Joystick Division New Banner CONTEST

Posted by Gary Hodges at 10:57 PM Jun 21, 2008

As you may or may not have noticed, we’ve got a new banner and logo for Joystick Division. We wanted something a little more colorful, a little more playful, a little sleeker… and now we have it! Even better, it presents an opportunity for you readers to flex your videogame trivia muscles and maybe win some free stuff.

In designing the banner, every one of Joystick Division’s Voltron 5 (Jonathan McNamara, Nate Patrin, Ward Rubrecht, Chris Ward, and me, Gary Hodges) plus our editor, Jeff Shaw, suggested videogame characters for inclusion. There were no rules – they could be hero or villain; animal, vegetable or mineral; universally recognizable or utterly obscure. Really, the only condition was that the character was meaningful to the JD alum in one way or another.

So the lists rolled in, and I did my best to reinterpret them for the banner. Now we’d like to see which reader can identify the most of them!

The characters hail from every possible type of gaming: consoles, arcade, and PC. If you’re going to identify every single one, you’ll have to be familiar with all of those platforms. All eras of gaming are represented as well. If you don’t know anything about gaming pre-Final Fantasy VII, you’re going to have a tough time.

Some characters are dead obvious – even a non-gamer can identify them. Most are in that zone where you need to have at least some history with gaming to recognize them. A few, though, are tricky. One bit of advice: some characters look a lot more “polished” than their original, low-detail highly-pixelated forms. Look for broad characteristics: clothing colors, equipment, box art, etc.

Below is a character list, with clearer, larger pics of everyone/everything in the banner, 1 through 23. For each number, identify both the character and the game he/she/it is from (if he/she/it is in a series of games, just name the first game in the series). For example:

Specificity counts! – if it comes down to a tiebreaker, the person who could identify characters more exactly will be named the winner. (If it’s still a tie, it will be a coin toss or whoever got their entry in first, depending.)

E-mail your entry to gwhodges@hotmail.com, with the subject “ALL TOO EASY”, before or on June 28. That’s a week from now, which is plenty. Any late entries will not just be deleted, but printed first and burned. One entry per person, yadda yadda yadda.

Alright, now down to brass tacks. As a national game reviewer wooed by game publishers, I end up with stuff. Stuff I don’t have any use for and am ethically prohibited from selling. This means you can benefit.

FIRST PLACE is the Metal Gear Solid 4 Limited Edition set, seen HERE. Opened, yes, but mint otherwise and only played by me for review. I’ll also throw in the original black-and-white drawing of your favorite character from the banner, signed.

Second place – being the proverbial first loser – nets you Go Diego Go!: Safari Rescue for the Nintendo Wii, which was sent to me for review but – since Joystick Division is decidedly R-rated – I’ll never, ever cover. That one, unlike MGS4, is sealed. And because I’m not a total prick, I’ll also throw in Major League Baseball 2K8 for the Xbox 360 (also sealed).

Third place is a lifetime membership to Joystick Division, with unlimited visits. And you just can’t put a price on that.

Okay, the characters. First, here’s the banner, which you can click on to get a larger view:

1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15 & 16.

17. 18. 19.

20 & 21.

22. 23.