Mario Warfare Episode 1 Released December 12, 2012

Did you ever wonder what would happen if the story of Super Mario was depicted a little bit more, realistically?  Or perhaps, you just wanted to see heroes like Mario and Toad fighting with guns and kung-fu.  Well, Beatdown Boogie, the makers of Modern War Gear Solid, has just released exactly what you want!

The first episode of the highly anticipated independently made fanfilm Mario Warfare was released to the internet yesterday, and it is just amazing.  The film takes all the classic characters that we remember from the Mario series and completely turns the Mushroom Kingdom on its head, as King Koopa prepares to attack.  Just who will defend them, and who will rescue the Princess?

This fanfilm was in production for quite some time.  It was announced shortly after the conclusion of Modern War Gear Solid, and there was a lot of teaser material released about it, so people have been anticipating its release for months.  I was planning to include this as part of Mario Weekend, but since it wasn’t out yet at the time that happened, I decided not to mention the series during that event and instead to hold off talking about it until the first episode released.  Enjoy!

The Phantom Pain Spike VGA Trailer December 12, 2012

There was probably no game that showed at the VGAs this year that was more controversial or praised than The Phantom Pain. On the surface it looks like an entirely new concept for a game. You play a wounded war veteran who lost his hand and has no memory of who they are or where they came from. Meanwhile everyone is trying to kill you and the rest of your squad.

Now I would be remiss to mention that it seems like everyone on the internet believes this to be a hoax trailer and that in reality this is a trailer for Metal Gear Solid 5. People have noticed several clues sprinkled through the trailer as well as during the Spike Awards Show which give credibility to this theory. Before this trailer launched, no one had heard of Moby Dick Studio, who the trailer credits as their developer.

Two days ago when I tried to do a simple search on them, I could not find their website through Google (however that problem has since been cleared up). If Google hadn’t heard of them until recently, that would mean that their site was so new that it hadn’t been added to Google’s search algorithms yet. Also, the fact that the website has a .se extension has made it harder for me to look up just who owns it through the usual search channels.

In particular, Hideo Kojima himself was at the VGA event, and witnesses saw several people wearing Moby Dick Studio shirts in the Konami VIP area. This could be because Konami is publishing the game, or the game is simply using Konami’s technology. Many people online think the game could be using Kojima Team’s FOX Engine, the engine powering Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. The rhetoric is the same from the other Kojima FOX Engine game, that everything in the trailer is running in real-time and the game is currently running on a high-end PC but will be on the PS3 and Xbox 360.

The first name of the person credited to be the game’s project lead is Joakim, an anagram of Kojima, the father of Metal Gear. Although I have been told that Joakim is a very common Swedish name and that could just be a coincidence.

There have also been a few Twitter accounts that have popped up claiming to be Twitter accounts for Moby Dick Studios, and while they have been obviously set up to continue the running joke that Joakim and Kojima are the same person, the official Moby Dick Studio site has said that all of them are fakes.

The Phantom Pain is coming to the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.