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It’s In the Game—Take It Or Leave It
He’s a a fight promoter and a guy with an outsize personality, but however serious Dana White was when he said these things, he still said them. The president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship called EA Sports a joke. He threatened to blacklist fighters who appeared in its old mixed martial arts video game. He…
By Owen Good - Culture
Chainsaw Reaction
Racy themes and racing games lead the lineup of the coming week of retail releases. Reissues of Metal Gear Solid and Pikmin 2 also come to stores. Today • Nintendo Selects: Pikmin 2 (Wii) Tuesday • Lollipop Chainsaw (PS3, 360) • DiRT Showdown (PS3, 360) • Gravity Rush (PS Vita) • Krater (PC) • Metal…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Security Tightens as Diablo III Prepares for Auction House Launch
When Diablo III‘s real-money auction house goes live, anyone wishing to add to their monetary balance in it will have to use an authenticator, Blizzard told its community on Friday. An authenticator, heretofore an optional security measure, is meant to address the claims and instances of hacking in which players’ accounts have been taken over…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Security Breach Turns DayZ‘s Servers into a Giant Botnet
In a month’s time, DayZ—the zombie-survival variant of Arma II— has quickly established itself as one of the most appealing mods of a PC game in recent history, if ever. That also makes it an appealing target to malefactors. One such person managed to get aboard the DayZ server admin team and, apparently, turn its…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Medal of Honor‘s Executive Producer Tangles with Critic Over Realism and Militainment
Give Tom McShea credit. At E3, the GameSpot writer penned an 800-word editorial ripping the tone of Medal of Honor: Warfighter‘s multiplayer, saying features like regenerating health and respawning teammates trivialize the sacrifice that the game professes to honor. In the tradition of a columnist showing up in the locker room after a particularly tough…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Forza Totilo
At last, we have a picture that just might get me in the bag-suit out of ‘Shop Contest jail. At E3 this week, our boss man went for a spin in a Ferrari, with an expression that suggested something less than all-out delight. Maybe it’s because he knew this would be fodder for our latest…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Weekend Talk Amongst Yourselves
Games. Know ’em, love ’em, live ’em. Talk about ’em here. Good morning, and welcome to Weekend Talk About Amongst Yourselves. Big thanks to Jamir, fresh off his triumph in yesterday’s ‘Shop Contest roundup, for supplying today’s TAYpic. Want a piece of the TAYpic action atop this six-day-a-week post? Grab the base image here, provide…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Neal Stephenson’s Very Special Guest Star Talks About His Appearance
If you have yet to watch Neal Stephenson’s pitch for CLANG, this story contains spoilers below. My first, briefly considered reaction at the 3:04 mark in Neal Stephenson’s excellent Kickstarter video, is that this celebrity guest star was an impersonator. That’s the nature of the Internet. I wasn’t aware these two had any kind of…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
A Hell of a Cameo Helps Neal Stephenson Pitch His Sword-Fighting Video Game
A flood of video game projects on Kickstarter over the past four months has made it extremely difficult to rise out of the crowd or portray one’s concept as particularly unique or worth funding. But Neal Stephenson, the eminent science-fiction writer, has hauled off and done something next-level with this pitch video. Stephenson wants “to…
By Owen Good - Culture
Sunday Comics: What’s My Motivation?
Welcome to your Sunday read of the week’s best in web comics. Make sure to click on the expand button in the bottom right to enlarge each comic. Penny Arcade by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik published June 6.—Read more of Penny Arcade Awkward Zombie by Katie Tiedrich published June 3.—Read more of Awkward Zombie…
By Owen Good -
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Wonder Nin Powers: The Winners
An E3 that began so promisingly for Nintendo ended with a shoulder shrug—no price, no release date for Wii U, and no real news out of the 3DS, either. It sure looked a lot more awesome in our smart shoppers’ retelling of the week in L.A. for the company’s big three. We’ve got 20 hilarious…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Once Crysis 3 is Done, Crytek will be Working on Nothing but Free-to-Play Games
Crytek is building Warface, the studio’s first freemium shooter, shown recently at E3. It’s also going to deliver Crysis 3, a more traditional FPS, sometime in 2013. Whenever the studio finishes off its current committments, CEO Cevat Yerli told VideoGamer.com, it will be developing free-to-play games only. Yerli considers DLC and premium gaming services, both…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Valve is Working on a Movie—but It’s Not What You Think
Curious item out of Hollywood—Valve is licensing its intellectual property to a science-fiction film, but it has nothing to do with Portal, Half-Life or any other title familiar to the publisher. Instead, its Source engine is being used to help animate Deep, a movie about mankind’s struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. At the…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
High Hope is Justified as Borderlands 2 Reopens Pandora
I loved Borderlands, the way you love memories of a summer or a semester when you first read a favorite book. Yet writing up impressions of a game like Borderlands 2 is quite difficult, actually. Where do you begin? “Hey, remember that game from October 2009 that inhaled 80 hours of your time? Well, get…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Strikingly Accurate Tipster Resurfaces with Info on Mass Effect 3‘s Alternate Ending DLC
While he offers no citation, the same Reddit tipster who absolutely nailed every detail of the Mass Effect: Rebellion Pack nearly three weeks before Sony’s Hong Kong website outed it, is back at it again with information on Mass Effect 3: Earth, the upcoming multiplayer extension and, more broadly, the “Extended Cut” DLC. Quoting derptemp6698:…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
PSN Picked a Strange Weekend to Have an Outage [Update]
Good old Error 8071053D is back if you try to sign into PlayStation Network from your PlayStation 3. If you try to log in to a PlayStation web site, you get a page tells you the site is down for maintenance. These outages affect North American servers. Update: A Sony representative tells Kotaku that the…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Sega Gives Phantasy Star Universe Three Months to Live
Though its singleplayer functionality will, of course, remain, the six-year run of Phantasy Star Universe will come to an end Sept. 7 when Sega shuts off online support for the game for the Xbox 360. Sega announced the shutdown yesterday. “This was not an easy decision but there comes a time when we must consider…
By Owen Good