Daily Tech and Gadget

Gaming The PC gaming community has long enjoyed the ridiculously awesome Steam sales Valve loves to break out during holidays and at other fun times of the year. The sales deliver game bundles for crazy cheap prices, even on AAA current titles. Steam’s summer sale kicked off a couple of days ago. For the first time, Mac gamers get to join in on the fun thanks to Steam’s recent adoption of OS X .

Here’s another opportunity to find out The Secret of Monkey Island — and at a discount before LeChuck has his high-def revenge this summer. The classic advent-arrr game is a mere 400 ($5) this week on the Xbox Marketplace — that’s less than a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle. A couple Monkey Island Avatar items are also on sale this week. The Cotton Swab is ready to clean 80 ($1) out of your account, while those on Team LeChuck can show it by picking up LeChuck Pirate Hat for 40 (50¢).

InstantAction’s new Gaikai -powered streaming service has debuted, allowing select games to be played not only in a browser window, but in an embeddable applet if desired (for those of you running Windows, anyway). The selection of games is currently limited to just one, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition . The service allows the game to be played for 20 minutes for free, with the option to buy the game for $9.99.

Click image to make a Booty call to our gallery We’re going to play a little game today. Here’s the only rule: try not to be impressed by the graphical fidelity of these Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck’s Revenge screens. Don’t marvel at the vibrant pirate spitting contest you see above. Don’t cower at the menacing and highly-detailed visage of LeChuck himself

Click to learn the Secret of Monkey Gallery Have you been holding off on purchasing games, DLC and other playable content in anticipation of pirate outfits for your Home avatars? If so, get your wallet ready, because LucasArts is adding Monkey Island 2 clothes to the PlayStation Store today. LeChuck, Elaine, Stan, Swordmaster and, of course, Guybrush outfits will be available, along with a LeChuck pirate ship space and various decorative items. If your tastes run more toward, you know, games, our gallery also features more screenshots of Monkey Island 2: Special Edition — just in case the last set didn’t convince you of its spruced-uppedness.

How appropriate, you click like a cow! That’s right — screen shot . LucasArts has released a single screenshot of the upcoming remake of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge . For comparison, two screens of the original version, including one of the same scene shown above, have been re-released. Wood ya chuck it out?

GDC 2010: Tim Schafer, Rhianna Pratchett, and Sean Vanaman trade tips that made Brutal Legend, Overlord, and Tales of Monkey Island humorous hits. Who was there: A panel of industry humorists including DoubleFine Productions founder Tim Schafer (Brutal Legend, Psychonauts), narrative designer and scriptwriter Rhianna Pratchett (Overlord, Heavenly Sword), Telltale Games writer/designer Sean Vanaman (Tales of Monkey Island, Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventure), appeared, answering questions posed by A.V. Club writer John Teti. What they talked about: After a full Game Developers Conference week of serious, high-minded discussion about business models, social media, and emerging trends, it was finally time for a humor-in-games panel to lighten the mood.

Does your dead-eyed Home avatar lack a bit of that buccaneering spirit ? LucasArts has a sure-fire way to fix your lack of nautical flair: During its pirate-themed party at GDC , the company announced that Monkey Island costumes (pictured above) would soon make their way to PlayStation Home. Now, we rarely get excited over virtual duds for our virtual manifestations — but Stan’s coat could really add a certain savoir-faire to our terrifying craft . Monkey Island Home costumes allow for Dread Pirate Quincy originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:20:00 EST.

Nothing says, “We’re at a serious gaming event where developers tell us about their innovations and upcoming creations,” like a papercraft Wario from WarioWare D.I.Y. And nothing says, “Hey, we’re about to write a bunch of news stories about all that stuff,” like posting a photograph of a papercraft Wario from the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. We’ll be here all week putting our hands on games, talking to people, sitting in panels, and bringing you all the news. What sort of news, you ask?

Filed under: Gaming , Software , Odds and ends , Developer Telltale Games has been rocking the retro lately, doing great things like bringing Secret of Monkey Island and Sam & Max back in new forms, and releasing new episodic classics like Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People . Now they might be doing so on the Mac: rumor has it that they’ll be releasing their whole catalog on the Mac as soon as next month, just in time for an appearance at Macworld Expo. Apparently there are many Mac fans both on the team and in the customer base, and they’re just figuring out a way to do it. Sounds awesome to us — Telltale’s stuff is already available on a few other platforms (both PC and consoles), but they have a history of putting fans first , so we might even expect some goodies to come with a Mac release. We’ll have to wait and see what they’ve got planned.

Nintendo’s iconic adventurer Link boards the Spirit Tracks on DS joined by Pandemic’s open-world actioner and Konami’s Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. By the first week of December, the annual herd of game releases has thinned considerably. However, the second week of the month will see Nintendo launch the latest installment in its long-running action adventure franchise, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. Link is going off the rails on a Spirit Train. Announced for the DS at the 2009 Game Developers Conference , Spirit Tracks features the same visual style as Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, released for the GameCube in 2003.