Say there's a special someone in your life. That special someone is partial to the ol' video gaming. Thing is, her wardrobe...it's kinda ratty. One part of you finds that endearing - in a cute, bohemian kinda way - the other half just thinks it's kinda ratty. That other half may want to buy her a new shirt. One that both gets her a new shirt and manages to cram a shitload of gaming controllers (including the Boomerang!) into its design. If so, you really can't go past this one, from FIFTY24SF. You can get it at the link below (search for FIFTY24SF in women's shirts).

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Gamers And The Women Who Hate Them: Child Man Meet Man Teen
Comment by: hahnchen
Nominated by: creid

This woman is under the impression that men need some outlet to vent their masculine rage and engage in childish fantasies. She's wrong.

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It's been announced that Bangai-O Spirits, Treasure's upcoming handheld version of its cheek-pinchingly adorable slice of bullet hell pie, will be out in Japan on March 19. Same day as Echocrome! Which is of course relevant to everyone able to work an import store's online store, seeing as with Bangai-O an ability to understand what's being said comes a distant second to being able to make an entire screen explode.
[Treasure, via GhostSeed @ GAF]

We like hearing David Jaffe talk. He says interesting things and uses bad words. We like interesting and bad words! Over at MTV's Multiplayer blog, there's a meaty interview with him discussing the types of music he listens to while making a game. During God of War? "Sail Away" by Styx. And now? Public Enemy, LL Cool J and Tupac. Does that mean Jaffe is making Saints Row 3? Not at all! He explains:

It's not 'You listen to hip-hop music' [means] 'you make a hip-hop game.' It's got nothing to do with that. It has to do with, at least for me, what is the underlying message of a lot of that hip-hop I'm talking about. Which is aggression you know, which is energy. That's the kind of stuff that I hope comes through in the game.

Insightful stuff. The rest of the interview is a great read and definitely worth checking out. We're just happy that we get to use this snowy Jaffe pic again.
Why Is Jaffe Blasting Straight Outta Compton? [MTV]

Ah, Tubbypaws. Few are able to delight us so with naught but a few pieces of coloured paper and some folding instructions. You've seen her Silent Hill and Portal papercrafts, now see her Vice City tribute, complete with little square Tommy Vercetti and three cars that he'll never be able to steal thanks to his poor, fat little head. Unless you make alterations on the design, that is, which you can find below.
GTA Papercraft [Tubbypaws]

The upcoming Lego Indiana Jones will, of course, feature cute, adorable little Indiana Jones. And - fingers crossed - a cute, adorable little Sallah, with a clicky little red fez. What won't be featured in the game are Nazis. While the characters themselves will still feature (yes, Toht is still in it, and yes, he's still going to melt), all references to Nazism have been scrubbed, Traveller's Tales telling Edge:

Lego [have] already replaced them with an anonymous genocidal, occultist, trenchcoat-wearing master-race.

On the one hand, understandable. Lego's for kids. But on the other...how many five year-olds know who the fuck Indiana Jones is? Surely the target demographic for this game is the 20+ market.
Lego Indy: First concrete details [Edge, via CVG]

Reader Ryan attended the Sapporo Snow Festival last week in Hokkaido, Japan. He spotted this Invader and writes:

It was dwarfed by some of the larger creations there but was still very cool to see. A lot more cool than the Al Gore snow sculpture that looked like Kim Jong-il.

Ice pixels, what's not to love?

A BioShock movie? No brainer. So why, then, have we heard nothing concrete about plans to adapt the project for the silver screen? It's not for a lack of effort on Hollywood's part, according to Ben Fritz over at Variety, who says that "you'd be hard pressed to find a production company, studio, or agency with at least one videogame savvy employee that isn't interested in BioShock". Seems Take 2 is being "bombarded" with requests from studios and producers keen on picking up the rights to the game, but so far, none have been successful. No doubt because every proposal has had a love story, and BioShock, it ain't a love story.
Bioshock: the Movie... where is it? [Variety]

By John Gaudiosi

MONTE CARLO--Cevat Yerli, co-founder, president and CEO of German game developer Crytek, recently was a featured speaker (for the second year running) at Imagina 2008, the annual 3D technology conference in Monaco. Following his discussion on the lessons learned from developing Far Cry and Crysis on CryENGINE and CryENGINE 2, he spoke about the changing face of game development.

Today's landscape has fewer independent game studios, especially on the heels of Electronic Arts acquisition of Bioware and Pandemic. Along with Epic Games and id Software, CryTek remains one of the top independent game makers in the world today.

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John Ricitiello started his DICE keynote with a list of games he's currently playing—Burnout Paradise, BioShock, Portal. The one game he's playing that we're not is Spore, a title he said he'd become "fixated" on. While John got the crowd up to speed on his gaming chops, he admitted "Deep down, I'm a business guy." That helps explain Riccitiello's publicly expressed hesitance about the ultimate success of the Will Wright "SimEverything" game.

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The Into The Pixel art showcase at DICE featured plenty of wonderful artwork from beloved games like God of War, Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life 2 and Rayman's Raving Rabbids, each up for auction. The piece that looked to grab the biggest bucks was the Viva PInata digital painting seen above, which closed at $US 1400. The winner? None other than Epic Games' Mark Rein, who hovered near the bidding sheet like a hungry wolf until the auction closed, growling at anyone who attempted to outbid him. My choice? It would've been the Team Fortress 2 piece seen after the jump.

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Based on the newly launched Grand Theft Auto IV web site, we know that the game has some sort of multiplayer component. What we don't know for sure is what it involves. But according to a rumored tagged report from Destructoid, citing an anonymous source, a suite of multiplayer options are planned, including death match, co-op, team based head-to-head battles and online races. While that may sound like a list of vague concepts that could be just an educated guess, the site's source has names for each, including Cops 'n' Crooks, Bomb da Base and Hangman's Noose.

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Game maker Sega's holding company, Sega Sammy Holdings, announced that the group's pachinko and arcade business were suffering, warning of a 26 billion yen (almost $US 244 million) loss for the year. That near quarter billion dollar loss, Reuters reports, is a result of tighter industry restrictions on the pachinko business in Japan and the Wii's impact on arcades overseas.

The company also said it's planning to lay off 400 employees at Sega's games division. The arcade division saw a profit of 132 million yen the year before, but plans to post a loss of 11.4 billion yen in the coming year. In times like these, when many people are about to find themselves without a job, we can always place blame on Shadow the Hedgehog. He must be responsible for at least some of this.

Sega Sammy sees loss in 2007/08, to cut 400 jobs [Reuters]

Hey, did you hear? Super Smash Bros. Brawl sold about a bazillion copies in Japan in its debut week. 820,000 is a bazillion, right? With all those copies out there, you're sure to run into some spoilers eventually, if you haven't already gorged on every Brawl detail leaked from before the Japanese release. Still, we'll do our best to keep it spoiler free, but I can't speak for the commenters. This week's additions to the official Smash Bros. web site includes a profile on one hidden character, a bunch of assist trophies and one character's Final Smash. I think you can guess who it is. If not, make your way to the rest of the Dojo Dump and catch up.

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I'll be playing a very realistic driving in a matter of hours, a sort of Need For Speed Most Wanted recreating using a rented Chevy Impala controller. It should be very, very exciting following the blue line from Vegas to LA. When I finally get home, expect me to unwind with a few rounds of Team Fortress 2, a title I've been chatting about a lot with colleagues and developers and DICE. Demos for Patapon and God of War: Chains of Olympus were stashed in the DICE schwag bag, so I'll be giving those a spin, too. Yeah, I'm late to the party. So what?

Enough reading of this drivel. Make with the comments about your weekend gaming plans, pronto. Anyone going to grab a copy of Professor Layton this Sunday?

Here's something disconcerting if it pans out as true: Siliconera reports that Echochrome will cost more than double for a UMD PSP ($US 37) version than a downloadable PSN/PS3 version ($US 17) when released on March 19th in Japan. While we've seen similar pricing discrepancies with downloadable vs. retail versions of Warhawk, that price difference included a headset for online chat.

The questions then become, are these two versions identical and will the game support Remote Play? And if so, just how much is it worth to have a UMD? UPDATE: Siliconera updated their post, pointing out that PSP Echochrome has twice the levels. I guess that explains the price difference.

PS3 Echochrome costs 50% less than PSP Echochrome [Siliconera via OpposableThumbs]

Up until now, I couldn't get enough Xbox 360 vs. PlayStation 3 side-by-sides. But after this direct HDMI feed from Turok, my mind is mush. The opening blacks look far better on the 360, but you lose sight of any contrast difference by the middle of the clip comparisons. Sometimes the PS3 has better textures, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the PS3's full RGB gamut offers colors that pop a bit more, sometimes it doesn't. Bottom line: if you have Turok for either of these next gen systems, you're doing fine. And it seems that publishers are getting far better about their cross-platform quality control.

UPDATE: It would appear that there was no control for the 7.5 IRE black level difference between US and Japanese NTSC standards.

Bullfrog, Origin Systems, and Westwood Studios rank as some of the best development houses of all time. They also happen to represent three of EA's most spectacular failures. "We at EA blew it," said EA CEO John Riccitiello at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas this morning, "To a degree, I was involved in those things, so I blew it."

While Riccitiello was proud of his achievements at EA following his return to the company, he warned developers and publishers not to make some of the mistakes the company has made in the past. Those mistakes, he said, involved the stifling of creative talent and their ensuing departure.

Riccitiello took DICE attendees to school this morning with his talk on Game industry Economics 101. EA, like Activision, Sony, Microsoft, will continue to absorb developers, as it did with Bioware Pandemic last year. And that presents a danger.

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In fear of letting the theme of "girls like video games too" fall by the wayside (because, y'know, you were all so concerned), I thought I'd let you know of my deferred Valentine's Day plans for this weekend: the boyfriend is taking me to see Video Games Live! While Kotaku writers have been to the show in the past, I thought it might be nice to let you know how the new 2008 tour compares, since Toronto will be the fifth stop on the tour of over forty cities.

I'll be sure to give a full report of my adventure next week. In the meantime, is anyone else going to the Toronto show - (and that's not an invite, you'll have to supply your own date)? Or does anyone else have gaming-related plans for V-Day?

Where does the virtual world end and the real world begin? Maybe Jimi Benedict's illustrations ask such a question of the viewer. Maybe they challenge our acceptance of simple lines in the sand between pixels and skin cells, politicians and character representations. His art site Jimiyo has all sorts of interesting vector artwork, some of which make for perfect Friday afternoon philosophising for the introspective gamer. Enjoy—my favorite piece is the Obama shot.

Jimiyo [Jimiyo via WiiWii]

BioWare's recent announcement of Mass Effect DLC has plenty of us frothing at the...mouths, but MTV points out that there's a pretty large catch to accessing the 90 new minutes of combat. To partake, the update may require your character to be reset back to the beginning of the game UPDATE: In the case that you are past the point of being able to access the galactic map. Players who are far in the game may need to restart and play through all of the Citadel storyline until they again reach the Normandy. Sure, speedy players can get through this content in about 30 minutes (while for others it could take an hour+), but most of us would probably prefer a more directly accessible option. What do you think? Did BioWare screw up here? Or are RPG players used to wasting their time?

'Mass Effect' DLC Requires A Spaceship, A Couple Of Hours Of Player Progress [MTVMultiplayer]

Remember earlier this week when EA pretty much bet on the PS3 whomping the Xbox 360's ass in 2008 (and not in the cool, we're still friends, kinky way)? Well apparently not every publisher is betting on the platform. During a shareholder conference call, they stated that Nintendo would lead North American sales in 2008, with the 360 selling between 4 and 5 million units while the PS3 sold only 3 to 4 million units.

In other words, even major, industry-shaping publishers have no clue how the console wars will end. So don't feel bad if you can't decide between a PS3 and Xbox 360.

Activision Projects 2008 Hardware Sales [IGN via NextGeneration]

Condemned 2 lead designer Frank Rook walks us through the changes made to the Condemned series in the second installment, Condemned 2: Bloodshot. He talks a lot about the combat system, which introduces fist fighting, combos, brutal chain attacks and environmental finishing moves similar to those found in The Punisher video game a few years back. It was hard to pay attention because I was just overwhelmed by the sheer brutality of the whole thing. The shaking camera and the sounds combine to make combat so visceral that even this tiny trailer had me wincing sympathetically. Rook also goes into the welcome changes to the forensics portion of the game, which was probably my biggest disappointment from the first one. They want to improve over the original in every way, and it looks like they are right on course to do so.

Can you just not wait to play Grand Theft Auto IV? Well then we have just the thing for you. The game? No, no. Even better. The website about the game. Oh yes, my friends. The GTAIV website is up and running. The interactive Flash map of Liberty City looks like an interesting interface, but from my 3 minutes of hands-on, I'm not so sure all the bugs have been ironed out just yet. I tried slapping that bitch around but it didn't help...and now our monitor is all flickery.

Welcome to Liberty City [Rockstar]

"Looking at the room, I can tell that you.
Are the most beautiful girl in the...room.
(In the whole wide room).
And when you're on the street, depending on the street.
I bet you are definitely in the top 3.
Good lookin girls on the street.
(Depending on the streets)."

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On Sunday, March 29th, rock and roll hero and sometimes actor Jack Black returns to the Nickelodeon stage to host the 21st Annual Kids' Choice Awards, where the stupid children decide who wins the awards! Now I know there are some pretty smart children out there, but they are all busy playing games like Portal or BioShock (with their stupid parents proudly ignoring them in the other room), thus the nominees for the 2008 Favorite Video Game Award:

Dance Dance Revolution
Guitar Hero
High School Musical: Sing It!
Madden NFL '08

There's really not much I can say here. I mean, Guitar Hero is nice and all, but they just list Guitar Hero...not II or III. Same with Dance Dance Revolution. There are 20 bajillion versions of DDR out there. Pick one! Madden 08 just goes to show that they were running out of kid-friendly titles to nominate, and if High School Musical: Sing It! wins? I am driving over to my nephew's house and smacking him upside the head just for associating with people his own age.

Kids' Choice Award's Official Nominee Announcement [Nickelodeon]

D3 Publisher of Europe has appointed Vivendi's former UK managing director and VP of Europe Adam Roberts as their new managing director. *yawn* He will be in charge of sales, marketing, and operational functions across all PAL regions. Exciting stuff! *scans the press release* Wait, what's this?

The company will also be releasing video games based on Aardman's popular Shaun the Sheep character in 2008, alongside the eagerly-awaited follow-ups to the best-selling Ben 10 and Puzzle Quest.

*twitch* Follow up to Puzzle Quest? More Puzzle Quest for me? I mean, you guys can play it too I suppose, but not as obsessively as I will. Why are they burying this amazing news in the middle of a ho-hum manager appointment press release? No offense to Mr. Roberts, who I am sure will do a bang up job, but D3 needs to get their announcement priorities straight. More Puzzle Quest!

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An entire swarm of Kotakuites has bombarded the tips email with a story from KETV 7 in Omaha Nebraska entitled, "Video Games Normalize Killing, Doctors Say." A completely atrocious headline, though good enough to get the story linked from the main page of CNN. Less hard-hitting news and more of a research roundup, the article presents information from studies done by Iowa State University, Kansas State University, the Indiana School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health showing that violent games normalize our children to violence...putting them more in tune with violent behavior and therefor much more likely to engage in it.

"Exposure to violent video games, even E rated video games, increases aggressive thoughts, increases pro-social behavior and increases general arousal," said Dr. Greg Snyder, a psychologist at Omaha's Children's Hospital.

Phew. And here I was feeling dirty for getting all excited while playing Dora the Explorer.

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