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Have Your Say On Video Game Pricing 
35,000 Telstra Passwords Reset After Games Services Hacked 
Dragon's Dogma: The Kotaku Review In case anyone needed a reminder that nothing’s ever anonymous on the Internet, and yes, your arse can get fired for stuff you put in your personal blog… or MySpace page… or Facebook page… comes the sad tale of Jessica Zenner, a 23-year old employee of Nintendo, was fired for her personal blog (allegedly). Of course, there’s a “she said, company said” element here, and while Zenner says higher-ups never informed her of any Nintendo policy on blogging, a spokeswoman for the company said “[Zenner]was expressly discouraged from doing what she did. I’ve seen everything that she’s written and it’s really not work appropriate.”
One post on Zenner’s blog–titled “The Daily Weed”–begins with her disputing her friends’ perception that she is a pothead. She digresses into a wry tirade against one of her bosses: “One plus about working with [a]hormonal, facial-hair-growing, frumpy [woman]is that I have found a new excuse to drink heavily,” Zenner writes. “My gut tells me that this woman hasn’t been fucked in years.”
… [Rebecca Jeschke, a spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation]says labour laws vary from state to state, so free speech may not always be enough to protect a blogger from getting pink-slipped. According to the Washington State Attorney General’s Office, there isn’t anything in current Washington State law that specifically protects bloggers.
Ranting and raving against your boss is probably not the smartest idea in the world, even if you’re writing under a pseudonym (Zenner posted pictures of herself, despite writing under the name “Jessica Carr”). It just goes to show that even tech friendly companies have their limits – Zenner is one of a longish line of people to be fired after their personal blogs were discovered by superiors.
Game Over: Nintendo Contractor Fired for Blog [The Stranger, thanks Stoli]
A new anthology on gaming – on design, architecture (both of the virtual and actual varieties), urbanism, and lots of other interesting and academic-sounding things – will be coming out next month (or November, for those of us in the US). Entitled Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture, and Urbanism: the Next Level, the volume brings together an impressive number of authors with a variety of backgrounds, and everything from game reviews to essays to interviews:
The richly illustrated texts in “Space Time Play” cover a wide range of gamespaces: from milestone video and computer games to virtual metropolises to digitally-overlaid physical spaces. As a comprehensive and interdisciplinary compendium, “Space Time Play” explores the architectural history of computer games and the future of ludic space. More than 140 experts from game studies and the game industry, from architecture and urban planning, have contributed essays, game reviews and interviews. The games examined range from commercial products to artistic projects and from scientific experiments to spatial design and planning tools.
“Space Time Play” is not just meant for architects, designers and gamers, but for all those who take an interest in the culture of digital games and the spaces within and modeled after them. Let’s play!
The table of contents is, at first glance, a lengthy and fascinating list of topics that really do span a broad range. You can see for yourself at the Space Time Play site [via The Ludologist]
With the release of Halo 3 just days away the ultimate faceoff went down over the weekend at the Dover Speedway: Halo 3 took on the Wii in the form of a NASCAR racing pitting Greg Biffle versus David Stremme.
Exactly 306 laps into the 440 lap race Stremme’s number 40 car blew its engine and sidelined the racer. No, I’m not making that up: The Halo car got a red ring of death.
Meanwhile Biffle’s Wii mobile landed a respectable fourth place. Ouch.
I’m quietly confident that all the fuss over BioShock has passed… well, until Ken Levine announces in one of his many interviews an expansion or sequel, which he surely will.
You see, one reason why BioShock has done so well – and deserves an encore – is because of its amazing pedigree. One such father in the family tree is Thief, an FPS “sneaker” where the objective was to steal, rather than slay.
Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun there’s a fancy write-up (with included developer interviews) on Thief: Deadly Shadows, the third title in the Thief series. Although it was developed by the now-defunct Ion Storm, the first two titles were cooked up by Looking Glass, who’s shattered remains became Irrational, and now 2K Australia/2K Boston (can we get this name shortened already? Sheesh. My vote is on 2K Aus/Bos).
The Making Of Thief: Deadly Shadows [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]
One of the most-ignored of the major titles on the showroom floor was the new Turok title, which found itself nestled at the back of Sega’s impressively large presence. FPS shooters were going to struggle at the best of times at TGS, but this one isn’t doing itself any favours. Mainly because the demo consisted of grass. Lots of grass. And very little else.
It was here, it was there, you could run through it, crawl through it, bad guys would pop out of it and you’d get yourself lost amongst it. Sure, it shakes in the wind, which is nice, as is the trample effect you get as you walk through it, but it’s also BORING, and is literally all you notice about the demo. In an attempt to break up the grass walking there were some dinosaur bones, some gun-wielding soldier types and even some actual dinosaurs in there somewhere, but you could only sort of make them out amongst the, you know. Grass. On the bright side the dinosaurs were well done, and fighting them was a lot more entertaining than dispatching the generic future-army-guys.
If there ever was an argument for PSP hacking (and there are many), then it’s this – playing multiplayer PS1 games using a pair of PSPs connected via Wi-Fi. I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of reverse-engineering this feat would have required. My black hat is off to “AhMan” over at Maxconsole.net.
If you’re wondering if you can download this wonderful thing in digital form, the answer (at least for now) is a rather sad “no”.
AhMan would like to point out that 2-player PS1 games via Adhoc is still in a very early development. It’s not even in beta yet, actually.
Is it time to go through your old PS1 games? Perhaps.
[WIP Video]Adhoc PS1 games using 2 PSPs (!) [Maxconsole.net forums via Engadget]
All the Tokyo Game Show news in addition to the regular bits and pieces made Saturday and Sunday particularly information crazy. Here’s the best of the rest.
Halo 3 Happy-Fun-Time Explosion Frakenreview: Halo 3, Xbox 360
Halo 3: Forge, Co-op Impressions
Halo 3 Super Duper Mega Gallery
Tokyo Game Show 2007 Super-Magic-Choice-Picks King Of Fighters XII Confirmed
Square Enix Closed Mega Theatre
Justify Your Engine: Mark Rein
Discovering Infinite Undiscovery
Tokyo Game Show 2007: Good Impressions As expected, the Xbox 360 doesn’t represent much at all at TGS. Owners of Sony and Nintendo’s consoles and handhelds should be ultra-excited, which is one better than mega-excited.
I noticed that some of you were hoping to avoid having to read my sorta lengthy review of Halo 3 and just wanted a single score. I don’t have a huge issue with providing scores to my reviews when I write for print publications, but I don’t usually use them here on Kotaku because I don’t think they do anything other than provide a hook for people to hang complaints on.
A review is a synthesis of a person’s thoughts about a thing. A score is a synthesis of a person’s review. So you miss out on a lot. But, I have a pretty specific idea of what I think Halo 3 deserves. When I reviewed it for the Rocky Mountain News (that review runs on Friday) I believe I gave it a B+, though I’d probably give the game a B to B+. So for the sake of specificity, I hereby declare that Halo 3 is a 87.5 percent game. And for the record, it didn’t live up to the hype, but nothing could have.
Halo 3. It’s Microsoft’s trump card. Their ultimate attack. Their nuclear fusion kamehameha. And it’s everywhere. More than any game that’s come before, Halo 3 has transcended the cult borders of simple videogame launch to a full-fledged popular culture entertainment monster attack. But is the hype the fair response to Bungie’s sweat or the product of Microsoft’s mega-funded PR machine?
Hit the jump for our Frankenreview on Halo 3: you know, finish the reading.
