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 There’s been tons of phony or placeholder Super Smash Bros. Brawl box art floating around. But when really neat art recently pops up on big name retail sites (Go Nintendo found it elsewhere), then we think that maybe, just maybe this is the real deal. If not, it’s still pretty cool! SSBB Box Art? [Amazon, Thanks Jacob!]
I just returned from Richard Garriott’s Britainnia Manor, which tonight hosted the Tabula Rasa Logos Academy, a well-crafted event that I will go into at great length at a later date. What I can tell you right now is what was revealed at the end of the event. Tabula Rasa now has an official street date. October 19th is when the game service will officially go live, with preorder customers getting a 3-day head start beginning on October the 16th. A newly redesigned website should be going live within the next day, so keep an eye out on http://www.playtr.com/ for updates throughout the day.
Forget those concerns that Ubisoft is going to be bought up. Ubisoft wants to do the buying! SCi Entertainment, owner of Lara Croft developer Eidos, stated that it received a bid from French publisher Ubisoft. SCi Entertainment has had rough times of late, and this Ubisoft move to snap up the company should peak interest from Time Warner, which already has a 10 per cent stake in SCi. Nothing’s set in stone, but Electronic Arts and Sony could also be interested in acquiring SCi. Aren’t corporate takeovers fascinating? No, no they aren’t. Ubisoft Buying? [The Guardian]
Apparently, Microsoft has temporarily locked out 23,000 thousands LIVE users who took advantage of a now resolved exploit in Call of Duty 4 beta. The exploit allowed participants to sign in on a different machine, use their beta token and download the beta again. Game site Xbox-Scene has a memo from an “internal Microsoft source” who details what’s gone down: There was an exploit (it’s been resolved), in the Call of Duty 4 beta. The public beta had 100k valid participants who qualified and were provided special tokens which allowed them to download the COD4 beta from Marketplace.
Haven’t played Rock Band? Good thing a GIANT SEMI TRUCK will be bringing Rock Band to the masses. On September 9th, a 24-city American tour will kick off in Las Vegas. MTV’s even going to make you famous. According to its GameDrop Blog: If you think you’re destined for Rock Band stardom, you’re in luck; you can test your skills and participate in the nationwide casting call at MTV’s Rock Band “Rock Off” events. Any rockers without stage fright who play on the Rock Band tour bus stage will be captured on tape for consideration by MTV casting directors. Two bands will get picked and flown to NYC to spend face-time with a real rock band for official rocker training. Then they’ll play on MTV’s TRL, and the winning outfit will get to open for a surprise super group at the Rock Band launch concert.
Hit the jump for the tour dates:
Kotaku reader Henry passed on what may be considered a clever homage or a the work of a lazy graphic designer, as the Alma Mater Society’s handbook for the coming school year at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver sports some strinkingly familiar imagery. We can only hope that no one was hurt during the tragic rolling up of the school and that someone issues a zombie army against these dogs of the AMS in retaliation for their swipe.
Big pic of the geeky handbook after the jump.
I’m perfectly content to go keychain-less, as I generally wear skin-tight leather pants everywhere I go, but I may have to revise my policy for a pair of new import goodies from Bandai and Yujin. On the left we have the mini Wii-mote projector, one that throws a spotlight featuring the Nintendo character of your choice—as long as it’s from Super Paper Mario, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess or Wario Ware Smooth Moves—upon anything your heart desires.
Only slightly less thrilling are the new The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass sound drops, featuring familiar sound bites from the Nintendo DS game.
All are available for pre-order at National Console Support. Yay for plastic!
What is it about Boogie that makes me so morbidly curious? Having just seen the trailer for the Nintendo DS version announced earlier today, I come away disappointed yet again. While I’m strangely fascinated by the 3D-glasses feature and the potential for mini-games (seriously!), this just doesn’t seem to live up to its potential as a rhythm game contender. Maybe it’s that cover of “Brickhouse” that makes me want to smash everything in sight that unfairly influences my opinion…
To: Ash From: Crecente Re: A Very Important Question (About My Hair)
Dude, mullet? Why would you want business in the front, when you can party all the time? That’s all I’m saying.
So HP’s new Blackbird PC landed on my doorstep this afternoon, just hours before the embargo lifted. I was supposed to have received it weeks ago to, you know, get time to actually check it out before writing about it. But that didn’t happen for some reason. And to make matters worse, the thing won’t boot up, the hard drive appears to be bad. Personally, I don’t think that’s that big a deal, from my perspective. I know what sort of wonderful things are out there in the way of cards and memory and motherboards, so none of that is going to impress me. And that’s not what sets this thing apart, it’s the 30 kilogram-plus chassis. The thing is made of solid aluminium, no plastic at all. And I was able to take the whole thing apart in minutes. It’s the best tooless PC I’ve ever seen. But it’s also a really big, really heavy paperweight right now and the box it came in is HUGE. I’m going to call up HP tomorrow to get it sent back. I just don’t have the space for it.
What you missed: Fahey is at the Austin Game Developers Conference PSP2K hit today New iPods have a gaming built in Karraker Quits SCEA but not before he chats with us Fahey is invading Garriott’s home The Lair Curse, Worse than the Madden Curse? Blackbird Impressions
Video game football is about to get yet another contender, this time with a decidedly specific bent as tongue twisting developer Nerjyzed Entertainment has announced Black College Football Experience or BCFx if the former grows to tiresome. The Unreal Engine 3 powered college football game brings together three historically black college and university conferences, including some 40 teams for “an incredibly fun football game for the whole family to play.”
So what is the Black College Football Experience? As a lily white dude whose closest hands-on experience with such a thing was flipping past a FAMU game once, I’ll have to wait for the PC release to find out. Based on the press release, it’s apparently not only football, but halftime shows, too, as you’ll “step into the boots of a drum major” for an interactive battle of the bands. Hey! I like rhythm games, too!
Far more details are available at the Nerjyzed site, but a handy press release follows.
