NBA 2K11’s Player Ratings Bring The Heat

Operation Sports today got the player ratings for all 30 starting lineups in NBA 2K11. Unsurprisingly, the Miami Heat have the league’s top rated starting five, though they are tied with the Los Angeles Lakers for that position. The Heat, who added Chris Bosh and LeBron James to Dwyane Wade, average to an 82.2 rating…

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Teaching Our Schools To Up Their Game

In this Finding Your Science video from the National Science Foundation Arizona State University linguist James Paul Gee discusses how schools kill the joy of learning and how video games can bring it back to life. James Gee is a strong supporter of learning through interaction. He believes that learning is one of life’s foremost…

Donkey Kong Country Pre-order Bonuses Are Bananas

Wii owners who have already earmarked funds for Donkey Kong Country Returns for the Wii may want to fork over some of that cash to GameStop, especially if they want to encase their Wii Remotes in banana pouches. GameStop is offering the Wii-owning banana fan something cute and clever with which to dress up their…

There’s A New Convertible Keyboard In Town

When peripheral manufacturer SteelSeries bought out Zboard creator Ideazon in 2008, everyone wondered what would happen to the Zboard. The SteelSeries Shift is what happened to the Zboard. Ideazon’s Zboard was a keyboard with interchangeable keysets tailored to different popular PC titles. If one wanted to play EverQuest 2, they would slap in the EverQuest…

Let This Be The Lone Uncharted Kart Racer

Thanks to the PlayStation 3’s ModNation racers, game developers who might dream of detouring their best series into the Mario Kart genre can instead just make, say, an Uncharted ModNation track. The official Uncharted mods are now available for all. Developers from Uncharted studio Naughty Dog have made an official bundle of ModNation DLC: ModNation…

Super Meat Boy Creators Say ‘Fuck You’ To The DLC System With ‘Teh Internets’

Team Meat, the makers of upcoming Xbox Live Arcade release Super Meat Boy, have devised a way to deliver downloadable levels to their bloody, meaty indie platformer, all for free. They call it “Teh Internets.” This unlockable chapter in Super Meat Boy grants players of the XBLA game the option to download future chapters, to…

Sackboy Invades The Kingdom Of Dotnia

On the same day LittleBigPlanet 2 is delayed a feature update for Atlus’ 3D Dot Game Heroes brings a special guest to the retro land of Dotnia. From one creativity fueled PlayStation 3 exclusive to another, LittleBigPlanet’s Sackboy makes his Dotnia debut in today’s feature update for 3D Dot Game Heroes. Sackboy is not alone…

Facebook Malfunction Spawns FarmVille Panic, Schadenfreude

Facebook is not working well right now. It’s down for a lot of folks. That means FarmVille crops may be dying. And that means some people are upset. Others are laughing. Let’s go to Twitter to survey the immediate reaction:

A New Halo Game Every Three Years Is Not Enough

Microsoft wants key entries in the Halo series to make their way to your Xbox 360 a little faster, increasing the frequency of the standard three year cycle developer Bungie was known for. But just how frequent? Phil Spencer, VP at Microsoft Game Studios, tells IGN that “one Halo game every three years – which…

Halo: Reach Armor Lock Not Quite As Useful In Real Life

If you could have any of Halo: Reach’s new armor abilities in real life, would you choose armor lock? Watch this video before answering. I would have chosen active camo myself, but then I am the sort of suspicious character who could benefit from being invisible once in awhile. Jet pack would finish second, followed…

Ninja Gaiden Developers Have A New Vision

Ninja Gaiden 3 is coming, under the direction of Yosuke Hayashi, a Team Ninja veteran who now heads the Japanese development studio responsible for that series and the latest Metroid. His team has a vision. This is it: In a new clip, partially screencapped here, Hayashi introduces fans to the new Team Ninja website. He…

Oh No It’s A Mr. Bill iPhone Game

Capcom resuscitates a 34-year-old Claymation Saturday Night Live joke in Mr. Bill for the iPhone. One would think that after more than three decades being abused by Mr. Sluggo and Mr. Hand the Claymation family man Mr. Bill would have wised up. Sadly that is not the case. The hero of the clay has fallen…

Swords Review: It Slices, It Dices, It Sucks

Of all the ways to play using motion-detecting video games, swordplay seems to offer the most potential for fun. The give and take of fencing and Kendo seem like easy rules to mimic in a video game and the slashing motion of using your sword to attack and block seem like the sort of big…

‘Replayability’ Might Be A Bad Word

I wish people would stop using the word “visceral” when they talk about video games. It conveys nothing to me. Writer Ben Abraham is enraged by a different word: “replayability.” In a recent essay his essay he tears into “replayability” a word, he says in a semi-ironically, is “what is fucking wrong with videogames.” He…

Football Mario Doesn’t Appreciate Mushroom Trash Talk

Compare him to a video game plumber all day long; all it does is make Houston Texans defensive end Mario Williams tackle Washington Redskins quarterback Donovan McNabb harder. Just because the Houston team’s stadium regularly flashes a Super Mario Bros. cartoon on its jumbotron doesn’t mean it is okay to taunt Mario Williams with mushroom-related…

Taking a Hockey Stick to Wii Party

Earlier this week I received a Wii Party pinata in the mail, it was pretty clear what had to be done. Good thing Ash is reviewing this particular game.

Explore The Future Of Gaming At BAF Game 2010

The creative minds behind games like Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Fable III, and Brink convene in November at the Bradford Animation Festival in Bradford, West Yorkshire, to discuss the future of gaming, and everybody’s invited! BAF Game is the video game arm of the annual Bradford Animation Festival, organized in partnership with the University…

The Sound And The Fury Of Fallout: New Vegas

Players will be running into plenty of things they want to shoot in the New Vegas wastes. The second Fallout: New Vegas developer diary shows off plenty of ways to kill them. You can keep your steampunk; post-apocalyptic weapons are where it’s at. The developers at Obsidian Entertainment channelled the 50’s sci-fi mindset in New…

An Open Letter From A Former Bungie VP to Bobby Kotick

While perhaps not seen in the full context of his talk at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch conference, Activision head Bobby Kotick‘s comments about Bungie did create quite a stir last week. It is worth your time to go listen to the full 40-minute or so talk here, but the thing that captured so…