When I was younger, like most kids, I had Michelangelo pegged as my favorite Ninja Turtle. He was the fun one, the cool one, the one that everyone wanted to be. But as I matured (as mature as you can get when still being a fan of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that is), I began to lean more and more towards Leonardo.

Of the four brothers he is the one who had to balance a father’s expectations along with brothers who were either immature, socially outcast or rebellious. He also has the most badass of any of the weapons.

In this new darker TMNT game coming to the PlayStation Network and XBLA this summer, Leonardo may very well be the first turtle I choose to be. In the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game his swords were second only to Donatello’s bo for range and damage and later iterations put in him the role as team leader amongst his band of brothers.

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If you’re close to my age, one of your favorite video game memories is most likely being in the arcade playing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game in all its side scrolling, beat-em-up glory. With the upcoming downloadable title Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, we may get to relive our past glory while a whole new generation gets to experience it for the first time (without pumping the arcade machine full of $27 in quarters.

In the latest trailer, we get to take a look at Michelangelo in action. The first thing you’ll notice is that the combat doesn’t resemble that of a simple brawler as the moves done by Mikey more closely mimic that of the Batman: Arkham franchise. Combat looks to have a dynamic feel, and though there are bound to be some canned animations (like Mikey’s head spin) it appears as though there will be a plethora of different moves happening during a fight as opposed to a few basic swinging animations from the classic arcade series.

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Back at Comic-Con 2011, I had the pleasure of interviewing some of the development team for Payday: The Heist while Matt Raub was playing along in the background. (He still has the promotional clown mask hanging on his wall) Now, it will be getting a sequel this summer, dubbed simply Payday 2, with the XBox Live Arcade being added to the two original platforms with the PC and PlayStation network.

Despite the positive response Payday: The Heist received, developer Overkill Software most likely saw the potential for an increased audience for the downloadable title in making it available on the XBox Live platform which has had a better reputation for its online service than Sony’s PSN.

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If you were born after 1980, the names Leonardo, Donatello, Rafael and Michelangelo aren’t just a bunch of names you ignored in fine arts class. For almost three decades, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been a part of the lives of so many different generations with some of their iterations being better than others and their history in video games is no exception.

While the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game is renowned as being one of the most difficult games on the NES (even though its key audience was kids), the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles four player arcade cabinet is one that hordes of us pushed quarter after quarter into and did so happily.

With the most recent version of TMNT hitting big on Nickelodeon and a Michael Bay (shudders…) feature film in the works, it’s no surprise that a new game would be making its way to consoles. Thankfully it isn’t based off the Michael Bay film but instead off the Nickelodeon franchise in TMNT: Out of the Shadows.

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Sony announced yesterday that with the purchase of a 12 month PlayStation Plus subscription, buyers would also get an additional 3 months for free added to their subscription time. A 25% bonus is nothing to ever be disappointed in. But the question comes up if PlayStation Plus is worth the $50 yearly (now technically 15 month) price point.

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The open world style of Minecraft took both PC and XBox Live Arcade by storm. Now, the 16-bit side scrolling counterpart to Minecraft is making its way to consoles. Coming to both XBox Live Arcade and the PlayStation network, Terraria had sold over 1.5 million downloads via PC by November of 2012. Terreria for consoles will be featuring new content as well as new controls specifically for the new platforms.

Still only listed as “Coming Soon”, Terraria is expected to launch in the first quarter of 2013 for consoles. Whether it is going to be available simultaneously on PlayStation Network and XBox Live Arcade or one of the two will get a timed exclusivity remains to be seen.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops II is addicting. Between the standard competitive multiplayer and the Zombie mode, thousands of lifetimes of game hours have already been played online. Now while the game doesn’t exactly go into a slump over time after its release, there is definitely a renewed spike in gameplay with the release of new maps.

Things may have been a little different last year with the early access that Elite members received in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 but with Call of Duty: Black Ops II Season Pass holders and the general public gaining access to the new maps at the same time, expect servers to fill up and social lives to diminish. But how do you help salvage social relationships with friends, family, work and significant others? Activision says it’s time to call in a Replacer.

In the video below, you’ll check out the real benefit of taking on a Replacer. For those moments that you don’t really need to be there for like putting together furniture or the first few annoying hours of labor, a Replacer is the ideal substitute.

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Welcome to The Flickcast Presents the Best of Gaming 2012. This is going to be a five part series throughout this first week of 2013 concluding with the Game of the Year being awarded on Friday.

Best Use of the PlayStation Network’s Voice Chat – Journey

So any gamer who has a PS3 already knows that people with microphones don’t really exist, especially compared to the plethora of expletive spitting, homophobic prepubescents who have claimed to have slept with our mothers that troll XBox Live. What they may not know is that some of the best communication that has happened in 2012 on the PSN comes from a game that actually doesn’t even allow for voice chat.

In Journey, players are placed in the role of a robed figure who has no voice at all but can make a singing tone. Those connected to the PSN will occasionally be placed in random worlds with other players but have no method of communication other than the singing tone. This means that players are actually tasked with creating their own non-verbal communication.

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The floor this year at PAX East included a section indie developers dubbed the Indie Megabooth- 16 independent developers showing off twenty of the latest and greatest indie games on all sorts of platforms. One of those titles was Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack, the follow up to PSN title Tales from Space: About a Blob, now available for the Playstation Vita. I decided to pick up the title to play during my free time at PAX East, and I’m really glad I did.

Much like the Katamari games, Mutant Blobs Attack  requires you to eat everything in sight to proceed through the level, as long as it’s not bigger than you. But, while Katamari is a 3rd person perspective three dimensional game, Mutant Blobs Attack is a 2D sidescrolling platformer, more like Loco Roco.  As a blob, you’ll also gain powerups to allow you to fly, float, and magnetize yourself to walls.

The game utilizes the Vita’s controls without overdoing it and becoming cumbersome to play. You control the blob throughout the levels using the analog stick, but there are also a few random levels that require you to tilt the Vita around like a ball maze to try to move the blob to the goal. The back touchscreen don’t come into play at all, but the front is used to manipulate the environment to proceed.

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When I first downloaded Journey off the PlayStation Network, I intended on giving it a traditional review. I had been mostly in the dark about the game itself other than hearing it mentioned after E3 last year. Quickly as I began playing, I realized this is not an ordinary game. In fact, it’s hard to even call it a game in the first place. So many conventions, not just of video games but of what people think of any kind of game be they sport, board, card or video game, don’t exist within the confines of Journey.

The name Journey, not to be trite, actually does say it all. Ralph Waldo Emerson is credited with the quote, “Life is a journey, not a destination.” In Journey, this statement rings true throughout as the player takes on the role of a faceless robed creature as they make their way towards a mythical mountain top location. Other than a three very brief “tutorial” instructions at the start, there is no instruction during the game. Journey is designed to give the player an indication of where to go and motivation to get there but never explicitly tells them why they are headed there. They don’t know what the ultimate goal is other than the location itself or even what the significance is.

In addition to being faceless, the player is also voiceless. While this has been used throughout gaming and worked well with specific examples such as Gordon Freeman of Half-Life or the boy from Limbo, it becomes even more interesting as the game has a built in multiplayer component to it. Much like the rest of the game compares itself to real life, players will find themselves crossing paths with others as they go through Journey. Through body language and the game’s brief musical tone abilities alone, players can determine how they interact with each other. Since Journey can be crossed from start to finish in about two hours, it is realistic that a pair can work alongside each other for the entire time. Others may intersect briefly with one deciding to hang back in hopes of new discoveries while the other pushes forward, a direct corollary of real life relationships. There is an added layer as players have no way of voice chatting over the PlayStation network as their identities remain hidden to each other so not to impair the game’s message by allowing players to chat over the network.

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