If money issues are keeping you from buying newly released "on-rails" shoot'em up Bit.Trip Fate, Gaijin Games has come up with a fun way to save up for the WiiWare game. The studio has once again teamed up with Bryan Green (of Paper Foldables) to put out a papercraft model/piggy bank for a Bit.Trip Fate arcade cabinet.

The miniature machine features a quarter slot to insert your spare change, and is decorated with a Bit.Trip Fate display, marquee, and control panel. It also has some sinister looking Commander Video side art! You can download the papercraft PDF and create your own here.

Make sure to check out Paper Foldables for two other Bit.Trip models, as well as papercraft for games like Bioshock, Fable, Toki Tori, Street Fighter II, and more.

5th Cell, known for developing DS million-sellers like Drawn to Life and Scribblenauts, unveiled its first title for a home console: Hybrid, a third-person shooter built on Valve's Source Engine and coming to Xbox Live Arcade some time next year.

Hybrid centers around two warring factions, Paladin (human) and Variant (alien), the former running a resistance force that hopes to kick the latter out of its cities. The game's teaser site shares journal entries from soldiers representing both groups -- the Variant soldier fears that he might actually pity the humans he's fighting.

This trailer unfortunately doesn't show any gameplay or demonstrate how Hybrid will stand out from other shooters, but 5th Cell has a reputation for putting out titles with creative concepts, so I expect we'll hear that the studio has something unique planned for this so far seemingly routine shooter.

[This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Ben Abraham stretching from pieces on Dead Space 2 through casual trawls through games, to the industry's problems encapsulated.]

Another week, another haul of the best game writing and criticism that the Internet can provide.

First up this week is Chris Green’s look at ‘Demon’s Souls as Epic Poetry’ for Chronoludic. It’s worth reading because it’s an attempt at actually writing some epic poetry about Demon’s Souls; whether it works or not, it’s a step in an original direction that is worth pursuing and promoting.

Speaking of Demon’s Souls, Matthew Armstrong at SnakeLinkSonic continues his discussion of the game linked to last week in his latest piece ‘Dying to Speak’.

And Mike Schiller wrote a piece for the PopMatters Moving Pixels blog this week, all about ‘Sacrificing horror for the sake of human competition’. Schiller looks at whether multiplayer compromises the horror elements of Dead Space 2 and if the trade off is worth it.

It being our duty to share every slight variation in the shoot'em up formula that comes our way, here's a trailer for Shmusicup (Shoot-music-up), a vertical-scrolling rhythm/shmup hybrid from newly founded Singaporean studio Tzai Entertainment.

In Shmusicup, you control a Hatsune Miku-like female with wings as she dodges bullet patterns generated by whatever song is playing. You can pull any MP3 from your library into the game, browsing or pausing the tracks using the music controls on the side.

And that's Shmusicup's primary gimmick! I'm not sure if it actually features enemies other than the speaker-thumping boss you see in the video, or if there's more to it than what I've outline, but perhaps we'll more that interests us when this game is closer to release.

Last month, we showed you Return of the Quack (pictured), a strange but attractive shoot'em up from indie developer Chevy Ray Johnston, artist Matt Furie, and chiptune musician Nullsleep, which was sponsored by Toyota's Scion brand and given away with issues of Giant Robot magazine.

Scion's Installation Space Los Angeles is working with Giant Robot again to have the latter curate a new "Pixel Pushers" exhibit, which bills itself as "an exploration of 8-bit digital media" and will run from November 17 to December 11.

A Famicom-inspired Scion art car will serve as a centerpiece from the show, projecting Return of The Quack, presumably for attendees to play. The exhibit will feature video-game inspired art, a bank of retro custom pachinko machines, 8-bit sculptures, and four mini-game consoles.

Participating artists include Return of the Quack's creators of course, Jud Buffum, Zach Gage, Len Higa, Daniel Rehn, Shawn Smith, and Kohei Yamashita. The show's flyer is available here. I can't wait to see the Famicom art car!

[Microsoft's Kinect is of some significant interest even for GSW readers, and in a wide-ranging interview, Microsoft Game Studios corporate VP Phil Spencer tells big sister site Gamasutra's correspondent Brett Bates that he "feels pretty good" about Kinect pre-release buzz, but admits the camera's success is an unknown "until [it's] out there and people are actually buying."]‭

The evolution of the Xbox brand is officially arriving next week, as Microsoft finally launches the much-hyped Kinect body-scanning camera for Xbox 360.

Years of research and millions of dollars have been spent on the device, which Microsoft hopes will finally capture a casual audience that has, for the most part, eluded the core-focused Halo purveyor since the original Xbox's launch in 2001.

As with any brand new commercial technology, there's no amount of money that a company can throw towards marketing that can ensure the success of a device like Kinect.

Microsoft Game Studios corporate VP Phil Spencer was candid when he told us, "As somebody who’s been in the entertainment business for awhile now,‭ ‬it’s not until you’re out there and people are actually buying"‭ will Microsoft know consumers' reactions for sure.

In a new interview less a week before Kinect's launch, a candid Spencer addresses lingering questions about Microsoft's pursuit of the mass market, the company's dedication to the still-loyal core Xbox 360 gamer, and whether people actually want a controller-free experience.

Now that Kinect is coming out,‭ ‬you guys are obviously putting a lot of your resources behind it.‭ ‬Where exactly do the priorities of Microsoft Game Studios lie right now‭? How much focus is on the Kinect and ‬more casual games compared to the hardcore games like Halo or Gears of War‭?

Well,‭ ‬I’m very proud with how Halo Reach has done in the market.‭ ‬That was a long undertaking.‭ ‬We worked with Bungie really hard to make that game be what it is,‭ ‬and it’s nice to see the review scores and the consumers have definitely showed up,‭ ‬which is nice.‭ ‬And Fable is shipping [this] week,‭ ‬another one of our core franchises.

The core has been core to our success from the beginning.‭ ‬We get that.‭ ‬It wasn’t by accident.‭ ‬And when I think about how we can continue to evolve our platform,‭ ‬adoption by the core of our new technologies is really important to us.‭

Yuji Naka and Sonic Team's classic Dreamcast puzzler ChuChu Rocket is now available to play on your preferred iOS device ($4.99 for iPhone/iPod Touch, $6.99 for iPad), allowing you to direct ChuChu mice to their rocket ship and avoiding evil cats while on the go.

The game will offer multiplayer support, 145 levels (includes challenges and multiplayer battle stages), and Game Center features for sharing achievements and high scores. You can play against up to three other people over Bluetooth or WiFi, or on the same screen with an iPad.

"ChuChu Rocket is undoubtedly one of our most beloved franchises," says Sega of America's Digital Busines VP Haruki Satomi. "ChuChu Rocket is undoubtedly one of our most beloved franchises."

Hardcore Gaming 101, known for its thorough articles dissecting hundreds of video games (many obscure or never released in the States), has posted "A Brief History of 2D Fighting Games", presenting a huge list of fighters from Capcom, SNK, and many other companies.

The timeline covers 2D fighting games from Karate Champ and Yie Ar Kung Fu in 1984/1985 (which "aren't the first fighting games, but they may be the first ones that are worth playing") to BlazBlue Continuum Shift II in 2010, though it skips over Mortal Kombat's sequels, games predating Street Fighter II, and a few others.

The list's author seeks to provide "another layer of perspective that is lost when you read about one series at a time", and does so with insightful and cheeky comments for many of the titles:

1996: Art of Fighting 3 uses rotoscoping to make some of the nicest animation you'll see of Robert putting his hands in his pockets and kicking his opponent while she's down.

1997: Capcom, long lambasted for its inability to count to three, releases Street Fighter III a mere six years after Street Fighter II. It is Capcom’s last internally-developed 2D fighting game to feature completely new animation.

You can spend your entire morning reading the 2D Fighting Game timeline here.

Organizers of the 2011 Independent Games Festival are announcing the distinguished jury panel that will determine the eight finalists and overall winner of its Nuovo Award.

This special award, part of the IGF, which takes place at Game Developers Conference 2011 next February, is dedicated to honoring abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which "advances the medium and the way we think about games."

Now in its third year, the Nuovo Award allows more esoteric 'art games' from among the almost 400 IGF entries to compete on their own terms alongside longer-form indie titles, and has been newly expanded to include eight finalists.

The Nuovo has previously been awarded to Jason Rohrer's abstract multiplayer title Between and to Tuning [YouTube link] -- the perception-warping platform puzzler from Swedish indie Cactus.

This year's Nuovo Award jury has been selected to represent a diverse body of developers both independent and mainstream, academics, art world notables, and -- in general -- some of our industry's top thinkers on the future of art and the video game medium.

The jury will receive game recommendations from the wider body of over 150 IGF Main Competition judges (itself including notable former IGF winners and finalists including Petri Purho, Kyle Gabler, Jakub Dvorsky, Tyler Glaiel, and Dylan Fitterer).

The 2011 IGF Nuovo jury consists of the following:

Four months after unveiling the port at E3 with a trailer, Square Enix is starting to show off its iPhone edition of Seiken Densetsu 2, or Secret of Mana, the beloved co-op action RPG originally released for the SNES in 1993.

Japanese gaming site Appbank shot and uploaded some video from Secret of Mana for iPhone, showing off the game's touchscreen controls, character portraits, Ring Commands system, and easily killed Rabites. Unfortunately, there's no multiplayer footage.

There's also no word on a firm release date, but Square Enix previously said Secret of Mana will hit iPhones some time this year.