Harley Quinn's Revenge Is Batman: Arkham City's Bad New Ending 
High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle 
The Last Moments Of GAME 
How Bad User Interfaces Are Ruining Video Games And Other Wonderful Things 
She Tried To Make Good Video Games For Girls, Whatever That Meant 
The Story Of Doodle Jump: Brotherly Love And Digital Snacks We’ve seen our share of Mario-related scarves here at Kotaku, but I’ve never seen one quite like this. It’s the 1-UP mushroom, and unlike the knitted versions that make for your average scarf, this one is crochet. The scarf will set you back a cool $US 150, but it’s hand crafted to order, so if green isn’t your color, no worries. I do wonder if it’s actually warm – but I guess something like this is more of a fashion statement than a utilitarian knit.
Custom 1-UP Mushroom Crochet Scarf [Etsy via OhGizmo!]
From artist Frank C., the creator of the No More Heroes Wii, comes this custom Evil Dead Wii GH Guitar controller. Who doesn’t need a little more Bruce Campbell in their life? Great work Frank, can you teach me how to to that? I’m feeling the need for some kind of customised system or peripheral. Better yet, I’ll just send you a check and you can do it for me. I’m too lazy busy writing.
Gamasutra has kindly compiled five complete interviews with members of the South Korean gaming industry to shed light on where Korea is now and where they’ll be in the future. During the GStar game show in Seoul, Gamasutra got Stephen Lee (Nexon), Sang Woon Yoon (Webzen), Yoo-Ra Kim (T3), Ji Young Park (Com2Us), and Dae Hwan Lim (Microsoft) to talk about just about everything under the sun. The complete interviews span a daunting 21 pages; despite the diversity of opinions, there were a lot of commonalities:
The interviewees … were universally interested in vaulting into the console and handheld markets, and growing audiences both inside and outside Korea with these projects.
The groundwork is still being laid, however …. Lim sees the Xbox 360 market as presently laying the groundwork for consoles catching on in Korea — “The console games market is not really successful here. We want to establish the base first for the Xbox 360 by releasing games more fit for Korean gamers. The company itself will make an investment for that. We’re trying to establish the fact that games can be played by anyone, not just by adults.”
If you’re not scared off by the length, it’s well worth a read through – the interviews cover a lot of ground and it’s interesting to see different approaches to the same problems.
Korea Rising: Five Crucial Interviews [Gamasutra]
For those of you attending CES with a hankering for all the Microsoft you can handle, you can now take a look at exactly what they are offering. Along with the Bill Gates helmed keynote speech, a variety of Microsoft related activities will be going on in conference rooms and at the MS booth itself. A total of thirteen panels and conferences will be held covering such subjects as Game Power: Entertainment as Franchise, Hollywood and the Digital Consumer: How Technology, Content and Services Establish the Next Level of Consumer Entertainment Experience and A Tale of Two Supply Chains: Halo 3 and Zune.
Check out all the listings after the jump to start making your schedule now.
Ars Technica has an interesting hands on with a creation tool that the Stanford Virtual Worlds Group released last month. It’s called Dryad, and is the first example of what the Stanford team hopes will be an easy way to create (realistic) user-generated content in virtual worlds:
It may not be completely obvious why research like this is so important, so we’ll spell it out at the risk of over-simplifying matters. If virtual words are to proliferate, one major bottleneck to that proliferation will be visual design. Let’s face it: few of us can draw something as simple as a tree well in two dimensions, let alone three. However, if a system could be devised that would allow everyday people to participate in the crowd-sourced construction of virtual worlds, then that particular bottleneck could be done away with.
While it’s limited right now to trees, the team clearly hopes it won’t be too long until even the least artistic among us can design buildings and objects for virtual worlds. It’s an interesting read (including thoughts from Prof. Vladlen Koltun, who headed up the project) on how some academics are trying to do research that will applicable in the not-too-distant future.
Researchers hope to enable crowdsourcing of virtual worlds [Ars Technica via Worlds In Motion]
We are constantly inundated with stories of games getting their release dates bumped back, but rarely if ever do we hear about something releasing early. In a statement to IGN yesterday, Ubisoft announced that Suda 51′s No More Heroes will be coming to the Wii a little over a month early. Originally slated to release Feb. 29, the quirky cel-shaded cousin of Killer 7 is now set to hit store shelves on Jan. 22. The original release date would have pitted No More Heroes against heavy hitter Super Smash Bros. Brawl, so was this a shrewd marketing move on Ubisofts’s part, or merely a coincidence?
In light of yesterday’s announcement that Warner Bros. will be going exclusively Blu-Ray, the HD DVD Promotion Group has cancelled it’s press conference for this year’s CES. The news came in an email sent around to CES attendees yesterday.
“Based on the timing of the Warner Home Video announcement today, we have decided to postpone our CES 2008 press conference scheduled for Sunday, January 6th at 8:30 p.m. in the Wynn Hotel. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
We are currently discussing the potential impact of this announcement with the other HD DVD partner companies and evaluating next steps. We believe the consumer continues to benefit from HD DVD’s commitment to quality and affordability – a bar that is critical for the mainstream success of any format.
We’ll continue to keep you updated on new developments around HD DVD.”
Yeeeeesh. Not that I think the entire format war relies on the decisions of Warner’s, but it is one of the largest movie distributors and their choice will serve to start swinging things in Blu-Ray’s direction. If a few more prominent companies choose this same option, we could well see an end to the format wars in the not too distant future. Man, am I glad I bought that PS3 when I had the money.
CES HD DVD Event canceled due to Warner announcement [Wesleytech.com]
As some of you may well remember, the Kotaku Team got a chance to pay a visit to the Q Entertainment Studios whilst we were in Tokyo for TGS. After meeting the amazing Miziguchi we were treated to a glimpse of some of their upcoming games including Every Extend Extra Extreme and Rez HD. I had the good fortune to be the first person to check out Rez HD and it was awesome. If you never picked up this title on Dreamcast or PS2 and are curious what it’s all about, GameTrailers has been kind enough to upload four gameplay videos for your perusal. Ok course, you can’t see the full HD effect in these videos (unless you go to GameTrailers where they have HD versions), but it should be enough to whet your appetite until the game shows up on Xbox LIVE sometime in the coming weeks.
Make the jump for the other three videos.
Hello and welcome to your first serving of Kotaku Originals for the New Year. This week we brought Witzbold into the Kotaku fold as the new King of Kommenters, a lucky reader became a brand new gamer and we took a look at the year’s top stories.
How to Spend $2,000 on Games in One Afternoon
What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Nintendo: Full DS Games Not Coming to Wii After All
MGS4 360 Rumour Smashed Yet Again
Missed Movie Licensing Opportunities Of 2007
Winner of the $US 2K Shopping Bot Contest
What Are Your Gaming Resolutions For 2008?
Meet Your New King of Komments
The Year’s Most Popular Stories
Soul Calibur Legends – The Masturbation Game
