Today’s video of the day comes from the PlayStation 2 game, 24. The game was released in 2006 and in terms of cannon occurred between Day 2 and Day 3 of television show. The coolest thing about this game was the cut scenes and the voice acting. The voice acting was done by the real cast members and the cut scenes were well done both in visual and sound effects and storytelling.

In the game, you had various tasks to stop critical events from assassination to terrorism to an attack on CTU.  Most of the game was a third person perspective where you controlled Jack or one of the other CTU agents, but there were driving sections, sniper missions and mini-games like hacking into a computer, decrypting a code or interrogating a suspect.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now the game had some faults, mainly the driving that was subpar and the computer AI was not the best, but overall it was a decent game for the PS2. As far as our video, it features all the cut scenes from the game and has a runtime of just under 90 minutes so make sure you have time to watch it all. If you like 24 it is worth it.

How we got to Free-2-Play

Anyone even the least bit interested in the world of MMO’s has seen many games released or converted to free-2-play. Often it is looked upon as a sign that a game has failed when it switches from a monthly subscription to free-2-play, the only exception might be for very old games like Everquest. However, recent reports have shown that free-2-play is a smart business move, not only for those games that struggled with subscriptions, but those who start off free-2-play as well.

So how did we get here, simple, too much product, and not enough people willing to buy it. Remember when Everquest was released there was only one other well-known MMO which was Ultima Online. Once games like, Dark Age of Camelot was released the thought was it would split the player base or some would pick one over the other. Not many, besides wishful sales people and marketers believed a large number would choose to play and pay for both.

As more games were released, many wondered what would be the lasting effect. Since there were still dominant games the idea was that the others would become more niche and could make just enough to turn a profit, but the giants would rule the MMO world. That theory was reinforced when World of Warcraft was released and you still had many other MMO’s on the market including Linage, City of Heroes, Everquest 1 & 2 and more.

It was the Korean MMO’s that used the free-2-play model first namely because there were so many being released and they discovered people were more willing to spend a few dollars at a time then one lump monthly payment. This allowed people to play multiple games and still feel as if they are paying less even though many ended up spending more than a monthly fee would cost in A la Carte selections.

As even more games came onto the market and with so many people playing World of Warcraft more scrutiny was put on new games. A high bar was set and gamers had no problem leaving in mass after the first or second month if a game did not perform the way they wanted or expected. During this time, we saw many games fail and some even shut down, most notably, Asheron’s Call 2 and The Matrix Online.

Many companies needed a way to keep a game afloat if it did not launch well and free-2-play became that way. Just like the 99-cent mp3 or application for your mobile phone sales people realized people would spend if it was in small increments. You might not pay 15 bucks a month for EQ2, but you might play it for free and then buy a horse for 4 bucks here and a piece of armor for 2 bucks there and by the end of the month you might have spent more than 15. Not only that, but by spending real money many people became more attached to their character and stayed longer with a game or came back from time to time to purchase more.

Now we have even newly released games such as DC Online Universe going free to play with many other big name MMO’s following suit. Could we see a giant like WoW turn free-2-play? Perhaps more U.S. based MMO’s will start launching free-2-play. Only time will tell, but the model is here to stay and is working, not only for the companies, but for the players as well and as long as that continues so will the trend.

Now, on with the Fapp!

Sneak King was one of three different games that Burger King offered back in 2006. I think you could purchase then for $2.99 with a value meal or something like that. In this game, the objective is to sneak up on people and deliver Burger King Burgers to them. Personally, I rather sneak up and deliver sausages but that is just me.

The gameplay works like this, you are in what they call a “sandbox”, which is a set area where you can walk around freely. You will see various people walking around and as they get hungry, a hunger icon will appear above their heads. Now I have no idea why you would need to sneak up on a hungry person to give them food, but that is exactly what you do.

Now like in games like Metal Gear Solid the idea is to stay out of their cone of vision. You can sneak up from behind, but the King makes a lot of noise so you have to be careful of that as well. You can also hide in places like garbage cans, (seriously, would you accept food from a guy popping out of a garbage can, what is this Final Fight?) or other such places.

So you can earn points for delivering fast or hiding versus sneaking. Also, the hunger meter starts blue and then turns red. If you wait too long to deliver the food the person passes out for a while. Now why are there hungry people walking around until they pass out, I dunno. Even stranger is if you time your food delivery just before they pass out you earn more points, way to care about humanity, Burger King.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This game has 80 challenges and once you finish them call you get a, Stealth Suit Overall, if you get this game for free or a few bucks maybe the weirdness is good enough to warranty the purchase, but don’t expect great graphics or long lasting gameplay.

Battleship will be in theaters in just about a week and leading up to the movie Coke Zero has launched Battle for Everything, which is a tower defense game that you can play for free and earn rewards. We had a chance to chat with the GTTV host about Battleship, Battle for Everything and even classic gaming. Check out our video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Battle For Everything is a tower defense game packed with unique twists and alien battles by sea, land and air to save planet Earth. It was created by Coke Zero as part of its sponsorship of Battleship, which hits theaters May 18. Gamers can use My Coke Rewards points to access additional levels and upgrade weapons for the chance to win exclusive prizes, including Coke Zero coupons, movie tickets, concert tickets, dream vacations and more. My Coke Rewards points can be found on 12-, 16- and 20-ounce bottles, fridge packs and 24-packs of Coke Zero and other Coca-Cola products.

Check out Amanda’s Gamer Profile.

You can view the latest Battleship trailer and play the tower defense game at Battle for Everything dot com.

A friend of mine showed me this cool mobile game that is in development right now. In fact if you head on over to Rocket Hub you can help support the project. So, Make it Rain is not a mini game for Everquest Druids (if you get the joke give yourself 500 points). In this game, you play the role of strip club patron with too much disposable income and a need to attention. Your goal is to rain money onto the dancing girl making sure most of it falls directly on the stage.

Check out J.A. Laraque’s video review:

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can check out the game and play a preview at Main it Rain Game dot com.

We’re marking the 20^th Anniversary of Wolfenstein 3D, the original, and now legendary, game that launched the first person shooter genre by releasing a free-to-play browser version of the game. You can now play the classic PC game directly in browser at: wolfenstein.bethsoft.com or on the Wolfenstein Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/wolfenstein.

Check out J.A. Laraque playing some Wolf 3D.

While you’re on the site, check out our Bethesda Podcast video featuring John Carmack, technical director of id Software, as he shares his insights into the creation and the development of Wolfenstein 3D while playing the game.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Later today, (Bethsoft) will also be offering Wolfenstein 3D Classic Platinum, available on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, free for a limited time. To download Wolfenstein 3D Classic Platinum from iTunes visit: this link.

This week’s Fapp is dedicated to the awesome Avengers movie, if you haven’t seen it yet, go, it’s awesome. By the way, all these characters were in the Avengers comics at one time or another, trust us we looked it up to be sure.

You need to Grow Up

The title is fitting in a post titled, “Fappathon”, but this is about the idea that those who play games past a certain age need to grow up. Now with more and more people playing some form of games you do hear it less, but there are still many who see anyone past their low twenties playing a game and think that they need to grow up.

Sure, there are those who take it too far. If you are skipping work, neglecting your hygiene or health or your kids or education then fine. For most of us it is the same as watching television, talking on the phone or building a model airplane, (Do people still do that?).

Games are a form of entertainment just like anything else and one should not give it up because the reach a certain age. I think far too often we think becoming an adult means following the herd. Perhaps you were not made to be married with three kids, a crappy job and an angry wife by age 30. Maybe you will work in your office job playing PC games in your spare time and hopefully live a happy life.

No one should tell you how to enjoy your own time, again, unless you are hurting someone by doing so and I mean really hurting them. Your crazy girlfriend who thinks you should be spending your game time walking her pet cat Mr. Whiskers does not count. However, always remember to play with the pussycat or you won’t have a girlfriend for long.

Hold on to your balls my gamers and this goes for the girl gamers too who has that, one in a million weird boyfriend who hates on you for being a gamer girl. Dump him and call me, I co-own a gaming website. Seriously, though, everyone deserves to have the time to do what they enjoy and for many of us that is a video game. You don’t have to completely understand why we like it, we will never understand why you love Jersey Shore, but we hold our nose as we go in the next room so do us a favor and just do the same when we load up Diablo 3.

Now, on with the Fapp.

Normally when someone says, “This game sucks,” It is a bad thing. In this case, it is the main goal of a weird PlayStation 2 game that came out in 2002. Mister Mosquito is one of those games that in Japan makes way more sense than in the U.S. In this game, you play as a mosquito that lives in the home of the Yamada family. Your job is to suck and store up blood for the winter by biting the family members on specific parts of their body.

Now this might sound easy, but only certain areas are bitable and you must watch your stress meter while sucking blood. If you suck to fast or too slow, you can stress your victim out and if that happens you are dead. (Seriously, I could go so lowbrow with the sucking too fast or too slow, but I will let it be just this once.) In addition, if you are flying around and are spotted you enter a battle mode where you need to avoid being killed while hitting pressure points on your attacker to calm them down. (I wish my mosquitos did this.)

A strange game indeed this is, but for you perverts out there, there is a level where you have to suck blood from a girl in the bathtub. (No, I’m not kidding.) How many of you are going to either go play this or look up Youtube footage right now?

Click here to view the embedded video.

You know we got you covered.

The end of Video Game Stores?

The question many have is will there still be video game stores within the next five years. I think the answer is yes, but how many will there be and how will they look? When more and more people began ordering their comic books online or even reading them there some comic book stores took a hit.  However, there was still that loyalty and personal touch that keep people going in. Perhaps that is what will happen with video game stores.

With outlets like Steam, Origin and Windows Marketplace there are less and less reasons to buy a game at a retailer. Sure, some people want the box or items inside be it manuals or a collector’s addition and that is the same as the comic book customer who wants to be there in the store picking out their comic, looking for new ones and talking shop with the people there.

Now big chain stores that sell other items will still keep major hits in stock because someone will buy a game while picking up an HDTV, but what about the chain video game store? We have already seen many close, but thanks to reselling of old games and the need to quickly by a controller or battery I could see a good number of them surviving. Perhaps we will see a merger where video game stores offer more as less people will have media to trade in.

So is this a good thing, to be able to get your media online at any time or do you need to have the disk in your hand and know you can return it or trade it in? With the new consoles coming out rumor is that disks are on the way out and soon everything will be downloadable in one manner or another. How many of you would notice, how many would care?

On with the Fapp.

Check out this awesome documentary on Sonic. The 36-minute video tells the history behind Sega’s iconic blue hedgehog and the war between Sega and Nintendo.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It kind of saddens me that I even have to write this, but like the signs put on coffee warning you that it is hot you have to know who some of your audience is. There have been some comments about Fappathon where people think they are being lessened to just a piece of meat and even the name is offensive.

We get that, but just like the website name, you need to look at what is really being said. As far as the website, it should be obvious we do not think these great games are obsolete in any sense of the word. However, by most people they are looked upon that way. Try talking about a classic game that either doesn’t have a remake or isn’t Pac-Man and see how many most modern gamers know about.

Our goal is to bring together classic gamers from all walks of life so hopefully we can all reminisce and even enjoy these classic games again because there are so many great games that even though they may be ten or twenty years old are worth playing.

As far as Fappathon, I came up with the name after writing for SpoonCraft, which is a World of Warcraft and MMO news site. We used to laugh because so much traffic would come from posts where he would post pictures of hot women while some great news articles and editorials received little. We joked that they must log on at 3am for a Fapp session and from that, Fappathon was born.

We wanted to focus on mainly video game cosplay and it is not just about how hot the woman is, it is also about the costume itself. We understand all the work that goes into a costume and believe me we pass up or reject a ton of pictures so think of being featured in an article like showing up in a popularity list.

Obviously with a picture post it will be hard to show how much we are into video game related cosplay, but believe me, we are. As far as mixing men and women or creating an all-male Fappathon, we have a standing call out to our female writers that if they are interested in putting together one we will be happy to publish it. However, at the end of the days we are a bunch of geeks so you won’t be seeing male Fappathon’s from me.

One last thing, the Anti-Fapp on our sister site Obscure Internet, that is totally to troll you bad cosplayers and we do not apologize for that. As a big guy myself I am not going to dress up in tight spandex unless I want to be trolled. You put yourself out there, you deal with the peanut gallery, it is a truthism of the internet.

Now on with the Fapp!

A super-sized edition of the Fapp this week featuring pictures of cosplays from Pax East 2012. It seems the report about banning cosplayers was not quite 100%, however we did find a lot of cosplayers that would make it into the anti-fapp so stay tuned to our sister site Obscure Internet for that one. For now, enjoy the Fapp!

I loved this game from the moment I saw it at the arcade. The Punisher has all the action I loved from Capcom’s Final Fight with the added bonus of Marvel characters and you can shoot a bunch of guns to boot. The gameplay is pretty simple. Your goal is to fight with either The Punisher or Nick Fury though a ton of bad guys on your way to kill the Kingpin.

You punch and kick your away though various bad guys and bosses and have a slew of weapons to choose from to take them out from lead pipes to tires to baseball bats. One of the coolest parts for me is when you can use your gun and take out as many enemies as possible, although, Punisher would just do that all the time.

The game is pretty simple in that if you are used to fighting games of this type you know not to get surrounded, used weapons whenever you can and hold out on using health replenishers until the last possible moment. Honestly, the only cheesy boss is the Kingpin himself, which makes sense.

Click here to view the embedded video.

All in all a great arcade game.

If they had a game like this in typing class, I would have stayed awake. The Typing of the Dead is considered more of a mod or remake because of how closely it is to House of the Dead 2. The game plays just like the first-person rail shooter where your mission is to take out zombies, but instead of a gun, you use your keyboard.

No, seriously, each zombie or monster has a word and you must type out the word fast enough to kill it. How does it know you typed the word or if you spelled it right? I think those questions asked means you are sympathetic to the zombie cause so shut up and play!

Click here to view the embedded video.

As far as bosses, you will have to type out answers to questions and for the final boss there are alternate endings if you type out different answers. I think we need a season of The Walking Dead that covers this.

A special edition of Fappathon featuring Easter inspired cosplay. O.K., Fine, it’s an excuse to show hot girls in bunny outfits and pictures of Jessica Rabbit cosplayers, can you blame us?

With this years selection of awesome cosplay I only wonder why I wasn’t there.

Going through my thousands of M.A.M.E. games, I wanted to search for really weird games that people might not know about. There are definitely a lot of them, but today’s weird game come from the PC-Engine.

The game is called Toilet Kids and is about a kid who goes to the restroom in the middle of the night and gets sucked in. The kid wakes up in a world where everyone looks like toilet fixtures and he has to fight his way out. One of the best things is the boss of the game is called Urinal, seriously I could not make this stuff up.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Most of the time your demo stations did not work and sometimes you only showed the opening video of a game (dick). The man behind the counter was mean and creepy and smell of failure. Oh Funco Land, I got you back one day when I sold my copy of Double Dragon to a lady about to buy it from you for half price of what you were selling it for and triple what you would have paid me for it. Alas, it was my only victory against you as most battles and the war belonged to you. Rest in peace my old nemesis I have a new abusive soul in my life named Gamestop.

Thanks to FamicomFreak from Retro Gaming Life for the scans!

This week Fappathon is dedicated to all the cosplayers donning their military garb. It doesn’t matter if it is from Call of Duty, Battlefield, G.I. Joe or even Anime if you look good in it we are all for it.

This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, “Boom! Head Shot!”.

Why oh why did you suggest this game, I woke up so happy considering it was a Monday and then I thought to myself, “Self, you need to get some gameplay footage of, Sinistar.” Now, my day is ruined and I know nightmares will visit me tonight.

Fine, this Sinistar is an evil arcade game released by Williams Electronics in 1982. The overall theme is you are a lone space pilot fighting waves of enemies while trying to mine planetoids for Sinisite Crystals, which you need to make Sinibombs to destroy the Sinistar. Does all this remind you of the 60’s Batman, with the Bat Shark Spray and such?

So, when you mine these crystals other fighters try to take you out while workers also try to mine the crystals to build the Sinistar. Once the Sinistar is built, it trolls you by calling you a coward and telling you to run. How am I the coward if he can one-shot me, but it takes 13 Cinnabon’s, er, I mean Sinibombs to kill him?

Now in the above video you see me running around like a chicken with its head cut off not properly mining the crystals and then promptly being owned by that dammed Sinistar. Now check out a better player who runs circles around him.

Enough of this game and damn you Travis Mikalson from our Facebook Fan page for suggesting this.

Cadillac’s and Dinosaurs is a fighting game released in the arcades during the spring of 1993. The game plays almost exactly like Final Fight except you have Cadillac’s and Dinosaurs, oh and guns which you really did not see much in FF.

The game has four different characters to choose from all with their own fighting style, special move and ability like using items for more effect. Besides that, the game is a typical Capcom fighter where you fight wave after wave of bad guys trying not to get surrounded and using your weapons at the right time.

I found the game easier than Final Fight at least in the first stages because there is plenty of food that falls out of oil drums and garbage cans. Also, most of the normal enemies are pretty stupid and if you played FF you know how to beat them easily. The bosses as usual have way too much health, but again, they are not too hard especially if you have a weapon.

That is what I really liked about this game, the tons of guns, knives and explosives you use. Also, the game has blood and scenes like butchers chopping up Dinosaurs, oh any they punch them to in order to enrage them, PITA would be so pissed.

Thanks to Dominic Mason from our Facebook Fan page for suggesting this game.

Now you would think since you can fly anywhere, even off of the screen, it would be easy, but it’s not. First, I had a handicap which was the sound did not work. Second, and this is normal gameplay mechanics, the thrusters take a bit to get used to and you cannot just stop and turn on a dime so the result is you end up coasting into mines or not moving out of the way of the cannon fire fast enough.

Now, something to keep in mind, which I did not know, your goal is not to destroy the entire outer shield because if you do it will regenerate. This makes the game harder because you want to hit the same spots and make a small window in the shield to take out the cannon. As you can see in the video, I was not very good at this.

Overall, this game is pretty fun and like all classic games of this type if you do take out the cannon you start all over, but with more mines and faster shots from the cannon, but definitely a fun game and a great time waster.

Thanks to Mike Taylor for suggesting this game to try.

We are counting down to E3 2012 with a look back to cosplay from other events. These are from this years PAX East convention.