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Squared Away
Ready for His Close-Up | Cleveland Browns running back Peyton Hillis, selected after a five-week fan-voted playoff, takes his cover shot for Madden NFL 12 in Times Square on Thursday. (Photo: Mike Stobe/Getty Images) Sony: PlayStation Network Will Return This Week PlayStation Network, down since April 20, will return this week, said Kazuo Hirai, the…
By Owen Good - Culture
Apocalypse Now
The zombie fad shows no signs of dying – hah, get it? – as Treyarch delivers the Escalation Map Pack for Call of Duty: Black Ops. The week’s biggest retail drop is Motorstorm: Apocalypse for PS3, but all your racing will be offline if the PSN Apocalypse hasn’t abated by Tuesday. Monday Fate: The Cursed…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Claire Redfield Put Guns N’ Roses in Mega Man X5
The transparent naming of Mega Man X5‘s Maverick bosses for the members of Guns N’ Roses stood as an unexplained oddity since the game’s 2001 release here in North America. (That’s Axle the Red above. See? Not subtle.) Now we have an explanation, and it’s just as strange. Claire Redfield did it. No, really. The…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Madden NFL 12‘s Wii Version Will Finally Support the Classic Controller
Madden executive producer Phil Frazier has confirmed, via Twitter, that Madden NFL 12 on the Wii will support the Classic Controller. Wii football gamers have long requested the feature. (His tweet was in response to this question from a fan.)
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Creepshow
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. •8 Creepy Video Game Urban Legends (That Happen to Be True) [Cracked] I have to tip my hat to Cracked. They do the best lists…
By Owen Good -
UncategorizedIs Portal 2 Controlled with Kinect a Good Thing?
I’m on the fence with this, but as Portal 2 has elements of a first-person shooter, and that genre is tricky to adapt for Kinect, it looks like a breakthrough to me. Here someone has hacked Kinect, using FAAST (the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit), to play Portal 2. Firing a portal is accomplished…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Sony Considers Reimbursing Credit Card Replacement Costs in Light of Data Breach [Update]
In this morning’s news conference, Sony Computer Entertainment head Kazuo Hirai said the company would consider covering costs associated with reissuing credit cards to PlayStation Network subscribers who feel their accounts have been compromised by the massive data breach of April 20. Update: The entirety of the news conference, including reporters’ questions, translated into English,…
By Owen Good - CultureShop Contest
AR Games in Real Life
Headline’s kind of a misnomer because, the deal with the augmented reality games on the 3DS is, they are kinda-sorta played in real life. But not the way we’re gonna play them. See, I have this silly belief that the AR characters are real, and they’re all around us, we just can’t see them. Only…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Weekend Talk Amongst Yourselves
This is not the TAYpic. Ceci n’est pas le TAYpic. We didn’t sort out the selection of the May image before this weekend, and that decision is the province of top men. Top … men … So for now, let’s talk amongst ourselves about video games. We’ve got a few suggestions already, but if you’d…
By Owen Good - Culture
Sunday Comics
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. Awkward Zombie by Katie Tiedrich published April 18. – Read more of Awkward Zombie Nerf NOW!! by Josué Pereira published April 18. – Read more of Nerf…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Sony: PlayStation Network Will Return This Week
PlayStation Network, down since April 20, will return this week, said Kazuo Hirai, the second-in-command for Sony Corp., at a news conference today in Tokyo. When PSN comes online, PS3 users will face a mandatory system software update that also requires them to change their account passwords before they can sign into the service. That…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Advertisement Unlocked: Winners
In-game advertising’s creep has been slowed only by a terrible economy damping all advertising channels. That hasn’t stopped one Silicon Valley startup’s vision of inserting it into your achievements and trophies. Last week, Kotaku’s skilled ‘shoppers went the extra mile and inserted ads into them all. Bouzi (3) gives us Fat Drake, brought to you…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Fatalities are OK in Mortal Kombat. Finger Banging, No.
Someone hacked apart the config file data for Mortal Kombat on the PS3 and in addition to discovering about 17 on-disc DLC character skins – and, weirdly, a dummy support-string for Kinect, they found hundreds of wirdy-dirds banned from text communication in MK’s online play. You can see them all at the link. It’s like…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
A Study Returns Easy Answers to Questions Not Yet Asked
Poring over the data, sifting through more than 1,700 specimens, a team of MIT researchers is, as we speak, cataloging the species known as the sports gamer. The data is, so far, unsurprising. 98.4 percent are male; 95 percent watch sports on TV; 70 percent have, and play as, a favorite sports team. Many answers…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
More Than 250 Colleges Ask for the Crysis 2 Engine
For about a year, Crytek has offered universities a free license to its CryEngine 3, the guts of this month’s big release, Crysis 2. Since it made the offer more than 250 universities have asked for the code, the studio reports. That’s a pretty significant indicator of the mainstream utility of gaming code in a…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
PSN Outage Leaves One in Five PS3 Customers Considering Xbox Live
Lots of people vow all kinds of extreme things when they’re pissed off, especially at giant corporations. Many come back for reasons of convenience or simply calming down. But a survey taken this week, reacting to the PlayStation Network outage, suggests that 21 percent of PS3 owners are considering selling their consoles and fleeing for…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
What Do You Want to Hear From Sony?
Early in the morning on the U.S. east coast, Kazuo Hirai will address the devastating outage of and loss of customer data from the PlayStation Network. Hirai’s participation itself sends a message. To investors, he is Sony’s second-in-command. To gamers, he’s one of PlayStation’s principal figures, if not its face for the past five years.…
By Owen Good