In more revealing witch goodness, Platinum Games demonstrated there are more wicked ways than a simple bullet storm, death hair slam, or leggy roundhouse kick to slay an enemy. Unleash your magical energy for a “torture attack”, dealing a myriad of successive moves to send the demons back from whence they came forth.

[Gametrailers via/ Joystiq]

Due out in February in both Blu-ray and DVD formats, Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic is a collaborative effort by several studios to create “6 terrifying visions of Hell”. It looks fun, gory, and reminiscent of Le Chevalier D’Eon if I was having a bad acid trip.

Oh yes, it’s that time of the year again, the time where strangers and relatives turn on you, get violent and an insatiable thirst for flesh. No, not the start of the holyday season, although that makes sense, I’m talking about the Zombie Apocalypse, it’s back once more with Left 4 Dead 2. The game just got released a few hours ago and I’m giving it three thumbs up (it’s a birth defect). But just as with the holidays, the spirit of the zombie apocalypse is also that of sharing. So let’s share the warm fuzzy feeling of shooting the horde of the undead together!

Join the Dark Diamond Steam Group where you’ll be able to play with some of us as well as with other dear readers. You can bet that’s all we’ll be playing for days. Also feel free to share your Xbox Live Gamertags, phone numbers, credit card details and social security numbers.

Yes, you can pretend to be Konata, but we aren’t talking about that kind of pretend. This is about the games of pretend you played as a kid, when the colored squares in the floor were lava and you’d die if you stepped on them. And also the kind you play today, even when you’d never admit it, like when you sit at your desk and pretend to be working for 8 hours a day.

We’re kidding on that last one, but Russell Davies takes pretend very seriously and he thinks it should become a bigger part of gaming in the future. He gave a presentation at London’s Playful event on the place pretending takes on our lives and how utterly magical it can be when we use it for gaming. This is augmented reality like you haven’t seen it before. The full presentation transcript, along with the slides and videos are on his site it its a must read. It’s smart, funny and very insightful. If you care for the deeper meanings of gaming or augmented reality you’d do yourself a favor by reading it.

[Russell Davies / Via Wonderland]

We’ve all heard horrible voice acting, for crying out loud, we love anime and there’s hardly a better example of horrible voice acting than english dubbed anime. Games are no exception though, specially during the days of the PSX and the early years of the PS2. Here’s a video compilation of some of Videogame’s worst voice acting moments.

It becomes pretty obvious pretty fast that bad voice acting is out there and there’s plenty of it, but that there’s also a huge amount of horrendous dialogue to begin with, specially Japanese games localized to english. Dear localizers, stop trying to sound like what you think a cool 13 year old sounds like. Now if you’ll excuse me “I have to stay alive and write this article before I die”.

I cant believe no one had done this before, if you had asked me I’d sworn I’d seen this some years ago. A group of researchers from Colorado University took a group of Roombas, those cheap, charming and delightfully exploitable vacuuming robots, and turned them into a gigantic Pac-Man game, complete with user controlled Pac-Man, Furtive ghosts and many, many dots.

Now how about someone sets one of these lose in the highway for a quick game of Roomba Frogger?

[Gizmodo]

Are you a witch? Are you or have you ever been a member of the communist party? Do you sell an R4? You haven’t? Funny because your friends say you do!

Oh haven’t you heard? Witch Hunts are in style once again thanks to Nintendo in Japan. The company, along with a coalition of other gaming industry companies are asking people to rat out people or companies selling the R4 backup player for the Nintendo DS. In a secure and anonymous website users are asked to tip Nintendo off about individuals or companies selling the device which allows you to play downloaded copies of games, they are even going after personal auctions selling an R4. The intention is to use the information in a legal suit Nintendo has against the selling of the device.

Call me old fashioned but when you’re asking your customers to rat out on each other, even on a personal level, that’s just asking for trouble. Thankfully this is only in Japan, sadly this is only in Japan and unless Nintendo somehow insults the nationalist spirit of Japan no one is going to say as much as a peep about it.

[Kotaku]

With every gaming generation that passes we continue to strive for better and better graphics, photorealism isn’t that far away from us, so perhaps it’s only natural that retro graphics are making a comeback. The folks at design group Alaskan Military School took it to the extreme though. They set out to represent classic games with just a 15 pixel grid. As ridiculous as it may seem, they achieved amazing results with a few, such as the video above which, if you haven’t deciphered it yet, is Street Fighter’s Ken Masters v. Blanka. Check out their website for the complete collection.

[Alaskan Military School / Via Boing Boing]

Back in 2006 Miyamoto let lose a few comments about how the next Zelda game after Twilight Princess would be completely different from any previous Zelda game. Allegedly they were aiming for some sort of first person Zelda game, which we kinda saw with that crossbow training minigame.

Now though, Miyamoto is saying the next Zelda will use the MotionPlus Wiimote accessory to “make you feel much more like you’re actually fighting while holding a sword in your hand”. Now at first this makes me think this might mean the next Zelda game will not be as different as previous ones since in the same Q&A session Miyamoto implied similarities in the game mechanics. However, as much as it’s been tried, even with Red Steel 2 using the MotionPlus, there’s yet to be a game that can adequately capture the act of waving a sword around in-game.

Also, knowing Nintendo, the MotionPlus will be a requirement for this next Zelda game, so you better get your hands on one as soon as you’re able, lest you be left swatting flies. Get it? Swatting flies? A reference to waggling the wiimote in games? Mario Paint? Ok, that was bad, I’m sorry.

[GameLife / Via Joystiq]

(Please excuse the  one-day-later post but this couldn’t wait another whole week). *Ahem*. . . Hello there, fellow Dark Diamond readers and friends, and welcome back to another one of my very well-received coverages about events that gather our one similar trait; that what makes us wake up early on a cloudy Saturday to be ready just in time to assist the one event you’ve been waiting all year long: The -anime- Halloween Party (because most of the other parties . . .just don’t cut it).

Read more!