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Every hack videogame writer on the planet has been waiting for this story, and this particular hack is no different. The Telegraph, one of Britain’s few respectable newspapers (i.e. does not contain tits) has reported that a 25 year-old man died while playing Wii Fit.
Tim Eves was jogging in Wii Fit when he collapsed, his girlfriend called an ambulance however he was pronounced dead at the hospital. Eves had spoken to his grandma just before he died and apparently he’d just ordered a Kebab and was drinking port.
An autopsy was held, but so far “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome” is the only possible cause of death stated, but no official report has been made public. Nice to see Wii Fit getting the completely unrelated mention though, proof of fairness in journalism.
Via: Destructoid
This is just a quick reminder to let you all know that today is the final day you can enter our Braid competition to win the game on PC and a free bottle of wine!
There have been some excellent entries so far, but there is still a chance for you to enter and win it at the last moment, making everybody else who entered hate you. The winner will be decided later this week and announced on the site this weekend.
What are you waiting for? Break out that cheese cloth shirt and grab a scarf!
A guy named Mike Tomich has written a book entitled “Our Silent Epidemic” which talks about the health risks involved in allowing children to do stressful things with their hands. According to the book if a child uses a crayon under the age of 5 then the forces involved could cause irreparable damage to their hands. Unsurprisingly, he applies the same logic to children playing videogames under the age of EIGHT! Accoring to Tomich:
Children develop the injuries because their bones are too soft (not calcified hard) and readily yield to the strong repeating forces. The permanent and accumulative damage from these forces is silently inflicted without pain because of the numbing effects they deliver to the soft bones.
OK, lets do a quick straw poll here. How many of us here used a crayon before we were 5? How many of us picked up a videogame pad before we were 8? I started playing videogames when I was 4 years old, 16 years later my hands are perfectly normal. My 5 year old niece plays videogames, last time I checked her hands were perfectly normal. This is unfortunate, since those hands can operate the DVD player and start High School Musical.
To be honest, if a deformed hand could play a part in wiping High School Musical out then I’m willing to take the hit. Also, a visit to Tomich’s website may not deform your hands, but it’s insanely bad design could well deform your eyes while the writing may deform your brain.
Via: GamePolitics
Bob made a demo for his game. I played it. You shouldn’t. Read more →
NerdfitTV Returns with Resident Evil 5!
Comments and ideas welcome for future videos. <3
The Independent Games Developers Association (Tiga) is demanding that the UK Government gives tax breaks to the country’s game developers. Tiga is a national trade association made up of UK developers and seeks to work with the Government to keep the industry competitive. Their ultimate aim is to see the UK as the third largest country for game development after the US and Japan.
This is unlikely to happen soon however, with a $104 million tax break announcement today from the Canadian province of Ontario cementing the country’s position in third place. Industry watchers are now predicting that the UK could soon fall to sixth.
Tiga CEO Richard Wilson (no, not that guy) responded to the news by calling on Chancellor Alistair Darling to announce a similar deal in the upcoming budget. Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz he said:
If the UK Government wants to maintain its position as a major developer of videogames then Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, must end the present policy of prevarication and announce a tax breaks for games production in his Budget on April 22nd. The UK videogames industry needs action and it needs it now.
Sorry Richard, but with banks to be bailed out and MP’s porn habits to be funded, I think it’s not looking likely.
The, frankly, awesome guys over at Mega64 have made another skit. This time based on Metal Gear Solid 4.
See if you can spot a couple of famous faces.
I think their own description of the video says it best
Dude.
Thanks, Gibbo.
In a move that I can only hope will result in people referring to Square Enix as Squeenixdos, it looks like the venerable JRPG developer/angst ridden teen production plant will indeed be buying up Eidos. According to MCV, the transition will happen in the next few weeks and Eidos will be left as an independent development house, which implies that jobs on the Eidos side are more or less safe.
Having said that, there is definitely a difference between the implication that everyone will keep bringing home the bacon, and actually following through. Takeovers, even non-hostile ones, can be messy sometimes. But hopefully those crazy Brits living in the house that Lara built will be alright.
Now on the surface this may not seem like terribly important news. It’s not like they’ve announced that Eidos will be relocated to Japan or anything crazy. Basically all this means is that the people working at Eidos will now get their pay cheques from the other side of the planet and will have to commit seppuku if they let any game assets leak early.
However, wouldn’t it be awesome if they did some crazy-ass crossover project? Like, Hitman meets Star Ocean, meets Parasite Eve? Except it’s like, set in the past? And there’s like, this dinosaur scientist that’s trying to take over the world using Chocobos, and Aya Brea needs to team up with Agent 47 to use technology given to them by Claude Kenni (Original Star Ocean) to fight him?
Oh, and they could throw lady Crofts boobs in there somewhere.
Awesome.
Fiddy wants his skull
custom soundtracks save the day
what plotholes?
The franchise around Riddick is somewhat confusing. The first movie Pitch Black was pretty good. The second movie The Chronicles of Riddick was not. The game The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was not based on the second movie and in fact the game was very good. It had innovative gameplay, a decent story and graphics that set the bar for all the other games in the PS2/Xbox generation. The developers had to do some tricky programming in order to get the best performance from the Xbox, which is why they couldn’t just simply port it to the Xbox 360. Despite being one of the best games of the last generation, this game was dropped in the Activision/Vivendi/Blizzard threesome. Read more →
By now you have read about it on Kotaku, Joystiq, or you may have even seen the live demonstration on Gamespot. I am referring to OnLive, a service that will kill console gaming, bankrupt Nvidia, cure world hunger and rape your enemies while giving you a soothing back massage.
Amidst all the chaos and the bullshit on the Internet there is a lot of confusion on this marvelous “Alienware Killer”, so today we go in depth and use classic NG-style journalism to clear the air and find out if this is worth your time or money. Read more →
I ramble a lot. Sorry about that.
In October last year the 22 year-old Stefan Martin-Urban shot 4 people, killing 2, before turning the gun on himself. After a 6 month investigation police have returned a verdict of “yeah, videogames done it” surprising absolutely no-one.
What makes this story stand out to me however is that the police comments are moronic, even by the standards previously set by events like these. Sgt. Tony Clayton gave us these pearls of wisdom:
Like the thugs in “Grand Theft Auto” and warlocks in “World of Warcraft,” Martin-Urban showed no emotion…
I wasn’t at GDC. I’ve been too busy being lazy, adolescent and bad at writing. I, like the entirety of the game’s industry, am a bastard and don’t deserve even an ounce of respect for my leeching, degrading, derogatory, un-skilled and bias work. Read more →
Just so we are all clear here, nobody is being happy right now. This is Negative Gamer and we have a reputation to uphold. With that in mind; who wants some FREE STICKERS!? Read more →
Do you still seethe when you remember the SecuROM issues that plagued Spore? Were you a part of the violent pirate backlash? Well guess what! EA may have just learned their lesson. According to Gamasutra, EA itself has announced that its next 1000kg gorilla, The Sims 3, will be released free of any oppressive DRM. Apparently they will use the good old CD serial key system, allowing the game to be installed without any kind of online activation. This also means that the new Sims game can be installed on as many machines as your little heart desires. This is an interesting move because The Sims is the most lucrative product since the Bible.
Of course final judgement should be reserved until EA actually releases the game. Who knows what those old men wearing $10,000 suits sitting in a boardroom in EA HQ smoking massive cigars are actually thinking? Maybe they’re going to try and slip some sort of DRM in eventually, or maybe they’ve actually decided to try going DRM-free. Who knows? Guess we’ll have to wait and hope that major publishers are re-thinking the policy of punishing people who legitimately buy their games.
*crosses fingers*
MadWorld is the first game from the renamed Clover Studios now under Sega’s banner as Platinum. The ultra violent, blood soaked game fits in with the public image of the Wii about as well as Freddy Kruger at a toddler group.
The story goes like this; a terrorist group has cut all the bridges linking Jefferson Island to the rest of whatever city it’s in and released a virus into the air. All the people of the island have to do to get a vaccine is to kill someone. After 24 hours whoever is left takes a share of $100,000,000 and gets to live. Obviously the fewer people left, the more money for the survivors. Cue the carnage.
You play as Jack, a mysterious man sent into the DeathWatch Games for reasons unknown. All you know about him as you begin the carnage is that he can take a man’s head off with his punch and has a chainsaw strapped to his arm.
The island is split into 5 areas, each containing 2 main levels with a boss each, followed by a fight against the area boss to earn the right to move deeper into the island. In each level the object is to score points by killing your enemies in as gruesome a way as possible to unlock new areas, weapons, games and finally, a chance to challenge the boss. It’s Smash TV meets Streets of Rage meets Manhunt, but does that make it a Vodka Martini or a Coke and Milk? Read more →
Whilst the video game industry may have successfully fought off morally-outraged critics like Jack Thompson, they could now come under fire for political incorrectness, according to a free-speech lawyer.
Speaking yesterday at the Game Developers Conference in California in a session titled “Silencing The Censors”, attorney Lawrence Walters said that the industry was in a “culture war”.
Like it or not, the video game industry is on the frontline of a war between the family values groups on one hand and the civil libertarians on the other hand. We didn’t ask for this–we’re just trying to entertain people with a product the public seem to want.
Yesterday at GDC, Keita Takahashi of Katamari fame, spoke about his most recent game Noby Noby Boy. He said some strange things.
Takahashi stated that the game was originally developed for the 360, but then it was changed to an exclusive PSN title. He says that he preferred the symmetrical stick layout of the PS3 controller compared to the 360’s. We all know the actual reason is that 360 owners would see it as a “gay” game and Microsoft does NOT support that.
I also heard that Cliffy B demanded they include guns but when Takahashi said no, Cliffy banned him from Xbox Live.
Takahashi went on to talk about sales:
Maybe it’s not such a good thing if a game sells a lot of copies. So we put it on the PS3 as a download only title so it wouldn’t sell as many.
So I guess Takahashi doesn’t like money. Even though it being just on PSN is perfectly fine, Takahashi talks about a 360 release:
Well, this game is not being sold well, so I can’t support Xbox at all.
Go figure.
Via: Joystiq
Addiction is a terrible thing. If you think you can beat Nintendoll’s Facebook Bejeweled Blitz high score of 173,800 do please get in touch. Also on this week’s show:
I’ve also just added us to the official iTunes store… or something. This means you can leave us reviews about how awesome we are! This gets us a million listeners, and thus gets me a jet.
MP3, iTunes (don’t forget to leave us a favourable review saying how sexy and awesome we are!), Any other RSS
