PlaySEGA has updated to include an all new game, Stuntmaster Motorcross.  The game seems simple enough, you can lean forward and back and go either fast or slow.  I loaded it up thinking I’d be doing massive tricks and watching my multiplier fly… I was wrong.

On my first few runs of the game, I was thinking that this game was easily Not Safe For Work, due to the number of expletives I was so very close to saying openly across the office.  Even my Safe For Work reactions were drawing some eyes.  I think I heard, “Are you ok?” at least four or five times while I was trying to just get through the level.  The first few runs were just trying to get from begining to end, no fancy stuff, and I was marching my Supercross guy into one painful face plant after another.

So a frustrating start, but fall after fall, I was getting it and it started to come together. I think I failed on maybe 100 flips before I started to get it.  The weight of the rider starts to feel more natural and suddenly I’m starting to get the ramp up to the jumps, keeping my speed, and doing endos into double backflips.  The subtleties of the maps start to make more sense and pretty quickly I was starting to see more natural lines and opportunities to lean back and sneak in a backflip here and there.  The first time you hit the triple backflip, oh man, amazing.

So here are my tips to become a top notch, achievement grabbing, PlaySEGA Motorcross star:
-    Patience! Yes, play and mess around and lose a lot.  While playing around, you’ll start to see how the weight of the rider works.
-    Learn the course.  Play each course to pass to the end, don’t go big on the first go.  Once you know the layout, come back and see how far you can push the limits.
-    Go fast and go big.  Even when you fail, and fail hard, you run the chance of sliding into a checkpoint, gaining you one step closer to the end.  Sometimes you even pull the trick off, which is a thrill.

So that’s my take, I hope you enjoy it as much as I now do.  If I could make one tweak, it would be to add a save-a-replay feature, so we could share our painful failures or our big successes.

Attention, soldiers of Gallia! It’s no big secret – Valkyria Chronicles is awesome. Really awesome. Awesome enough that lots of our own staff are addicted to it, and that the author of this blog post thinks it’s one of the best games he’s played in the last few years.

The best news – there’s even more in store for Valkyria. Soon we’ll be announcing a date for the first batch of Valkyria Chronicles downloadable content, and – this is the cool part – in the meantime, we’ve got a very nifty call-to-arms for all you Valkyria fans attending the New York Comic-con! Here’s how it works:

• 1: Buy a ticket for the New York Comic-Con this February.
• 2: Show up dressed like any character from Valkyria Chronicles.
• 3: Charge towards the battlefield objective SEGA Booth!
• 4: Get a free copy of the Limited Edition Valkyria Chronicles Art Book!

We’ve stockpiled a very limited amount of these books to give away, so time will be of the essence as we’ll have a set amount to give out on both Friday and Saturday at the convention. Just in case there are a large number of cosplayers, the fastest soldiers to arrive each day will be the ones who get the books, but we guarantee that anyone who shows up as a Valkyria character will get some special attention here on the SEGA Blogs, on our Flickr page, and maybe even on the Valkyria website…

Finally, if you’re a twitter user, we’ve added a Valkyria Chronicles feed – check us out: @ValkyriaTribune!

This year’s Comic-Con is going to be packed with all sorts of SEGA goodness – we hope to see some members of Squad seven (or even the Empire) at the show next month!