Obama Family Owns, Plays a Nintendo Wii
Even the first black president prefers a white console… It’s been recently confirmed that the first-family elect has picked up a Wii console for Christmas, and Obama has joked about how he’s better at Wii bowling than the real thing during his campaign.
Normally, something like this would be a fluff piece, but it brings up two very intriguing points. First, real adults, as opposed to us tall-children types, are buying and playing Nintendo’s crushingly popular game system. Can you see your parents sitting down for a relaxing night with the ol’ PS3? Secondly, the soon-to-be leader of the free world and most powerful man on the planet plays video games. Maybe not often, maybe not those Ninja Gaiden-style controller snappers, but certainly now and then with his family. It’s a start.
The gamers are winning. After Obama’s eight years are up, …
Warhammer Online Fortress Updates Hit Live Server
The big draw of Warhammer Online has always been epic battles around keeps, fortresses, and castles, but the damning truth of packing a small area full of players is that modern servers just can’t keep up. Flames and terror are the usual result, not in the game but inside the server room. This makes for unhappy players in that special way only staring at a login screen after the game explodes can.
To salvage what they can after being brought low by the limitations of hardware, the folks at Mythic have made a few changes to the way these massive sieges work. The big deal in all this is a hard cap on the number of players, but what’s really interesting is how this cap is enforced. Basically, lower-level players get the boot in favour of their higher-level counterparts. The long version has it …
Strange oops! when installing World of Warcraft on Unbuntu
Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing had a bizzare little oops when attempting to install World of Warcraft on Unbuntu Linux.
While installing World of Warcraft on my Ubuntu Linux laptop (using the WINE compatibility software), I found myself confronted by this license agreement. Ain’t that a pickle? I wonder if I’m bound by the license terms now that I clicked “Agree”?
Link, via Boing Boing.
Slightly Late Video Review — Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!!
In a desperate attempt to whore ourselves across more media channels, we here at Vox have been experimenting with this strange YouTube thing you kids are into these days. The result is a video version of our Mike Tyson’s Punch Out review.
Don’t forget to let us know what you think in the comments. We’re new at this, we can use all the help we can get…
1UP.com Acquired, Gutted by UGO Entertainment
Sure, it’s splashed all across the remaining game sites out there, but we at Vox would be remiss in our duties as the starving vultures of game journalism if we didn’t spend a moment to pick the bones of our own dead. And 1UP is dead.
For the longest time now, 1UP, along with its magazine arm EGM and associated websites GameVideos.com, MyCheats.com, and GameTab.com, have been bleeding money like a gunshot victim with a pressure pump shoved down his throat. Ziff-Davis, their ownership company, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and that was even before the economy tanked.
While UGO’s injection of zombie juice into 1UP might bring the company back to a shambling mockery of life, the simple fact remains that certain vital functions are going to missing once the corpse rises up from its slab. The largest of those is EGM, the gaming magazine …
Chapter Eight: At Felendren’s Pad
“Could you pass that? No, not the blue—yeah, the green one. Thanks.”
Felendren didn’t seem so bad; at least Helvetica didn’t think so. It wasn’t like he had any fight in him, certainly not while he was toking on the huge bloodthistle bong. Except that it didn’t look like any bong she’d ever seen in her life. For one, it appeared to be made out of a Burning Crystal—the shard truly took offense to this and continuously shook with rage, producing a strange humming noise. The bong itself burbled constantly with a green-orange fume, and a pair of red eyes glared lazily at nothing. They also seemed to have bloodshot lines running through them.
“Dude, I wish that I had asked that Shara Sunwing chick for extra crispy spider legs,” the wretched …
World of Warcraft 3.0.8 Patch Fails to Go Live
This Tuesday did not see the release of the anticipated 3.0.8 patch for World of Warcraft, instead confronting players with the usual maintenance downtime. There were no changes in world mechanics, such as the ability for any race to ride any mount, nor were class mechanics updated, like the Hunter’s Aspect of the Wild going raid-wide.
Despite the lack of a patch, or indeed any change at all, the players who bitch about nerfs and class imbalance on the World of Warcraft forums have continued to bitch about nerfs and class imbalance on the World of Warcraft forums. We wish them luck with their inevitable panic-induced heart attacks at age 25.
The full patch notes for the update which didn’t happen yesterday may be found at Blizzard’s Test Realm page, but here’s what they look like at present.
General
* Players …
PETA Names Fable 2 “Most Animal-Friendly Video Game” in Proggy Awards
Oh, this is cute. PETA, everyone’s favourite outdated reactionary treehugging convocation, holds their own awards for animal-friendly companies, products, services, entertainment and so on called the Proggy Awards. Fable 2 got the nod for Video Games, since it promotes an agenda where vegetables and tofu help make your character slim and powerful, while eating meat “makes your character fat and evil.” I’m certain the fluffy widdle puppy isn’t he so smart and adorable awww didn’t hurt, either.
Fable 2 is an interesting game, no doubt, and worth checking out if you’re into building up a character and buying your way into nobility while banging an undead mistress. Somehow, though, I don’t think promoting vegetarianism was one of the designer’s goals, and PETA is just seeing what they want to see.
You can check out the whole Proggy affair at the PETA …
Warhammer Online Hotfixes are In
It’s as true now as ever before, Tuesday is patch day. Warhammer Online updates with a few cleaned up quests and a quick PvP fix. Here are the full patch notes ripped straight from WAR’s website.
Content
* The Deathclaw Cold Ones that assault the High Elf Chapter 22 hub will no longer attack players.
Quests and Public Quests
Quests
* Betrayal from Within: Adjusted the waypoints on this quest so that they correctly lead players to the Bastion Stair entrance.
* Broken Core: Fixed an issue which was preventing Squig Herder players from completing this quest because they could not choose a reward.
* Eyes of the Spy: Fixed an issue with the Raven Caller quest item which sometimes allowed more than one raven to be summoned.
* Bitter Blood: This quest will now reward …
Used Games Drop in Price
While video games as a whole are doing well, the prices of used games at the retail level dropped by a considerable amount, although you wouldn’t know it browsing the local Gamestop. In part, this can be be pinned directly on the sucktastic economy since used games don’t have the same marketing and appeal as brand new titles. Also, those new titles of late have been really good, and there’s only so much cash in the cookie jar to blow on digital heroin.
Check out the details in this Gamasutra article here.
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