Sunday, September 7, 2008
News
GameFly Wants to See Your Sucky Videos
10:00AM Brian Crecente | Ever wanted to appear on television hawking something and not get paid to do it? Well, now’s your chance. GameFly is holding a “contest” to see who is the biggest GameFly super fan. The winner gets to show up on a GameFly television commercial. To enter, you just need to submit a 45 second video of yourself explaining why you love GameFly and why the character you are dressed as is your favourite. You can submit as many videos as you want from now till Sept. 30. The video with the most votes between Oct. 1 and Oct. 31 will win a trip to Hollywood to appear in the commercial. Get on it, as of this morning there were only six videos submitted to GameFly for the contest… many of which sucked. Hit the jump for visual proof of suckage. More »
Guitar Hero: Aerosmith Demo is Live
9:00AM Brian Crecente | The Guitar Hero: Aerosmith demo has launched on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 we’re told. The demo includes Sweet Emotion and Dream On by Aerosmith, as well as Walk this Way by Run DMC and I Hate Myself for Loving You by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Say what you will about artist-themed Guitar Hero games, at least you’re getting four free songs out of the deal. Update: Seems that the official press release announcing that the demos was a bit premature. Back to playing regular old non-Aerosmith-infused Guitar Hero. More »
Nintendo Gets Down with AARP
8:00AM Brian Crecente | Nintendo, always on the hunt for new gamers, hit up the American Association of Retired People’s Life@50+ Expo in Washington, D.C. this week. The expo gave the company the chance to win over even more people who will buy the Wii and never actually plug it in. I kid, though my parents have been the proud owner of a Wii for several months now and it remains safely ensconced in it’s still sealed box. Maybe if I drove down there and set it up for them they’d be high-fivein’ over Brain Age 2 and Wii Sports too. More »
WoW is a Dirty Word
7:00AM Maggie Greene | Most of the Rock, Paper, Shotgun guys recently posted their thoughts on the Warhammer Online closed beta; they were descended upon by WAR supporters (some rabid, some a little more even-tempered) for drawing more comparisons between WoW and WAR. After this little display of MMO chest thumping, Alec Meer put up a thoughtful piece on why it is that WoW has become a dirty word, both in and out of the industry, and why people are so quick to leap to vociferous defence of their games: More »
Saturday Timewaster: Aether
6:00AM Maggie Greene | We’re having a slow weekend here at Kotaku: Owen is off, and I’m holed up in bed trying to stave off the flu; Aether made a nice respite from my headache and general feelings of ‘blah.’ It’s a weird little game — a little abstract and fuzzy around the edges, you control a little guy and his pet who can fly through the air with the greatest of ease, using said pet’s tongue as a grappling hook/trapeze …. I actually quite enjoyed zipping through space from planet to planet, trying to solve puzzles and bring the colour back to unhappy people (the core of an unhappy planet seen above). It’s not the most intuitive game ever — it did take me some time to figure out how to successfully get off the ground and into the atmosphere – and I broke out the mouse because the trackpad wasn’t cutting it. Still, it’s pretty and soothing (and short) — good for a bit of time on a Saturday afternoon. Aether [Armour Games via IndieGames] More »
Breaking Through the Retail Glass Wall
5:00AM Maggie Greene | The typical method of keeping games in glass cases works like a charm when it comes to reducing theft, but stymies impulse buys — something the game industry is working to change as companies attempt to appeal to ever broader markets. The San Jose Mercury News has a reasonably interesting short piece on what companies are doing in an attempt to broaden their appeal, get games out from behind glass and locks, and encourage people outside the target ‘gamer’ audience to pick up games on a whim. Of course, there’s the problem of dealing with retailers’ wants and needs: More »
BioShock: The Postmortem
4:00AM Maggie Greene | Gamasutra has published a postmortem for the hugely successful Bioshock; nothing contained within is particularly shocking (though comments have groused that they left out some big snafus), though I think it’s always interesting to see what participants in the creation process have to say about the success (or lack thereof). The article goes beyond game elements and gets into things like how design teams were organised. But where does Alyssa Finley, project lead, have to say about the problems the Bioshock team ran into?: More »
News
‘Debunking the Stereotypical Gamer Profile’
3:00AM Maggie Greene | Via Terra Nova comes word that a new series of academic articles centered around Everquest II has just kicked off, starting with an article on ‘who plays, how much, and why’ (with a couple of ‘oddball’ gems scattered throughout the data). The results weren’t always what researchers — or the general public — would expect. While there have been other studies done in MMOs, this group was the first that took place in the game engine had the full cooperation of a company like SOE. What are they going to be looking at over the course of the study?: More »
Licensing Blasts From the Past: Nintendo
2:00AM Maggie Greene | I’ve really been enjoying the posts over at the Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection blog, even though it has one of the worst titles I’ve ever seen. Up recently was a look back at some of the licensed goods in the collection, including this box of the ‘Nintendo Cereal System.’ And yes, they tried some of the 20 year old cereal before gutting the box to save it for posterity. Eric Kaltman mentions some of the challenges that come along with attempting to preserve these bits of game culture: Working through the collections provides some rather weird challenges to the discipline of library science. An entire segment of the collection is devoted to items termed as realia, basically commercial products tied to video game concepts or characters. They don’t fit on shelves very well, and the exact means of how to preserve these detritus of commercial culture are fraught with an internal debate about their validity to humanity. I think everything should be remembered or recorded fastidiously, but then again I get a thrill out of looking at old Nintendo marketing crud, and I work in a library. That said, these items make my inner child awaken anew and crave some tasty morsels of the past. I hope we can expect to see more of this sort of stuff — it’s fun seeing what librarians at Stanford have decided to add to the collection. Though I would be curious to learn the acquisition backstory — was the cereal just hanging out in someone’s personal collection? Two decade old overstock at Ralston Purina? Errant Nintendo Licensing: Parties, Cereal, and School [How They Got Game] More »
