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"Slicing" may be a bit generous here. While the mechanic works great, it becomes more of a flailing of your arms than precise ninja like skills. It's not as easy to pick up and play as the mobile version, but overall it works much better than anticipated. There are multiple game modes to keep you entertained. Classic Mode asks you to slice as many pieces of fruit as possible without slicing a bomb or missing 3 pieces of fruit. Arcade Mode adds in bonus bananas that can double your points, freeze the timer, or put everything in slow motion. Zen Mode is pretty straightforward. You get 90 seconds to slice as much fruit as possible. No bombs. Halfbrick has also added in multiplayer. Competitive 2 player mode highlights fruit red or blue and slicing your opponent’s fruit reduces your points. There is also team based multiplayer where you are out to get more points than the opposing team. It really was the most fun I have had in any Kinect multiplayer game to date. Last, but not least is Challenge Mode. When you go to this mode, your Fruit Master gives you different goals to achieve. They will range from generic "Score 250 in Classic Mode" or it will pull directly from your friends list and tell you to beat the highest score. It became addictive trying to beat the others on my friends list and gloating to them over messages when I finally did. The only drawback to the game is the menu interface. The hands-free control just feels clunky and will cause frustration when you select something you didn't mean to select. It is a small problem, but really did frustrate me at some points. Especially in the unlockable screen. Speaking of unlockable, there is a lengthy list of new blades, backgrounds, and shadow textures to unlock. As with the main menu though, selecting these is an exercise in frustration. Halfbrick really did a great job of taking a dead simple mobile game and translating it to the Kinect. Menu problems aside, the game is addicting and chock full of fun, especially with friends. There's nothing more satisfying than getting that 9 hit combo at the last second to beat your friend's high score. I highly recommend this to any fan of the mobile versions of the game. Now, go my pupil and slice some fruit.

Big Science labs is the setting for this latest entry and much like the 2 games in the series, none of the experiments are going quite as planned. With Splosion Man captured, she will have to utilize all the gadgets in the lab to save him from the Mighty Eternal. Much like the full non-pinball game, the main goal of the table is to 'splode' as much as possible to save him. The aesthetic of the table really does a great job of conveying the feel of the Splosion Man universe. Bright colored explosions, the now classic Ms. Splosion Man voiceovers, even the alternating colored light gates all make their way to the table. As with the Marvel tables, Ms. Splosion Man is another hit for Pinball FX 2. Any fan of the game or the Splosion Man series would be doing themselves a disservice by skipping this table. Graphically the table is great and gives you tons to look at. The sound is, as with the Splosion series, top notch. In short, go get it.

The Gunstringer and Fruit Ninja Kinect Packaged Together This September Get the Ultimate Kinect Bundle! A Shootin’ and Slashin’ Good Time for $39.99! Mark your calendars for a bullet-slinging, fruit-slashing party this September because Twisted Pixel’s Kinect-enabled action shooter “The Gunstringer” AND the highly anticipated “Fruit Ninja Kinect” will be bundled together at retail for just $39.99 USD! Whether you shoot-em-up or slice-em-up, YOU are the controller in these two fun, action-packed titles. The retail bundle will be available September 13 in North America, Australia, New Zealand and Asia; and September 16 in EMEA. In “The Gunstringer”, you control a fiery gun-toting marionette through his adventures, combining solo platforming and shooting mechanics into fun, competitive action with a full suite of collectibles, unlockables, abilities, rewards and more. Plus, as a special bonus to celebrate the release of “The Gunstringer,” players can also download a free add-on pack for the game at launch called “The Wavy Tube Man Chronicles” which pits players against the time-traveling son of Wavy Tube Man, the first boss players battle in the game. In this add-on, Wavy Tube Man Jr. steals a time machine to prevent his father’s death at the hands of “The Gunstringer,” and it’s up to players to battle classic western cowboys and futuristic warriors to save the world from destruction. Along with the disc for “The Gunstringer,”the retail package will include a token code for the full downloadable version of “Fruit Ninja Kinect” via Xbox LIVE. “Fruit Ninja Kinect” is an amazing evolution of the slice-em-up genre created by Halfbrick, which brings the worldwide mobile gaming phenomenon to Kinect so you can use your arms as blades in an epic battle against the world’s most delicious produce is just beginning. Is September too long to wait to sharpen your Ninja skills? Don’t wait! Buy “Fruit Ninja Kinect” via Xbox LIVE Arcade for Xbox 360 on August 10 and get a jump start on your friends. Finally, pre-order “The Gunstringer” from select US and European retailers today, and you’ll receive two tokens for a free Avatar Prop from the game, available exclusively through the pre-order program!

Game’s Release Coincides With Announcements About Bonus TMS Content, New Website, and Free DLC for the Original Splosion Man July 13th, 2011 - Austin, TX - Ms. Splosion Man releases today on Xbox LIVE Arcade, but amongst the joy comes the sudden announcement that her TMS could strike at any moment. TMS, or Title Managed Storage, is a special feature of the Xbox LIVE® service that allows Twisted Pixel to present free extra Challenges for the players on a regular basis. These week-long Challenges appear off of the Main Menu and take a level from the game and give it special rules and new content. There’s no predicting the effects of TMS, you just have to adapt to the new rules and do your best to survive until the end. Leaderboards created especially for these TMS challenges rank players on their success at playing the level. “From time to time, we will be awarding real prizes and other fun stuff to the top finishers, and sometimes random players, from the Challenge’s leaderboards,” states Jay Stuckwisch, Marketing Director. “We are finding it harder and harder to ‘one up’ ourselves with new ways of giving away free stuff to people who buy our games, but TMS has opened an exciting new door for us.” Worried that you’ll miss the signs of Ms. Splosion Man’s approaching TMS? Not to worry, the brand new version of www.MsSplosionMan.com launches today, with a wealth of information on story, character bios, game information, and everything you need to know about the next TMS challenge. Free downloadable extras like wallpapers, game soundtrack, and the Ms. Splosion Man development blog are all available there as well. Ms. Splosion Man has garnered rave reviews in the days leading up to her release and follows the adventures of Ms. Splosion Man as she splodes her way free of Big Science and out into the world. Featuring 50 single-player levels and a separate 50 level multiplayer campaign, this sequel to the award-winning Splosion Man brings a host of new gameplay and features like ghost leaderboards, new mechanics, new bosses, extra gameplay modes, and tons of unlockable content. Ms. Splosion Man retails for only 800 points and can be found on Xbox LIVE Arcade. Check out the new trailer below:

With the release of another Marvel character themed table for Pinball FX 2, Zen Studios has brought us another amazing table to their pinball simulator. This time Captain America gets the royal treatment with a World War II themed table that doesn't disappoint. Every detail of the table is well done and screams Captain America. Bright colors and array of different lights, bumpers, and spinners all animate to bring the table alive. You'll see Cap standing guard over the table and the villains coming and going as necessary. Voice work and animations are solid and the missions available are extremely varied. Whether you are searching for Bucky and the Howling Commandoes or facing off against Red Skull and Baron Zemo, the missions are well thought out and just challenging enough not to frustrate. If you've been waiting for a great Marvel themed table to get in to Pinball FX 2, this one is the best of the bunch thus far. Impressive graphics, varied missions, and more than enough is offered to keep you coming back for more. At a very reasonable 240 Microsoft Points or $2.49 on PS3 ($9.99 for Pinball FX 2 is required as well); this table is more than worth it.

Serious Sam: Double D, that is all . . .

Episode 1 FREE (for now); Episodes 2-5 Available for Purchase Tomorrow!!! Telltale Games’ award-winning Monkey Island Tales HD series is back on iPad with more swashbucklin’ adventure than you can shake a wooden leg at! And Telltale Games is offering iPad owners some serious booty! As of today the first episode of Monkey Island Tales HD is available for free on iPad until July 22nd! It’s available and ready to plunder as you read this – so get to plundering! And here be another bit of news…starting tomorrow (June 23rd) Monkey Island Tales HD Episodes 2-5 are available for $6.99 per episode on the AppStore. That’s right mateys, the remainder of the entire Monkey Island Tales HD season - in four salty doses of high seas humor - will be available all at once for your downloading pleasure. Telltale’s trademark humor and adventure gameplay will delight Monkey Island fans old and new as the entire five-episode saga unfolds on iPad for the very first time. So be it high or low tide, weigh anchor, hoist the mizzen and head over to the AppStore to get the best game series featuring the unlikely combination of an ancient tool and a clamshell to come to iPad!

June 22nd, 2011 - Austin, TX - Embattled socialite Ms. Splosion Man has been roundly condemned by authorities for her destruction of property and abundant manslaughter charges, but nevertheless remains hugely popular in the hearts of the people. They call her a free-spirit and the meat-bringer but Big Science insists she is a dangerous element getting special treatment only because of her abundant celebrity. Everything will come to a head on July 13th, when the highly anticipated followup from 2009’s Summer of Arcade hit title Splosion Man splodes her way onto the Xbox LIVE® Arcade marketplace. Boasting improvements to nearly every aspect of its gameplay, Ms. Splosion Man is a true successor to her illustrious forebearer. Players can look forward to a host of new gameplay mechanics, varying environments posing new unique challenges, totally revamped network support, epic boss battles, original music, and plenty of the humor and charm that people have come to expect from Twisted Pixel. Tons of unlockables throughout the game give players a complete behind-the-scenes look at the game’s creation. “We are incredibly proud of Ms. Splosion Man and feel like it is our best game to date. We are very excited to launch it this summer on XBLA,” says Twisted Pixel CEO, Mike Wilford. Featuring 50 all new single player levels, a 50 level multiplayer campaign and a bunch of surprises to come, Ms. Splosion Man debuts this summer on Xbox LIVE Arcade, July 13th, 2011.

Where did the fun go? Over the past few years games have become more and more dependent on real world situations, social commentary, and political correctness to drive their narratives along. The days of the simplistic story and overall fun gaming seem to be slowly coming to an end, with little resistance from us, the gamers. The select few games at the top echelon in gaming are becoming more and more like simulations and less and less like the games that started the industry. “Games as art” has become the battle cry for almost every company out there trying to reach the top. While I have no issue with that comparison, what concessions are we allowing companies to make their art? Sacrificing fun for art, in a hobby that was built for fun, is truly sad and somewhat asinine. Back in 1985 when I received the NES and Super Mario Bros. as a birthday gift, after much begging and pleading, I knew from pressing Start that I was a gamer from that day forward. The story, as everyone knows, revolved around a kidnapped princess. However, without reading the manual you didn't know that until the end of world 1-4 when the major crux of the story was, "I'm sorry Mario but the Princess is in another castle". No matter how hard you try the sheer fun of running, jumping, and shooting fire from god knows where never felt forced or serious at all. It literally was just fun in its simplest form. Even before the NES the Atari, Commodore 64, and even Tennis for Two were all just "fun". No social commentary. No "art" comparisons. Just fun. Fast-forward to present day. The biggest franchises in gaming are arguably Call of Duty, Halo, Gears of War and many others of the same type. All of which amount to "war simulations". The stories try and try to take themselves seriously to convey the argument of "Videogames should be considered art" as best they can, but at what cost? I tried playing through Call of Duty 4 and found myself getting more and more depressed by the story that was playing out. The "shocking twist" that happens to one of the main characters did more to make me not want to continue than anything else in the game. If I want to see death, images of war, and the horrors of history or present day, I would turn on the history channel or the nightly news. Yet a game that resorts to dick and fart jokes or making off color jokes about things such as abortion are literally shit on by critics and most players alike for being juvenile/crude. The people that find these diversions from reality fun and funny are more often than not ostracized or called out for not wanting to have everything in gaming be so damned serious. A good story does not have to have some social or moral commentary to be meaningful or fun. Hell, some of the best games don’t even have a story. This is not to say that the games mentioned can’t be fun but I have yet, in a single-player environment, found anything remotely fun about them. Multiplayer can be a plus in quite a few of these games. Whether it be rolling through the story in co-op and saving your buddy’s ass from certain death or just making up your own game types in open world environments, this can be the saving grace for some games. Take GTA IV, it is/was a critical darling. Yet, the overall story just got monotonous and wasn’t very fun. However, get a group of friends together (drunk or otherwise) and get set for some truly fun times. Non-scripted, no story, everything as YOU make it. Boiled down to its simplest form, it is fun. Yes, I understand the word "fun" is all a matter of opinion and everyone has their own views on what the word means. However, any gamer my age can agree that pouring hours and hours in to Super Mario Bros. was a hell of a lot more fun than seeing a group of innocent people being gunned down with machine guns, mass graves being covered up, or an atomic bomb going off in the middle of a populated city. If "games as art" have to sacrifice the fun to gain critical acclaim or we have to be serious constantly throughout our pixelated adventures, this old timey gamer may need to find a new hobby.

Be sure to check out the screenshots and game trailer here: http://www.ninjabee.com/akimi-village/

Our good friends at Hyperduck Soundworks are working with Extend Interactive again on their next game So Many Me. The pre-alpha trailer below has some rough sound work that The Ducks would like you to ignore and just enjoy the game play. Take a look and let us know what you think. http://vimeo.com/25086057