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 Typical. A week ago I got an iPhone at the urging of a friend and then, at the urging of the same friend, bought Pangea’s Cro-Mag Rally (“I think it has multiplayer. It has this mode called “gather” but I’ve never been around anyone with the game to try it.”) That was $5.99, now it is $1.99, along with a slew of other Pangea games (and the VR Pro utility) available for iPhone and iTouch. Just goes to show, even if you wait a year, you still can’t buy anything new from or for an Apple device without seeing its price halved the next week. Full list on the jump. It’s a limited time promotion, like the McRib.
Chris Bateman of Only A Game has spent a not insignificant chunk of time talking about the ‘hardcore/casual’ divide — especially in terms of discussing the accuracy of such a distinction. As he points out, more complex models of how people like to play their games are simply too unwieldy to be of use for general conversation; still, a lot of the ideas about what makes a ‘hardcore’ player versus a ‘casual’ player don’t necessarily stand up when looking at certain (admittedly self-reported) studies, like the DGD1 & 2 questionnaires:
The Virtual Worlds Expo took place last week in Los Angeles, and there’s been bits and pieces of news from the event floating around — the wrap ups of roundtables and panels are the most interesting. Over at Free To Play, they have put together five big trends in virtual worlds, ranging from ‘the war on geekiness’ (oh, ouch) to one I’m most interested in, the movement from virtual world to real world instead of the other way around:
So here’s a trailer for Sonic Unleashed, added on Thursday. You can judge for yourself if the Were-Sonic features here look like something you want to play. Regular Sonic mode seems all know-and-love familiar; in the beastly beat-em up, check out the spinning Schick Quattro attack and the running man tap-dance on a foe’s skull. Tipster Max Mello points out Sonic does talk in lycanthrope mode, so listen for it.
The National Science Foundation has awarded $100,000 to do a cross-cultural study of World of Warcraft — Bonnie Nardi, an infomatics professor at Irvine, will be looking at player gaming habits and culture in the United States and China. Nardi has already spent time in the field, observing WoW players in Beijing internet cafés; she’s already noted some basic differences in play styles and similarities in culture, so I’m curious to see where she’ll go from here:
Crytek and Valve have reached an agreement to bring both Crysis Warhead and Crysis to Steam this weekend. So if you drop 7 hundy on your Crysis-branded PC rig but don’t want to shell out or drive to the store for a retail copy of its namesake, there you go. And if you’re keeping your old setup and want to know what you need on board, check the specs. Valve says both titles are available for pre-purchase now, and will release “mid-September.” Warhead’s commercial street date is Monday.
Disturbed, Judas Priest and Cheap Trick (pictured) are challenging the top three user bands in the nation tonight on SPIKE TV’s “30 Minutes to Midnight,” the official countdown show for the launch of Rock Band 2. The three bands challenge the users to play their songs, among the hardest in the game, with other competitive twists. There will also be a guy who can finish a song playing all four instruments at once. If you’re one of those people transfixed by watching others play this game really well, you might want to flip over.
