What Will Disney/Pixar Mean For Games?

Gamasutra talks about what the Disney/Pixar merger might mean for some game licenses like Finding Nemo. One also has to wonder what this might mean for Mac gaming as Disney continues to ramp up it's interactive media while a certain Mr. Jobs has a seat at the table.


tagged: disney, gaming

Schools to DDR The Fat Away

Apparently middle schools in West Virginia, which I guess has quite the fat problem, will be installing Dance Dance Revolution to combat obesity. There have been earlier examples of vidkidgyms as well, so it should be interesting to see the "video games are bad for you, now go play your video games before breakfast" mashup of child rearing.




tagged: schools, gaming

Alienware Offers Games Downloads, Mature Content

If you head over to downloads.alienware.com, you'll see that the computer dealer has gotten into the downloadable games market with little fanfare (via Technocrat Soapbox). The titles are modern, including F.E.A.R. and King Kong. Interestingly, they also offer a "Girls of Gaming" with bonus mature content. So I guess Alienware is now your one stop shop for a high end gaming rig, the latest games and some pixel porn.


tagged: alienware, gaming, pixel porn

Statistical Frenzy

Found this off the logs ... a blog dedicated to tracking interesting and bizarre stats. For instance:

Men take only 15 minutes to decide if a woman is worth a second date. For women, it take an hour or so to decide whether to get together again.
Source: Sex in America: A Definitive Survey
Here are some other US dating statistics from the source:
63% percent of married couples meet through friends;
44 % of adult Americans are single (so pretty much everyone have a chance to find someone if looking hard enough);
40 % of those singles use online dating services. A latest add-on to the dating service industry is a web site exclusively for isolated farmers, it received more that 10,000 hits a day when the news broke out last year.
It is nice to be a man - there are 86 unmarried men for every 100 unmarried women.

-- It is a numeric life



tagged: statistics, blog

Smoking Crack

Gamers are apparently not just violent madmen, but addicts as well. At least that's the conclusion of Personal Tech Pipeline:

In November, we ran a poll on this site asking what kind of electronic crack you're addicted to. The results were shocking:

Video games - 9%
PC games - 14%
Online multiplayer games - 15%
Instant Messaging - 5%
Web surfing - 18%
Online pornography - 7%
E-mail - 14%
Cell phone text messaging - 3%
Mobile gaming - 2%
None -- I'm not addicted to any of the above - 13%

You'll note that somewhere between 15 and 40 percent of you are addicted to some kind of gaming, according to this poll. That's probably a little higher than the general population, but, then again, this is Personal Tech Pipeline. It's also a self-description -- we didn't list symptoms to look for.

Gaming of course isn't all bad, and many "addicts" don't really have a serious problem (the real problem starts when playing games stops being fun or when work or loved ones are neglected). Although concern about gaming addiction has been around for more than two decades, a raft of services and sites have sprung up recently around the idea.

-- Five Ways To Avoid Gaming Addiction

So, allow me to translate that nonsense in case you are still shaking your head. Remember that completely unscientific poll we ran? Well, the utterly inaccurate and equally unscientific responses are astounding. Especially if you take into account that what I'm about to ramble on about, we weren't even quanitifying. So for all you people out there that aren't actually addicted to anything ... listen up on how to avoid to your addiction.

What a joke. You're honestly going to get me to believe that nearly 20% of this guy's readership are addicted to just surfing the web, but only 7% go for porn? Please. What are they addicted to, guys like this? And of course almost 40% responded with some kind of video game ... half of your answers were some kind of gaming.

Gee, gaming isn't "all bad"? Thanks for the 411, Columbo. I'll try to keep clean on the streets. In the meantime, how about stopping the fearmongering and finding something real to write about?







tagged: addiction, gaming

Xbox Media Center Versus Xbox 360

XboxSpace takes a look at the media center on a modded original Xbox compared to the 360, and determines that the 360 comes up short:

One advantage that the 360 as a media center has over its XBMC counterpart is that there is no modding required, and it will work right out of the box.

The disadvantages of the 360 are that it is extremely limited in the file formats it can handle. Unless you have a Media Center Edition PC, you will not be able to stream videos; only pictures and audio. The 360’s stock HDD is 13GB out of the box, so if you want to download a trailer or game demo, you have to take the download and delete approach due to the space requirements of HD content.

-- XBMC VS Xbox 360

Interesting to compare illegal after market modifications to legitimate next-gen offerings, and something one would wish the industry would give a little attention. The 360 costs more, so why shouldn't it offer a more powerful solution than what someone can cobble together?




tagged: xbox, gaming

Hardcore is Average

Or something like that. It seems that's the argument of Ziff Davis Game Group's Editorial Director John Davison:

So what is being "hardcore?" It's a form of behavior rather than an expression of taste. Really, being a core gamer is choosing to play games above any other form of entertainment. Any game can be responsible, and the step toward playing 10 hours a week or more is just the beginning of the journey. Microsoft rightly told us at E3 that "Not everyone is driven by the need to crush his opponent on the field of battle," but this doesn't immediately relegate these gamers to the rank of being "casual," does it? If you play Civilization IV for a couple of hours every night instead of reading a book, what are you? If you're one of the 5 million people playing World of WarCraft and you're a level 60 player with 600 hours logged but you never play any other game, what are you? Hardcore gaming behavior manifests itself in more ways than we tend to acknowledge, and the "gateway drug" is rarely something that's actually designed to be just that. All it takes is a single experience introduced by a friend or sparked by reading something in a magazine or online

-- Hardcore Is Mainstream

There's even a plug for a certain gaming grandma by the end. Definately a twist on the normal "casual gaming is for everyone" mantra. It does seem like the lines are getting pretty blurred. Sure, Katamari is fairly "casual" gameplay in that it's easy for anyone to pick it up and roll (hehe) ... but what does playing it twenty hours a week and desperately trying to find every cousin and present qualify as?



tagged: hardcore, gaming

Siren to Silver Screen

Possibly at least, as Coming Soon reports that the rights to the horror game have been purchased Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert's Ghost House Pictures. They are showing a preview for Silent Hill before the Underworld sequel and it actually looks like it might be pretty good.

If people keep saying that games aren't art ... are movies based on them?




tagged: movie., gaming

Attacking Peter Moore

So Dan Hsu took at least one kid glove off when interviewed Peter Moore about the 360, a feat which earned him Penny Arcade cred and more than a few detractors.


I definately wish there were more articles like this in games journalism. The hokey jokey rubbing of elbows interviews can so easily turn into prolonged press releases and let's be honest ... games journalism doesn't exactly bring a lot of accountability to the industry. If the 360 shipped without power cables, there would be plenty of articles on it, but few people would bother to really find someone to rake over the coals as would be justly deserved.

If the 360 is so justly deserved, as I've mentioned, is something of a debate on it's own. I'm not getting one anytime soon, so I should probably bow out of the conversation on that point now.

But to say that the 360 launch doesn't have some open questions is just silly ... and I'd rather have those questions get sharpened points.



tagged: xbox, gaming

Meet MKBOT

While I still think Mario Kart DS is just about the best thing this side of gravy, some of the NiWiFi implementation leaves a bit to be desired. No lobbies or matchmaking services outside of the barest of barebones to be precise. To that end, some intrepid gamers came up with MKBOT, an IRC bot which can challenge people, run tournaments, track scores and more. Pretty sweet stuff, and definately the kind of functionality that Nintendo should be thinking about.





tagged: mario kart, gaming

Finger Pointing

So apparently a teenage kid in America committed suicide recently. Tragic, yes. International news? No.

Unless, of course, you can somehow tie this tragic event with something like ... gaming. You know, sorta like how murder isn't interesting without an Xbox involved. So to make it news, some people simply say that gamers were party and partially responsible to this horrible event.

Course, as the Guardian points out and Game Politics has as well, it's not true. In fact, I'm willing to bet that if these so-called reporters would just do their jobs they'd probably find a lot of online networks can actually provide decent support frameworks. But that's just not as sensational as bringing out the video game boogeyman. People don't want to hear that their might not be something to blame, I guess. As if this kind of stuff never happened before Atari.

Pathetic. Society needs to stop trying to look under the bed when it should know full well there isn't a monster there.




tagged: journalism, gaming

Stargate Developer To Close Doors

Perception, developers of the until recently upcoming Stargate SG-1 shooter, are apparently closing the doors on both the title and their studio, reports Gamasutra.

Perception went through a high profile legal battle with JoWood on the licensing and control of the title, but now that all seems moot. Namco apparently attempted to step in and publish, but MGM never sealed the deal. On one hand, it's definately a shame because Stargate has serious gaming potential. On the other hand, I never had a lot of faith in Percerption tackling such a franchise with their first outing on the Unreal engine anyway.



tagged: stargate, gaming

Alternate Handhelds

Yahoo! Games looks at a few handhelds made by people who don't rhyme with Mintendo or Zony. This includes the GP2X which is UNIX based and hopes for a strong independent and amatuer showing to keep it afloat. Some parts are funny, like where they complain of the GP2X's eight hour battery life ... which is like almost three times that of the PSP. Still I do think that in this day and age every handheld device should come with a charger. They also cover the XGP and iRiver's atttractive G10. Towards the end they make the inevitable comparison to the Tapwave Zodiac, of which I've talked about before.

Will these handhelds be able to avoid a similar fate? I've not heard of many people developing for them, but I sure wish I would.






tagged: indie gmaes, gaming

25 To Life Writer Calls Arnie A Hypocrite

And how can one not agree with him?

Williams says he finds it ironic that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to introduce legislation that clamps down on violent games.

"How can Arnold Schwarzenegger, the guy who has made some of the most violent movies in the history of entertainment and made hundreds of millions of dollars off this stuff, be trying to tell some video game guys not to make video games with mature ratings?

"It's so hypocritical. It's totally ridiculous."

-- Cop-killing mayhem is intended for adults only

On a relevant point, I saw Underworld: Evolution this weekend. I'll probably talk opinion later, but let's safely say it's not for kids. This movie might have an award for most heads ripped off. There's a little sex. And yes, a few law enforcement (well, military) types might an untimely demise.

Half of our post-move discussion was about the number of kids we saw at the theatres. One of these kids couldn't have been more than four.

Yeah, it's the industry that has a problem here. Parents taking their kids to go see people get dismemebered and roll around in blood are completely blameless and utterly helpless against the power of advertising.


Whatever. Wonder how many kids have seen Arnie's movies. I'm guessing quite a few.




tagged: violence, gaming

How ARGs Can Be So Cool

I just love reading synopsis like this:

With the help of the players, Seth set up a trap for Cassandra. He would put up a fake blog post saying that more information of Steven's had been seen in the Gardens. When Cassandra showed up to collect it, he would capture her. At 7:00 EST, players were able to listen in on what was happening in the Gardens. When confronted with the fact that she was caught, Cassandra collapsed, and gave Seth a clue to Steven's whereabouts in case something worse happened to her.

At this point, the audio connection to the station is cut. Raider, the ever resourceful SAIPets robo-dog, is able to connect to IRC and the players start to help Seth decode Cassandra's message. The name Cassandra provides was another directory on her website. Players had to solve a couple of different number slide puzzles before they got their answer. Steven was being held in the Level 13 Biolab V.

-- Orbicon's Stellar Finish

So many genres are trying to figure out user engineered experiences, dynamic content, etc. ARGs offer up on of the solutions I've talked about in the past. Sometimes games need gamemasters, real good honest human gamemasters.



tagged: alternate reality gaming, gaming