Psychosis and Bad Internet Connections Do Not Mix
In a grand display of a lack of self control—the type that Jack Thompson and his ilk would have loved—a teen in Sweden went berserk and stabbed a girl when he couldn’t connect to Starcraft.
An 18 year old Starcraft player has been reported as attacking a 15 year old girl. The gamer became angry when his internet connection wouldn’t work and picked up a kitchen knife and headed into the street. When there he came into contact with a 15 year old girl who was on her way home from a party and laughing with a friend. He attacked her with the knife but despite several stabs her injuries were not life threatening.
The troubled teenager has now been sentenced to psychiatric care by the Nacka court for these actions, his first offense. The gamer’s thoughts apparently grew dark as a result
…
Brutal Legend Unleashed, Rocks Out, Gets Drunk, Pukes Up, Goes To Bed Early
Brutal Legend, an epic heavy metal adventure game with a big damn dose of RTS, hits shelves today. We here at Vox have done some coverage of the game, and the demo on Xbox Live was certainly interesting.
Brutal Legend is doing well by reviewers; they like its style and humour, but the controls are not far away from Double Fine’s previous game, Psychonauts. That one came out years ago. Also, the story game is short by some standards, coming in around or under 10 hours. Multiplayer options using the RTS elements fill out the game.
We’re watching this one. By all accounts, it’s a good game, but we’ve yet to see if it’ll sell well, or grasp any sort of longevity in a metallic death grip.
I’m holding out for Korean pro Brutal Legend tournaments.
Warhammer Online Looks At The Newbie Experience, and Patch 1.3.2
Warhammer Online is a tough game to get into, largely because of its PVP focus, combined with a graying playerbase of max-level characters. There are precious few fellow low-levels for a new player to group with, and yet far more high-levels prowling the quest hubs for easy ganks.
Patch 1.3.2 aims to expand and enhance the newbie experience in ways that don’t involve a fireball to the face.
Rock Band U2 Finally Considers Promoting Themselves, Thinks About Video Games
Aging rockers U2 recently admitted they would like to follow in the footsteps of other aging rockers by appearing in one of the latest guitar games. Although the Rock Band franchise approached U2 some time ago, the band turned them down. U2 bassist Adam Clayton says that a new deal could be worked out.
“We definitely would like to be in there, but we felt some of the compromises weren’t what we wanted. That could change. I love the idea that that’s where people are getting music, and we’d love to be in that world.”
Expect any future U2 Rock Band game to take place in a tour through Africa’s slums.
Ratings Board Leaves Australia Unprepared For Zombie Armageddon
The upcoming zombie survival game, Left 4 Dead 2, will be released short of a few features thanks to the actions of the Australian media censorship board. This board controls media by ratings and classifications, much like the American ESRB we’re all familiar with. Because we’re all Americans. Unlike our superior, more or less voluntary ratings board, the Australian version has the force of law behind it, and media without a proper rating cannot be sold.
The board has refused to give a classification to Left 4 Dead 2.
Features edited out to meet the board’s arbitrary standards include, “depictions of decapitation, dismemberment, wound detail or piles of dead bodies lying about the environment.”
Now that dead people have been thoroughly scrubbed out of a BRAIN EATING ZOMBIE NIGHTMARE WHERE THE DEAD RISE TO FEAST ON THE LIVING (ahem), the Australian ratings board has …
Sound Engineers Dance to the Beat of a Virtual Drum
Sound engineers at Ford are tuning in to the techniques of virtual reality to create better stereo systems for the automaker’s latest vehicles. By simulating the effects of a given sound system design inside a virtual car, engineers can carve away gaping swathes of development time in the real world. The result is a better sound experience, built cheaper and more quickly.
Hellforge reviews Dead Space: Extraction
Hellforge is running a deeply engrossing review of the recently released Dead Space game for the Nintendo Wii: Dead Space: Extraction. This is proported to be an action on-rails shooter that is heavily narrative and story focused—mostly a prequel to explain what happened to create the original Dead Space experience.
Pros:
* Decent visuals….. for the Wii anyway.
* Excellent Sound and Music
* Interesting story, backed by great characters and exceptional voice acting
* Fairly good level designs, with the occasional branching path.
* A newer, tougher take on the On-the-Rails Shooter genre
* Weapons actually useful… but only once upgraded
* Wii-Mote allows for accurate aiming
* Play from multiple perspectives to cover many different areas of the story
* Comic extra is cool
Cons:
* Slow paced at times, with some levels having very few actual encounters
* Short: A mere 10 chapters
* Next to no replayability, as you can’t “skip” dialogue or story scenes
* Not nearly enough extras
* Character …
Mythic Moons Warhammer Online
A new live event, Daemon Moon Rising, is coming to Warhammer Online on October 23 through November 2nd. It’s your basic holiday Halloween event, with masks, prizes, hordes of demons, and the understated negotiation between factions that Warhammer Online is so famous for.
Read more at Mythic’s website.
Iggy Pop, David Bowie Get Really Small Together
Lego Rock Band. Just let that thought sink in for a moment.
Iggy Pop and David Bowie will both feature as horrible, yellow mutant versions of themselves in the upcoming Lego Rock Band title. Read more at USA Today.
Top Ten Game Addiction Fallacies
As video games become a new media of communication and actually make a splash in the modern, global community scares will continue to crop up about their influence on the masses. Just like the emergence of literacy, the novel as a form of writing, the radio, rock and roll, and comic books being blamed for every ill society might have video games are the new emerging art form in the crosshairs and the hysteria runs broad and deep.
As does the misunderstanding and gross fallacies on the subject.
Neils Clark decided to response to the top ten errors made in discussing video game addiction, which are tried-and-true elements of most anti-emerging-media propaganda with some interesting twists. It’s a reply to a column over at Green Pixels. The entire article, Big Trouble In …
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