GAME Australia Lays Off 281 Employees, Closes 60 Stores 
How Diablo III's Always-On Internet Requirement Makes It A Better Game GAME: No Buyers Yet, Crisis To Drag On For Another Month 
Have Your Say On Video Game Pricing 
35,000 Telstra Passwords Reset After Games Services Hacked 
Dragon's Dogma: The Kotaku Review In Japan, Pokémon is on everything. I mean EVERYTHING. Not true in the USA! Good luck finding things like Pokémon curry or Pokémon wonton soup in the States. Why is that? Why?! Over-exposre has led Pokémon USA to be way more selective. Says the company’s Holly Rawlinson: We get requests for all kinds of products, but now we turn a lot down.
Turned down products include nappies and gerbil cages. Yes, Pokémon USA turned down Pokémon gerbil cages. What the hell are those people thinking? Poké gerbil cages are a GOLD MINE. Pokemon is Back [NY Times via ANN]
Whenever things go bad in a legal/social sense, you can always count on the Dutch to pull one out of the fire. They’ve just announced that, should Take-Two wish to publish Manhunt 2 in The Netherlands, they can go right ahead and do it, since their classification laws are based on …the principle that every adult is considered capable of deciding for himself which games he wants to play, unless it contains illegal material.
In case you’re wondering, illegal material means either anything a paedophile would enjoy or any kind of racist propaganda. Manhunt’s got neither, so it’s all good! And that’s the completely uncut version, too, not the recently-edited US version. BONUS GOOD NEWS: should Take-Two wish to publish the uncut version in The Netherlands, it would most likely include the original PAL language tracks, in effect giving anyone throughout Europe and Australasia access to a legal, unedited copy of the game via importing. Dutch Won’t Ban Video Game Manhunt II [Forbes, via Gamesindustry]
Remember that kurazy Kokoro Scan video we posted a while back? How could you forget! The game, created by SEGA’s Feel the Magic team, uses voice recognition technology to decipher how people really feel. It launched earlier this month in Japan with some delightful TV ads like this one. The girl is saying a bunch of relationship type words like “living together” or “marriage”, and the software analyses her speech to pick the one that matches her true feelings. Did it select the word marriage? Nope! It choose CHEATING. Just look at the look on her boyfriend’s face. He’s crushed!
Hey, so the Elite finally launched in Australia yesterday. Microsoft were kind enough to ship one over to my place to check it out, and I can safely say…it’s exactly the same as Crecente’s! Oh, except for the fact we’ve got nothing to put on the 120GB HDDs, since the Video Marketplace still isn’t here. I will say this though – it’s quieter than my original, makes less clunking and clattering noises when I’m loading BioShock and looks positively fetching on my black entertainment unit, where it blends in so well you can barely see the thing.
Whoever it was at Nintendo that sat down, looked at the release schedule and went “yeah, fuck it, let’s release this in Europe”, I say this: thank you. Whoever threw the music together for this trailer, I say…thank you?
Just because Microsoft doesn’t have the home field advantage doesn’t mean the company is going to sit on the TGS sidelines. Yes, the company will be announcing something. In an interview with Canada.com, lippy Microsoft exec Jeff Bell hints at what Microsoft will be showing at the Tokyo Games Show, namely Alan Wake, Fable 2 and Halo Wars. As well it should be! Those are all first party games, though. What about third part stuff? Bell stirs the hornet’s nest: Let’s be honest. There’s only two major franchises that are talked about not appearing on our platform: Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid.
So why not buy them? You’re Microsoft, you’re rich.
BioShock’s actual setting is seven-and-a-half shades of awesome. It’s earlier proposed setting, with Nazis on an idyllic tropical island, also sounded great. Before that, though, it had another proposed theme: that of the deprogrammer. As in, a guy hired by a Senator who’s job is to deprogram people, altering their beliefs, philosphies, etc. Kinda ties in with a theme in the final product, yeah, but definitely would have made for an interesting premise on its own, especially if the player had to start messing with people’s views on sex, gender or religion. Maybe next time, Ken? Levine: BioShock Originally About Cult Deprogrammer (Updated) [Shacknews]
Poor Retro. All these years, all these Metroid games, they must be sick of Samus. Sick to death of her pretty blonde hair and big orange suit and arms that are guns and suit that’s a ball. The guys have done enough for the Nintendo faithful, and they deserve a break. And a break’s what they’re going to get. We are taking a break from the Metroid series and from Samus. I think that there will be other titles created. But as far as Retro Studos is concerned, we’ll take a break for a little bit.
Take five lads. Go to some exotic Mediterranean resort, drink fruity drinks with umbrellas in them, have a discreet rendezvous with a bored Italian housewife. You’ve earned it. Metroid Prime 3: Developer Interview [Yahoo, via Game|Life]
Guess the fear-mongers will need another scapegoat! According to Governor Tim Kaine’s Virginia Tech Review Panel final report, video games are not a factor in what cause the horrible VA Tech shooting. Game site GamePolitics has highlighted selected section involving games in Chapter IV: Mental Health History of Seung Hui Cho. Those include: “He was enrolled in a Tae Kwon Do program for awhile, watched TV, and played video games like Sonic the Hedgehog.”
My internet connection is hating me right now. Not only am I downloading the Tekken 5 online add-on on my PS3, now I’ve got my Xbox 360 downloading the 581mb TimeShift demo I just read about over at Larry Hryb’s blog. I had TimeShift preordered before the Xbox 360 came out nearly two years ago, so it will be fun to finally get my hands on a playable version of the title so I can see if I need to go back to my old GameStop and get my fiver back or not. If the old GameStop is even still there. It has been awhile.
Demo: TimeShift [Xbox Live's Major Nelson]
