Here's something I wish I could do; hypnotize myself before sex so I wouldn't have to feel any of the awkwardness that seems determined to accompany me on my last few sexual encounters (or should I say near-sexual encounters).
Dammit, have those 10 readers who actually used to read this blog in its previous incarnation really upped and left the building?
Two months since my last post. Brilliant! (some would say, particularly those wishing for me to finally do something worthwhile with my precious time)
For others, you may be lamenting the crappy game links, the overabundance of Youtube videos and reliance on Wikipedia entries for game info. In which case, you probably stopped reading eons ago and I'm just here..by myself, right now.
Anyway, to get to the point; Seeing the shambolic state of my life right now, I've decided I need to wise up a bit, stop spending my entire life online and start figuring shit out that doesn't involve me; a) whoring myself out to corporate salesmen (no, you really need that 47" plasma Mr. Maloney) b) spending all my money on booze and candy and c) generally getting dumber with every passing nanosecond.
Hence, my wistful plan of turning this site into something readable, informative (to some) and chock-a-block with witty, biting remarks about all things I love and hate, will perhaps one day come to fruition. Just don't hold your breath waiting for it, cos I certainly am not.
Anyway, enjoy my new favourite producer, Jean-Christophe Le Saoût of Wax Tailor fame...
Edit: Oh yeah, did I mention its been about two months since I last picked up a game controller of any kind? Sold my Wii, my gaming PC and am looking for a buyer for the rest of my junk...a set of 1210mk2s and a DJM-600 anyone? 47" plasma with a small white patch in the bottom left corner? (hardly noticeable, really.)
Edit no.2: Fuck. This gaming-geek site got me a paying job. Hmm. Anyone know if there's an Undo button in Blogger?
Original review
Retraction
After losing a fight in school, a 17 year old boy in Beijing doused his classmate with petrol and lit him on fire. According to Beijing News the teen claimed that he “had lost himself in World of Warcraft” and “transformed into a Fire Mage.”
The teen has since been sentenced to eight years in prison and ordered to pay the victim and his family 760,000 RMB (about $103,140 USD). (Wired)
Hell yeah, if I lost a fight in a public school playground I'd probably whip out my desert-camo Dragunov and start knocking off kids left, right and center too. Oh wait, you mean Call of Duty 4 isn't real life after all? Doh.
Beijing News
GamesRadar has an amusing look at some of the more criminally-minded celebs to have graced us with their gaming presence...
Name: Tim Allen
Appeared in: Home Improvement (SNES), The Santa Clause 3 (GBA)
Heard in: Toy Story 2 (PC/PSone), Toy Story Racer (PSone)
Rap sheet: Tim Allen's stint in prison is rarely discussed, but hardly a secret; before he was synonymous with family-oriented comedies, Allen (then named Timothy Allen Dick) was a cocaine dealer (Wtf). In 1978, he was nabbed in Michigan while carrying more than a pound (somebody's coke bitch?) of the stuff, and subsequently served more than two years in prison before turning his life around and embarking on a career path that included some of the most aggressively mediocre tie-in games ever made.
Oh, so many more funny ones following the jump below...
Name: Danny Trejo
Appeared in: Def Jam: Fight for NY (PS2/Xbox)
Heard in: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PS2/Xbox/PC), Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (PSP/PS2)
Rap sheet: In movies or in games, Danny "Machete" Trejo has always been a scary-ass mofo, largely because he used to be one in real life. Specific details about his early life of crime are sketchy, although in an interview with the UK Guardian, he claims to have started by smoking pot at eight, doing heroin at 12 and then graduating to armed robbery, all of which put him in and out of jail through his teenage years before finally landing him in at least three separate California prisons between 1963 and 1972. Prison boxing and a 12-step program helped Trejo turn his life around, and his record since his release has been spotless. Of course, that doesn't make him any less fun to play as in the raptastic Def Jam: Fight for NY, in which you can put his tattooed muscles and intense, mustachioed glare to good use hurling Flavor Flav through a penthouse window.
Name: Steve-O (aka Steven Glover)
Appeared in: Jackass (PS2/PSP/DS), ESPN NFL 2K5 (PS2/Xbox), Tony Hawk's Underground 2 (PS2/Xbox/PC/GC), Tony Hawk's Underground 2 Remix (PSP)
Rap sheet: We never knew this before, but it turns out that getting naked in public and stapling your nutsack to your thigh isn't just a good way to have fun without drugs or alcohol - it's illegal, especially if you do it in Louisiana. Steve-O's most infamous run-in with the law began when the hyper-obnoxious and frequently nude Jackass star performed the "Butterfly" stunt at the Abyss nightclub in 2002, after which he was arrested, charged with obscenity and assault and eventually put on probation and barred from ever performing in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana again. Later incidents saw Steve-O arrested for trying to smuggle drugs into Sweden in 2003 (for which he paid a fine and admitted to drug possession), and charged with disorderly conduct after publicly pissing on potato chips (yes, really) during a Lollapalooza show in Pennsylvania.
Name: Macaulay Culkin
Appeared in: Home Alone (NES/SNES/GB/Genesis/Game Gear/PC), Home Alone 2 (NES/SNES/GB/Genesis/PC)
Rap sheet: Frankly, we're not really surprised that a former child star with a private life as reputedly effed-up as Culkin's has been arrested. What surprises us is that he's apparently been arrested only once, after Oklahoma cops found him carrying weed and prescription drugs during a traffic stop in 2004. After posing for a gruesome mug shot and being briefly jailed, the kid we fed to giant evil Christmas trees in Home Alone 2 was sentenced to drug counseling. Not exactly a harrowing tale of steel bars and hard time, but we are only getting started.
Name: Paris Hilton
Appeared in: Paris Hilton's Diamond Quest (mobile)
Rap sheet: Everyone already knows that media target/attention whore Hilton was jailed for 22 days in June 2007, after repeatedly violating her probation and driving with a suspended license after her 2006 arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol. What you might not have known is that she also starred in her own cell-phone game, Paris Hilton's Diamond Quest, an odious piece of vanityware described by IGN as a hybrid of casual games Bejeweled and Jewel Quest. And that's really all that's notable about Hilton's connection to the world of gaming, aside from the fact that she was roundly ridiculed for getting the name of her own game "wrong" during a press event at E3 2006. Whether the title was changed because of her flub is up to history to decide, mainly because we don't care enough to take even a cursory look into it.
Heaps more on the GamesRadar site here
(Click on the image above for PennyArcade's comic)
By now you may or may not have heard of how Jeff Gerstmann, Editorial Director of huge-flashy-corporate-gaming-for-teens website Gamespot, was fired last week. What you may not know is why: apparently publisher Eidos Interactive threatened to pull the plug on a massive advertising campaign after Gerstmann dished out a low 6/10 review score to the rather mediocre Kane & Lynch: Dead Men -published by, yep, Eidos Interactive.
More after the jump below.
CNET (parent company of Gamespot), immediately issued an official statement declaring:
"For over a decade, Gamespot and the many members of its editorial team have produced thousands of unbiased reviews that have been a valuable resource for the gaming community. At CNET Networks, we stand behind the editorial content that our teams produce on a daily basis"
Eidos threatens to pull the plug
Eidos reportedly threatened to pull a massive advertising campaign for Kane & Lynch if the "tone" of Gerstmann's 6/10 review wasn't changed. Apparently Gerstmann did in fact alter his review but it obviously wasn't enough to appease the demi-gods over at Eidos or CNET.
When asked about the situation, Eidos declined comment, "Eidos is not able to comment on another company's policies and procedures," said a company representative.
Sarah Cain, a spokesperson for CNET, did say,“We do not terminate employees based on external pressure from advertisers,”
Aw, isn't that nice to hear?
Gamespot digs an even deeper hole?
Now there is news of how Eidos is deleting hundreds of user complaints from its forums, citing: “There will be no further discussion”, an Eidos forum administrator bluntly warned visitors, describing the complaints as “ugly spam”.
Alex Navarro, an Editor for Gamespot had this to say on the state of CNET:
"Remember SimCity? Remember what a joy it was to build up a fully functioning, living, breathing city, full of life and wonderment? Then, at some point down the road, after you've built up your city to the peak of its productiveness, you'd start mashing the disaster button and a wide variety of tornadoes, earthquakes, and fake Godzillas would come tromping through, laying fiery waste to every bit of what you'd worked so painstakingly to create? Yeah. It's a little bit like that. Except someone hit the disaster button for me."
What does this all mean?
Not much really. Unless you're seriously misguided or just an eternally annoying optimist, you were probably able to put two and two together just after you'd left university and realized that;
a) The world wasn't quite as rosy as you thought for the first 21 years of your life
and
b) Its all about advertising, marketing and PR, baby....its all about that.
What can you do?
If you happen to be a reader or subscriber to anything related to CNET at all, you can stop reading and cancel any subscriptions as a way to voice your displeasure at this whole debacle. Just know that there aren't that many other sites out there who don't practise something similar already. CNET / Gamespot just got sloppy on this one, but don't expect IGN, 1UP or any of the other big sites to play any fairer.
Highlights from Gerstmann's review of Kane & Lynch:
Story and characterization
“It's impossible to care about anything that's going on in the story, because every single character in the game is almost completely unlikeable. There's no one to root for here, not even in a cool anti-hero sort of way. You're just left with a bunch of really ugly characters that just become impossible to care about over time”
“The dialog's not particularly great, though the voice acting's not bad, but really the problem is that every third word out of every character's mouth is the F-word... it's great when properly used, but here it's just so done to death... it just becomes a real crutch and stands out as just kind of lazy.”
“But it's not the story and the premise that are going to drive you away from Kane & Lynch Dead Men, the gameplay itself also has more than its share of flaws”
Gameplay flaws
A system for taking cover from enemy fire behind objects is “a real pain that you just never use because it's kind of a hassle”
“The squad tactics... don't work very well because the AI on both sides of the game is really pretty flawed”
“The enemies get stuck on cars and run in circles and do all kinds of dumb stuff. So that's not much fun either”
The game's multiplayer mode is “a really neat idea, but unfortunately that idea plays out in the context of Kane & Lynch, so it has most of the same problems that the story mode has”
Conclusion
“Probably not worth purchasing”
BioWare Corp. and Pandemic Studios have ten franchises under development, including six wholly owned games. BioWare Corp. is currently developing the highly anticipated Mass Effect, which will be published by Microsoft in November, and is in the early development stages of a massively multiplayer online game. Pandemic Studios is redefining open-world games with its upcoming Mercenaries 2: World in Flames™ and Saboteur™, in addition to several unannounced projects. Pandemic Studios and BioWare Corp. employ roughly 800 people across four studios located in Edmonton, Canada; Los Angeles; Austin; and Brisbane, Australia. “These are two of the most respected studios in the industry and I’m glad to be working with them again. They’ll make a strong contribution to our strategic growth initiatives on quality, online gaming and developing new intellectual properties,” said John Riccitiello, EA’s Chief Executive Officer. “We also expect this will drive long-term value for our shareholders.” Pandemic Studios is led by Andrew Goldman, Josh Resnick and Greg Borrud. BioWare Corp. is jointly led by Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka. These teams will join the EA™ Games Label run by Frank Gibeau, President of EA Games. “Pandemic Studios remains focused on attracting the best talent and creating blockbuster action games,” said Josh Resnick, President and Co-founder of Pandemic Studios. “As a worldwide publishing leader, EA represents the ideal partner to bring our titles to market as global entertainment events.” “We are truly excited by John Riccitiello’s new vision for EA,” said Ray Muzyka, Co-founder and CEO of BioWare Corp. “This vision is consistent with BioWare’s focus on crafting the highest quality story-driven games in the world. It will enable us to further the careers of the passionate, creative and hard working teams at BioWare Edmonton and BioWare Austin.” EA will pay up to $620 million in cash to the stockholders of VG Holding Corp. and will issue up to an additional $155 million in equity to certain employees of VG Holding Corp., which will be subject to time-based or performance-based vesting criteria. EA will also assume outstanding VG Holding Corp. stock options. In addition, EA has agreed to lend VG Holding Corp. up to $35 million through the closing of the acquisition.
Great, just great. I know only time will tell if EA can fuck this one up just like they've managed to absorb (and fuck up) every other talented independent game studio they've bought over the years, but I can't help but hear Queen's 'Another One Bites The Dust' playing on repeat inside my head.
(Thanks to Destructoid for the image)
Follow the jump for the full report...
Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:ERTS) today announced an agreement with Elevation Partners to acquire VG Holding Corp. -- the owner of both BioWare Corp. and Pandemic Studios. This acquisition gives EA a strong competitive position in key genres in interactive entertainment: action, adventure and role-playing games. The two studios have been recognized for creating some of the highest-quality games in the industry.
I know this is quite old, but I could only find photos of this before - now at least we've got some info regarding this Chinese-brand Wii rip-off. More after the jump.
And just remember this is all translated from the Chinese Engadget via Google Translate:
Let us close this feeling under VII products: power rods vii, of the 2.4 g shock wireless controller. 360°感应玩家动作。 360 ° induction player moves. 定位是5岁+的儿童及其家庭，目前售价为1,280元（奇怪，好像之前是说不到1000RMB），虽然游戏扩展性不佳，但显然是为了蚕食WII没进入中国留下的市场空白，这款产品大约在10月底11月初上市。 Positioning is the age of 5 + children and their families, currently sells for 1,280 yuan (strange, as if that is less than before 1000 RMB), although the poor scalability of the game, but apparently not to erode WII entered the Chinese market left blank, this product around the end of October early November listing.
我们只能说，任天堂可能得重新考虑是否进入中国了，XBOX是不是也要紧张下，哪天跑出个中国版，别怪我们没提醒哦。 We can only say, Nintendo may have to reconsider whether to enter China, Xbox is also tense, which day outside the Chinese version, we do not blame remind oh. 瘾科技想听听大家对这款产品的更多观点。 Addiction Technology want to listen to your more of this product perspective.
Engadget China has more here (source)
McDonald’s Restaurants chief executive Steve Easterbrook said: “The launch of free Wi-Fi in our restaurants in the UK is an exciting move that we believe will further enhance our customers’ experience when they visit us.”
Yay, now we have even more reason to justify that extra Big Mac or two (and plus, we get to order fries now instead of all those damned 'Grande' Lattes when we want free Wi-Fi access. Suck on that Starbucks!)
Source
I don't think I even need to write captions for these as they speak for themselves. More here if you're still interested.
And here is the rest of it
A Chinese man in Guangdong province in Southern China has died after a 3-day binge at a cybercafe in Zhongshan. No word on exactly what he was doing online for those 3 days, or whether the Chinese government will denounce this as yet another evil of the Western world or just execute the cybercafe owner instead.
(source)
And here is the rest of it
And here is the rest of it
IGN has posted a list of the Top 10 Worst Game Character Names. Personally, I think some of them sound awesome - TX-11 Bloody Brad anyone?
10) Seaman
Seen in: Seaman (Dreamcast)
. Still, we think the folks at Konami outdid themselves when renaming Arnold, a TX-11 cyborg in the original Metal Gear. To avoid conflicting with the character's obvious influence (Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger), Konami came up with Bloody Brad. The name is vaguely badass on its own, but when combined with the TX-11 moniker, its true awfulness is evident.
Amazon is showing the new release date for GTAIV as June 30th. 2008. Next year. (Are you serious?)
Nothing here? Click on Amazon above!
A dude on the internet referred to Navy Fire Controlman 2nd Class Petty Officer Russell Tavares as "a nerd" in an online troll-fight. In one of the more dramatic tales of internet rage we've seen lately, the 27-year-old Tavares, who believed himself to not be a nerd, hopped in his car and sped off 1,300 miles from Virginia to Texas, where the name-caller lived.
Dishonorably discharged? Is that it? WTF?
Tavares photographed road snapshots along his route, and posted the images online, as if to prove to his internet peers that he was not a luzer. When he got to there, he burned the dude's trailer down. Tavares has been sentenced to 7 years in prison for arson.
Snip:
The feud started when Anderson, who runs a haunted house near Waco, joined a picture-sharing Web site and posted his artwork and political views. After he blocked some people from his page because of insults and foul language, they retaliated by making obscene digitally altered pictures of him, he said.
Anderson, who went by the screen name "Johnny Darkness," traded barbs with Tavares, aka "PyroDice." Investigators say Tavares boiled over when Anderson called him a nerd and posted a digitally altered photo making Tavares look like a skinny boy in high-water pants, holding a gun and a laptop under a "Revenge of the Nerds" sign.
Tavares obtained Anderson's real name and hometown from Anderson's Web page about his Museum of Horrors Haunted House. (source)
Once again, I am lost for words. WTF?
Clock Suckers is a new cartoon from the makers of College University, and just so happens to be my new favorite show. Forget South Park, forget Family Guy and forget about the damned Simpsons, Clock Suckers is where it's at;
"What's up your ass Kate? You love videogames."
"I do. I'm just sick of beating you guys all the time. It's like I'm the Harlem Globetrotters and you guys are two retarded assholes."
In another Bill Gates' shaped devil horn likely to strike yet more discontent and depression into the hearts of gamers everywhere (DX10? Vista?), Microsoft has just announced plans to work closely to bring more in-game advertising to EA Sports' yearly updates for "hits" like Nascar, NHL, FIFA, etc. Thankfully I haven't bought or played an EA Sports game since I was 14 and didn't know better (Konami?), but this is a sure sign we are going to see more of the whole viral-advertising thing in the future. Great. More after the jump or follow the link above...
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microsoft said on Wednesday it will pipe advertisements into a slate of popular sports video games from Electronic Arts, including its best-selling "Madden" football franchise.
The deal, which also covers EA's "NASCAR," "Tiger Woods" golf, "NHL" hockey and upcoming "Skate" skateboarding games, is a significant win for Microsoft as it tries to build an early lead over rivals such as Google in putting ads into video games.
"The real issue here is that we're making a network play. If I just had 'Madden,' while great, it would be of limited value to advertisers," said Cory Van Arsdale, chief executive of Massive, a game ad company that Microsoft bought last year for $200 million.
The deal comes as Massive faces increased competition from Google, which bought game ad service Adscape for a reported $23 million in March, and from privately held companies such as Double Fusion.
"We need to build an overall network and this is a major stepping point to have us do that," Van Arsdale said in an interview with Reuters.
Massive acts as a broker between companies that want to get their ads in front of gamers, and game publishers eager to tap new sources of revenue to offset higher development costs for flashy new titles that can cost $20 million or more to make.
Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. In-game advertising was worth just $50 million in 2005, but that is expected by many analysts and industry executives to balloon to $1 billion over the next few years.
The $30 billion global video game industry is also one of the fastest-growing entertainment sectors, thanks to new home and handheld gaming machines and a rush among publishers to win over nontraditional buyers like women and seniors.
The ads Massive delivers are dynamic, meaning they can be tailored by advertisers to target specific groups or areas. Unlike static ads that are a permanent part of a game, they can be altered quickly to pitch new products.
In response to a recent Mercury News interview, a user who is on his 9th Xbox 360 speaks his mind about what he believes is the real problem with Microsoft's gaming console. "... the problem isn’t just with launch units. Of the 8 I’ve had so far, only 2 were manufactured in the first three months of launch. The last one I had red-ring on me was manufactured in November of ‘06 - a full year after launch. The problem is that the cooling design of the 360 doesn’t hold up. The cooling of the CPU was well done, with a heat pipe to draw the heat away from the chip (and accordingly, away from the mainboard). The problem is that the GPU and its low-profile heatsink sit under the DVD drive, and are given a very narrow channel for air to be pulled acrosss the heatsink by the fans. When the GPU heats up enough, not only does it reflow the solder in the ball grid array slightly, it can cause the entire mainboard to flex - a phenomenon largely caused by the X-shaped brackets that hold the heatsinks on under the mainboard. They hold the heatsinks down to the chips with a tension fit that presses up directly underneath those chips. So when the system gets too hot, the combination of loosened solder with a mainboard that flexes from heat causes the GPU or CPU to actually break its connection from the board - resulting in the 3 red lights and secondary error code 0102 (the “unknown hardware error” code). This is true of ALL systems manufactured thus far, not just the launch systems. Hopefully, Microsoft’s new measure of adding a heatpipe to the GPU heatsink will reduce the heat on the mainboard itself enough to keep this from happening. We shall see." Reports are coming in of Microsoft receiving up to 2,500 broken 360s per day in the UK alone. Another user has just admitted to having 11 broken 360s and yet Peter Moore, head of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business division, which controls the 360, has merely stated: "I can't comment on failure rates, because it's just not something - it's a moving target. What this consumer should worry about is the way that we've treated him. Y'know, things break, and if we've treated him well and fixed his problem, that's something that we're focused on right now."
More after the jump.
These revelations come after Microsoft recently denied having any "systematic issues" with the 360. Reports coming from Australia have also indicated that the failure rate of the 360 is much, much higher than what Microsoft is letting on. Retailers are claiming the figure is closer to 30% than the 5-6% that has been officially claimed. The unlucky user's explanations can be found in a recent interview with Microsoft's Todd Holmdahl.
Even after studying Business & Economics at uni for a year I still never worked out the difference between these. I still think its some sort of "I lick your arse, you lick mine" kind of mentality but hopefully these will help explain things better. Yup, you, me and the rest of 7th grade.
Click on the picture below for the full size one.
Game Revolution has made what must have been a very exhausting list requiring the minds of countless nerds worldwide. My favorites are:
Panic Restaurant (28)
Tongue Of The Fatman (18)
and....
Bad Dudes VS. Dragon Ninja (5)
And here is the rest of it
