1P Start

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.

At the beginning of last month, rumours emerged of Microsoft developing a Wii Remote style controller for the Xbox 360 in an attempt to grab a piece of Nintendo’s obviously huge market. The company has already started this strategy by releasing the Xbox Arcade pack, a cheap and cheerful package to appeal to casual gamers everywhere.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of months, here’s a short rehash of the rumours. MTV News (not who I’d normally look to for gaming news, or any other news for that matter) reported that an inside Microsoft source has revealed the plans for an almost exact replica of the Wii Remote. It looks almost identical, although is thought to have a microphone included for future games similar to Singstar.

At the time, Microsoft refused to comment on the speculation, as they do with almost every rumour, but Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has chosen to speak out.

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Wii Fit is due to be released in the USA this week, first in the Nintendo World Store on May 19th before being available everywhere on May 21st. The game, which is already available in Europe and Asia ships with a balance board peripheral which allows gamers to do exercises, and yoga, and even weight themselves using the software.

The game, or lifestyle device as some are more accurately calling it has already divided opinion. Hardcore gamers more in to their first person shooters and RPGs have written it off as not even a game, and the Wii itself as not a true player in this generation’s console war. While others thinks the Wii and games such as Wii Fit are bringing more people in to gaming, and opening up the hobby to a more diverse range of people.

Wal-Mart were even marketing the game as the perfect Mother’s Day gift by offering $10 gift card to anyone who pre-ordered the game by May 10th. A Teacher in Canada even tested the game out as a possible alternative to more traditional forms of exercise, with surprising results.

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How do you like to play Halo 3 on the Xbox 360? With friends? With lots of cold beers and snacks? How about with some prostitutes? The latter may seem to be a bit obtuse, but that is exactly how a 13 year old kid from Texas and his friends decided to play the game.

Ralph Hardy ordered an extra credit card in his father’s name, and then went on a $30,000 spending spree with a number of his friends. The credit card company sent out the card after the kid managed to answer a series of security questions correctly.

Hardy was caught after buying an Xbox 360, a load of games, and then booking in to a hotel room with his mates to play the games. After ordering snack food such as Dr Pepper, Fritos and Oreos, the boys asked the hotel management “where they could score some chicks and were willing to pay”.

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Electronic Arts desperately wants to acquire Take-Two Interactive. It already wanted it before Grand Theft Auto IV was released but now that the game has made $500 million in its first week on sale, and proved once again the value of the franchise, EA are even keener.

Take-Two, who publish the Grand Theft Auto games, have already rejected a bid from EA back in February. So now EA are going hostile, and have offered the shareholders a $2.1 billion all cash offer. The shareholders have until May 16th to consider the bid and decide if it’s enough to warrant a mass sell out or not.

The problem is, EA doesn’t actually have $2.1 billion in the bank, and has had to take out a $1 billion loan to cover the costs of the investment if and when it happens. The huge financing will come from Morgan Stanley, the bank of Nova Scotia, and several other financial organisations.

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In the latest edition of The Official X-Box Magazine a rumor that should get both fans of Bioshock and fans of the classic PC (and PSX) game X-Com: UFO Defense in a tizzy. Bioshock creator Ken Levine is rumored to be working with 2K Games on a sequel to the space alien fighting game. If any franchise needs an awesome revival, it’s X-Com: UFO Defense.

If you’ve never played X-Com: UFO Defense (or unfortunate enough to play it’s lame sequels), I can’t stress to you how awesome that first game was. Not only did you have to fight aliens in super intense (and incredibly difficult) turned based combat with a team of badass commandos (that you recruited and trained), but you also controlled funding for research and were the sole hope for humanity against the threat of death by alien invaders.

It’s what dreams are made out of… awesome dreams.

Last week saw various media types getting themselves in a tizzy over the so-called clash between the release of Grand Theft Auto IV last Tuesday, and the long awaited Iron Man movie starring Robert Downey Jr. The argument was that the timing of the multi-format GTA 4 coming out was going to play havoc with the box office takings for the film, as millions of gamers would be too busy indoors playing the game to venture out to the cinema to see the film.

And surprise surprise, here we are the week after, and as well as GTA 4 selling in phenomenal numbers, the Iron Man movie did spectacularly well, taking $100 million in the States, and $200 million elsewhere in the world. The movie also ended up being the 10th largest opening movie ever, and the second biggest ever original (non-sequel) film, just behind the first Spider-Man movie.

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Over on 1up a couple of guys with one of the coolest jobs in the world (one of them is in charge of overseeing interactive game content done with Marvel’s characters) have a blog where they intermittently post articles of high interest to geeks like me. One (planned) series of articles of most interest to me is the history of Iron Man in video games. The first post and only one that is up right now deal with Iron Man’s appearances in such classics as Captain America and the Avengers and Marvel Super Heroes in War of the Gems. Okay, I’m sure you never heard of the second game, unless your a true comic book loving video game geek. I hope they keep up with the posts, I love comics and history so this is a marriage made in heaven.

Link: Here’s a super awesome review of Captain America and the Avengers. Yes, it is a shameless plug. Also, the sketch is from my buddy Jacon who is an awesome artist and funny guy. Check out his stuff here.

Grand Theft Auto IV is still three days away from release, and the vast majority of people won’t have yet had the chance to sample the game. But that doesn’t seem to be stopping no-nothing do-gooders from calling for the game to be banned, before it even hits the streets, and before any of them have even played it.

We’ve already seen adverts for the game being pulled off buses in Chicago due to a biased piece of reporting from Fox News, and now more opinionated people have decided to butt in.

Parents Television Council president Tim Winter started the invented outrage by declaring:

“This brutally violent videogame must be kept out of the hands of children, and we are calling on all major retailers to reconsider any decisions to sell this game.”

The next day, California state senator Leland Yee sent a message to parent urging them to “avoid (the) latest ultraviolent videogame.”

Now hang on a minute Mr. Winter and Mr. Yee, how do you know the game is going to be brutally or ultra violent? You haven’t played it, so you are just guessing based on the old iterations. Now okay, GTA IV is going to have some scenes of violence in it, but then it is a game about criminality, and violence is an unfortunate part of that. We all wish it wasn’t obviously, but life is unfair.

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