News For The Week Of May 4th

Another week, another post. On time, once again.

• Advergaming powers activate! Shape of an H&M shill! I totally don't get this in it's entirety... Never really dug the Sims too much, so maybe it's just over the top of my head here, but shouldn't advergaming still be making gaming... uh, cheaper? Where's the goodwill for the people who you might want to soon sell your affordably priced fashionable clothes to? Or are gamers not included in that demographic?

• Now I've said in the past that Consumer Affairs is basically worthless. They have a tendency to write to the lowest common denominator which always leaves me feeling like someone is talking to me like a rather dull sheep. Fairly often I'll read something there and it's kind of like they don't actually have someone checking things for grammar or flow before they are posted. Some of the stuff they have is good info, do not get me wrong, but this article on video games is not some of that stuff. Take every gamer stereotype and have some drunken travel hippy (you think I kid...) rehash it for you in a semi-cohesive manner and there you go. Have these people ever actually tried to immerse themselves into gamer culture before writing an article? What's that? No? Curious.

• Oh my god. Seriously? Srsly? It's not like this kid said "OMG VATECH SHOOTZES WAS SO AWZOMNLFDSKL!!!1" and built the map. This had to take time to do, the kid was proud of his work... He just had really bad timing. And a hammer is a deadly weapon? what the hell? There is so much wrong with this whole thing I don't know where to start. Which also reminds me, why didn't they arrest the other kids in the school who played the map? They were doing some terroristic training, you know?

• WoWcard? WoVisa? Are you kidding me, a World of Warcraft Visa card? I want to dismiss this out of hand, but you know... No annual fee, a fairly reasonable APR after a 12 month 0% rate and a full penny on the dollar (one 'reward point' per dollar spent... almost like xp!) goes to buying you more months of WoW. A WoW player with half-assed financial skills could be playing for free indefinitely just based on monthly purchases. Or every time you buy another 2000 gold, it's like Bliz encourages that and gives you a free month's worth of play for it. Huzzah!

There will be more. There's always more.

News For The Week of April 27th, Curt Edition

There it is.

• It's beautiful, it's Katamari... It's Beautiful Katamari. I thought they were done making these things, but whatever. I"m not going to get upset over a Japanese LSD trip on a disc. It's fine by me.

• Playing games makes you green, huh? All that item management, wearing gear for as long as it'll last you, hording items... I can see that.

• This isn't specifically game related, but it can be used in the application of games, and it is really awesome, so in it goes. 3D, cheap, in your living room.
  

Maybe more news next week.

News for the week of March 16th, early editon.

Yeah, it's going up early today, I have a lot more stuff to do tomorrow than I planned... well, this morning. It was unsurprisingly slower this week, what with the GDC not on. No one flipping out over the Wii, and I still don't really care about Spore.

• I'm sure someone is tired of this by now, but I'm not. A German site, Cynamite, got a hold of a pre-production Pal PS3 and did a little backwards compatibility testing. Very astute of them, since it's been a big deal that Sony said Europe will be getting the software BC but has assured everyone it'll be just as good as the hardware BC. Maybe not so much according to Cynamite, who put a dozen recent popular games through their PS3, and only one – Eragon – worked. No God of War, no Guitar Hero 2. A caveat: it was the 1.6 revision of their firmware, it could easily be updated by the ship date.
• Good for them with the whole folding thing, though. It would be nice to see other console manufacturers doing that, with their multi-core chips and all... maybe some SETI action.

• Epic lawyers gone wild, some more! Do you recall that little throwdown Epic's lawyers had with this guy? Sure you do! Mark Rein even came out of the woodwork to apologize, which is pretty cool even if his company can't hire lawyers that can read a website fully, which is weird because they apparently passed the bar exam and I understand that takes some reading skills. Well, those lawyers and their text disabled browsers have done it again, giving this gent the option to destroy his one-off piece of fan art. Nice. It's acrylics on canvas, for chrissake.

• 300 and video games in the same post? Awesome. Or is it? Variety, of all places, has a nice piece on movie critics comparing (in this instance) 300 to 'video games' in general. This is basically used as a thinly veiled insult, that a movie heavy on the visuals and lighter on plot is tantamount to a video game. I'm guessing these people have never played a Zelda game or waded through FF7. I recall being mildly incensed by Joe Morgenstern's article about games in the WSJ, where he admitted his gaming experienced started and ended at Nanosaur 2. Yeah, maybe just drop the 99 bucks for a ps2 and fire up anything that's sold well in the past three years before you run your mouth.

• NPD numbers for February are out, and... You know, I kind of want to actually not feel like I have to rag on Sony for the PS3, but it sucked out loud last month. Coming out on top? The Wii. I wonder if Nintendo execs have Scrooge McDuck style money bins that they dive into when they feel the need for a refreshing swim?
  
• - 335,000 Nintendo Wii's
• - 295,000 Sony PS2's
• - 228,000 MS Xbox360's
• - 127,000 Sony PS3's
• I understand they were intent on moving 200,000 PS3's, but consumers apparently had other ideas.
  

News For The Week of March 9th, GDC Edition

Well it was a big week for games, what with the Game Developers Conference and all. I am attempting to keep it short even though there was a fair bit of news.

• Sony makes PS3 owners happy by... giving them 3D spaces to hang out in? Damn, here I've been hanging out in 3D spaces since 1980 maybe, I never realized that I would need a PS3 to do it right. Color me 'eh' about it. It looks alright, if not sterile. Like if someone boiled Second Life in disinfectant and then slapped some Playstation stickers on it. But if you do happen to have a PS3, feel free to sign up for the beta.

• Peter Molyneux likes dogs, and he wants you to like dogs too. At least he wants you to like the dog in Fable 2, which is important. So you know you're actually still human, not some shambling wretch enslaved by your console, a husk of what you used to be. That aside, it seems like a neat feature... Hopefully this won't turn out to be Fable 2's tree.

• Spore developer Chris Hecker (Yeah I know, who?) flips out on the poor, defenseless Wii. Thankfully, there are no Wii's to be found anywhere in public, so no harm was done to their fragile psyche, even though he apologized. This also gives me a chance to flippantly dismiss Spore, which I will now do with aplomb, because I've never really cared about it and it's just another Will Wright game.
  

News For The Week of March 2nd

Well, news just snuck up on me this week. Didn't even see it coming.

• Bioshock is coming out August 21. Nice long days in August. Yes sir, if it's the spiritual successor to System Shock like they claim it is, I will be liking those long, light filled days.
  

• Ten's of PS3 owners are to become 'very happy' next week at Game Developers Conference, so says the director of the GDC. I don't want to know how Sony intends to make them happy, but I'm sure they will do their best.

• Speaking of Sony... They're going to have fixed the PS3 shortages by May. It's not like you can't find them in stores now anyway, perhaps they will spill out into the streets, begging to be taken home like a lost puppy. But it'll have a blu-ray drive, which puppies do not come with.

• Insider secrets... well, secrets from a guy that used to sell you video games anyway. Just nine of them, and they should very well be things you already knew... But if you don't know some of them, it's worth the read.
  

News For The Week of February 23rd

Well, this is the first time I've done this bit, so bear with me. It felt like a slow news week anyway...

• As it may have been noted, I am not the biggest PS3 fan. I do wonder what is going through the head of a company who decides to *remove* functionality from a later revision of a piece of hardware, which is what Sony has done to the PAL version of the PS3. It is just the hardware PS2 emulation, which I understand will drive down costs, but at least you could throw Europe and Australia a bone and let them know how long they'll have to keep their PS2's out.
• Wing Commander Wing Commander Wing Commander! Oooh, maybe not so much. Thanks EA, I just knew you would wreck it. It's been a long time since since I've seen a good space flight game, and this looks like it'll keep that tradition alive. At least it looks like the previous games and not like the movie.
  
• The Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta Invite Crackdown came out this week. Looks like it was pretty well liked, despite being a little light on the plot and having a few other issues. I guess there is something to say about being able to fix all problems with violence.