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Here’s some troubling news for my fellow World of Warcraft players. It seems that hackers, account thieves, and other miscreants have now embraced man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks to further their evil ways. Blizzard says it’s not a widespread issue, and it’s rather difficult to pull off, but it’s something y’all should be aware of.
The deal is that WoW hackers are able to infect your PC—this is a PC-only problem, mind you, so Mac players can more or less ignore all of this—with a bit of malware that’s then able to initiate the MITM attack. The purpose of this is to intercept your login name, password, and authenticator number so that they can log into your account. Once online, they can do whatever it is you’d be able to do inside the game world: sell items, mail gold to other players, etc. They cannot, it should be noted, delete your actual account or anything like that. Still, it’s potentially devastating, selling all your epics for fast gold, then turning around and selling that gold for real money to someone else.
MITM attacks aren’t new or anything. There’s plenty of programs out there can initiate them rather easily, letting people intercept passwords, instant messages, you name it. They work in that they sit in between your PC and the server you’re trying to connect to. So, if you’re playing WoW, instead of your username and password and authenticator number going directly to Blizzard’s servers, they first go to the hacker’s rogue server, which then passes the info onto your intended server, capturing the information in the process. It’s essentially invisible to you, the end-user, which is why the attacks are so dangerous.
Blizzard has already identified the piece of malware that initiates the MITM attack, so be on the lookout for emcor.dll. Be sure to keep your anti-virus software up to date.
One final bit: the odds of you being a victim of such an attack are quite low, if only because it requires so much work for the hacker to pull off; you’d have to be hacked a the very moment he wants to break into your account, and that’s something that simply doesn’t happen. Rather, your account will be compromised on, say, Monday, but it won’t be until the following Saturday that the hacker actually access your account. And again, the worst thing that could happen with this kind of attack would be for someone to sell off your character’s items and gold, then, for good measure, delete your character—your actual account cannot be tampered with. That may be a distinction without meaning, yes.
So yeah, just be sure to keep your anti-virus software up to date, and keep your wits about you. Stay away from the shady parts of the Internet!
Let’s say you’re a company that makes video games – sports games in particular – and you generate a nice recurring stream of revenue by putting out new versions of your sports games every year to coincide with the new seasons of each sport. But let’s also say that some of your customers don’t buy the newest versions because they’ve discovered almost endless replayability of the older versions thanks to online multiplayer features. What a pickle!
Although EA would probably never say that cutting the online features of older games is a move to get people to buy the newer versions, that might be what’s on some people’s minds. So it’s with a heavy heart that I relay to you the February 2nd, 2010 kill date for the following games’ online services:
UEFA Champions League 07 PC and x360 Facebreaker x360 and PS3 Fantasy Football 09 x360 and PS3 FIFA 07 PSP, PS2, PC Fight Night Round 3 PS2 Madden 08 Wii Madden 08 PC Madden 09 Xbox1 Madden 09 Wii and PSP March Madness 07 x360 NBA 07 PSP, x360 NBA 08 PS2, PSP, Wii NBA 09 Wii – Europe only NBA Street (2007) PS3 and x360 NCAA Football 08 PS2 NCAA Football 09 PS2 NASCAR 08 PS2 NASCAR 09 PS2 NASCAR 09 PS3 and x360 – Europe Only NFL Tour PS3 and x360 NHL 07 PSP and x360 NHL 08 PC Tiger Woods 07 PC Madden 09 x360 and PS3 Madden 07 Xbox 360
Yes, indeed, there are some old-ish games in there. But Madden 09? There are probably a fair amount of people still playing that game online who aren’t going to be too happy next month.
This story is not nearly as interesting as I was led to believe. Some guy bought something in the online game Entropia Universe. He bought it with in-game currency—PED3.3 million, to be exact. It just so happens that that amount, PED3.3 million, can be converted at will to real life currency. At current conversion rates that equals approximately US$330,000. So if you want to say that the guy bought an in-game item for US$330,000, well, be my guest.
The item itself, the Crystal Palace Space Station, is some sort of ship or craft or something that other players can buy things from. So the buyer of the thingamajig can use it as an actual source of income.
You should know that the game isn’t merely a game, but a fully registered bank in Sweden, complete with all the protections afforded to other, “real” European Union-based banks.
Embedded is a video of Crystal Palace, which looks an awful lot like that spaceship from Phantasy Star Online.
It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present another installment in our “Of the Decade” lists.
Winner: Resident Evil 4 (GameCube, 2004)
This decade saw a lot of “big” games, but how many of those games were any good? How many do you think you’ll even consider replaying in five or 10 years? If there’s one, and only one, game of the decade it has to be Resident Evil 4. The game resurrected a waning franchise, justified your purchase of a GameCube, and was actually fun to play. How rare. The lackluster Resident Evil 5 only reinforced how well made Resident Evil 4 was: perfect controls, probably the best graphics ever to grace the GameCube, and, yes, the best single-player mode of the decade make this the game of the decade. It’s pretty much non-stop fun, which is really all you can ask a video game to do.
Runners Up
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PS2, 2003)
You can almost consider Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to be the same game three times, but Vice City wins because it’s our favorite setting of the series so far. Is it fun to go around and blowing up anything that moves? Yes, but it’s actually more fun to appreciate the time and effort Rockstar put into crafting a pretty enjoyable cast of characters and reasonably OK story for our entertainment. Plus, how many game in the 2000s have completely ripped off the GTA franchise?
Guitar Hero (PS2/PS3/Xbox 360, 2005)
Our original game here was Super Smash Bros. Melee because it was, and I quote, “the ultimate party game.” Upon further reflection, that title actually belongs to Guitar Hero if only because you couldn’t attend a party attended by non-gamers between the game’s release and today without running into people banging on the strumming a plastic guitar. This is especially true if you visited certain gentrified sections of Brooklyn. The game was everywhere, so clearly it must have done something right. Publishers may have since shot themselves in the foot by releasing 800 versions of the game in a two-year window, but you can’t blame the game itself for publishers’ greed. It’s fun, and it represents the peak of the music game genre that, in a very real sense, defined the decade in gaming.
Shadow of the Colossus (PS2, 2005)
This is our arthouse pick, yes, but for all the hullabaloo of “please re-make Final Fantasy VII for the PS3,” we say: no! Instead, re-make Shadow of the Colossus for it pushed the PS2 as far as the little guy could go. The game was like playing art. Rarely has a sense of scale been so raw in as it was here. A terrific soundtrack, a unique setting, and an unmatched sense of “oh man, we’re going on an adventure” means that youre sure to impress your “games as art” buddies .
Our Take
Devin: I want to throw Final Fantasy XII on here. A lot of people dismissed it because of its cipher of a main character and weird MMO-style combat. But the fact is it was a hugely deep, very interesting, and strikingly beautiful game. I loved it from start to finish, although the final boss was a bit corny.
Matt: You can’t tell me that any of these games above are more fun — I mean LOL, smile-on-your-face, gets-better-as-you-drink fun — than Super Smash Bros. Melee. Yet it probably isn’t the best game from the last 10 years. But it’s still damn fun.
Greg: I’m going to pull a Nicholas here and proclaim that this is all a bunch of nonsense. It’s impossible to claim that any one game of this decade was the most definitive (especially not RE4, dumb dumbs), considering how many games changed the horizon. Guitar Hero and Smash Bros made busting out a video game at a party okay. The Lego Star Wars/Indie/etc. series proved to girlfriends around the world that gaming with your boyfriend can be a fun experience. GTA taught the world to hate linear gameplay. Call Of Duty and Halo taught millions of console gamers the joys and frustrations of well made competitive first-person-shooters whilst simultaneously increasing the average weight of adolescents around the world. WoW brought MMOs into the mainstream. Shadow of the Colossus destroyed our sense of scale, while Katamari Damacy proved that games can be abstract and still sell well. There is no one answer to this question, because the games of this decade were simply too good.
Doug:Wii Sports — hear me out! As most people’s introduction to the Wii, the bundled Wii Sports game serves as the ambassador to a new way of thinking about video games. How many video games from the past ten years will you find people of all generations playing? Nobody’s really playing Halo in nursing homes or senior centers. The simple control scheme and 1:1 movement in Wii Sports made Nintendo’s latest console a hit with people outside the core demographic of gamers, something Sony and Microsoft are still scrambling to replicate.
David Diaz: I think Halo: Combat Evolved should have made this list. It became the benchmark for all console FPS and sparked the beginning of one of the most dominant franchises in console history.
A few of you may already know that Team Fortress 2 didn’t always look like Toy Story más violence, but for the unawares: it did. So, proof! A certain Curits Lassam, friend to all, found an old PC Gamer preview from the year two-thousand that described the game in its old, Counter-Strike-like art style. Yuck.
It’s safe to say I wouldn’t have spent nearly as much time sniping those red dogs if the game looked realistic. There’s a certain charm to mayhem and carnage when it looks like Buzz Lightyear.
Spore was the most pirated game of 2008, but that needs to be viewed through the lens of EA wrapping the legitimate, retail copy of the game with all sorts of DRM nonsense that made it unplayable under certain situations. You know, like putting the disc in your drive and expecting it to work. It was easier to pirate it than play the copy you bought at the store. Insane, yes. Modern Warfare 2 was the most pirated game of 2009, also known as “this year,” primarily because it was backed by a zillion dollar marketing campaign. That, and people like shooting at each other, virtually.
TorrentFreak estimates that Modern Warfare 2 was downloaded some 4.1 million times this year via BitTorrent. There’s, at best, no way in hell to determine how many times the game was downloaded from Usenet, Rapidshare (and its equivalents), and burned once then passed around entire dorm room buildings on college campuses from San Diego to Stuttgart, from Pensacola to Pretoria.
That’s for the PC and Xbox 360 version, mind you. While it’s trivial to pirate a PC game, it takes slightly more wherewithal to pirate an Xbox 360 game, though no more than the average 16-year-old can attain in a few hours’ worth of forum-lurking.
You know Activision will be mightily upset to read this news, but you have to figure at least one guy on the Infinity Ward roster, perhaps a QA employee, is all, “Yes! You liked it! You really, really liked it!”
Meanwhile, anyone with a brain and a hankering for some multi-player FPS action is playing Team Fortress 2. That, or Quake III Arena.
Picture is unrelated because I’m tired of putting that same damn MW2 screenshots in every post about the game
You would have been foolish to assume that Modern Warfare 2 would treat foreign cultures with any sort of reverence. First there was the rubbish accents in the Rio de Janeiro level(s). Then there was “No Russian,” which, well you know what happened there. Now there’s this: there’s Arabic all over the Karachi multi-player level. Why is this an issue? Oh, only that Arabic isn’t spoken in Pakistan (Karachi is Pakistan’s largest city).
No, Arabic is not a main language of Pakistan. Realistically, there’s no reason why the Modern Warfare 2 representation of the game should be littered with Arabic language signs. And yet it is so!
The country has two official languages in Urdu and English. Urdu, like many other languages, in written using the Arabic alphabet. You know, just like how English and Italian and Spanish and German and French are all written with the same alphabet (the Latin alphabet) but are completely different languages. Same thing with Urdu and Arabic: just because they both use the same script doesn’t mean they’re the same language.
Not if you’re Infinity Ward, I guess.
Now, is this is big deal? To most people no, it patently isn’t, but you’d think big budget games like Modern Warfare 2 would try to be as authentic as possible.
How dumb would it look to be playing a game set in Paris with all the street signs in Dutchor Swedish? I mean really.
More importantly, what would we do without Wikipedia?
Time-wasting Web sites, video games, and the dumbest tech products ever were among the most popular stories on PCWorld this year. Here's our top 10 list.
Gotta love cops. A woman in Boston got mad at her 14-year-old son for being up at 2:30am playing Grand Theft Auto. (At least the kid wasn’t smoking dust in the street at that hour.) In fact, she got so mad that she called 911 for help. You know, “You have to help me. My son is up in the middle of the night playing video games! I don’t know what to do!” The cops responded, no doubt aggravated that they had to deal with this garbage, by saying, “Calm down, ma’am. Just put your dumb kid to bed.” That’s not an exact quote, but you know that’s what they were thinking.
The woman, Angela Mejia, feared that her son was addicted to video games. Rather than throwing the kid’s PlayStation into the Charles like a normal parent would do, she waffles, baffled that her son is acting out by having the audacity to stay up late and play games.
And who knows: maybe this kid is absolutely miserable, and the time he spends playing video games represents his only outlet. That certainly sounds familiar.
It’s like, I could see the mother being upset if her son ran with gang-bangers, but staying up past his bedtime to get in a little GTA? Doesn’t sound like too big a problem to me, and certainly not worthy of harassing the 911 operators. As if they don’t have actual emergencies to respond to!
Oh, look, I’m taking a single remark from a lengthy interview and making an entire post about it. It concerns Blizzard, the famed developer of World of Warcraft and Diablo. You may think of Blizzard as a PC developer, but that ignores games like The Lost Vikings. Anyhow, Blizzard has said in an interview with Gamasutra, which always does good stuff, that it is not averse to making a console game in the future, just that it needs to be the right game.
An RTS like StarCraft II? That’s probably not the right game: have you tried to play an RTS on a console? Even if a developer pulls it off, as pretty much happened with Halo Wars, compare that to a a proper mouse and keyboard control scheme. It’s almost not even worth the effort to re-invent the wheel like that.
What about an MMO, like You Know What? Again, it’s so crazy to think that you can effectively take a mouse and keyboard and map it over to a controller for such a game. Look at how many buttons this mouse has, and even then it takes a while to get used to it.
As for being so damn pro-PC:
It’s obviously because we’ve made only PC games for the last 15 years, but there’s a perception, I think, that Blizzard is anti-console, and that’s absolutely not the case. We just want to make the right game for the right platform. Think about StarCraft II. Some real-time strategy games have tried to happen on the console. Some of those have been successful, but overall, our experience is that it’s going to be a better game on the PC, ergo it’s developed on the PC.
So it’s not that Blizzard hates your PS3 or Xbox 360, just that its current big games are so PC that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense trying to pigeon-hole those onto consoles.
No, this isn’t an official ad campaign, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth mentioning. It was created by a Mexican ad agency, Diagonal, and shows how awesome the PS3 is. Take that, mother-in-law.
The other ad I liked—there are several—was this one, with the zombies:
I’m sitting here wondering how many graduate students have written papers, if not entire dissertations, on the role of zombies in film. Why are zombie movies so popular (relatively speaking)? Why do people feel no remorse for zombies? In video game culture, zombies are right up there with Nazis as go-to cannon fodder: who could object to shooting a zombie? A Nazi? Or a zombie Nazi?
Incidentally, I’ve come up with a clever PS3 ad campaign of my own: 29 seconds of dramatic God of War III footage (I saw the game the other day, and boy does it look good), then the PS3 logo flashed across the screen for one second. No fancy concepts, no extreme nonsense. Just let the game sell itself.
Mad Men: Technology Edition (I smell College Humor bit).
The product description says it all. “With the Maracas for Wii you can enjoy those Maraca based video games as if you were actually celebrating a big fiesta!” Ah yes, all those Maraca based video games.
Terrible news, friends. It looks like UFC has chosen not to renew the contract of famous ring girl Logan Stanton (and Natasha Wicks, bit she’s not germane to this here story). Her contract ended with UFC 107, which took place last week. Rumor is that she’ll be replaced by former Playboy Playmate (is Playmate a proper noun?) Chandella Powell. There’s a tech angle here, believe me, and it has to do with the next UFC game, UFC Undisputed 2010, which is due out next May.
The thing is, Logan did a whole bunch of scenes for the game last week. Clearly those scenes are now useless. So Yukes (the game’s developer) is going to have to either A) pretend this firing didn’t happen and just keep Logan in the game (not likely) or B) spend another bunch of days recording the new ring girl crew. What a giant pain in the neck.
Then again, if I had the UFC license I’d go to the ends of the Earth to keep Dana White and the Fertittas happy. UFC license = money these days.
Shocking study coming out of the University of Minnesota that says Wii Fit won’t get you into shape, despite what you may think. Well, to be specific, the study says the game won’t produce “significant changes in daily physical activity, muscular fitness, flexibility, balance or body composition.”
The study, which took place over six months, looked at eight families in North America and gave them the game for three months, then took away the game for three months.
It found that families used the game an average of 22 minutes per day.
You’ll recall that Americans watched TV for an average of 18 hours per week, or 2.57 hours per day. Yeah.
That’s the thing: Wii Fit isn’t exactly heavy training, so using it for only 22 minutes per day and changing nothing else about your lifestyle wouldn’t produce any sort of noticeable fitness result. The game is supposed to help train you into the habit of taking in less calories than you burn, how to be conscious of that fact that a hamburger has more calories than a banana, etc.
So use Wii Fit to develop healthy habits, which is what Nintendo has always said the game was about, and not to look like Brock Lesnar or George St. Pierre.
Sony hasn’t given up on Home, its virtual world filled with avatars and overall weirdness. It just launched Sodium One, which is the latest Home world you and your avatar can spend the day in. There’s a game to go along with it, one that looks an awful lot like Wipeout, which isn’t bad at all.
The actual game, Salt Shooter, does have a ludicrous premise, but it’s hardly the only one with that affliction: “This entertainment event, set in a future of advanced technology where man and machine meet on a vast salt plain to turn deadly battle into extreme sport [lol wut?], resides only in the ever-growing world of PlayStation Home.”
Like I said, ludicrous. My guess is that once you play it you won’t pay any attention to the story.
Sony’s giving away 1,500 vouchers for full Salt Shooter unlocks, so best to login as soon as possible for your chance to win.
A few weeks ago, Woot opened up a new section of its site called Woot Deals. This area marked a departure for the service because it is run by Woot users, rather than a Woot employees selecting every deal. Of course, when you open it up to users, they’re going to get what they want.
Today, the most popular items in this deals section include a bunch of video games, some tennis shoes, a monitor, some laser pointers, oh, and a 9mm handgun.
Awww, schweeeeeet! This calculator says, “Hey, I need a calculator but I want people to know that I’m down with video games. Please don’t step, mess, or front. I got eight digits to work with, B.”
Shaped like an Xbox controller, you’ve got a D-pad with add, subtract, multiply, and divide keys, number pad right in the middle of everything, functions on the right, and big fat CE and equals buttons. Oh and the shoulder buttons correspond to on and off.
It’s $13 from an Australian store. The product page says that it’s almost sold out, which makes perfect sense since this product is somehow so dumb it’s cool.
Like with every game not called World of Warcraft, I played Assassin’s Creed II for a solid two or three hours, and it’s been collecting dust ever since then. This is relevant because, what, Ubisoft sold me (and all of you!) an incomplete game? Apparently! The game’s upcoming DLC, Sequence 12: Battle of Forli and Sequence 13: Bonfire of the Vanities, which go on sale in January and February, “complete” the game. At least they’re cheap: $3.99 and $4.99.
This is news to me because I never completed the game and had no idea about this corrupted DNA nonsense. Yes, it’s merely a presentation issue—Ubisoft could simply have added DLC like everyone else does, as “bonus” content, but to present it as though you’re completing the game by buying the DLC? Rubs me the wrong way.
Would you buy a video game out of a vending machine? I certainly would, if only to avoid the phony human contact thrust upon me at GameStop. So these POP247 whiz-bangs are great. Too bad I’ve never seen one here.
They’re starting to appear in the UK, home of formerly good football team Liverpool FC. Sony and Universal are behind the machines, and they dispense, yes, titles from said studios. It’s not just video games, either, but DVDs and Blu-ray discs, too.
In the future, they may even provide a way to push downloadable content, like PSP Go games.
Let’s be honest: the most exciting part about this post was the completely unnecessary dig at Liverpool FC. Without Torres and Gerrard that team would be fighting for top-flight survival this year. Fact.
This is the IntoDream, a homemade, portable DreamCast. It’s a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts, being part DreamCast, part PSone, and part N64.
It’s definitely a “pictures speak louder than words” type thing, so watch along with me as we remember the hours lost to Phantasy Star Online, Grandia II, Skies of Arcadia, Street Fighter Alpha 3, and Soulcalibur.
The Media Democracy Survey tries to ascertain America’s entertainment habits. It comes out every year, and this year’s edition just went live. As you might image, the terrible economy played a major role in the way Americans went about their business this past year. In fact, it turns out that Americans now watch (well, watched in the past year) an average of 18 hours of TV per week, which is up from 16 hours from last year. And this is TV on TV, not Hulu or anything like that.
Let that sink in: 18 hours per week spent sitting on a couch, watching TV. That works out to a little more than 2.5 hours of TV per day if you want to average it out like that, which might not make too much sense. How many Americans will sit there all day on Sunday to watch the NFL? (I tend to watch at least one soccer game per week, typically the FC Barcelona one when it airs. So there’s two hours right there.)
The story, though, is that Americans, strapped for cash, have returned to almighty TV to entertain themselves. It’s cheap and it gets the job done. So that’s not hard to understand.
The survey did touch on new forms of entertainment, including online entertainment consumption. Only 10 percent of Americans watch TV online (Hulu, downloads, etc.), but more and more people are buying video games, which is where I spend most of my entertainment hours. (New Dungeon Finder~!) And it’s people between the ages of 27-43 who are the fastest growing segment of gamers. That’s good news for Hollywood, provided it figures of digital distribution sometime before the year 3000: these people have money and they’re not teenagers who will download a movie just for the hell of it. Hmm, people with money, willing to spend it… why try to reach them? Madness!
So yeah, that’s about it. People were broke this year, so TV to the rescue. Not online TV, not fancy set-top box TV, but plain ol’ TV.
Ubisoft hasn’t given up on the Prince of Persia series just yet (despite the fact that Assassin’s Creed is essentially Persia of Persia with a different pair of shoes). There’s the movie with that guy, and the just-announced Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. It’s coming out in May of 2010 for all the usual suspects.
There’s very little concrete information to share. The press release touts “amazing this” and “stupendous that.” It does use the Anvil engine, if that means anything to the more hardcore gamers here.
Pics or GTFO? Pics, then. (Concept art, though.)
And am I the only one who thinks this version of the Prince looks exactly like WWE’s John Morison? I’m not even talking about the hair style, but the face is pretty much the same. I hope Morrison is getting paid.
We’ve all seen MythBusters when there’s nothing else on TV, right? Right. Well here’s a video showing a Modern Warfare 2 several game myths either busted or confirmed. Well, mainly confirmed. Sorta reminds me of that Halo Warthog video.
For me, the best part of Patch 3.3 in World of Warcraft is the new dungeon finder. I’ve used it a bunch in the past couple of days, and can say this: PUGing is now fun (though it’ll change the way we look at guilds).
PUG stands for pick-up group, a term to describe a ragtag collection of players thrust together to run though a dungeon, or instance. Prior to this latest patch, setting up a PUG was a pain the the ass: you’d join a specific chat channel then submit yourself to a pretty rubbish queuing system. It would take an awful long time to get five players together. We’re talking 30+ minutes. Inconvenient, yes. You’d get prepared to run a dungeon, have all your potions and items and whatnot on you, then enter the queue… then you’d wait. And wait and wait. Needless to say, by the time you got a group together, you were often no longer in the mood to run the dungeon.
And then you’d find that the group itself was rubbish. Not fun, no.
The new system changes things. The biggest change is that the dungeon finder looks across servers, so even if your server has, say, only 100 people in it (for argument’s sake), that’s no longer a problem. You’re no longer handcuffed by your server’s inadequacies!
The queueing system has also improved, and dramatically. Now you select your role in the group (damage-dealing, healing, or tanking), then the system scours several servers to find other plays queuing up for the same dungeon. What used to take 30+ minutes to set up now takes around 10. I say that as a damage-dealer (Warlock); healers and tanks, being more rare, are placed into groups even quicker. (Groups consist of three damage-dealers, a healer, and a tank.)
Like I said, I’ve used the new system several times since the patch went live. I couldn’t be happier. Within 10 minutes of entering a queue I’m fighting my way through the game’s dungeons.
Yes, this is what I do with my life, such as it is.
But the new dungeon finder may change the way people look at guilds. Before, you’d join a guild so you can get to know a bunch of other people who you’d run dungeons with. It was a lot quicker for a few guildies run a dungeon than sit though the old PUG system. But now that you can have a dungeon run up and ready in just a few minutes, why bother with a guild? This is especially true of people who like to play the game alone like I do: I have no interest in asking my fellow guildies “hey, what’s up guys?” If I can find a group in a few minutes, then be done with a dungeon in double-quick time, why put up with all the drama of a guild?
This only speaks to pre-endgame raiding, of course. That’s a whole different animal where being friends with people and knowing what are people’s motivations (what gear they’re after and so on).
So there you go. Running dungeons is infinitely easier, and faster, now, but it may change the way people look at guilds. Are they even worth the trouble now, especially at lower levels?
Did you know that, at one point, Sony considered constructing the PS3 Slim around the concept of network storage? That is, instead of there being local storage (hard drive, memory cards, etc.) you’d store all of your data on Sony’s servers then retrieve said data over the Internet. Now that would have been radically different.
Of course, Sony decided against the idea, primarily because it would have cost too much money to set up and maintain the required servers. It’s a shame, because as slim as the PS3 Slim turned out, it could have been so much slimmer!
Well, all of this according to a recent interview with Nikkei Electronics Asia.
Sony also said that it could have made the PS3 Slim even slimmer by moving the power supply (see: the Xbox 360’s power brick) outside the system. That was ixnayed, too, because it would have made it “harder to use freely.”
I don’t know about you, but when I place a video game console in its spot, it doesn’t leave that spot until the next generation rolls around. So I officially don’t understand why Sony didn’t go with the power brick idea—it did with the PS2 Slim!
Now, the network storage thing, yeah, that I can understand. Money aside, it’s a pretty foreign concept for console owners. “So I have zero control over my saved games? That’s not cool.” What happens if Sony’s servers explode and an earthquake knocks over the backup storage facility and a tornado destroys the backup’s backup facility?
Good news, people who play Modern Warfare 2 online multi-player. It seems Infinity Ward has fixed the dreaded “javelin exploit” that has plagued multi-player matches since the game’s launch.
This patch is for the Xbox 360 version (the PC and PS3 versions have already been patched), and brings the game up to version 1.06.
As a refresher, here’s the javelin exploit, complete with Benny Hill music. Can we let that song die already?
Right now, if I could play a round of Multiplayer Game 2: The Sequel with anyone in the whole world, it’d probably be either Manuel Zelaya or The Situation from Jersey Shore. Zelaya because I’d could ask, “So what’s it like to be the first South American leader in a really long time to be illegally ousted in a coup?” Then I’d tell The Situation, “Hey, you’re terrific. Let’s do 800 sit-ups then pump our fists in the air to the latest episode of A State of Trance.”
What? Weekly Reader Research just published the results of a survey that found that boys aged 8-17 most want to play video games with President Obama. Second place is Tom Brady, followed by Seth Rogan, Michael Phelps and the Jonas Brothers.
For girls, the ranking is Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, President Obama, Lady Gaga, then Angelina Jolie.
Modern Warfare 2, now censored in Japan. The game, which Square Enix publishes tomorrow, changes the way the level “No Russian” works. Here, killing civilians is a no-no.
Killing civilians inside the airport results in a game over. So, don’t do it!
The game’s text was also edited to read, “Kill ‘em, the Russians” instead of “Remember, no Russian.” Why that’s a better way to go about things, especially when you can’t kill your Russian partners either, I don’t know.
What else is there to say, really? Pretty sure y’all are sick of “No Russian” discussion, so I won’t bore you any more.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PS2, 2003)
Guitar Hero (PS2/PS3/Xbox 360, 2005)
Shadow of the Colossus (PS2, 2005)
A few weeks ago, Woot opened up a new section of its site called Woot Deals. This area marked a departure for the service because it is run by Woot users, rather than a Woot employees selecting every deal. Of course, when you open it up to users, they’re going to get what they want.
Today, the most popular items in this deals section include a bunch of video games, some tennis shoes, a monitor, some laser pointers, oh, and a 9mm handgun.
