Three Words I Said To The Man I Defeated In Gears Of War That I'll Never Say Again 
New Doom 3 For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 Supports Head-Mounted Displays 
Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land 
Why Robin Makes Batman Better 
Resistance: Burning Skies: The Kotaku Review 
Harley Quinn's Revenge Is Batman: Arkham City's Bad New Ending Fascinating article on Wired.com — the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s CIA counterpart, just paid $2.6 million for three custom video games to train its entire analyst corps, young and old. So, you want to bitch about $US60 titles on the Xbox, think of that next time. Plus, these games are bereft of squad-based FPS tactics or any real arcade action. They’re designed to get to the heart of epistemology, which is, in essence, how you know what you know, and in these three cases, it’s how to assess a threat or judge the quality of information.
The9, a Chinese company best known for operating the Mainland licence of World of Warcraft, has bought a minority stake in Korean Company G10. G10 developed the popular Audition titles; under the terms of the agreement, The9 will get the stake for a cash investment of $38 million USD. G10 execs seem to be pleased they’ll have more formal ties to a big Chinese player (and a nice little cash infusion), and The9 will hopefully get better support for G10 products. Hopefully this deal won’t go down in flames like a couple of other Chinese-Korean deals I can think of. Full release after the jump.
I’m really more of a Records of the Grand Historian girl myself, but Romance of the Three Kingdoms — much like The Water Margin — is one of those classic Chinese works that’s going to outlast us all. To prove the point, Koei has announced that they’re bringing Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI to North American PCs. PS2 owners and people willing to slog through traditional Chinese or Japanese PC versions already had the opportunity to immerse themselves (yet again!) in the world of ancient China. After the apparent success of Warriors Orochi, Koei felt the time was right to bring the RTK‘s eleventh volume to North America on 29 July so even more people could take a stab at politics and war in the Six Dynasties period. Full release after the jump:
There are signs you’re getting old: Baldness, yelling at people who play music too loud, that cummerbund of gut that’s been piling up like credit card debt since your freshman 15. And then there are signs you are really old, which means you can’t hack it as a serious gamer anymore. TechRadar has a list of 11, and, like, eight apply to me. Harsh.
Most hurtful was “You’ve pre-ordered GTA IV but don’t mind if it doesn’t turn up on launch day.” Oh come on. I have a life, I have a job, I probably won’t even have everything moved in by Tuesday … why does that make me such a backslider?
So here’s the list, and I’m curious what’s the youngest applicable age for any of them? “You fondly remember a golden age of gaming …” That qualifies Dreamcast fanboys, much less guys like me who loved … oh never mind.
11 Signs You’re No Longer a Hardcore Gamer [TechRadar]
While going through a stack of family photos last night, I hit upon one of what must have been my first encounter with video games – Chuncheon, South Korea in 1983, at the age of six or seven months.
Unlike Mini Bash or Tristan, I didn’t have particularly cool or hip parents, thus my video game education was more or less self-directed. My mum still doesn’t really get the whole gaming thing, but thinks it’s pretty cool I write for a big gaming blog. So, Kotakuites, what was your introduction to gaming? Were you lucky enough to have parents who encouraged it? If you’ve got kids, do you game with them? When and how did you introduce them to gaming?
Today is the NFL Draft. Yep, right, I don’t care either, and I am a sports fan. Instead, we’re going to hold the inaugural Kotaku Video Game Draft. Because if you’re going to spend three hours indoors today looking at a screen and pondering a trivial event for a shoulder-shrugging, what-did-that-prove result, you might as well do it up right.
Busy times for the last full week leading up to the GTA IV release. We had two pirated releases, a probe into gamers stupid enough to play them with Xbox Live enabled, and a desperate attempt out in Holland to get stores to sell it early. Nuh-uh. Nice try though. And no one stateside was able to convince their local Gamestop to slip a copy early. Someone will, though. Just wait.
