1P Start

I’m not really into games like World of Warcraft, mainly because of the monthly fee and also because I fear having any kind of obligation to play a game in able to do anything to get to the “good parts”. Still, I’m amused by the fact that a deer very similar to Bambi named Bambina will be appearing in the World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. There’s also a skunk named Flora and a rabbit named Thudder, which are also eerily familiar to Disney characters seen in Bambi as well.

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It looks like one of my biggest wishes has come true. The major publishers of music based games, Activision, Neversoft, Harmonix, and Konami, have worked out an agreement with Sony that will guarantee that games will be compatible with the musical peripheral for each game maker. That means that owners of Rock Band 2, Guitar Hero: World Tour, and Rock Revolution will be able to buy one set of pretend instruments on the PS3 and buy all of the games and enjoy them… well except in the case of Rock Revolution. I don’t know how much enjoyment you’re going to get out of that dog.

Don’t worry Xbox 360 owners, you won’t be left in the cold. Microsoft confirmed that they had worked out a similar deal for the 360. Niiiiiice.

On David Jaffe’s blog, the mind behind God of War said that creator of almost anything famous by Nintento, Shigeru Miyamoto, and legendary game creator Will Wright are not as well known as Steven Spielberg because there is no mention of him on box art.

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Not only is Watchmen, one of the greatest graphical novels of all time being turned into a film, but it’s also going to be an episodic video game hitting both XBox Live Arcade and the Playstation Network. The game will supposedly be a “mature” brawler that will feature, “visceral superhero combat.”

Thankfully, they are making the game a prequel to the events in the novel/film, because there really wouldn’t be a whole lot of combat found in a brawler based directly on the source material. I bet a million nerds lost there minds at the announcement of this game and not in a good way. Enough people are having a problem with Watchmen being turned into a film, much less turn into a standard beat-um-up video game.

This week’s Rock Band downloadable content brings more Nine Inch Nails and a couple of tracks from Shinedown. The songs are:

* “Burn” Nine Inch Nails

* “Capital G” Nine Inch Nails

* “Last” Nine Inch Nails

* “Devour” Shinedown

* “Junkies For Fame” Shinedown

The Nine Inch Nails songs are available in a three pack for $5.49 (440 Microsoft Points) for the pack and the Shinedown songs and the Nine Inch Nails songs individually for $1.99 (160 Microsoft Points) each. I’m not a huge NIN fan, but it is nice to see more of their songs. I do have to wonder about Shinedown, do they have any kind of following?

Videos and my retarded thoughts after the break!

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With all the excitement for the upcoming games in the musical genre like Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero: World tour, there really hasn’t been as much heat on the Konami pretend band game aside from their lawsuit with Harmonix. What little I’m hearing hearing isn’t very good, either. Kotaku got their hands on the drums for Konami’s Rock Revolution and boy does this thing look ugly as sin:

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Over on some website some skirt wrote up something about how to pick up a girl gamer or something, I guess. Her tips might be valuable for you losers out there that can’t get a woman of your own and need to have random websites tell you how to do it.

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The Playstation Portable has been something of a failure for Sony so far. In every single territory around the world, it has been roundly beaten by the cheaper and more innovative Nintendo DS, although Japan continues to be Sony’s strongest supporter. But the lack of success in managing to get a sizeable foothold in the hand-held market means there is a question mark hanging over the little console’s future.

According to Zeno Colaço, a VP for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, talking to Pocket Gamer recently, the console is still subject to the 10 year hardware strategy that Sony seems intent on sticking with. But while that has proved a viable strategy for the PS2, which continues to sell in huge numbers for such an outdated piece of hardware, I just can’t see the PSP having that much life left it in.

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When Wii Fit was released in the states last month, not only did it sell out within days, it also prompted a new wave of fitness freakery and another way of people to attempt to lose weight. While some will doubt the ability of what is essentially a video game, to help you lose weight, one blogger’s experience with the game is nothing but positive.

Kris Abel, a blogger writing for CTV, details his experience with the game in the six weeks since he bought it, and reviews the software at the same time.

The most interesting and intriguing part of his post is where he tells of his Wii Mii’s response to him reaching his weight-loss goal of 16 pounds in six months in just six weeks.

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In today’s multiplayer games the team colors are usually between red and blue. Why red and blue vs. any other colors, I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone really knows other than the extremely nerdy. A study done using the game Unreal Tournament (a game that has red vs. blue teams) has shown that out of 1,347 team matches, red won 55% of the time. The scientists that conducted the study think it’s because of a negative human reaction to seeing red, thus the blue team has an unfair disadvantage.

While it probably doesn’t really mean anything in the long run, it is interesting trivia. Personally, I prefer being red because it’s a darker color that I think tend blends in better with most maps, but I’m not a fancy scientist wasting everyone’s time working on video game statistics.

My wife isn’t a gamer in the least, but like most non-gamers she does enjoy Rock Band. After my hard drive busted on my 360, the annoying task of unlocking all the new songs and creating new rockers fell upon us. I created a guy named “Paul” since I’m the most uncreative gamer in the universe. The wife likes to come up with more creative names that are more “rockish” and this time she created a brand new rocker from scratch with the name Jett Midnight. Immediately upon creation, Rock Band told us that “Jett Midnight” wasn’t classy enough to be listed on Xbox Live. Huh? We couldn’t figure out why. Aside from the fact that it’s a little corny, we could think of nothing inappropriate about the name. Out of curiosity I quickly Googled “Jett Midnight” to see if it was a porn star or a stripper name, which would help explain this strange reaction by the game. I found nothing inappropriate and I’m left wondering what’s going on.

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Addiction of any kind is obviously a huge problem, and in these days when most of us can get hold of pretty much anything we desire, the range of addictions is growing massively.

It used to be that someone’s vice was sex, drugs, or drink, and that was about it. Now we have different forms of addiction, from porn, to the Internet, to gaming. However, out of those, I’d assume that gaming was the least serious, with less underlying reasons attached to it. But that’s not the case, at least according to Dr. Jerald Block, a psychiatrist in Portland, Oregon, who recently spoke to Boston.com about the prevalence of addiction to games such as World of Warcraft.

Block specializes in treating gamers who get so caught up in the world of warlocks and elves that they can’t then drag themselves away. And he views gaming addiction as more serious, and more complicated to treat than porn addiction.

The reasons he claims are to blame for this are two-fold. Firstly, porn addiction is more tolerated than gaming addiction. People expect porn to be a factor in a huge number of people’s lives. Sex is all around us, and so when someone gets addicted to one element of that, it’s not wholly unexpected.

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Over on Kotaku they ran a story about a one handed controller that is now for sale for the price of 129.99. The controller is designed for disabled people that either only have on hand or can only use one hand and this has got to be the greatest idea ever. I can’t imagine how terrible it would be if I lost a hand and was unable to get my games on anymore, I’d be beyond depressed.

And if you don’t miss the obvious, the one handed controller would be good for the two handed too. The U.S. needs some games where players can… have one free hand… for stuff. Hey, don’t look at me that way! Everyone does it! We need some super fun adult games released to help balance out the amount of horribly violent games out there. Boobs not war people, boobs not war!

This post is rated PG-13: You’ve Been Warned!

It was recently reported on the nets that players logging on to the new MMO Age of Conan were both shocked and angered when realizing their player characters had received an unrequested breast reduction. It wasn’t just a cup size reduction to make it easier on the female avatar’s backs, either. It was almost a full on mastectomy:

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Over on Filefront I saw an interesting article highlighting the fact that the marketers around the new Penny Arcade game (Penny Arcade: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness) have been using quotes that are a little less than complimentary in their ads:

The quotes don’t come from a gushing review, they are from a Penny Arcade hater by the name ddf on Wired’s blogs. In case you haven’t guess, ddf is the type of person that has absolutely no life and has the overwhelming need to tear the creative works of others down, because he (who are we kidding, this can’t be a she) can’t create anything himself.

Listen, I’m not a Penny Arcade fanboy. I like a lot of their strips and I bought the first two volumes of their comic strip collections, but there’s a lot of times they fall flat. I also find their commentary posts on their site both hard to read and smarmy. I can understand why people might not like them, but if you spend any amount of time actively trying to crap on them it’s a little freaking sad.

For the record this guy has a blog and yes he is a jackass on it. I’m not going to link to it in order to give him any kind of boost in traffic as a reward. If you’re curious though, here’s a tidbit of the kind of wit and substance that can be found there: “I hereby come out of my soap opera coma to coin the term “BioSuck” in regards to new lame FPS game Bioshock. Anyone using it from now on owes me royalties.” Uh yeah, because it’s so clever to put in “uck” after an “s” to mock something. When reading anything by this guy it’s nearly impossible to believe that he’s not some sort of plant created by the Penny Arcade crew to create some extra buzz for the game.