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Whenever I have a conversation with someone about Atlus and the games the notoriously niche publisher puts out, the conversation always devolves into some permutation of, "Yeah, but how do they make money?" For as great as many of Atlus' titles are, the company almost exclusively deals in oddball Japanese role-playing nonsense that treads pretty far off the beaten (mostly beaten by Square Enix) path of games that American audiences acknowledge the existence of, let alone actively want to play.

After reading today's news that Catherine, the Q*Bert-meets-anime/mumblecore game Atlus mostly recently brought to American audiences, sold 200,000 units in its first week of retail. Now, to be fair, this information comes from Atlus' Twitter feed, and specifically from a picture of a cake. In celebration of the milestone, this cake had the sales numbers emblazoned in icing for all to see.

Unfortunately, as we all know, cakes are by far the most unreliable of all desert treats, known for providing consistently apocryphal information and constantly double-dealing for the pursuit of their own nefarious gains. Perhaps if this information had come on some manner of pie, or spelled out in chocolate chip cookies, then we could rely upon it. But a cake? They're like the Robert Ford of deserts.

Seriously though, whatever you may have taken away from the experience of Catherine, it's always good to see games outside the mainstream norm of "shoot that guy" and "stab that dude" find success. Given the massive retail disappointments that were Child of Eden and Shadows of the Damned, this does at least give us some hope that Japanese weirdness can still succeed in America. Especially if there's marketing for it.

Okay, Internet! Okay. I’ll play The Stanley Parable. Jeez, I’ll play so you’ll stop hassling me. I’ve got tea to drink and stuff, y’know. I mean so what, yes, it is my kind of thing. And I do like wry and creepy first-person games, and The Stanley Parable is one of those peculiar story-driven, non-linear, thought-provoking, brilliant-constructed, acutely clever, well-writeen mods that we love to post about, but some of us want to sit about watching Chinese action movies at ten o’clock at night, and totally don’t have time to download 450mb of Half-Life 2 mod (which you only actually need Source SDK to play) and then wander through corridors figuring out what the hell is going on, and smiling all the while at that incredible voiceover.

It’s brilliant. Exquisite, even. I can’t spoil it by talking about it, but there’s a trailer below, if you want to take a look. But you shouldn’t look. You should play it.(more…)

if you already bought Bundle 3 before 2 was added, or if you pay over the average now (which is rapidly going up).
This is good because I didn't really want Bundle 3, but I missed out on the second bundle.

I guess those who already had Bundle 2 now have a bunch of games to gift.

Well, I just recieved an email from Nintendo explaining the system in a little more detail.

In order to qualify for the free games, you need to visit the 3DS eShop at least once before 23:59 CET on August 11th. This registers your 3DS for the giveaway. On September 1st the first 10 games will then be made available to all registered consoles, with the second set of 10 being made available sometime by the end of the year.

There's also a video in the eShop at the moment that repeats all of this information if you want to hear it for yourself.

in the meantime, you can look at the funny man on the right side of this picture

'later losers

Detroit has succumbed to total anarchy

http://www.pathguy.com/cg35.htm

This time, I'm the dungeon master. We voted, and decided to play 3.5. As far as I can tell, three players have signed up already. Use the link for character creation. I want you to stick with races, classes and spells from the following sourcebooks:

Complete Adventurer
Complete Arcane
Complete Divine
Complete Psionic
Complete Warrior
Expanded Psionics Handbook
Dungeon Master's Guide 3.5
Dungeon Master's Guide II
Monster Manual 3.5
Monster Manual II
Monster Manual III
Player's Handbook 3.5
Player's Handbook II

Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords

Most Forgotten Realms material

You may use any race that is outlined in those books, so long as it has stats for player characters and does not have a level adjustment of more than +0. If you don't want Psionics in the campaign, get a few people to bitch at me enough and I'll ban it.

Current Players With Approved Characters:

RaveRaze

Bremmy

Flavio

Popple

Tails Doll

DarkBlueAce