Slashdot's Michael Zenke mentioned to me earlier this month that he was now penning a regular column for 1Up about massively multiplayer games.

Massive Update, at least the most recent one, certainly lives up to it's name, packing enough juicy tid-bits and inner machinations to fill a full newspaper page. Today's update deals mostly with Blizzard's suit against gold-farmers Peons4Hire and the incredibly complex finger-pointing going on over at Eve Online. What's with that game? Even the allegations of corruption are too complicated for me to understand. I am definitely going to be taking at dip into that game in the near future to check it out. (If for no other reason then to find out why the likes of both Joel Johnson and the New York Times Seth Schiesel are so into it.)

And the coverage goes on from there, boy does it go on from there, with round-ups of ever major MMO story of the week and links to blogcasts and feature stories.

If you're into MMO's you've got to check this thing out. Brian Crecente

Massive Update: Weekly MMO News [1Up]

True, chess champion Garry Kasparov's ties to video games are tangential at best. (Though I loved his PC chess games.) But I have a soft spot for him and when I read on Slashdot that he had been arrested for leading a march through Moscow in opposition to Russian President Vladamir Putin, I knew I had to post it.

Kasparov's group, Other Russia, has been essentially banned from appearing on TV so they take to the streets to get their message out. In this latest protest, the group was denied a marching permit, so the big K got himself tossed into the can.

You'd think a chess grandmaster would have seen that coming. Brian Crecente

Gary Kasparov Arrested Over Political Fight [Slashdot]

Wow. Say what you will about Phil Harrison, president of Worldwide Studios for Sony, but the man certainly has some brass balls. Harrison has agreed to make a run through the Q&A gauntlet that is the Slashdot Ask series.

Essentially, Zonk opens the floodgates to the readers, letting them ask whatever questions they want of a person and then tries to guide the person in the sights through the gauntlet.

Keep in mind these are questions that come straight from the readers, readers that Zonk likes to describe as "cranky." Brian Crecente

Ask Sony's Phil Harrison About PS3 and Games [Slashdot]

Sissily slapping Charlie Demerijian to death with their purple electronic purses, the Cylons over at Slashdot have taken umbrage at The Inquirer's earlier portrayal of the PS3's Cell as "slow and broken".

Look, there's no one currently on staff who is a hovering cybernetic brain; consequently, no one here at Kotaku is smart enough to tell you what these nerds' beef is. Here's the best layman's summary in the thread we can find, from gabebear:

The Cell reads from the graphics card's memory at glacial speeds, so they run the headline "PS3 hardware slow and broken" and fail to point out the fact that you would almost never want to do this in a game.

A respectable article would have pointed out that this doesn't have any impact on games, but will effect applications. The 256MB of RAM connected to the video card is really only good for vertex data and textures, so you are only left with 256MB to run the executables in. The practical implications of this information means that Linux will only be able to use 256MB of RAM. The RSX(graphics card) can render out of it's own local memory or main memory(almost as fast as local mem), anything that needs to be modified by the Cell must stay in main memory because of this bandwidth issue.

Luckily, games contain a lot of static models and static textures that will easily fill up the 256MB of local mem on the RSX; stuff that the Cell would never read from....

I dunno. This all just seems so analogous to sniffing someone's underpants in order to ascertain what they had for lunch. Let's just wait for the games. FLORIAN ECKHARDT

PS3 Cell Processor 'Broken'? [Slashdot Games]

Slashdot beat me to the punch this morning and has an interesting three-pronged look at the naming of Nintendo's Revolution. The article cites the story I wrote for the Rocky Mountain News in which I spoke to a branding expert about the name. It also includes Chris Kohler's defense of Wii over on Wired and Games.Net's piece on the strangeness of the name.

From the Rocky article:

"Graphically, the distinctive 'ii' spelling symbolizes both the two unique controllers and the human form. An unusual name sets us apart from the crowd, just as our distinctive machine is completely different from what our competitors are offering," (said Perrin Kaplan, Nintendo of America's vice president of marketing and corporate affairs.)

But (branding expert) Steve Manning says that Wii doesn't really convey any of those things, adding that anytime a company starts explaining their brand name, it's a bad sign.

"The biggest key to figuring out it's a bad name is when they explain it," he said. "You don't have to explain a good name, you have to explain a bad name."

He goes on to talk about why Nintendo probably didn't stick with Revolution.

Both Sides of Wii [Slashdot]

It's finally happened: The goodness that is Carnival of Games has hit the greatness that is Slashdot.

From the Zonk:

Today, Slashdot Games is hosting 'The Carnival of Gamers', a roving blog event that collects together some blog entries on gaming written during the previous month. The entries are all self-submitted, and cover everything from the legalities of online currency to the state of videogame reviews. This is a great opportunity to check out some sites you may not have had the chance to read before, and expand your thinking on gaming in society today. Think of it as a large quickies entry, grab your coin purse, and step inside.

This single entry is like a week's worth of slashdotted goodness with more than two dozen must-read posts from around the blogosphere.

The Carnival of Games—Slashdot [Slashdot]

Last week or so SOE announced a ground-up revamp of Star Wars Galaxies, in an attempt to bring it more in line with the action-adventure films, and presumably slightly further away from the sit-back-and-craft MMOG that it could sometimes be. One particular aspect of the update has the diminished community up in arms: Jedi is now a starting profession.

While Jedi used to be something that happened to you after mastering professions and meeting (at the game's choice of time) a mysterious Old Man who "ascended" you, now it's a free-for-all, and who doesn't want to be a Jedi? This has occurred to the designers of course, and we suppose they're thinking, so everyone will be a Jedi. So what? Rebel Jedi vs Imperial Jedi, party on!

Glowy multicolour sticks as far as the eye can see, it'll be like 1992 all over again ... (still, it can't be worse than Darth Christmas. Can it?)

Meanwhile, Slashdot has taken the bantha by the horns and has been granted an audience with John Smedley. They're trawling their community (90% oldskool diehard SW fans?) for questions which will be put direct to SOE's CEO. Oh boy, this should be good!

Oh dear. What a geek faux pas: Blizzard made CmdrTaco, Lord of Slashdot, change his name in World of Warcraft.

A random GM decided "Cmdr" isn't allowed, as there's an honour system in the game. "Cmdr" isn't actually part of their honour system though, so perhaps they thought some Alliance would get confused. CmdrTaco is being very gentlemanly about it, and notes that it raises some very interesting points about online identity and the value of a name...

Read his account here.