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Olympic Gold Medal Skiier Teams Up With Counter Strike Champion
What’s a good encore after winning two gold medals at the Vancouver Olympic Winter Games? For one of the world’s most accomplished cross-country skiers, it’s playing alongside his world champion counterpart in Counter Strike at Norway’s largest LAN party. Petter Northug (pictured, left; you can see his translated gaming profile here) will be taking on…
By Owen Good -
Warner’s New Montréal Studio to Make D.C. Games
A report says Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, the publisher behind Scribblenauts and F.E.A.R. 2, will open a studio in Montréal to focus on developing games based on the Warner-owned D.C. Comics franchises. The Canadian gaming news site GameFocus first reported the new studio’s creation, and in a followup with Warner Interactive president Martin Tremblay, said…
By Owen Good -
Bad Company 2 Video Spoofs Modern Warfare 2’s “F.A.G.S.” PSA
When Battlefield: Bad Company 2 riffed on rival Modern Warfare 2‘s “Mapathy” promo last week, it could be seen as a playful poke. This, however – a comprehensive parody of October’s infamous “F.A.G.S.” video – is a straight-up nutshot. For those not familiar with C.C. Sabathia or why he would be in this video, his…
By Owen Good -
EA Sports MMA Serves Up Four Courses of Pain
Having seen it at GDC, Totilo gave us his impressions of EA Sports MMA yesterday. Today, EA Sports released a batch of 16 screens. How about that ballroom setting? Nothing like fine dining while two guys pound each other senseless. I’ll confess to being a neophyte at MMA, so the combatants aren’t very familiar to…
By Owen Good -
Well, That Didn’t Take Long; MLB 2K10 Patch Arrives
After vowing yesterday a patch fixing a bad multiplayer glitch and punching up the game’s AI had been “fast-tracked” for delivery, MLB 2K10‘s team backed it up today with the arrival of the game’s first Xbox 360 patch, sometime overnight. The patch finally, fully enables bug-free online ranked games against random opponents. If it punched…
By Owen Good -
Reviews
Scrap Metal Micro-Review: There’s a Difference Between Mindless and Pointless
All it took was seeing one demolition derby to hook me on car combat, but in video games we haven’t seen much in the way of this for awhile. Scrap Metal‘s here, and running unopposed. Is it still a winner? Loved Variety Car-crashin’ Land: In single-player, you get a campaign of eight tracks and more…
By Owen Good -
Someone’s Gonna Buy a R.O.B. for Four Grand
This display case, containing a pristine, never-played Nintendo Entertainment System, and a never-used Robotic Operating Buddy (we like to be formal on first reference here) fetched $4,150 in an eBay auction that just closed. For those who remember when the console first came out, this would be the Deluxe Set, which included the console and…
By Owen Good -
A New Marathon Trademark? What’s That Pfhor?
One week ago Bungie filed a new trademark application for Marathon, the FPS superstar of Mac gaming’s brief apogee during the mid- to late-1990s. There are few details beyond that but the paperwork’s enough to stoke fantasies of a reboot. It’s definitely Bungie filing it, though the application notes the first use in commerce was…
By Owen Good -
Multiplayer Fix for MLB 2K10 Could Arrive This Week
A fix correcting a debilitating dead-end bug for players connecting to random ranked matches in MLB 2K10 could go live as early as this week. The patch addressing the error contains a multitude of other fixes as well. On its forums, 2K Sports has published the patch notes. There are a lot of cosmetic changes…
By Owen Good -
NCAA Video Game Picks Kentucky, but Trouble Lies Beneath
A tournament simulation I did with NCAA Basketball 10 returns a believable national championship – Kentucky 88, Kansas 82 – but the rest reads like 3/4ths of the brackets in your average pool: Lots of chalk, and several WTF upsets. Yesterday, after suffering with plugging in this year’s 64 teams (the sim does not include…
By Owen Good -
Stupid Sim
To: Luke From: Owen Anyone who’s played NCAA Basketball knows what a pain in the ass it is setting up a full 64-team custom bracket. I’ve spent the past 90 minutes inputting this year’s field into the game for a full bracket simulation – literally beginning after Greg Gumbel called Notre Dame as the final…
By Owen Good -
Brilliant Five-Word Reviews of 94 Video Games
Haiku is so overdone, and would be verbose compared to these spot-on assessments of nearly 100 video games, done in just five words by Games Radar. Some rate a spoiler alert. “Max Payne: Dead family means bullet time.” “Bomberman: Trapped in a corner. F**k.” “Assassin’s Creed: Eavesdropping on conversations gets boring.” And, right after that,…
By Owen Good -
Week in Games: A Wrathful God
Tuesday is named for Tiw, the Norse god of war. Fittingly it’s also the day Sony’s God of War III releases. Other highlights: Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver are out today for the DS, the Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening DLC is available Tuesday for all three platforms, and Perfect Dark comes to Xbox Live Marketplace…
By Owen Good -
Kotaku’s Top Five List of Top 10 Lists
Each week throws off several new video game lists ranging from the humorous to the trivial. What’s better? A list of those. Here’s a roundup of the rundowns out there. •Ten Moments Where You Have Felt Like Shouting “MORTAL KOMBAT!” [Gaming Bolt] Though “not based on any kind of ranking,” I think we can all…
By Owen Good -
If Cut God of War III Ending Returns as DLC, It ‘Would be Free’
We’ve heard that God of War III had a pretty involved postscript that had to be trimmed from the game. The game’s director explained why to Kotaku Talk Radio, but said if it does come back, it’ll be free. Speaking somewhat generically to avoid spoilers, Stig Asmussen said the game originally called for so many…
By Owen Good -
The Difference Between Scary and Horror
I have a fear of horror films, and by extension horror games. I’m just too attenuated to suspense and having the hell scared out of me. But what I’m really experiencing, argues one writer, is just that: scary, not horror. Craig Lager, at Gaming Daily, points out the real differences in the two themes in…
By Owen Good -
Three Sony Devs Switch Over to Valve — Three Years Ago [Corrected]
A story out there that three former top employees at Naughty Dog have joined Valve is true. It’s also three years old. The site PlayStation Lifestyle put up the item yesterday. Kotaku linked over to it earlier this morning. A quick check of their LinkedIn CVs notes these guys all joined Valve between 2006 and…
By Owen Good
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