressing sequences.  And if it still didn’t work (which it inevitably didn’t) you were encour­aged to call a 1–900 Mat­tel num­ber for “assis­tance” and charged $1.50 for the first minute, $.75 for each addi­tional minute.

In real­ity, this “new dimen­sion of game­play” the man­ual describes is a far cry away from those rad moves Lucas showed off in The Wiz­ard. I guess that’s why Mat­tel felt it was nec­es­sary to dumb things down for the kiddies.

Enter “Glove Mas­ter” and “Lit­tle Digit”

Meet “Glove Mas­ter” and “Lit­tle Digit”, a pair of white, non-threatening, casually-dressed car­toon char­ac­ters who exist solely to explain away the com­plex­i­ties of oper­at­ing the Power Glove with help­ful illus­tra­tions and what can best be described as church pam­phlet humor.

But are “G.M.” and “L.D.” (as they like to call each other) all that they seem??  Look a lit­tle closer and you’ll see that Lit­tle Digit, a naive boy of about ten, has a habit of get­ting him­self into some ques­tion­able sit­u­a­tions with Glove Mas­ter, an older gen­tle­man who refuses to take his jacket and sun­glasses off even though they are both clearly indoors:

What the hell is the “Sens­ing Zone” and what is Glove Mas­ter doing with his hands hid­den behind the TV?  Also, appar­ently Glove Mas­ter likes to com­mu­ni­cate via his crotch:

Didn’t I say it was a gold­mine?  For an amus­ing if slightly creepy snap­shot of video gam­ing life in 1989, I highly rec­om­mend you read the whole thing, which was painstak­ingly scanned and PDF’d by yours truly.

Down­load

You can down­load the full scan (PDF for­mat) from Rapid­Share here:

Nin­tendo Power Glove Instruc­tion Man­ual — 1989 (PDF)

You’re wel­come, Internet!

Underrated Adventure Game ‘The Neverhood’ Coming Soon to Mobile Phones?

The Nev­er­hood is prob­a­bly one of the most under­rated PC games of all time.  A col­lab­o­ra­tion between the biggest names in Hol­ly­wood and the soft­ware industry—Stephen Spiel­berg, Bill Gates, to name a few—The Nev­er­hood was an adventure-style game with a unique blend of clay ani­ma­tion, point-and-click game­play, and a beau­ti­ful score com­posed by Terry Scott Tay­lor.  Released back in 1996, it was the first prod­uct from then recently-launched Dream­works Inter­ac­tive, which later become a divi­sion of EA.  Although a com­mer­cial fail­ure at the time (it only sold about 42,000 copies), The Nev­er­hood was praised by crit­ics and fans alike and con­tin­ues to live on in many gamer’s fond memories.

Today I was really excited to learn that the orig­i­nal devel­op­ers of the game are cur­rently in nego­ti­a­tions for exclu­sive rights to re-release the game on mod­ern mobile plat­forms, includ­ing iPhone and Android.

Whether you’re a fan of the orig­i­nal game or just hear­ing about it for the first time, be sure to check out their Face­book and Twit­ter to fol­low their progress and show your support!

To make The Nev­er­hood, game devel­op­ers used 3.5 tons of clay and over 50,000 frames of animation.

Ridiculous Video Game Storage Solutions

We gamers tend to have a lot of plas­tic things lay­ing around:  con­soles, con­trollers, periph­er­als such as head­sets, mics, and adapters, add-ons, acces­sories, includ­ing large, bulky items like Rock Band gui­tars and Wii Sports attach­ments, cords, mis­cel­la­neous odds and ends, and the games them­selves; some with cases, some with­out.  We have large accu­mu­la­tions of stuff; most of it mis­matched, unat­trac­tive and awkwardly-shaped.

Gamers have so much stuff, in fact, that a whole sub-industry has sprung up around us to accom­mo­date all of our crap:  video game stor­age!  Did you know that “Game Stor­age” is one of the fastest-growing prod­uct cat­e­gories among fur­ni­ture man­u­fac­tur­ers?  Or that there are entire com­pa­nies and  blogs ded­i­cated to video game stor­age?  When it comes to keep­ing our gam­ing col­lec­tions and gear neatly stowed away, there seem to be no lim­its to the amount of avail­able prod­ucts to choose from, which range from taste­ful, furniture-like solu­tions to cheap, gaudy, and overly-specific wastes of money.

Here’s a humor­ous look at some of the most ridicu­lous “solu­tions” that some of these com­pa­nies are try­ing to sell you:

Wii Tower Gam­ing Station

Despite being large enough to count as stand­alone fur­ni­ture, this “offi­cially licensed” thing only holds 16 Wii games and 4 Wiimotes (or 2 Wiimotes and 2 Nunchucks). At 47% of the pur­chase price of a new Wii, the Wii Tower Gam­ing Sta­tion can be yours for a mere $70 at Wal­mart.  But hey, it looks like a Wii!

Nin­tendo DS Ele­ment Tray

I haven’t quite fig­ured out who Level Up Gear’s Nin­tendo DS Ele­ment Tray is meant for.  Most of us who carry around our DS—a portable gam­ing handheld—keep it in some kind of case meant for, you know, porta­bil­ity.  I keep mine in my mes­sen­ger bag and pretty much always have it with me.  So what exactly is the point of this thing?  Do we really need cuphold­ers for extra sty­luses?  Also, how are you sup­posed to pick this thing up by its han­dle with­out all your loose games falling off?

Playsta­tion Ver­sus Game Tray

Another gem from Level Up Gear, this piece of plas­tic with a Playsta­tion logo slapped on it is sup­posed to be some kind of caddy for your PS3 con­trollers (or PS2 con­trollers, as their web­site so help­fully points out). Care­ful not to let any extra plas­tic go to waste, the Playsta­tion Ver­sus Game Tray also comes equipped with four awkwardly-positioned slots for hold­ing games; I guess there’s only room enough for the ones you play most often.

Video Game Stor­age System™

Note the trade­mark sym­bol.  I guess Game On wasn’t clever enough to come up with a unique prod­uct name, so they opted for the super generic sure-to-be-SEO-friendly “Video Game Stor­age Sys­tem” to describe what is essen­tially a plas­tic box with some hooks stuck to the sides.  While I can appre­ci­ate the sim­plic­ity of the design, what’s so insult­ing about this one is that it costs $60.  Really?  And for that price, this “sys­tem” doesn’t even have ade­quate air­flow or a way to hide your cables if you’re sup­posed to mount this thing on a wall.  For a good laugh, I rec­om­mend check­ing out their prod­uct demon­stra­tion video.

Step 2 Deluxe Video Center

Just look­ing at the Step 2 Deluxe Video Cen­ter pisses me off for some rea­son.  Maybe it’s the fact that it only fits 20″ tele­vi­sions, that it’s made entirely of plas­tic, or that the poor stock pho­tog­ra­phy sub­jects who can’t pos­si­bly both be play­ing a single-player FPS at the same time—but nice try!  For the $150 price tag, you could go out and buy a real piece of furniture.

System-Specific Game Disc Stands

Do we really need to have game disc hold­ers that match each console—especially ones that only hold 12 games? Ever heard of a shelf?

Who is buy­ing this stuff??

Indie Games Radar: TRAUMA, Vessel, Atom Zombie Smasher

Indie Games Radar is a pre­view of new and upcom­ing inde­pen­dent games that I’m really excited about.

TRAUMA

Devel­oper: Krys­t­ian Majew­ski
Plat­form: PC, browser-based
Release Date: End of August 2011?

“TRAUMA tells a story of a young woman, who sur­vives a car acci­dent. Recov­er­ing at the hos­pi­tal, she has dreams that shed light on dif­fer­ent aspects of her iden­tity — such as the way she deals with the loss of her par­ents. TRAUMA lets you expe­ri­ence those dreams in an inter­ac­tive way, rem­i­nis­cent of Point-and-Click Adven­ture Games. It builds upon this estab­lished for­mula by intro­duc­ing a gesture-based inter­face, real-time 3D tech­nol­ogy for dynamic level lay­outs, unique pho­to­graphic visu­als and a level design phi­los­o­phy that focuses on cre­at­ing a rich expe­ri­ence rather than an elab­o­rate puz­zle chal­lenge. Com­bined with the uncon­ven­tional story, it is aimed to be a com­pact and deep game for a lit­er­ate and mature audience.”

Ves­sel

Devel­oper: Strange Loop Games
Plat­form: PC & Con­sole
Release Date: TBD

“Ves­sel is a 2d action and puz­zle game played in a phys­i­cally sim­u­lated world, built on a physics and fluid engine fea­tur­ing the unique abil­ity to sim­u­late char­ac­ters com­posed entirely of fluid.

Ark­wright, inven­tor of the world famous Fluro (mechanized-fluid automa­ton) is on a quest to fin­ish his next great inven­tion – The Device – that will alter exis­tence in unimag­in­able ways.

Travel to dif­fer­ent indus­trial sites that use Arkwright’s Fluro inven­tion to run their machin­ery. The Fluros, thought to be life­less machines, are some­how devel­op­ing minds of their own, mutat­ing into new forms and run­ning amok. It is up to Ark­wright to under­stand (and exploit) these strange evo­lu­tions, and apply what has emerged in the field back to his lab work at home. Gather these evolved Fluros and machin­ery and bring them back to Arkwright’s lab to fin­ish his grand invention.

Explore phys­i­cally mod­eled worlds, solve puz­zles by con­trol­ling fluid and machines, and har­ness the power of the mys­te­ri­ous ‘Fluro’ crea­tures that pop­u­late the land.”

Atom Zom­bie Smasher

Devel­oper: Blendo Games
Plat­form: PC
Release Date: Avail­able Now

“The only thing pre­vent­ing the zom­bie apoc­a­lypse is…90 mil­lion tons of nuclear warheads…and you.”  Atom Zom­bie Smasher is a zom­biepoca­lypse game that com­bines real-time strat­egy with clas­sic tower defense.

Is Sony’s “Welcome Back” Package Enough to Make You Forgive Them?

Unless you have been liv­ing under a rock for the past month, you know that Sony has been bat­tling a series of gigan­tic secu­rity breaches, affect­ing more than 100 mil­lion users.  The large-scale hack attacks were respon­si­ble for the month-long down­time of the Playsta­tion Net­work and the theft of a stag­ger­ing amount of PSN users’ per­sonal and finan­cial data from across the globe.  Even as Sony rebuilds its infra­struc­ture and slowly gets back on its feet, addi­tional attacks and new secu­rity issues con­tinue to cause fur­ther delays.  For now, at least, the Playsta­tion Net­work is back online and mil­lions of gamers are recov­er­ing from withdraw.

This week, Sony pro­vided details on its blog for the Playsta­tion Net­work and Qri­oc­ity Cus­tomer Appre­ci­a­tion Pro­gram, oth­er­wise known as Sony’s “wel­come back” (read: “please love us again”)  pack­age.  If you have a PSN account, here’s what you will get:

All PlaySta­tion Net­work cus­tomers can select two PS3 games from the fol­low­ing list. The games will be avail­able for 30 days shortly after PlaySta­tion Store is restored and can be kept forever.

• Dead Nation
• inFA­MOUS
• Lit­tleBig­Planet
• Super Star­dust HD
• Wipe­out HD + Fury

For PSP own­ers, you will be eli­gi­ble to down­load two PSP games from the fol­low­ing list. The games will be avail­able for 30 days shortly after PlaySta­tion Store is restored and can be kept forever.

• Lit­tleBig­Planet (PSP)
• Mod­Na­tion Racers
• Pur­suit Force
• Kil­l­zone Liberation

• A selec­tion of “On Us” rental movie titles will be avail­able to PlaySta­tion Net­work cus­tomers over one week­end, where Video Ser­vice is avail­able. Those titles will be announced soon.
• 30 days free PlaySta­tion Plus mem­ber­ship for non PlaySta­tion Plus subscribers.
• Exist­ing PlaySta­tion Plus sub­scribers will receive an addi­tional 60 days of free subscription.
• Exist­ing Music Unlim­ited Pre­mium Trial sub­scrip­tion mem­bers will receive an addi­tional 30 days of free pre­mium subscription.
• Addi­tional 30 days + time lost for exist­ing mem­bers of Music Unlim­ited Premium/Basic sub­scrip­tion free of charge for exist­ing Premium/Basic members.
• To wel­come users Home, PlaySta­tion Home will be offer­ing 100 free vir­tual items. Addi­tional free con­tent will be released soon, includ­ing the next addi­tion to the Home Man­sion per­sonal space, and Ooblag’s Alien Casino, an exclu­sive game.

Per­son­ally, I would have liked a longer list of games to choose from, although I under­stand that it’s up to the par­tic­i­pat­ing pub­lish­ers who con­tributed to this pack­age.  I’m going to go with Infa­mous and Super Star­dust HD myself, which are two games I’ve been want­ing to play.  But I do feel sorry for the Sony gamers who have already pur­chased every game on this list, as there’s quite a few of them out there.  It was bound to hap­pen with all of these titles being so pop­u­lar.  The rest of the free­bies on this list seem pretty lack­lus­ter to me.

What do you think? Is Sony doing enough to buy back your affection?

How To Clean Up Pre-owned Games and Make Them Look (Almost) New

Being a gamer is an expen­sive hobby. There’s always a ton of new games to buy, new sys­tems, DLC, periph­er­als,  acces­sories, sub­scrip­tions…  To help keep costs down, I try to buy pre-owned games when I can—especially the titles that have been on my radar for a while, but I never quite got around to play­ing.  When GameStop is run­ning a “Buy One, Get One” or “Buy Two, Get One” pro­mo­tion, I’m usu­ally all over it.   (By the way, don’t you just hate the term “pre-owned”?)

If you don’t mind own­ing games sec­ond­hand, you can get some good deals this way.  Unfor­tu­nately, buy­ing used also means your game’s case and paper insert are likely to be cov­ered in mul­ti­ple lay­ers of price tags, stick­ers and gunky residue. It’s enough to make the col­lec­tor in me twitch.

Here’s how you can clean up your pre-owned games and make them look (almost) new.

What You’ll Need:

• A bot­tle of Goo Gone
• Roll of paper towels
• A plas­tic scraper tool, or your fin­ger­nail (if it’s long and sturdy enough)

Before

Here’s some “before” pic­tures of Lit­tle Big Planet, one of the used games I started with:

There was even a sticker on the game’s paper insert.  GameStop is espe­cially guilty of putting stick­ers here, whichreally pisses me off.  But that’s OK; we can take care of it.

Step 1: First, wrap a paper towel around your index fin­ger and wet it with a few squirts of Goo Gone. (It’s safe for skin con­tact, and even has a pleas­ant lemon-fresh scent!)

Step 2: Apply the moist­ened paper towel directly to the sticker.  Press down hard all over the sticker to make the Goo Gone pen­e­trate the lay­ers of paper; usu­ally there’s a glossy top layer and a thin, fuzzy back­ing (which is the crap that leaves the most residue).

For extremely stub­born residue, you might need to pour Goo Gone directly on the sticker, com­pletely sat­u­rat­ing it:

Step 3: Gen­tly peel away the  sticker with your fin­ger­nail or plas­tic scraper tool.  I would rec­om­mend NOT using a razor blade, which could acci­den­tally pierce right through the plas­tic case.  Rub the edges until you can slip your fin­ger­nail or scraper under­neath, then slowly and gen­tly scrape until the sticker comes off; if you’re lucky, in one piece.

Step 4: You’ll most likely have a fine layer of sticky gunk left behind on the case when after remov­ing the sticker, like this:

Dampen another paper towel with more Goo Gone and rub it all over the sticky sur­face.  The Goo Gone will remove all the tiny bits of crap.  Keep pol­ish­ing the plas­tic with the moist­ened paper towel until the sur­face is smooth and shiny.

Step 5: If there are stick­ers on your game’s cover insert (the hor­ror!), you’ll need to remove it from the plas­tic case.

Step 6: This part is tricky, and much harder than remov­ing stick­ers on the plas­tic case because you won’t be able to use Goo Gone, which could dam­age the paper.  With your fin­ger­nail or scraper, slowly and gen­tly scrape at the edges of the sticker until it starts to “roll up” under your nail or scraper edge.  Work from the edges toward the cen­ter of the sticker, rolling it up bit by bit until you can peel it away.

The cover inserts are pretty glossy, so usu­ally the sticker will come off clean, as long as you’re careful…it’s just an annoy­ingly slow process.  Put the cover insert back inside of the plas­tic case when it’s clean.

After

Ta-da! When you’re all fin­ished, you should have a rel­a­tively new-looking game before you:

Of course, there’s a cou­ple of things you can do while you’re shop­ping to avoid sticker frus­tra­tion and buy the newest-looking games pos­si­ble. Here are some tips:

• Closely inspect the games before you buy them. Is the cover insert torn? Are there scratches or frayed edges on the plas­tic cover?  Try to find the newest-looking copy you can.  At GameStop, the game box you pull of the shelf is the one you’re tak­ing home.
• If a game doesn’t have a cover or book­let (or both), don’t buy it. There’s usu­ally mul­ti­ple copies of the same game float­ing around, some with and some with­out all the pack­ag­ing.  And retard­edly, they’re usu­ally the same price no mat­ter what con­di­tion they’re in.
• Test-peel the stick­ers while you’re still in the store to see if they seem like they’ll come off cleanly. Avoid the boxes with mul­ti­ple lay­ers of sticker build-up and go for the ones that look like they haven’t been sit­ting on the shelves for months on end.

Yes, I real­ize this all seems a bit anal-retentive, but when you love your games as much as I do and enjoy show­ing off your col­lec­tion, it’s worth tak­ing the extra time to make ‘em look shiny and new.  And who doesn’t love shiny things?