♥ Harry Potter for Kinect - Walkthrough PART 1 Become the Real Harry Potter! (Game for Kids)

(2013) Harry Potter for Kinect - Walkthrough Gameplay Let's Play PART 1 Become the real Harry Potter! If you liked this game, don't forget to check other awe...

The Closest You'll Ever Come To Seeing A Real Pokemon Museum

Artist RJ Palmer has taken his "realistic" series of Pokemon illustrations and put them all on the one image, which is available as a poster.

I am so in love with the "human silhouette for scale" bit it's not funny. You knew you were onto a good thing as a kid when a dinosaur book had them in it. You knew you were onto a better thing when there was also the silhouette of a bus.

Pokemon [RJ Palmer]

Kotaku

Finally, A Collectible Character Game With Real Action

The mobile collectible card genre has exploded over the past year, with players shelling out big bucks for virtual cards with statistics assigned to them. Players for teams of heroes, demons, pirates or robots and take them into battle, which is generally nothing more than a quick stats comparison. What if a game in the genre had actual arcade gameplay? Why, then it would be Battlestone.

Battlestone began life as Golden Arrow, a much cooler-looking action game, which drew the attention of the folks at Zynga. Zynga purchased the developer, adding the group that worked on The Force Unleashed to their talent pool and transforming their game into a cartoony shadow of its former self.

The end result is Battlestone, a free-to-play game that marries the action role-playing genre with collectible card game mechanics. Instead of summoning cards, you summon different varieties of 3D heroes, each with its own strengths and abilities. You can still sacrifice lesser heroes to strengthen more useful ones, upgrading their stats. You can still join a guild and participate in special events. The difference is that instead of watching numbers clash on the screen, you're controlling your characters' movements directly.

Now before you get to any of that, be prepared to see quite a bit of this.

I could barely play the game for a minute the first time I downloaded it without having to wait 10-15 minutes for files to download. Instead of bringing the game down in one huge chunk, Zynga decided to try out streaming files. Hopefully it doesn't do that again.

Once you can get anywhere without a loading screen, the combat in Battlestone is quite simply and satisfying. You tap to move across the playfield, swiping enemies up close or from afar to initiate attacks. Each character in your party has special attacks they can use at regular intervals, from arrow flares to earthquakes. It's about as casual an action role-playing game as they come.

I just wish there was a little more meat to the story mode. It's laid out across a series of maps, each with a selection of short mission types — kill x number of creatures, find three keys to unlock a door — none of which take more than a couple of minutes to complete. Once the player completes all of the smaller missions to 100 percent (each much be performed multiple times, the difficulty increasing with each instance), a boss fight occurs. When that's done the day is saved, and the player gets a set of eponymous rocks to use to summon new warriors to their stable.

There's a multiplayer aspect to Battlestone, but it's very slim. Players are able to duel with AI representations of other players to win fame and more of them Battlestones. There's no direct interaction, and the battles are incredibly easy. I'm not really sure the feature is even necessary.

As with games in the collectible card game genre proper, the real joy in Battlestone is collecting characters and building the ultimate party. Using those characters in real combat, however simple it might be, is a truly welcome diversion.

Battlestone

• Genre: Collectible Character Action RPG
• Developer: November Software
• Platform: iOS
• Price: Free

Get Battlestone in iTunes

Kotaku

NCAA Football Used Tim Tebow's Real Name Before He Graduated

Real college football players' names are not supposed to appear in video games if they're still in school at the time they are published. But Tim Tebow's name slipped into NCAA Football 10, which came out during the Heisman Trophy winner's senior year at Florida.

Tebow still was called "QB#15" in the game itself, unless you edited the roster or downloaded one from someone else. This usage concerns a play available in the Florida playbook—"Shotgun Twin QB Tebow"—whose full name was visible only in a dynasty-mode feature that hasn't been in the game since. An SB Nation reader spotted it last week.

This is interesting because, as you may know, former college players are suing the NCAA and EA Sports over the unauthorized use of their likenesses in college football and basketball video games. Currently, NCAA Football's roster features performers whose heights, weights, ethnicities, uniform numerals and talent level generally conforms to the real world (especially for star performers) but does not use their names. The plaintiffs say they still are meaningfully recognizable in these games.

Tebow's name in a football play doesn't sound to me like a use of likeness though. As the playbook may be used for any team, the name plainly identifies a formation the movements of 11 players after the snap, not a specific performer on the field. As a frame of reference, the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series populates the leaderboard of its career events with all the real names of those currently on tour. Only two dozen tour pros are licensed to appear in that game this year. But the name-only references are fair enough, provided that's the extent of the representation. Even applying that name to a computer-drawn shot arc in a playoff scenario would be over the line.

What this does show is another example of those making NCAA Football 09 basing the game on real and current college performers. But we already knew that. Any thinking person, as I have said, knows Tim Tebow was "in" this game in 2009, and 2008, 2007 and 2006, along with his teammates and everyone else playing college ball at the time. But it's up to a court to make that into a finding of fact.

EA Sports Used Tim Tebow's Name in NCAA Football 10 [SB Nation]

Kotaku