Sunday, November 23, 2008
Blizzard Celebrates World Of Warcraft’s 4th Anniversary With Baby Bears
2:10PM Mike Fahey | Four years ago today (November 23rd), Blizzard threw open the doors to Azeroth and then quickly shut them, opening and closing them several times until they were sure they had enough servers to handle the massive rush of players eager to enter the World of Warcraft. To celebrate 1,460 days of lost time, broken relationships, and weight gain (and I’m not excluding myself here), folks who log into the game today are gifted with the achievement “WoW’s 4th Anniversary” and an adorable little baby polar bear to follow them around everywhere they go. More »
Columnist: Ninty Gets Some Blame For Crappy Wii Titles, Too
11:00AM Owen Good | So Reggie Fils-Aime popped off to Forbes this past week, saying developers should shoulder the blame for the shovelware rep richly earned by the Wii games lineup. Many third-party publishers don’t get the Wii audience, Reggie said, and finger-pointed at publishers’ reluctance to bring games that have done well on other consoles over to the Wii. More »
Cliff Huxtable Announces New Grand Theft Auto SKU?
10:00AM Owen Good | [sarcasm] Speaking in Greenwood, Miss., noted games industry insider Bill Cosby announced a new version of Grand Theft Auto IV. This one apparently costs $US250 and has some extras, and not a key to Liberty City, more like an aptitude test for jail or something. More »Batman: Arkham Asylum Debut Teaser
9:00AM Owen Good | Here is your official Gotham City Bureau of Prisons tour of Arkham Asylum. As you can see, this facility embodies the meaning of sanitarium, providing compassionate, patient-oriented mental health treatment under close and considerate supervision. We recommend the board’s continued certification of this first rate inpatient facility for the criminally insane. More »
‘Air Guitar Hero’ Aiding Artificial Limb Research
8:00AM Owen Good | Calibrating an advanced set of artificial limbs, which rely on signals from the residual muscles in amputees, can be tedious, exhausting, and extremely discouraging. But when two researchers at Johns Hopkins paired up their work with Guitar Hero, they were able to make the process a little more fun, and lots more efficient, and very empowering for those who are coping with the loss of limbs. More »
‘To Do: Finish Any Game’
7:30AM Maggie Greene | Tom Endo has a nice essay up over the Escapist on the issue of finishing games (or not finishing games, as the case may be). “What other medium,” he queries, “allows us to be so blithely indifferent to its consumption?”. I certainly have a somewhat appalling stack of partially finished games, some of which have been languishing for years. Do games in their current format simply not fit comfortably into the flow of many people’s lives?: More »
Rachel from Friends Discovers the Wii
7:00AM Owen Good | So, after you’ve flung mud at Lara Croft for stealing your husband, and gotten everyone to sympathise with you against an actress with a Q score of 24 (no mean feat), what do you do for an encore? Why, you go out and discover the Wii. Jennifer Aniston reveals as much in an interview with The New York Times Magazine this weekend. She says she’s peeked at Facebook and peered into its heart of darkness. But the Wii is much more to her liking. More »
News
MIGS Keynote: A Broken Business Model
6:30AM Maggie Greene | The Montreal International Game Summit recently wrapped up, and keynote speaker David Braben of Frontier Development really took the industry to task on everything from the business model (broken!) to retailers (killing longevity of games!) to the ‘online myth’ of the next gen consoles. He makes some interesting points, though I’m not at all convinced of the veracity of some of them. Here’s his take on the retail model: More »
[Updated] Gold Lancer Removed, Revoked; Consider Lootathon Over
6:00AM Owen Good | OK, gang. I think the fun is over. Many of you pointed out that the Golden Lancer for Gears of War 2 is now either 99999 points or won’t download. I tried to cue it up again and got the can’t-download notice. Then the lancer was stripped from my hard drive. But I showed them!!! I put it on a memory unit before logging in!!! Which means if I ever want to play Gears with my ill-gotten gun I’ll probably have to do it offline, if that even works. More »
