Harley Quinn's Revenge Is Batman: Arkham City's Bad New Ending 
High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle 
The Last Moments Of GAME 
How Bad User Interfaces Are Ruining Video Games And Other Wonderful Things 
She Tried To Make Good Video Games For Girls, Whatever That Meant 
The Story Of Doodle Jump: Brotherly Love And Digital Snacks Print is dead – a phrase we’ve almost come to accept as gospel, particularly when it comes to the tech savvy audience engaged in tech and video games. But, surprisingly, the latest readership and sales figures have shown that video game magazines are beginning to show a significant amount of growth – particularly over the last year.
A lot is made of the decline of print magazines. How, we hear you pondering over morning corn flakes and the funny pages, are they going to stay relevant in the face of free, immediate and online content? Easy. With stuff like this. The February 2008 issue of the Official Xbox Magazine will come bundled with three exclusive Rock Band tracks: Freezepop’s “Sprøde”, “Shake” by Count Zero and Bang Camaro’s “Rock Rebellion”. Great news for OXM subscribers, but for the rest of us? Would really help if they were bands we’d actually heard of. Three Exclusive Rock Band Tracks – Only in OXM! [OXM]
Over at the Official Xbox Magazine they’ve just launched a brand new feature called The Scoreboard, which takes a different approach to reviewing Xbox 360 games. Instead of reviewing the games themselves, Casey Lynch critiques the games’ achievement points. The inaugural installment takes a look at Guitar Hero II, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty 4, and Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Burning Earth, listing their best, worst, easiest, and hardest achievements, and then giving a final overall score for each title. Guitar Hero II took the the low mark of this round with a 5/10, mainly because many achievements ask you to do things outside the normal parameters of the game, such as playing through a career using the standard controller. The winner was Avatar with an 11/10, an extraordinary score justified by the fact that you can get 1,000 gamerscore points in two minutes. This is just a completely brilliant idea, and I look forward to future installments of The Scoreboard.
The Scoreboard #1 [OXM Online - Thanks GetsomeYo!]
