I was going to write a review for King of the Fighters XII. Well, actually, I was going to write a review about how my wife cleaned my clock on KoF, as I suck at fight games and she is the Queen of Whup-Ass.

Go re-read my Street Fighter review to get up to speed on that.

Anyway. I was going to do that this week, but I can’t because the disk SNK sent out doesn’t work. At first I thought it was my Xbox, but I tried it on another Xbox and got the same no-play results. So, I can’t review a game that doesn’t play.

Great job, SNK.

If my research on the game has lead to any conclusions that’s a good thing. What I did instead was download Headshot from Xbox Live Arcade, and shot people in the head. That calmed me down a lot.

So, what I will talk about is my recent experience at the Austin Game Developers Conference. As you well know, us Monkeys here at Monkey Labs are routinely given a heads up to what’s coming down the pipe so we’ll be able to alert you to the cool and warn you about the suck. And the Austin GDC was no different. Some cool and a lot of suck.

If you followed my tweets over the last week you already know this, and if you’re not following @cybermonkeys on Twitter, you should be!

Anyway.

I talked to a lot of people about their upcoming games. And most of them suck. Seriously, do we really need ANOTHER hamburger chef game? Really? No. No, we don’t. It wasn’t fun back in the Atari days, and it ain’t fun now. Also, while shuffle board on the Wii sounds like tons of fun, it’s not so great in the execution. However, I did find a couple of pearls in all that swill.

Wizards 101, Victory!, and Taikodom.

Wizards 101 will be getting it’s own review here in a week or two, so stay tuned for that Monkeys as that review will involve a true story of 40 oz malt liquor, Strippers, and the phrase, “Bitch, puleaze!” You won’t want to miss that one.

But the other two, Victory! And Taikodom. Both of these games are being published by Gamers First. Which, I know what you’re thinking, “Abraxas, who the hell is Gamers First?” Well, it’s K2 Networks re-branding effort, so that way you’ll forget about all the crap they imported from Japan over the last few years.

They’ve decided to step their game up and start bringing the quality. They’re launching a few new games here in a few months, most are standard fair for their niche but there are two that struck me as being something to watch out for: Victory! and Taikodom.

First up, Victory!

Victory is a racing game played online against other players. The benefit here is you can race against your friends sitting at your computer while in your underwear instead of having to get dressed to have the people you pay to be your friends to come over.

What I like about the features for this game, is Victory will allow you to up load your own graphics to paste onto your racer. For me, that’s huge. Being able to customize the look of my car along with its capabilities is a huge attraction for online racing. Another plus is Victory isn’t a rip-off of Mario Kart, meaning that there’s no whacky weapons or goofy looking racers that don’t make any sense.

I’m looking at you, Excite Bots.

Anyway, Victory isn’t out yet and it’s not even open for a Beta test either, so we’re gonna have to wait on it. And, it’s going to be Micro Transactional- meaning, if you want to upload your graphics you’ll have to pay.

Speaking of micro-transaction, Taikodom.

Taikodom is an already playable game being brought to the States. It’s an import from Brazil, so right now everything is in Portuguese and not a stitch of it is in English. It’s a lot like EVE Online, except it adds a twitch factor. Meaning, that it’s got the boring epic scale of EVE Online and all that snore-fest economics stuff with mining, manufacturing and corporations but adds an element for Space Fighter Jockeys.

You can plug your joy-stick into the game, hop into your tricked out space fighter, and start schooling fools on what it really means to dog-fight in three dimensions.

Guess what part of the game I’m looking forward to?

Not So Random Aside: The game EVE Online is a lot like it’s Lead Designer- Long winded, kinda dull, and not too friendly with new people.

Gamers First is taking Taikodom to micro-transactions as well, and they’re not really sure what will cost what but anything that can be purchased with real money can be purchased with in-game money earned through game play.

Overall, I had a good time with GDC Austin. The strippers were nice, and I maybe drank too much malt liquor, but gamers are a hard-drinking crowd and as a Cybermonkey I gotta represent. There are going to be a lot of sweet Indie titles being released over the next year, as well as all the mainstream crap being pumped out by the studios, so keep it here at Cybermonkey Death Squad to be in the know of what’s playable and what’s skippable.

And, as always, you can keep your comments to yourself at abraxas@cybermonkeydeathsquad.com