New Doom 3 For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 Supports Head-Mounted Displays 
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Harley Quinn's Revenge Is Batman: Arkham City's Bad New Ending 
High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle Have we posted about this? Seriously? No? Wow. Just wow. David Hasselhoff stars in four smarmy infomercials for Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, and the self-deprecation and irony are set to 11. So is the Hoff’s BAC. Listen that guy is slurring his speech, I don’t care what anyone says, the man’s lit. I would be too. Seriously, does he have a brain injury I don’t know about, and now I’m an asshole for picking on him? Wild.
Someone walking through the parking lot of my apartment complex and seeing a shattered DualShock laying on the ground probably thought someone had a little temper tantrum mixed in with his Bioshock last night. Actually, that’s only half right. I wasn’t mad at a game, but I was mad at the controller (of course, I’m not to blame). I’d spilled Dr. Pepper all over myself and some got in the left thumbstick. Suddenly I could not move to the right anymore. That’s kind of important in a game like MotorStorm: Pacific Rift. It’s kind of important in any game, actually. I tested it against my other controller, restarted the machine, let it dry out, nothing. So, $US60 got me barely a day’s worth of use of this controller. I said why not, heaved it over a row of apartments here and into the adjacent parking lot.
Adam Barenblat is bigtime PO’d about this. He swears he had this idea first. But the New York Daily News got a member of the New York Jets’ “Flight Crew” cheerleading team to review All-Star Cheer Squad on the Wii.
And you thought you played games to have fun — Steven Poole has a lengthy essay trying to prove you wrong. We’re working — working for the (video game) man, man. I must confess that even if we’re on a literal or figurative rat race when it comes to ‘working’ in games (I am, after all, a passionate fan of the Harvest Moon series, which is unabashedly obvious about the necessity of work), I still find much of it fun. Still, despite the wet blanket overtones, Poole’s essay is thoughtful and makes some interesting point. Is it really just about following orders?:
Telltale Games has been churning out the episodes of their Sam & Max and Strong Bad series; GameSetWatch talked to Mike Stemmle, LucasArts veteran and current Telltale writer and designer, about the Telltale design process, the veteran-friendly atmosphere (unsurprisingly, the Telltale ranks are full of other LucasArts veterans), and the potentials for non-licensed IP. On the inner workings of Telltale, Stemmle has this to say:
A graduate student at the University of Southern California is working on a project that employs Half-Life 2 as a setting/context for political cartoons. Sounds a little out there, but MFA student John Brennan has turned out that video so far, which features Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama on a debate stage, and a headcrab just to show this is Half-Life 2 we’re dealing with. And I guess those are combine soldiers in the back beating up on something as these two talk, too.
Gamasutra has a nice interview up with Peter Molyneux on the topic of Fable II and the process of putting a game together; there’s also plenty of discussion on lessons learned from Fable I and the uproar over the cooperative play issue. There’s a certain air of bewilderment that pervades the article, though the Fable team apparently got over their bafflement at the reception of Fable I to try and improve the second installment:
Last week Microsoft announced the winners of its 2008 Dream-Build-Play game development contest. The indie devs took home more than $US70,000 in cash and prizes, and “will have the opportunity to receive an invitation to publish their games on Xbox LIVE Arcade.” Microsoft’s words, not mine. There probably is some legal stuff that has to happen and they can’t just say straight out you’ll be able to play these on Xbox Community Games, when the new Live goes up Nov. 19.
Danc of Lost Garden is back with another prototyping challenge; game designer I am not, but I love these things — especially seeing what people come up with. On the plate this cycle? A fishing game that Danc describes as “Frogger using a polar coordinate system, a frog that insists on drifting to the left and only the ability to move forward”:
Fresh off getting Sega to be the publisher for its Wii FPS, The Conduit, High Voltage apparently is looking to deliver titles with a more traditional appeal to gamers.
