Have a good Fourth of July weekend, Dtoiders! Eat meat, get drunk and blow some stuff up!

The Friday Night Fight tournament is well underway, we looked at the top ten games in Japan, 'Splosion Man wants you to feel the shame, we have the best review of Mad Dog McCree you'll ever see, Jim is at the ScrewAttack Gaming Convention, Japanator is in Los Angeles for AX 09 and plenty more happened on 07/03/09.

Destructoid Originals:
READY TO FRIDAY
RetroforceGO! episode 94: Naughty retro games
How to set up a match in Quake Live
Art Attack Friday: captainosaka
Top Ten Gaijin Games: Bionic Commando Edition
Retroforce Recap: so what about those dirty games, now?
Friday Night Fights: Fourth of July weekend edition
'Splosion Man lets you skip levels at the expense of shame
Fanboy Friday: New Orphus edition

Community:
Community blogs of 07/03/09
Forum of the day: The Conduit (add your friend code!)

Reviews:
Mad Dog McCree Gunslinger Pack

Contests:
Friday Night Fights begins! Win $9,000 in Cyberpower PCs
Twitter Friday: Serious bunny, Cell Factor (winner update)
FNF: I played Cosmic Cannon and all I got was a 9800 GTX+
And the Halo Uprising contest winner is ...

Anime Expo 09:
West coast videogame cosplay is hot hot hot!

ScrewAttack Convention 09:
Stuff, things, happening, yes
Jim meets a personal hero
ScrewAttack blows ... NES cartridges

News:
Alpha Protocol to hit in early October
Milla Jovovich confirms a new Resident Evil film ... sigh
Monster Hunter Freedom Unite gets its first free DLC update
Left 4 Dead 2 boycott didn't change Valve's plans
Undead Knights comic features zero zombies, two boobs
Cliffy B blames tech for bald space marine overload
Two Worlds II announced, set to hit this winter
There's a pun in here somewhere: Risen coming out October 2
Media Molecule hints at LittleBigPlanet Ghostbusters content
Qix headed to XBLA, possibly Minter-ized
Frozenbyte admits Trine project is kind of a trainwreck
Crawford/Rohrer documentary now available online...sorta
Steam can cause spikes in retail game sales too

Offbeat:
Take your Zelda on the go with these handpainted Vans
Mega64 dies of dysentery

Media:
Battlefield 1943 hitting LIVE and PSN on July 8th and 9th
Dante's Inferno gameplay footage looks hotter than, uh, hell
Bayonetta's rival looks like Cruella de Vil
Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles is lookin' pretty
27 million balls busted in Combat Arms and other fun stats
XSEED announces The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces for Wii
Splinter Cell Conviction will take around 12 hours to beat
Three new gameplay trailers for Madballs in Babo Invasion
Dead Space: Extraction requires a controller to play
17 minutes of Brutal Legend and Tim Schafer

We at Destructoid cannot get enough of Brutal Legend. Everything about this game is going to be so awesome!

A new video for the game was released and it shows off the first 17 minutes of the game. All of this was covered in our preview already, but this video also has Tim Schafer walking us through the entire thing which makes it 100 times better.

There’s just something about Tim Schafer that’s so … magical. Like, he could be selling a wrecked car filled with flaming dog sh*t and I know he’d be able to convince me that it’s the best thing ever. I'd end up buying three off of him due to his charm.

I am so looking forward to Rocktober when Brutal Legend is released. How about you? Hit the break to check out the new video.

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One of the highlights of today's ScrewAttack festivities was the great cartridge blowing competition, an epic contest in which hopeful gamers relived their childhoods in an attempt to get old games to work. The lads at ScrewAttack put fourteen NES cartridges through the worst possible Hell -- dirtying them, drowning them, even putting them in the toaster.

The aim was simple -- blow into the cartridge as hard as possible, pop it in an NES and see if it works. It was tense drama that not even Jack Bauer could hope to rival. Hit the jump for some footage I grabbed of the event, even though a bunch of nerds kept getting in the way and whatever footage ScrewAttack puts up will be ten times more professional and less shakey. 

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Breaking: Dead Space: Extraction will require the use of a controller.

Earlier this afternoon we were shocked by a trailer Electronic Arts sent around to the media. The scandalous trailer (available below the fold) clearly shows two Visceral Games employees using the Wii remote and nunchuck attachment to solve puzzles cooperatively and dismember anorexic aliens in the Wii-exclusive title. The two staffers even go so far as to explain how to play the game. Whoa.

We haven’t contacted Electronic Arts about the content in the video and certainly have not asked what the publisher was thinking when choosing to add controller support. To be frank, we’re just kidding about controller thing and asking about it jokingly be a really easy way to make EA and Visceral Games think we’re retards.

[Update: Talk about clumsy. Wii remote, confirmed.]

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Mega64 has gone way back and spoofed the classic Oregon Trail game. Watch as they ford the river, barter for goods and die of horrible diseases.

You know, I never really knew what dysentery was before this. I mean, I knew it was a deadly disease. I just didn't realize you sh*t yourself to death because of it. That sh*t is gross, man. 

Check out the new Mega64 video after the break!

[Thanks, Frank]

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Madballs in Babo Invasion is an upcoming XBLA title where you'll be playing as murderous disgusting looking ball demon things. I brought you a preview of for Madballs yesterday and it's actually a pretty fun game. It's promising to be one of the deepest experiences on XBLA thanks to all the features that developer Playbrains has put into it.

While previews are nice, videos are always better and we have three videos for Madballs for you all to check out. Find out what Invasion and Avatar Attack mode are all about and see just how hectic battles can get after the break.

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There were some good entries in the Halo Uprising photoshop contest but only one person can win the graphic novel. Mastersystem, congratulations! You've won the novel for your Wolverine, James Bond and Iron Man photoshop entry. No one will stand a chance against you with a team like that! Check the e-mail address that's registered to your account on Dtoid so we can get this book shipped off to you.

Sad that you didn't win? Well why not give our Friday Night Fights tournament a shot? You might win a computer worth $9,000! Also, expect another contest from me next week where you'll have to do some dressing up to win the awesome prize! 

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Ahh, the 4th of July weekend. A Friday off from my day job, fireworks, parties, and fanboys. It's been a relatively slow news week for the video game industry, but, fanboys will still find something to whine about. If it's not a game announcement or a statement from an industry figurehead, it's review scores. While not as extreme as last week's raging over The Conduit, some people are really mad about IGN giving Overlord II a 6, which struck me as odd since the Overlord games have never really been super popular. Usually we get calls for reviewer firings over major releases that get 8s instead of 9s, but some people are just really upset about Overlord II. It's fun, it's flawed, and apparently some people see it being on par with Half Life 2 or Super Mario World and can't deal with people who don't. Those silly fanboys! view full story + comments

When people talk about the inevitable downfall of retail videogames from digital distribution, the one topic that always gets mentioned is undoubtedly Steam. However, Valve is here to set the record straight, and clear up what the company views to be a common misconception.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Valve's Doug Lombardi says that "A lot of the 'Steam is there to compete with retail' stuff is sort of sensationalized." Not only do Steam's free weekends lead to more players, and more digital downloads, but in the case of Left 4 Dead, the promotion also gave the retail PC and Xbox 360 versions of the popular game an increase in sales.

"[Steam is] about making the games better," says Lombardi. "It's currently a great marketing and promotions channel, and yeah we sell games over it and that's great, but whether people buy games at GameStop, or GAME UK, or on Steam, we get paid."

"So for us, whichever cash register you want to pay at, that's fine." Love the honesty, and you know what, it's all about consumer choice in the end.

In a conversation with Official Xbox Magazine, creative director Maxime Beland, said Splinter Cell Conviction will take around twelve hours to complete on the “Normal” difficulty setting. And those twelve seemingly orgasmic hours won’t be filled with “Game Over” screens -- Beland reckons players won’t be eating baddie bullets often.

“We’re going to ship with difficulty levels,” Beland said, “at least a normal mode and realistic mode -- like we did on Rainbow Six Vegas. And ‘Realistic’ is going to be really f--king hard -- you’re going to need stealth, two bullets is going to kill you, the enemies are going to be super-lethal.”

Beland then noted that in Normal mode players “are going to spend 12 hours playing our game and not 30 because they’re dying all the time.”

Twelve hours of Conviction sounds good to us, however, we wouldn’t mind more time with Mr. Fisher. He seems so lonely.

[via 1UP]

While The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Ages was released by Namco Bandai in Japan last year, it's going to be all new to the US very soon thanks to XSEED, who announced today they'll be bringing the game here this holiday season with the help of Namco's Project Aces team.

Based on a series of novels from author Hiroshi Mori, the game is a flight sim that fully utilizes the Wii control scheme to fully immerse you into battle. If you've either seen the Mamoru Oshi film based on Mori's books or read any of the manga that was serialized in Monthly Comic Blade, you know the Sky Crawlers universe has a lot of story, too, and it looks like we'll also enjoy that in the game, which promised to tell it through animated cutscenes.

I have to admit, this looks awfully pretty, but since I've never enjoyed flights sims I may end up passing on it. Having been a fan of the film, though, I can't help but be curious about the new story the game will tell. Does anyone still really get into flight sims, though? I feel like it's been ages since I've heard a gamer say they were really into playing them...

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There's been a lot of hubbub about the "Demo Play" mode in the upcoming Super Mario Bros. Wii. This optional mode reportedly will allow the game to take over for the player, getting them through tough areas they'd been having trouble with. 

This is an interesting approach to games, especially for casual players looking for "fun" rather than "frustration." Playing through an early preview of Twisted Pixel's upcoming Xbox LIVE Arcade game 'Splosion Man this week, we've seen another approach to getting players through those tough spots. One that ends in, of all things, a bit of humulation. 

After I had been dying a lot, the game was called to action. 

"You've died a lot," it told me. "You can now choose 'Way of the Coward' from the pause menu to skip to the next level."

Slightly ashamed, but ready to move on, I did. The results were... unexpected. 

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Kyozo Kicks has been busy creating awesome again. Last time, he whipped up the most incredible tribute to Phoenix Wright in wearable form ever, and this time, he's back with a little bit of love for the Triforce-obsessed.

I really dig the crisp paint job and cool look of these sneakers -- and it seems the artist is open to custom requests as well, so if you're wild about the idea of owning your own Arcana Heart sneakers, get to it and send him an email. Check out his blog if you want to see more about the creation process.

I personally think these are cool, but I would guess some people feel taking your gaming obsessions to your closet might be a little bit further then they want to go. Would you wear shoes like this, or do you prefer to limit your gaming apparel to cleverly worded t shirts?

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Friday Night Fights is a weekly gathering of Dtoiders to just play games with one another.

It's the Fourth of July weekend here in the United States so a lot of people are out of the house doing family stuff. Such a weird concept. Still, there are people playing some games tonight and you can get the lowdown of tonight's events after the break.

Today also marks the beginning of the Friday Night Fights tournament. We're giving away a badass computer worth $9,000. Kick some ass at Quake Live and you'll be on your way to owning a sweet new computer. More details on the tournament here and here's how to set up a match in Quake Live.  

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So, how's your Cosmic Cannon score these days?  I'm up to 26 and about to stab myself in the eyes. Anyway, the score is irrelevant: we're giving away random prizes for another week to participants in our raffle tournament.  All you have to do is give it your best and you're entered in the game. Good luck!

Also, congratulations to Super Drybones, our randomly selected winner from last week's Cosmic Cannon giveaway.  You sir will receive this lovely vidia e-GeForce 9800 GTX+ GPU! video card as seen modelled by our San Francisco correspondent, Mr. PerLee, who is out buying explosives and meat to celebrate America (f*ck yeah)! A steak sounds awesome right now, actually. Why am I still at the computer?

Also, very special thanks to the Eidos family for providing this prize. We salute you, Battlestations: Pacific!

The fantastic documentary I reviewed two days ago is now available for streaming on ARTE's official Web site.

The only problem is that ARTE evidently block their videos behind a region gate; if you're not from Germany or France, you'll have to find a way to make that link believe you're from Germany or France. Web sites exist that can help you to these ends.

If you can't get past the region lock, however, it should also be known that I have seen the documentary uploaded to at least one popular torrenting site. I can't link you to the torrent, of course, but I may be allowed to say that the site to which the torrent belongs phonetically rhymes with "Shmirate Fay Bot Dorg."

See if you can crack my code. See if you can unravel that cipher.