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Use Your Mouth to Look Around with Need For Speed‘s Kinect Features
When you begin a game of Need For Speed: Most Wanted, your engine will be off. How do you start it? Well, by saying “engine start.” Free-look also is controlled by voice in the Kinect-supported version of the game, providing a 360-degree spin around the car to show you how far behind the fuzz are…
By Owen Good -
Guess Who Forgot to Ship Activation Keys With Their Latest PC Release
Though it recently removed its onerous always-on DRM requirements of PC games, evidently the fact people are still able to play them remains a concern for Ubisoft. That must be why the publisher shipped copies of Rocksmith in Europe without activation codes. On the other hand: Totally secure product! Yep. The publisher that can’t do…
By Owen Good -
This Nintendo Bootlegger’s Middle Name Is Success. Really.
Justin Success Brooks—yes, success is his middle name—made about £600,000 selling cartridges and discs loaded with pirated Nintendo games from 2009 to 2011. He’s now headed for the slammer, or whatever they call it in the U.K., following a guilty plea last week. From the report, it sounds as though Brooks, 41, was selling his…
By Owen Good -
Moneysaver of Honor: Dealbuyer
Microsoft seems to be having success bundling up full price releases with $20 worth of funny money on Xbox Live, so they’re doing that again this week with Medal of Honor: Warfighter. In other news, recent, solid releases like Borderlands 2, Sleeping Dogs and Darksiders 2 can all be found for less than full price.…
By Owen Good -
Get Three Credit Hours Toward Your Degree Playing Skyrim Next Semester
The English department at Rice University, to my knowledge the only American university established by the murder of its benefactor (true story, actually) will next semester offer “Scandinavian Fantasy Worlds: Old Norse Sagas and Skyrim.” That’s right. You get to play Skyrim for college credit. If you’re enrolled at Rice, which is a rather selective…
By Owen Good -
Video Games’ First Spoken Words Still Sound Good Today
When it released in 1980, computer voice compression cost around $1,000 per word. Berzerk spoke about 20, and it was a sensation. Gorf and later Wizard of Wor likewise used speech synthesis to heckle players. We’ve come a long way since those dark ages, as this roundup of 50 early attempts at voice synthesis, compiled…
By Owen Good -
Backhanded Box Quotes: BFG is a POS.
Welcome back to “Backhanded Box Quotes,” a collection of measured, thoughtful criticism from the user reviews of Metacritic and elsewhere. Doom? James Bond? Dragon Ball Z? Big names, big deal. With critic scores inflated like your typical Ivy League comparative lit final, we’ve got to go to the vox populi to get the real word…
By Owen Good -
Their Studio Gave them an Amusement Park Ticket—and Then a Pink Slip
How would you like to be fired? Do you want to go out in a take-this-job-and-shove-it blaze of glory? Would you like security to martyr you, marching you out by the elbows, as you clutched your box of things like Richard Gere carrying off Debra Winger? Would you just want the chance to look into…
By Owen Good -
Two Years Later, Sleep Researchers Now Say Gaming Before Bed Is Bad
Two years ago, sleep researchers at Flinders University of Australia found that playing video games before bed was indistinct from watching a movie, in terms of the good night’s rest a teenager would have after either. This week researchers at the same university said that “prolonged gaming” before bed is disruptive to that longtime childhood…
By Owen Good -
Esports
Today is the 40th Anniversary of the World’s First Known Video Gaming Tournament
In October 1972, video games were still mostly an after-hours pastime in corporate or university laboratories. Pong had been installed only one month earlier at a Sunnyvale bar called Andy Capp’s Tavern (today a comedy club.) Forty years ago today, just up U.S. 101, on Stanford’s campus, computer science students saw this flyer tacked to…
By Owen Good -
Shovelware Maker Going to Jail for Not Paying Workers
The owner of a Utah game studio is going to jail for not paying his employees. Criminal prosecution for nonpayment of wages is rare. Incarceration is even more rare, but it is deserved for a guy like Dave Rushton, considering the lives he upended four years ago at Sensory Sweep Studios in suburban Salt Lake…
By Owen Good -
After One Day, 85 Percent of Facebook Gamers Don’t Care About Their Own Stupid Farm, Either
Research by a “social game analysis firm,”—the existence of that title tells you a lot about the state of the business—indicates that 85 percent of social gamers, who began a new title sometime between July and September, quit playing it after just one day. Nine out of ten of them didn’t play it after September.…
By Owen Good -
Hell Hath No Fury Like a PC Sports Gamer Scorned
In forums and comments, PC gamers come off as implacably angry about a number of topics. The most vehement responses are in issues that treat PC gamers like second class citizens; for example, DRM, console ports, DRM, piracy, DRM, delayed releases and DRM. Let me tell you, there is no citizen more second class than…
By Owen Good -
A Son Takes His Father on a Tour of His Boyhood Home—in a Video Game
When you introduce a video game to an older relative who doesn’t play them—a parent or a grandparent—and they realize they’ve underestimated how detailed, how immersive these things really are, the conversations you have after that really are special. If this hasn’t happened for you, ask anyone for whom it has. Or better yet, just…
By Owen Good -
Having Gone Six Years Without Saying Anything Offensive, Steve Lyons Gets a Job in MLB The Show‘s Booth
Steve Lyons, whose 15-year broadcasting career is dotted with numerous insensitive remarks—one of them enough to get him fired—is taking a seat in a more controlled environment: MLB 13 The Show. As reported by Operation Sports, Lyons said via Twitter at the end of last month that he was recording “lots of VoiceOver work for…
By Owen Good -
ReviewsForza Horizon: The Kotaku Review
Forza Horizon coined a new term for itself, more out of self-defense than to describe its creative goals. “Action racer,” we were told at E3, because another racing genre known by the A-word would be a scarlet letter on a motorsports brand as precise as Forza. Arcade racer, action racer, either term is accurate to…
By Owen Good -
You Can’t Watch Halo 4‘s Intro Right Now [Update]
The leak, and subsequent piracy of (and perma-bannings for playing) Halo 4 resulted in a flurry of videos such as this one, uploaded by the YouTube user Madchinima. [Update] Microsoft is officially not screwing around with this leak. This video was taken down inside of 20 minutes. This is the opening of the game, not…
By Owen Good -
Culture
The Week in Games: Licensed to Chill
Just 007 Legends from Activision represents the big console release in an unexpected lull in the fall release cycle. Serious Sam 3: BFE arrives on Wednesday for the Xbox 360. Monday • The Lord of the Rings Online: Riders of Rohan (PC) Tuesday • 007 Legends (PS3, 360) • Doom 3 BFG Edition (360, PS3,…
By Owen Good -
The 360’s $50 Price Drop Is For Two New Bundles—But It Isn’t Limited to GameStop
With big thanks to our partners at Dealzon, we know a little more about this $50 price drop on Xbox 360 configurations. The big detail is that the cut isn’t limited to just GameStop. “These are new bundles, supposedly released Oct. 9, and are now selling for $250 at Best Buy, Amazon, and Gamestop, instead…
By Owen Good
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