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 
High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle The teaser artwork for Square Enix’s Bahamut game? Looked gorgeous! Could have been a chance to do something special! The reality? It’s another Japanese RPG for the DS. Yay.
See it? Look closely. In the DS cartridge slot. In the cart in the cartridge slot. The Micro DS Card. It’s there, we think, look. Just as Kyoto cops are cracking down on the R4 business in Japan, Japan-based Chinese bikini model Rola Chen is totally using a R4. And totally taking pictures of herself using it. And totally putting that on her official blog. She writes, “During times when I’m waiting around, I play my DS! …Now, what game do you think Rola?” Dunno, but we’re pretty sure Rola didn’t pay for it. Arrest her, officers!
イーちゃんとDS [Rola SMILY Diary via Livedoor News]
Ack! Saying this lady loves Pikachu is an understatement. Known as “Pikabellechu,” the 32-year-old PikaHolic owns over 8,000 Pikachu goods, including a Pikachu car she named “PikaBug.” The Guinness World Record Member writes:
Two years ago tomorrow the PlayStation 3 had its North America launch. Remember November 2006? Ah, yes, the days of $3,000 machines being sold on eBay and beyond-the-pale mayhem in the midnight line-ups to get one. Sony Computer Entertainment America had a far more sedate affair on Wednesday, toasting the two year anniversary (don’t call it a “birthday”) of the console.
Fresh from the “Study finds violent video games do X to kids” pile, we now find — shock — playing them results in “a greater variation in Heart Rate Variability.” This isn’t straight out one’s pulse quickening. HRV is “the oscillation in the interval between consecutive heartbeats” — more or less, a measure of minute changes in heart rate.
Ah, unrequited love — a classic theme in all sorts of media, and gaming is no exception. There’s a wonderful little post over at auntie pixelante on the issue as it relates to games — and why it is so powerful. As far as I’m concerned, the whole player-game relationship is founded on unrequited love (and at least, unrequited adoration). The article takes a look at a Wii game called Art Style: Orbient, it’s a meditation on the ‘so close, yet so far away’ phenomenon that is all over the place in classic games and newer iterations:
A Spanish-language magazine (picked up and translated by Nintendo Everything) has more of what you can expect when Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars releases for the DS, whenever that is. This is in addition to news that the game will feature most of the map from Grand Theft Auto IV (all the boroughs except Alderney).
Jane Pinckard of game girl advance has come up with four future trends of entertainment, and they all apply to gaming — while her ideas aren’t necessarily ‘new,’ she does really boil down some of the tensions and innovations facing the industry right now. She points to four trends — tension between immersion and transparency, asynchronous instant communication, credible advertising with integrity, and tools as the content. This last issue is one that’s come up a lot, and I really like her take on it — the move from passive consumer to active user:
Not much of a surprise this is a possibility, the two games do use the same game after all. But Left 4 Dead hasn’t even launched and someone’s already modding it (probably the demo, anyway.) Here’s nine minutes — reloading! — of Left 4 Dead gunplay on TF2′s Dustbowl map (slightly customised). Warning, the volume on this sucker is hecka loud for some reason, with tons of — reloading! — gunfire.
Left 4 Dead Meets Team Fortress 2′s Dustbowl [CS-Nation, thanks AproposOfEverything]
I’m an archive junkie — I consider it a side-effect of my profession, since we spend half our lives in temperature-controlled buildings with lots of old stuff. So I watch the growth of the video game archives across the globe with no small measure of excitement — not only does my little historian heart go pitter-patter at the fact that people are being so proactive in figuring out how to preserve our beloved medium for future generations, but it means a couple more places to poke my head in when I have a good excuse. The recent announcement of the UK National Video Game Archive has led to some fruitful discussion on how to preserve games — not just in terms of the hardware, but also as a culture. Which, of course, is a hell of a lot harder than making sure books don’t rot:
