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SOCOM Studio Hit With Layoffs; Sony Calls them Routine
Scuttlebutt has it that the Sony Computer Entertainment studio Zipper Interactive, maker of combat shooters MAG and the SOCOM series, lost several employees in a round of layoffs today. Reached for comment, a Sony spokesperson confirmed layoffs at Zipper, characterizing them as “normal business practice and a result of cutting back on production resources after…
By Owen Good -
NBA 2K11 Predicts Bulls Beat Mavericks in Seven
2K Sports ran a simulation of the remaining rounds of the NBA Playoffs – the conference finals and the NBA Finals – and found the Chicago Bulls defeating the Dallas Mavericks in seven games. The simulation calls for both Dallas and Chicago to win seven-game series in the conference finals (versus Oklahoma City and Miami,…
By Owen Good -
Turns Out Kinect Can Read Sign Language
Kinect’s patent application said the device could recognize American Sign Language. Microsoft then backed off the claim, at least for the initial generation of the device, saying that sort of application would be supported in later models. Then people started developing open-source Kinect drivers and doing all sorts of cool things with them. And lo…
By Owen Good -
Fortified With Vitamin D
As a guy who works from his home and plays video games as part of his job, you can guess which vitamin deficiency my doctor found during my last physical. It’s the big D, i.e. the one you get from being out in the sunshine. (You do get some from milk, but not as much…
By Owen Good -
Record-Seeker Restarts 70-Hour Assault on All-Time Q*Bert Mark
Last month, George Leutz set out to topple a high score nearly 28 years old: Q*Bert‘s all time mark of 33,273,520. It’s believed that it would take playing for 70 hours on a single quarter to beat that score. Halfway into it, someone kicked a power cord, (seen above) and all of Leutz’s work was…
By Owen Good -
Video Game Hall of Fame Cancels This Year’s Gala Weekend
After a grand opening that last year enshrined the first class of the International Video Game Hall of Fame and attracted nationwide media exposure, the IVGHOF has found it does not have enough money for an encore. The Hall of Fame, based in Ottumwa, Iowa, is indefinitely postponing the “Big Bang” but says a second…
By Owen Good -
We Have a Winner in MLB 2K11‘s Million-Dollar Perfect Game Challenge
When 2K Sports vowed to declare a winner in its second Million-Dollar Perfect Game contest as soon as a winner could be verified, most assumed we’d have heard of a winner in April. Last year’s inaugural challenge was won on the very first day, as a matter of fact. Yet as April dragged into May,…
By Owen Good -
It Takes a Special Sort of Death to Become a Pac-Man Ghost
According to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy there are several different circles of hell, each reserved for a particular type of sinner. What do you have to do to wind up on the Pac-Man circle? Blinky reveals the truth. There are many different theories about how the ghosts in Namco’s classic arcade game found themselves in…
By Mike Fahey -
Check Out the World’s Largest Working NES Controller
Students at a Dutch university on Tuesday unveiled what they claim is the world’s largest working Nintendo Entertainment System controller, some 30 times bigger than the console’s actual game pad. It’s so big, the only way to manipulate the D-pad or buttons is to stand on them Built by electrical engineering students at TU Delft,…
By Owen Good
