Watching Claptrap break it down to dubstep makes me very happy. WUB WUB indeed! Game launches on September 18th.

Regardless of its potential threat to humanity, the folks at Steam decided it would be a good chance to have a 33%-off sale on the recently released iD game, Rage, with the coupon code ‘”2005 YU55″ LOL.’ Now, it may just be me, but rubbing the little asteroid’s face in the fact that it just missed us by ‘laughing out loud’ seems to smack a bit of hubris. But hey, if you can’t laugh at potentially hazardous space objects wiping out large groups of people, what can you laugh at?

There’s always next time.

While I love rhythm and music games such as Dance Dance Revolution and Rock Band, I had decided to pass on the DJ Hero series (especially after Activision killed it.) Frankly though, I’m glad to have picked it up — it is a thoroughly fun and engaging experience… and that turntable doesn’t take up nearly as much room as five or six plastic instruments!

So, if you have a Big Lots in your area, go check it out. The one here in Nashville had over a dozen for the Wii and only a couple for the 360. (And after you get it, challenge me to a DJ battle! My gamertag, as always, is SCAD.)

The process is a bit obscure; you have to enter Settings in the eShop, then click ‘Your Downloads,’ and finally download all of the games from there with the ‘Redownload’ icon. If you get confused, head over to Nintendo’s official page explaining all things Ambassador.

Now, if you’ll excuse me… I now have an excuse (and easy means) to play Zelda II again. Maybe this time I’ll actually finish it!

If the multiplayer’s mechanics are essentially getting an update (by staying with the new Reach standard), then why not the campaign as well? 343 says they wanted to stay true to the original Halo as much as possible, and have done so by retaining the engine from Combat Evolved so that it plays exactly the same. I fail to grasp the logic in this move. If someone wants to play the original Halo, they likely still have the disc (which works fine in the Xbox 360) or they can buy it through Xbox Originals. All 343 and Certain Affinity have done is throw a shiny new veneer over the old game, and they even let you toggle to the decade-old graphics if you so choose.

This just seems lazy to me. Don’t get me wrong; I know the artists and technicians worked hard to pretty the old girl up, but shouldn’t we expect more of remakes? Take the Resident Evil remake as an example. On top of the stellar new graphics, they also overhauled the gameplay, changed puzzles, updated the storyline and played with the mansion’s layout, even going as far as to add new areas. When a movie is remade, most fans don’t want a shot-by-shot duplicate with better visual fidelity, but instead a re-imagining with new characters, new plot-devices, new music and sounds. The same holds true with games. If a remake is to be truly new, it must have new and changed gameplay along with the visual upgrades.

Halo Reach, in my opinion, is a pinnacle in the refinement of Halo’s mechanics. Were Halo Anniversary to be a completely new experience, I think the engine from Reach (and not just the visuals) should have been imported. Now, I don’t think that armor abilities should have carried over, for instance, but the intricacies of movement and aiming are honed so finely that I think it will actually be fairly jarring for people to go back to one that’s a decade old.

Halo Anniversary is just a disappointing product, and I think Microsoft knows this or else they wouldn’t be pricing it at $39.99 on release-day. I also understand that 343 is hard at work on Halo 4, so they probably just couldn’t take the time to remake Halo CE in its entirety… which is a shame. I guess the price-cost analysis said it would be better to do a quick remake that raving Halo fans are sure to buy for 40 bucks, than a full remake that the same amount of people would buy for only $20 more.

Whatever the case, I’ll be getting some hands-on time with Halo Anniversary this weekend at PAX’s Halo Fest, so check back for my afterthoughts on that.

You can join the undead Bachmann (don’t worry, all political leaning goes right out the window once you start eating people) by visiting my gig on Fiverr.com — I will draw you as a zombie for $5!