It’s our birthday! Three years ago we started what is now Dark Diamond and white a ride it has been. Of course, it’s all for you dear readers, without you we’d just be a bunch of opinionated fools instead of consummated internet journalists… well that’s not true, we’re still just opinionated fools, but we do it for you!

And what better way to celebrate than by giving you guys some nice presents. That is why today we’re launching Dark Diamond’s Birthday Contest 2009! It’s really easy to enter and win, hell some of you reading this are already participating and you don’t even know it! Lets begin!

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Guitar Hero. Seriously, who hasn’t played it yet? If you missed the first one, you were bound to have touched the second one, unless you have made a cave far out north your permanent residence. Great songlist, great way of making young and old ones rock out with your rooster out, great controls thanks to the X-Plorer bundled with the 360 version, and the other wired controller with the PS2 one (don’t really recall the names of these guitars, unfortunately). This is a license that has cash cow written all over it.

Inevitably, part 3 makes its way to stores. The series is in the hands of Neversoft, famous for churning out Tony Hawk Skateboard sequels. This was all due to a nasty feud between them, Harmonix, EA, and Red Octane which I will not go into great detail, simply because this is a game review, not MTV’s Behind The Scenes. Besides, my puny brain cannot remember industry details unless I have Gamasutra.com and Gamebiz next to me. So how does Neversoft handle Harmonix’s baby this time around?
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” With an orange-painted-with-swirls LesPaul in hand, Sir Swissgar The Stallion, the dude with the blonde hair and spiked leather jacket, struts out with covers of ‘You’ve Got Another Thing Coming’, ‘Killing In The Name’, and ‘Surrender’, followed up with an encore of ‘War Pigs’, sung by the notorious Black Sabbath. He misses a few notes, but it matters not. He was in the zone, and the crowd just went balls-busting nuts.”

Sounds like something you come up with your imagination while punching in numbers at that job in the local bank. In truth, this was one of the examples of a play session of Guitar Hero 2, the sequel to the acclaimed rhythm game series created by Harmonix. All of the intensity of performing live, less than 10 minutes to perform.
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If you’ve been around the web this week, you might have heard of a certain “Megaton Announcement” from Capcom. And we get not one, but TWO old-school franchises being developed. One involved Nazis and SuperJoe, while the other paved the road of quarter-circles and lots of quarters being fed to machines back in 1992. Yes, Bionic Commando and Street Fighter IV are confirmed to be coming out hopefully by next year or so. Check out the teasers if you think I’m making this up.

Street Fighter IV: I’ll need actual game footage in the next year if I were to make a tiny bit of judgement. Bionic Commando remake? His arm is about as subtle as a 4-ton sledgehammer. Still, nice to hear from you, old favorites of mine. Also, here’s an in-game video of the first level of Contra 4, developed by Wayforward Games and published by Konami. Mmm…pixel explosions. Good.

Technorati : about time, capcom, contra, dark diamond, konami, street fighter

Wait, I mean Legend of ZEL-da. Because of, you know, the whole internet forums bitching about Link’s new cartoony look. Oh wait, that joke’s 3 years old? Review after the jump.
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And now for a little self referencing humor here’s a little visual story about how I just might have found my new religion right on Dark Diamond. Click the thumbnail for the full version.

Also reminding you of our newly opened forums where we already have a small ammount of members posting and we’d all love you to join and come be a huge geek with us.

Happy new year! Hope you all had fun last night, I certainly did. 2006 was a great year for gaming with two new consoles hitting the market making next-gen officially this-gen, sadly not so much for the anime and manga world, there was a serious drought in good new series (at least for my tastes).

But most important of all it was a great year for us, we launched the site and we’ve been steadily growing ever since and its all thanks to you, our readers. As much as you hate to comment I know a great portion of our daily traffic are repeat visitors. So thanks, you sneaky lurking bashtids, we love you!

2007 is packed full of promises and so are we, there’s big plans for this year, more content, better content and perhaps a little surprise here and there. 2007, GO!