Amazonys – Wii Games

There is a new Holy Grail of Rare Video Games, and it is Stadium Events. The auction on a factory-sealed NTSC version closed just minutes ago, and it was sold for $41,300, almost double the old record.

Three days into the bidding the high offer had already eclipsed the record price ever paid for a rare game – $20,100 for a Nintendo Campus Challenge cartridge sold last fall by Denver entrepreneur J.J. Hendricks, who earlier in 2009 also paid $17,500 for a gold Nintendo World Championships cart.

“I was pretty amazed at the price,” Hendricks told Kotaku. “This Stadium Events auction destroys the previous record and I think is a surprise to everyone in game collecting community. I just wish there was such a thing as a sealed Nintendo World Championships Gold.”

Hendricks said he did not bid on the sealed Stadium Events box. “I thought about it briefly but the bidding quickly went beyond what I was willing to pay,” he said. “I’m not that into sealed game collecting.”

Bidding surged in the final 18 hours of the Stadium Events auction, nearly doubling the price from $22,500 to its final amount. Much of that was attributable to a single user bidding it up unopposed 35 times in a 10-minute span early this morning – from $22,700 to $39,800 – before leaving the auction. In all, more than 100 bids were placed on the item.

Hendricks thinks that the price paid for this Stadium Events, plus the $13,105 paid for an unsealed, used version sold two weeks ago by a woman in Haw River, N.C., has “caused a huge spike in interest in game collecting.” Hendricks said that traffic to his site, VideoGamePriceCharts.com, where he’s compiled an updated list of the most expensive used NES games ever sold. has seen a corresponding surge. “It almost doubled the week after the first Stadium Events auction,” Hendricks said.

The NTSC version of Stadium Events is believed to be one of the rarest games ever; fewer than 20 copies of the game, only one of them factory-sealed, were known to have existed before last week’s auction began. Its rarity is owed to the fact the rights to it and its dedicated controller, what later became the Nintendo Power Pad, changed hands to Nintendo soon after its limited 1987 release in North America.

Hendricks’ World Championships Cart was one of 26 prizes given out during a 1990 promotion by Nintendo Power magazine. The Campus Challenge cart is the only original copy in the world known to exist.

Interestingly, Hendricks points out that another copy of Stadium Events – apparently factory sealed in its listing photo, but not described as such in the headline – is currently selling for far less. The latest bid on this version was $7,300 with a little less than three days remaining.

Thank goodness it’s Friday. And thank the heavens for Kotaku Off Topic, where non-video game related conversation kicks off the weekend, a chance to let off some steam about whatever subject is on your mind.

No dilly-dallying. This is an open topic, yours for the steering. Here are a few things to get the conversation going, including something unexpectedly not safe for work. Have a good weekend, y’all!

• Living above the Arctic Circle – Vice’s VBS TV heads north to see what living in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is like.
• The NSFW Effing Typeface – Brought to you by the letters T&A.
• Detective Comics #27 goes for $1 million – That’s a lot for a funny book.
• Man or Astro-man? Reboots for 21st Century – I think I saw this band more than 25 times.
• A Nightmare On Elm Street – If you didn’t already catch it. Looks alright.

This is Rittai Kakushi e Attakoreda, a DSiWare game that makes brilliant use of the Nintendo DSi’s built-in cameras to control an in-game camera that lets the player explore a 3D diorama to find hidden objects.

The downloadable game, right now for Japan only, comes courtesy of Wario Land: Shake It! developer Feel-Good. As one can see in the preview video above, players must locate hidden objects and form letter shapes by tilting the DSi, and, in turn, the game world. Movement is tracked by processing input from the handheld’s dual cameras.

Maybe not the killer app that will get you to upgrade from your DS Lite, but perhaps the coolest use of the DSi’s unique features to date.

Rittai Kakushi e Attakoreda [Nintendo Japan via BoingBoing/TinyCartridge]

Next week’s batch of Rock Band, Rock Band 2 and LEGO Rock Band downloadable tracks leads with mood rockers Disturbed, who bring more of The Sickness to Harmonix and MTV Games’ music game.

A three pack of Disturbed tracks will come to various Rock Band games (but not the family friendly LEGO spin-off), with tracks by The Mother Hips, Silversun Pickups and TRUSTcompany joining them. The following new tracks adding to the 1,100 song strong Rock Band line up will be available on Xbox 360 and Wii on March 2 and PlayStation 3 on March 4.

Tracks marked with a “+” will be available in LEGO form.

• Disturbed – “Meaning of Life”
• Disturbed – “The Game”
• Disturbed – “Voices”
• The Mother Hips – “Third Floor Story”
• The Mother Hips – “White Falcon Fuzz” + (Europe only)
• Silversun Pickups – “Panic Switch”
• Silversun Pickups – “Sort Of” +
• TRUSTcompany – “Downfall” +

Pricing? Oh yes. Each track is $1.99 USD, £.99 UK, €1.49 EU, 160 Microsoft Points for Xbox 360 or 200 Wii Points for Wii. The Disturbed pack is $5.49, £2.49 UK, €3.99 EU or 440 Microsoft Points for Xbox 360.

An Australian morning news team catches up with curling, the latest It Sport, via Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games. What’s the joke? Well, here it comes … here it comes!

[thanks Ryan H.]

Atlus is bringing From Software’s 3D Dot Game Heroes to North America this May, a PlayStation 3 exclusive adventure that’s full of tiny, blocky, brave adventurers sporting monster blades and here are six scorching shots full of huge hard steel.

Oh, and one rare fish.

For a quick video primer on just what 3D Dot Game Heroes brand of retro gaming adventuring is all about, watch this very informative trailer. If you prefer your pre-release look at video games in screen shot form, enjoying a half-dozen new screens. Click now, my lord!

EA Sports gave its first exclusive look at (and first screengrab, above) NCAA Football 11 to ESPN, and the first details emerging about the game are ones sharpening the game’s visual authenticity.

In terms of actual gameplay, so far only the return of formation substitutions (a feature on previous-generation versions of the game) changes what you’re able to do afield. The other details EA’s sharing right now are largely cosmetic.

They include: dynamic helmet numbers, for teams featuring them. This is really only a concern for Alabama, whose helmet emblem is the player’s number (and then, of course any created teams that use this option). Crimson Tide fans are not, however, an inconsequential constituency. While in replays the helmet numbers appear once you zoom in close enough, in real time gameplay the helmets have been left blank. The new game will cope better with that.

Other details? Different sleeve lengths; hand warmers, towels, knee braces and other equipment; on-field officials who have enough sense to get out of the way (no glitching the defensive back up against the back judge.) Gang tackles based on the Pro-Tak system introduced in Madden NFL 10. And, should a dynasty team switch conferences, its onfield conference logo will also change. Considering all the talk about the Pac-10 and Big Ten potentially raiding from the Mountain West or Big XII, this is important.

Yes, very little of that has to do with how you play the game, only how you see it. But I scarcely believe these will be the only changes to EA Sports’ college football game. I suspect we’ll be hearing more about the gameplay upgrades as we approach the NFL Draft, which typically kicks off the hype cycle for NCAA Football.

‘NCAA Football 11′: First Look [ESPN.com]

It was a week infested with zombies, Nazi zombies and micro-reviews, the smaller format reserved for Kotaku reviews of downloadable video games and downloadable game add-ons. It was also the week that featured our first massive-review.

That would have been Mike Fahey’s review and four week long log of massively multiplayer online role-playing game Star Trek Online, our first experiment with a new review format for games that are harder to judge in just a few days time. What do you think? Was it informative?

Get caught up on all our little reviews of big game expansions and at least three reviews that reek of the undead in this extended Kotaku review round up.

Link ‘N Launch Micro-Review: How About ‘Pikmin Rockets’ Or ‘Better Than Bioshock Hacking’?
In which Stephen Totilo finds the connection between a DSiWare game and Princess Zelda’s venerable rescuer rather puzzling and un-Intelligent Systems.

Endless Ocean: Blue World Review: The Wii Game You’re Wrong About
In which Stephen Totilo discovers a rare underwater lifeform, the scuba RPG.

Plants Vs. Zombies iPhone Micro-Review: Touch The Dead
In which I perform more lawn maintenance in a few hours on my iPhone than I’ve done in the last decade.

Across Age Micro-Review: Slam Evil
In which Mike Fahey travels through time and experiences a 16-bit world of bashcraft.

Resident Evil 5: Lost In Nightmares Micro-Review: Less Fighting, More Frightening
In which Stephen Totilo finds himself slaying zombies out of Africa and enjoying the svelteness of it all.

Assassin’s Creed II: Bonfire Of The Vanities Micro-Review: Once More, With Fleeing
In which Luke Plunkett loves a cheap date but despises sequence breaking.

The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom Micro-review: Snack Of The Clones
In which I count pie out to 51 places.

Call of Duty: World At War: Zombies Verrückt Micro-Review: Solo Fun
In which Brian Crecente goes mad for a chance to tap the walking dead back into oblivion.

Kaleidoscope Micro-Review: What a Colorful World
In which Owen Good restores color to yet one more world lacking it. Don’t worry, he’s frugal with his atta-boys.

Star Trek Online Review: A Piece Of The Action
In which Mike Fahey does not bogart Captain Cannibis of the U.S.S. Blunt’s space, thereby keeping his mellow unharshed.

Specifically the Eegra version, as seen in Xbox Live Indie Games release Avatar Showdown.

In October a visually-impaired gamer sued Sony, alleging that it wasn’t fulfilling its responsibilities under U.S. law to provide access to the disabled. The reasoning depending on finding that Sony’s products constitute a public accommodation. A judge said they aren’t.

Plaintiff Alexander Stern sued Sony, Sony Computer Entertainment America and Sony Online Entertainment in federal court for the Central District of California, alleging that “his visual processing impairments prevent him from fully enjoying the video games manufactured by Sony, some of which are played on gaming systems with internet connections through which players in different locations can communicate and play with or against one another.”

The court, in granting Sony’s motion to dismiss on Feb. 8, refused to go so far as to say any game Sony currently makes constitutes a public accommodation. A public accommodation doesn’t need to be publicly owned -very loosely speaking it can be a grocery store, hotel or office building whose use is generally available to the public. In a broad sense, we were talking about applying that standard to a virtual environment.

So as you can imagine, allowing the suit to proceed on this finding would have wide ramifications for games publishers. Instead, the court found Sony “is not a place of public accommodation,” and therefore is not in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Disabled Gamer’s Suit Against Sony Tossed [Game Politics]