Now I understand why Call of Duty costs hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. So real! → Read More
Here’s an interesting study: the effect video games have on kids’ happiness. BYU surveyed a couple hundred families, and asked to tell about their children’s video game use along with school performance and behavior. The results are kind of interesting: it turns out that young girls who spent more time playing games with their dads are happier and better-behaved. → Read More
Not that this should shock any of you, but Nintendo has admitted that it’s working on a new, proper Mario game for the 3DS. So says the mighty Shigeru Miyamoto, who was recently profiled in the New Yorker. This is most welcome news, yes. → Read More
Marvel vs. Capcom 3 comes out in two weeks—woo!—and that means it’s time to throw your standard-issue controller in the trash and pony up for a proper arcade stick. Mad Catz has one that may interest you called the Marvel Vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds Arcade FightStick: Tournament Edition. The name is quite the mouthful, yes. → Read More
Good news for Pittsburgh Steelers fans: Madden NFL 11 has predicted that the black-and-gold will win the Super Bowl, 24-20. Hit the music! → Read More
A quick “this exists” for your Monday morning. It’s a Nintendo 3DS Starter Kit, from Icon. The $20 kit contains a number of items to make your 3DS-ing all the more pleasurable come March 27 when the system is released. Rumor has it you’ll find a copy of Fernando Torres’ transfer request in there! (No you won’t.) → Read More
Word on the street is that cloud-based game save management will be coming to the PS3 beginning with firmware 3.60. Hate the idea of the cloud managing your saves? Don’t worry, for it looks like the feature will only be available to PlayStation Plus subscribers. Outrage! → Read More
Good news for you, this cold Friday afternoon. Crytek now says that there will, indeed, be multi-player demo for the PC version of Crysis 2. Huzzah! → Read More
By now you surely must know that Sony has released PS3 firmware 3.56, which applies a “minor security patch” to the system. Of course it does, and of course it prevents people from hacking their PS3. What happens hereafter will be most telling. → Read More
John Carmack, the man behind Doom and Quake, appears to be a bit of a Sony NGP fan. That shouldn’t come as a shock to close followers of id Software, which has very much embraced mobile gaming, particularly of the iPhone variety. Shortly after Sony’s big reveal, he tweeted: “Low level APIs will allow the Sony NGP to perform about a generation beyond smart phones with comparable specs.” Is that… → Read More
PS3 owners will be prompted to update their system to firmware version 3.56 today. Why is that? Hmm, could it possibly have something to do with Sony trying to prevent your from jailbreaking your system? Yes, obviously. (“This is a minor update that adds a security patch.”) If you update your system say goodbye to being able to hack your PS3 to pieces… for now, at least. And maybe for a good… → Read More
It’s probably a snow day for many of you, so what better way to kill a few hours than to fire up an emulator? “But Nicholas,” you interrupt, “there are so many emulators out there, and so much conflicting information. I wouldn’t know how to start if my life depended on it!” Don’t throw away your life—there’s so much beauty in the world! With this handy guide you should be… → Read More
How many of you have played “violent video games” since you were a wee pup? I certainly have, and you don’t see me stealing cars or robbing banks, do you? Exactly. The most violent I get is when I boo the TV when stupid Manchester United improbably comes back against the most entertaining team in England, Blackpool. I bring this up because a congressman from California has proposed a new… → Read More
You’re now looking at a pair of Nike Air Force 1 sneakers. But these are special in that they have the classic PlayStation logo on them. You’ll be the coolest kid in Long Island City, the new new Williamsburg. → Read More
DC Universe Online, the first “big” non-World of Warcraft MMO release of the year (the other being Star Wars: The Old Republic), has done quite well for Sony. It’s done so well, in fact, that Sony has had a hard time keeping it on store shelves. So says a tweet from Sony Online Entertainment president John Smedley. → Read More
http://www.rockstargames.com/videos/embed/6441 Ladies and gentlemen: the second LA Noire trailer has landed. “LA Noire?” Yes, it’s the next Rockstar game that will sell 80 zillion copies in two days. → Read More
Uh, oh: the second Usenet story of the day, this time from Newsdemon. Someone check to see if the planets are still in their orbits, or whether or not that second sun has popped up yet. They’re running a contest over there that I thought I’d point out for a minute. The prize? A couple of free games up for grabs. Nothing wrong with that. → Read More
Direct2Drive, the digital download service for PC games, has started a rental service. It’s $5 for five hours of gameplay, which, doing some maths, works out to $1 per hour. There’s a small catch: only three games are available to rent right now: Grid, Divinity 2, and Silent Hill: Homecoming. The future, Conan? → Read More
Quickly now: Duke Nukem Forever will be released on May 3 of this year for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. 2K, the game’s publisher, says that “May 3, 2011 marks Duke’s return as he unleashes his brash and brutally honest wit on the world. His return is going to be epic and one that will make video gaming history!” Indeed. Update: Reveal trailer after the jump! → Read More
Video game piracy cost some £1.45 billion ($2.31 billion) in lost sales last year, as well as around 1,000 lost jobs. So says the Association of UK Interactive Entertainment (UKIE), which cautioned that even those impressive numbers are on the conservative side. That’s console piracy, mind you, which yet again throws a wrench in publishers’ arguments that piracy is only a problem on the PC, so… → Read More
The one disappointing thing about the Nintendo event from this morning: we still don’t have the exact list of launch titles, with Nintendo instead opting to draw attention to the system’s “launch window,” the several week period between its March 27 launch and E3. What are you gonna do? Me, I played a couple of these “launch window” games right after the press conference. Here’s a quick… → Read More
Nicholas here, live from Nintendo’s big press conference in New York. The star of the show will be the 3DS, and Nintendo is expected to announce launch details: exact release date, price, games, etc. The stuff you’ve been waiting for. Like with the IBM Jeopardy challenge last week, feel free to refresh this post every minute or so; I still don’t know how to use fancy… → Read More
It’s probably fair to say that LittleBigPlanet came out of nowhere to become the early face of the PS3. You’ll recall that the system didn’t have the smoothest of launches, completely overshadowed by the Wii back in 2006, but then this odd little platformer and its troupe of sackboys appeared. What, a PS3-exclusive game worth playing?! Has the world gone mad? (No.) → Read More
Nice, it looks like the PS3 version of Portal 2 won’t stink on ice—something that can’t be said about the Xbox 360 version of Team Fortress 2. (Though that’s hardly Valve’s fault, having to play by Microsoft’s silly Xbox Live rules.) PS3 owners can look forward to cross-platform (PC/Mac vs. PS3) gameplay in multi-player mode, Steam Cloud-based storage of saved games (eh…), and… → Read More
Sony’s trying its hardest to erase the PS3 Jailbreak hack from the Internet, but we all know that’s folly. Two seconds on YouTube turns up not only links to all the necessary files, but detailed, how-to videos describing how to hack the system. The scary thing for Sony is that we’re long past the point where hacking a video game console requires soldering knowledge and a hard-to-find modchip. → Read More
We talk about Steam seemingly every 18 seconds here, so it’s only fair that we pay attention to some of the other digital download services that are out there. Direct2Drive, the IGN-owned download service, has added The Sims to its existing catalog of “more than” 2,500 games. That means one thing for y’all: there’s a big sale! → Read More
Ha! Well that didn’t take long. Sony has now officially sued the folks behind the PS3 hack, Geohot and fail0verflow. This is good news for Sony’s lawyers, and bad news for pretty much everyone else, particularly those of you who still believe the quaint notion of hardware ownership or anything like that. Foolish! → Read More
Well, well, well. THQ, the famous video game publisher that’s brought us all those UFC and WWE games, not to mention the criminally underrated (particularly if you have a beefy computer) Metro 2033, now has a new logo. Surprisingly, the logo doesn’t once mention the publisher’s distaste for the used games market, nor are the letters D-L-C anywhere to be found. → Read More
You forget about some of the fun stuff you’ve seen after having spent an entire week fighting crowds in Las Vegas while sick and tired. And I do mean sick and tired: I was sick flying into Las Vegas (you know the sharp, stabbing pain you get in your ears when your airplane descends from the heavens while sick? Yeah, I had that, and it wasn’t fun), and all that running around, lugging… → Read More
Whatever happened to the idea of “you bought it, you can do whatever you want with it”? You buy a car and want to add all sorts of silly aftermarket modifications like it’s 2004 and Pimp My Ride is still relevant? Feel free! But no, you buy a video game console, explore its inner workings, maybe discover and exploit or security vulnerability and The Man wants you silenced. In this case, The… → Read More
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