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Castles and Customization Among First Details to Emerge on Dragon Age III
Character customization will return “in a big way” for Dragon Age III according to a BioWare panel spilling details and concept art on next year’s game at the Edmonton Comic & Entertainment Expo today. Already known as Dragon Age III: Inquisition and slated for a “late fall 2013” release, BioWare said it would release concept…
By Owen Good -
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 -
The Best of Kotaku, This Week
Welcome to the Best of Kotaku, where I round up all of this week’s best content. This week’s best image is a mashup of Adventure Time with Yoshi’s Island, by Classy Raptor. I particularly like it because I can totally see Jake molding himself into Yoshi to take Finn on adventures. Classy Raptor indeed. Moving…
By Tina Amini -
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 -
He Raised $25,000 To Make A Game. Then All His Programmers Quit.
2012 in gaming may well be remembered as the year of the Kickstarter. Crowdfunding, in all its forms, took off into the stratosphere with the DoubleFine drive back in February, and has just kept going since. Many gaming projects have been successfully funded, from little $5000 art and experimental games to multi-million dollar juggernauts like…
By Kate Cox -
There’s Just Too Much Beauty in The Week in Gaming Apps
Sometimes there’s so much beauty in Google Play, iTunes and the Windows Phone Marketplace I feel I can’t take it; like my heart’s going to cave in. That’s my completely original explanation for why I did three of our Gaming App of the Day entries this week. I might have done five, but Ashcraft loves…
By Mike Fahey
