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Visually Impaired Gamer Sues Sony
GameSpot reports that a man has sued Sony, Sony Online Entertainment and Sony Computer Entertainment of America, contending the company violates the Americans with Disabilities Act for not making its virtual worlds more easily navigable by the visually impaired. The nature of Alexander Stern’s visual impairment isn’t clear from the report, whether that is total…
By Owen Good -
The Meta-Narrative That Pulls Back the Curtain for All Games
Was GLaDOS, the artificial intelligence in 2007’s critically acclaimed Portal, in fact a game designer? And if so, what does our relationship to the computer, and its abuse of our trust, say about the other games we play? Guido Pellegrini at Playtime Magazine raises that point, among many others, in examining not just the meta-narrative…
By Owen Good -
Valve’s Multiplayer Calculus: (360 = PC) > PS3
More provocative tidbits continue to trickle out of Valve, with the Left 4 Dead 2 project lead saying that game won’t be coming to PS3 because the console’s multiplayer community isn’t on par with PC and the Xbox 360. “Right now don’t not buy it on the 360 because you think it’s coming out on…
By Owen Good -
NCAA Football, and the Science of Subjectivity
With true-to-life fidelity, my most recent season simulation in NCAA Football 10 found Boise State losing a trap game late in the season and, as the token BCS Buster from a minor conference, paying for it dearly in the polls. Having gone undefeated through 10 games, the Broncos (not a user-controlled team in this dynasty)…
By Owen Good -
Weekend Coupons: Prelude to a Black Friday
Walmart kicked off the morning lineup craze three weeks early with its Saturday-only electronics sale. Crecente was there at 7:30 a.m. down there to file a live report, if by “live report” one means, “buy a Blu-Ray player.” Hardware • Today is the one-day only special in which you can grab an Xbox 360 Arcade…
By Owen Good -
Kotaku Originals: Dog Gone
The old dog-ate-my-controller excuse got a guy out of a 5,000 Microsoft Point purchase, plus Gamertag immortality for the scape-pooch, in the No. 1 story of a news-packed week delivered by your humble editors. Top Stories Microsoft Refunds Dog Shopping Spree, Grants K9 Gamertag Rumor Rumor: Kane & Lynch 2 Has A Very NSFW Level…
By Owen Good -
Trials Dev Pirated Its Own Game to Drive Interest
RedLynx, the developer of the well received downloadable title Trials, said that it seeded pirate torrent sites with neutered copies of the game in order to stoke interest in the title. According to GamesIndustry.biz, Tero Virtala, the RedLynx CEO, said that the pirated version his team sent out did not include leaderboard support, which Virtala…
By Owen Good -
Germany’s Censored L4D2 Runs Faster
Australia isn’t the only nation receiving a powercleaned version of Left 4 Dead 2. Germany, no doubt because of the killerspiele hysteria, has a similarly sanitized demo. But guess what, it also runs 40 percent faster. PC Games Hardware benchmarked both the uncut Left 4 Dead 2 and the censored German demo using to a…
By Owen Good -
Calling Preview: Ju-on, Take Two
Halloween might be long gone for 2009, but Japanese horror is fashionable all year round. Or at least Hudson hopes to make it so with Calling. As the name suggests, there’s an awful lot of cell phone usage in the horror/adventure game. During a demo given to games journalists by the Japanese director, a poor…
By AJ Glasser -
PC Version of Dragon Age Patched, Explained
The PC version of Dragon Age: Origins got a 1.01 patch not 72 hours after release; lead designer Mike Laidlaw jumped onto BioWare’s forums to explain its necessity. First, the changes, according to BioWare: • Fixed potential corruption of character statistics • Fixed portrait appearance sliders when importing a character from the downloadable Character Creator…
By Owen Good -
Rooms Preview: Sliding Under The Fun Fence
If the puzzles of the Professor Layton games and the moody, noir setting of 2005’s Hotel Dusk could somehow mate and produce offspring, Rooms would be it. In this moody puzzle game, players take the role of a mysterious person invited to a mysterious birthday party in a mysterious building. Sensing a theme here? What…
By AJ Glasser
