I usually try to wrap up Saturdays with some laughs so, here's this and two other funny pics I found through the week. On their own, maybe not worth a post but together, hey, it's the weekend, so here's a funnies page for you to spread on the living room floor.

Remember, if you're a Madden gamer and want in on the KFC (Kotaku Football Conference), that announcement will be at 1 pm MDT (3 pm Eastern, noon Pacific)

This one apparently came off of Facebook. I friended the guy who created/posted it, I'll let you know if anything comes of that. Also, someone run out and register www.muahahahahahahahahaha.com.

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We enjoyed the hell out of a pre-release Wipeout HD at last year's Games Convention. But the PlayStation Network release is looking noticeably more impressive in its showing this year, what with its fancy pants new menus and graphical upgrades. We sat down with the PlayStation 3 game — which is hopefully coming soon — today to get an update on how its looking (sharp!) and how it plays (the same!), but we'll bore you with our hands-on impressions of Wipeout HD after we do more than just lose three races and clumsily navigate German language menus. How does tomorrow work for you? Excellent! Enjoy the new screens.

The classic sound of a room full of arcade games all going at once started to vanish before the coin-op arcade started its slide to extinction. Game audio and speech got more sophisticated and music evolved into soundtracks, creating a blend different from the early to middle 1980s. But the Arcade Ambience Project has created more than eight hours of mp3s, sorted by year that depict arcades at their height, buzzing, chirping and whirring like a field of crickets on a summer evening.

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When Valve forwarded us the finalised art for the Xbox 360 and PC retail versions of Left 4 Dead, we were too excited by the visual pun to realise they'd missed out on a more complete version of box art literalism. But others wondered, "Why does it have a right hand?"

Believe it or not, we actually wasted breath asking this very question to Valve's Doug Lombardi at Games Convention.

"All I can say is 'stay tuned'", he said with a smile, noting that we weren't the first to inquire about the missing visual gag. As Valve is wont to do, Lombardi didn't elaborate, but it sounds like the finalised written earlier is more of a "finalized". We hope this long national nightmare of squandered puns on Left 4 Dead box art will soon be over.

Look closely (full size on the jump). Reader Ian S. found this back-to-college ad for Sears in his local paper. Looking at this guy's set up, I'm betting the propmaster for this ad shoot is someone so out of it he refers to consoles generically not as "Nintendo" but as "the Sega." Because that's Solid Snake on the screen, and a 360 controller in our hip gamer friend's hands. So here are my thoughts for what might be going on.

1) Newton's Dirty Little Secret: It's a Sixaxis.
2) Check Out This Rad PS3 Casemod for Your Xbox 360!
3)'Intense' Driving Motion Controls Introduced to Metal Gear Solid 4 Cutscenes
4) MGS4 Now Supports Guitar Hero: Aerosmith Peripherals (lower right)
4) Sony Confounded by Standard DVD Players Kept as Heirlooms (console, under the small speakers)

I'm sure you've got your own ideas. Put 'em in the comments.

Don't mix beer and wine. Ever. And don't dabble in Golden Axe: Beast Rider when suffering from intercontinental jet lag. Let my folly become your wisdom. See, the Secret Level-developed update to the Golden Axe franchise is probably more... let's say... relaxing than it should be. That's a nice way of saying rather bland, as the rainbow of browns that permeate the game may lull hack 'n' slash fans into a restful slumber.

I mean, even the purple chicken things are brown.

That's not to say Golden Axe: Beast Rider is a bad game, from our hands on time with it. Just a bit uninspired, lacking in some tangible oomph, in the graphics department and the swordplay.

Beast Rider star Tyris Flare looks fantastic though. Whomever is responsible for her model and those perfectly modeled lower back dimples deserves a raise. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game does have its moments, visually. Hopping on a ridable beast that can camouflage itself with a Predator like effect looks pretty snazzy too.

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Watch NASCAR much and you notice the winning driver's post-race genuflection to his sponsors can get to be a mouthful. So it's probably a good thing Joey Logano finished 16th in last night's Food City 250 at Bristol, Tenn. in stock car racing's Nationwide series. Otherwise Logano would be like: "Well, Jerry, we just have a super group of guys on the Call of Duty World at War GameStop Joe Gibbs Racing Number 20 Toyota team. Just a great car, ran super good and I'm glad we could get a win for the Call of Duty World at War GameStop Joe Gibbs Racing Number 20 Toyota team.

"I thought we was gonna run out of gas there at the end but I got a nice push from my teammate Jerry Jeff Jeeter McPheeter racin' in the Peter Jackson's King Kong The Official Game of the Movie ... Number ... 14 ..". [starts breathing into paper sack].

Food City 250 Results [USA Today]

Emily Short has an interesting response up to some comments made by Playfirst's John Welch in a recent Gamasutra article. The issue at stake? Welch's assertion that Playfirst has introduced 'narrative' to games such as Diner Dash. Short's response? 'This made my eyelids twitch.' What's the difference between narrative and fiction? Short argues that games like Diner Dash have a fiction attached to them, but are sorely lacking on the narrative bit, which she feels can add something to currently lacking casual games:

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The announcement of SingStar: Queen at Games Convention had some of us immediately and excitedly wondering online, what's on this thing anyway? And is "Who Wants To Live Forever" going to be included? Sorry, Luke, we still don't know. We do know however, that Queen classics "Don't Stop Me Now", "Radio GaGa", "Bohemian Rhapsody", "A Kind of Magic", "Breakthru", and "The Show Must Go On" will definitely be included, going by the screen shots and trailer provided by SCEE. If you want to gorge on low res shots of Freddie Mercury's face, do so in the gallery below.

McWhertor is in Germany so I get custody of Lazy Sundays this weekend. As for what I'm playing, I got Bionic Commando: Rearmed and the Fable II: Pub Games on Thursday, and I'm thrilled with both. You know why else I like them? Means I get to game on a super quiet Xbox, which lately for me has sounded like a tuberculosis patient gargling pea gravel. And why is that interesting? Hit the jump for an honest to God IM transcript with Bash and Brian last night, and then tell us what games you're not destroying playing this weekend.

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Talk of how we review games has been swirling about for quite some time now. Many people have commented on the lack of audience/reviewer gap, as we see in book, food, and movie reviews — but have also commented that the gap is becoming more obvious as casual players start making up a larger part of the gaming audience as a whole. Kieron Gillen has a great piece up on why we need an 'elitist' reviewing culture for the good of gaming. Drawing from music examples of year end charts, he points to rarified tastes as being good for exposing even a hardcore audience to more 'under the radar' titles:

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I'm relatively sure that my experience with Fracture's multiplayer mode at the Games Convention in Leipzig is a whole lot like what AJ experienced on her experience in San Francisco, only we had much better beer. She's already gone over the modes, the guns, and the grenades, all the while fulfiling Kotaku's quote of fisting references for the next three months, so I won't bore you with those details. The event here in Leipzig was set up as a team affair, with six stations set up on one side, six on the other. Journalists took turns taking on the other team until the matches were over or the tremendous heat inside the room shorted out the power strips. At one point, as you can see in the picture below, they had to turn off an entire side, resulting in a spontaneous free for all death match taking place on the working half.

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Pretty much anyone who reviewed Alone in the Dark on the Xbox 360 heaped hatred on the game's controls and camera system, and developer Eden Studios have learned their lesson. Not only is the forthcoming PS3 version going to have better movement and non-claustrophobic views, the 360 will get a patch that Eurogamer says "will implement most of the changes that have been made to the upcoming PS3 version".

Eden opened its AitD presentation at Leipzig by listing all of the flaws in the 360 game. "We have absorbed and taken every piece of criticism about the game that was constructive and would help", a rep said. Eden's spokesperson also explained why they thought the tight camera position was a good idea at the time. Writes Eurogamer:

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Poor Shanda. Poor Chinese game companies! A surprising number of suits have been brought against them in the past year, but this — for a more reasonable 11,000 RMB ($US 1600) — takes the current cake. Shanda froze the account of a Legend of Mir player (for unspecified reasons), who is now suing for emotional distress and the return of his virtual items:

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Anywhere you combine video games and large masses of the general public you are bound to find the odd cosplayer, but today at the Games Convention in Leipzig I not only found cosplayers - I found their nest. Entering the transparent dome building I've dubbed the Hall of Justice I only encountered one or two costumed con-goers, but once I got to the very back of the building I discovered an almost never-ending stream of them coming in through the back door. Following the trail, I discovered a veritable cosplayer hive. Resident Evil, Naruto, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and many I was too dizzy to correctly identify, buzzing about their business until they spied the telltale glint of light off a camera lens, at which point they'd drop everything and go into their defensive poses. If I had to pick a winner, I'd say it was definitely the main character from The World Ends With You, though after snapping the pic of Link not posing I felt I had betrayed the cosplayer-camera guy trust and had to flee.

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And that comes from SCE Development. In PlayStation's Europe message board, he says the producer who spoke yesterday was confused when he said LittleBigPlanet would be region-locked. All shared levels will be available in the game worldwide. Verbatim from Sony:

Hi all, as many of you may have heard already in an interview at Leipzig the senior producer for LittleBigPlanet announced that the game is region locked. This is in fact not the case, and all shared levels in the game will be available worldwide. The confusion arose out of regional differences in how moderation will work as there are different legal rules each region have to play by, and at one point this looked like it may require the game to be independent in each region - however this has been worked around and there will only be one region for the game.... a LittleBigRegion.

Apologies for any confusion over this issue, however I'm pretty sure you're happy with the result.

LittleBigPlanet is Not Region Locked [Official PlayStation Community, thanks Combichristoffersen and many others. We're having issues with our tips e-mail this morning]

Have time to waste on this lovely August Saturday? If you do, there's an appallingly expansive look at the history of Atari's early years (19 pages, plus one for citations) over at Gamasutra. This is actually a companion piece to the first Atari retrospective, which looked at the years from '71 to '77 (also clocking in at a mere 20 pages). It's stuffed with quotes, so the length isn't simply 'and then ... and then ... and then ....' Steve Fulton describes this period as one of the most exciting for Atari:

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Sega whipped up an exceedingly clever Games Convention press kit for the just announced The House of the Dead Overkill. Capitalising on the '70s horror schlock style of the on-rails Wii shooter, Sega stuffed a horrific post card and The House of the Dead T-shirt into a custom VHS sleeve case. Yes, that little brick is wearable — just add water.

We've secured two of these schwag boxes for future contests. Start brushing up on your The House of the Dead dialogue, kids. Oh, and check out the half-dozen pics of the press kit in our gallery below.

Our friends at Manchester University have published another study looking at developing nations where the poor earn money by gold farming or powerlevelling in MMOs. The estimate is half a million people do the work for pay, a supermajority of them in China. Of the online toilers, 400,000 are involved in gold farming, the rest powerlevelling and other services.

The study's author admits that precise estimates are not possible because of the underground nature of the activity. But it's at least a $US 500 million global industry as of now, with organised crime snaking its tendrils into the business.

The growth is entirely predictable and not really a new phenomenon, when you think about it. "When you get people with more money than time and time than money the two will find a way to meet", said Stephen Davis, of game security firm Secure Play. Quoted for truth.

Poor Earning Virtual Gaming Gold [BBC]

Compared to a lot of esoteric ruminations on game design, Ernest Adams' little essay on 'the dao of game design' is remarkably grounded and to the point. The question of how to make a game that players — not just the designer — would want to play is an obvious one; perhaps more obvious is the fact that a designer needs to know what they're trying to convey (though, considering the muddled end products we're sometimes presented with, perhaps some designers don't pay enough attention to the 'message'):

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It's Saturday and the Leipziger Messe is stuffed like a bratwurst with savory Germans. In Hall 3, where Sony, Rockstar, Eidos and others have set up shop, the walkways are thick with a horrible swarm of game enthusiasts. There are lines for everything , making it nigh impossible to get on a demo station in what spoiled press members (like us!) consider reasonable timeframes.

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Eurogamer caught up with Hideo Kojima at Games Convention '08 and asked out of the blue if Metal Gear Acid, the PSP-only, turn-based version of the series, would ever arrive on PlayStation Network. Kojima's answer was noncommittal, but not a brush-off either:

"I'll say yes to that idea, but not because it is already running or anything", Kojima told Eurogamer when asked about the possibility of porting the turn-based strategy titles to PSN.

"I'm just saying yes because it's possible, I think it is possible. Sorry to say we don't have specific plans at the moment, but it is possible, yes".

Wikipedia points out that the two games in the Metal Gear Acid series are non-canonical.

MG Acid for PSN "Possible" -- Kojima [Eurogamer]

This Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe video should put any fears to rest that the game won't ship with a respectable amount of murder intact. The game's producer, Hector Sanchez, walks us through the Joker's move set, explaining that "Rage Mode" that we half-understood during our latest hands-on with the title. Mr. Sanchez ends it with a bang, demonstrating how the Joker takes people out, Mortal Kombat style.

If you haven't seen this one yet, don't skip it. It's full of win.

Last October the team at CD Projekt Red released The Witcher, one of the best PC RPG titles of year, and they've been working on it ever since. Not in a big fixing sort of way, though surely some of that has gone on, but rather working on improving the title - enhancing it, hence the subtitle of next month's The Witcher: Enhanced Edition. See, despite the slew of awards and accolades the original release has received, CD Projekt isn't done. They are trying to build the perfect game, and they're not content to rest until both themselves and The Witcher community are completely satisfied.

I got a chance to sit down with a beer on a nice, comfy couch and watch a demonstration of the newly enhanced features of the ultimate edition of The Witcher.

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Kimberly Jernigan isn't much of a dog person. Lions are more her speed. In fact one was her boyfriend. In Second Life, of course, but never mind, it felt real. And when the romance went down the crapper in their virtual world, it got even weirder in the real one. No surprise that someone ends up locked in the bathroom with their snout duct-taped shut. And probably not much of a surprise it wasn't either of the humans, but the dog.

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I spent the better part of an hour today playing through several rounds of Killzone 2 multiplayer at Sony's Games Convention 2008 headquarters, and rather than spend several paragraphs lying about how well I did, I figured I'd just round up the finer points of the session and present them here in easy-to-ingest numbered form.

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The big lure of Fable II Pub Games is that you get a two months head start to pile up gold before the game drops. The big drawback is that it's gambling, not a Pell grant, so you could wind up in the hole when the game drops Oct. 21. Larry Hyrb is -- sorta.

Seems the Xbox Live programming director left himself signed in and his wife got a hold of the game under his tag. He popped in the door to find her in full gambling-problem mode, which is to say distant, uncommunicative, unconcerned and four figures to the bad, on his account.

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The Mikes of Kotaku are still in Germany, land of better beer, better coffee, and the best damn gummi candy on the planet, experiencing all that the Games Convention in Leipzig has to offer. We'll be continuing our coverage over the weekend and well into the beginning of the week, as we've discovered that every once in awhile sleeping is good.

While there are still plenty of impressions both hands on and hands off on the way, Saturday marks the end of appointments and the opportunity to get out on the floor and bring you the stuff they didn't want us to schedule a time to see. It could get ugly. You've been warned.

Leipzig lizards, Daddy Warbucks! A 9/11 skin on Space Invaders got MSM attention for Games Convention '08 alright, perhaps not in the way anyone other than the exhibit's creator had hoped. Kotaku's Michael McWhertor spotted it on Wednesday, snapped a pic and then later hands on with the exhibit. But his snapshot went global nookular instantly. After the New York Daily News ran it, with predictably insulted react from 9/11 survivors, Taito got on the ball and postured about legal action, although since it can be argued it's an interactive art exhibit, fair use defences may protect the creator.

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