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The urban legends of every era always seem to reflect whatever teenagers are doing at the time: Forty years ago, they told stories about serial killers attacking kids making out in cars and escaped criminals hiding in someone’s backseat, because they didn’t have jetpacks yet. Today, most young people seem to spend their time sitting or standing in front of video game screens, so it makes sense that we should get legends like …

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I am loving the game portal 2 & came across this great pic…

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WHOAAA!!!

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It’s been a thorn in any Android user’s side, but finally the full Angry Birds game is now available on Android phones…only, not in the Android Market. Instead, Rovio chose to release it, for free, on the GetJar store.

Rovio said that it was an “obvious choice” of GetJar over Android’s Market, thanks to the “global reach and popularity as well as their unique App It! download service.”

Although it’s free to the Android user, the guys at Rovio won’t be living off baked beans and cup-a-soup you’ll be pleased to know, as it’s ad-supported. That’s not a big problem to you guys, is it? Extra Angry Birds levels in exchange for a few adverts?

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It seems like every few months we hear about another major theft or scam in EVE Online. In most MMOs, acts of theft could earn the perpetrator a permanent game ban. In EVE Online, however, it’s an accepted part of the game that people are strongly encouraged to protect themselves from. Even the game’s developers have acknowledged that corporate infiltration, scamming and theft are just another part of the harsh criminal underworld of New Eden. With its latest official game trailer, CCP Games told an impressive tale of corporate theft and revenge, showcasing some of the emergent gameplay that typifies EVE.

Last week, the latest big scam to come out of the criminal underworld of New Eden came to completion. The popular investment scheme Titans4U turned bad, with the creator “Bad Bobby” stealing all of the company’s assets. The theft was the ultimate conclusion of a plan that was set in motion years ago. Bobby began his investment career by running several smaller schemes to build up a positive public image. Over the years, he ran increasingly larger and more popular schemes and always returned on investments. Just over a year ago, his reputation-building efforts paid off as his good name secured the successful launch of the massive Titans4U investment fund.

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Here’s a reason to dust off your Wii: When GoldenEye 007 comes out in November, you’ll have the option of buying it with a golden Classic Controller Pro. You can see it in the picture above. It’s a beauty, right? No word yet on the price, but seriously, when has James Bond ever cared about spending money — just charge it to British Intelligence.
Having played GoldenEye 007′s multiplayer, I feel confident saying that you should purchase this game upon its release. It’s a premium gaming product that will make you and three friends very, very happy. Throwing Oddjob’s killer hat is a great thing, made even better when using a blinged-out, gilded controller like the one you see above.

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The emotional experience of Star Wars™ comes to life in new music created exclusively for The Old Republic™. From soft melodies that ring in the forest of Alderaan to the magnificent booming of a battle scene on Ord Mantell, a talented team of composers, musicians and developers came together to create a magical score for the game.

Watch Developer Dispatch: Music of The Old Republic to see what goes into weaving the familiar Star Wars riffs with a new original score. And learn how music impacts the thrilling moments in video games as well as movies.

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Google Games, built around some sort of partnership with casual-gaming company Zynga, is in the works and would be part of a larger social network called Google Me, according to technology blog Tech Crunch.

Statements from notable internet players, including Digg founder Kevin Rose and a former Facebook chief technical officer, have suggested in recent weeks that the search-engine giant is working on a social network geared toward rivaling Facebook.

TechCrunch this weekend reported that unnamed sources said Google has invested between $100 and $200 million in Zynga, the maker of successful online social games like “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars.”

The investment part of the deal was confirmed last month and a “larger strategic project” is still in the works, according to that report.

A Zynga spokeswoman said Monday that the company has no comment on the reports. A Google spokesman referred questions to the company’s media-relations e-mail account, which did not respond to inquiries.

The popularity of Zynga’s games — more than 50 million people play them on any given day, according to developerAnalytics — could bring considerable heft to any online networking or gaming project Google launched.

The obvious question then would become whether the “Farmville” maker would pull its games from Facebook. That would be a tall order considering the success those games have seen.

The TechCrunch report also added a new wrinkle to the Google Me speculation — saying the Zynga deal would be part of a project called Google Games, according to sources.

On the question-and-answer site Quora, former Facebook technical officer Adam D’Angelo said the Google Me rumors are real. The project would build on Google Buzz, a social networking effort rolled out by Google in February, he said. Google Buzz has been widely criticized by tech pundits.

Reports have not offered details on how a Google site would look, whether it would link to Gmail and other Google pages like Buzz does, or how Google Games would integrate with it.

“This is not a rumor. This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it. I am completely confident about this,”D’Angelo wrote.

“They realized that Buzz wasn’t enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network. They are modeling it off of Facebook.”

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In a conclusion contrary to many recent studies, the research conducted by Texas A&M Associate Professor Christopher Ferguson concluded that violent video games could actually combat anger and depression. The method of measurement came by subjecting four groups of predominantly Hispanic students to a scientifically-proven stress-inducer called the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task. Afterward, two groups were given a violent game to play (Hitman: Blood Money or Call of Duty 2), one was given a non-violent game (Madden 2007) and a final group was told they wouldn’t be able to play any games due to a malfunction.

While Ferguson concluded that the game-playing groups exhibited less hostility and depression, the professor presented a caveat regarding the conclusion–that the uniqueness of the control groups could reveal different results with a larger and more diverse pool of subjects. To learn more about the study, check out the source links below. The full study will be found in volume 15 of the “European Psychologist” journal.

SOURCE: Study: Playing Violent Games Helps with Stress and Depression [Game Politics]

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I am one of many people looking forward to the highly anticipated Star Wars MMO. It is set 300 years after the original Star Wars knights of the Old Republic and 3,000 years before Star Wars The Phantom Menace. There are many aspects of why I am looking forward to this game mainly because it is Star Wars, but also because I am hoping that it lives up to what all the hype. We need a competitor to the most dominating MMO of all time WOW. One can only hope.

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First appeared in: Planescape: Torment (1999)

If you’re looking for the one of the most original, inspired and fascinating character since gaming began, then look no further than The Nameless One, star of Black Isle’s game-changing RPG, Planescape: Torment. Waking up on a mortuary slab in the inter-dimensional city of Sigil, Nameless discovers (with the help of his floating skull companion, Morte) that he’s an immortal amnesiac who can never truly die and the only clues to his past are scrawled in spidery tattoos across his scar-laden flesh.

So far, so Memento, but as The Nameless One’s story slowly unfolds, we see a tortured, tormented soul who has lived a thousand different lifetimes and played host to a dozen different personalities, only to be slain and rise again. What’s more, every time Nameless is reborn, a random soul in the multiverse dies to fuel his resurrection, eventually returning as a shade to exact its revenge.

Torment is a tragic, intricately woven tale and, quite deservedly, recognised as one of the greatest role-playing games of all time. Rather than other RPGs of the era, which gave you a blank slate character to flesh out as you wanted, Torment’s strength was in the detail and richness of its protagonist, who remains one of the very best more than ten years on.

Check em out and pick your favorite.

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This is a true artifact of gaming history. The notebook of Toru Iwatani, creator of Pac-Man, complete with sketched-out pixel art, prototype mazes, and ghost movements. My goodness! Remember when you could sketch out an entire game on a page of graph paper? More here.

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Without the ‘Boss‘, a video game is simply not a video game. Bosses serve as the final challenge, the true test of your skill. And by this point, you tend to be living in the world which the game has created, so they are pretty damn scary!

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The Force will be strong with our younglings this fall, when Sony Online Entertainment releases Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures, a free-to-play, kid-friendly online PC game.

Clone Wars Adventures (trailer embedded above) will deliver a suite of online mini-games themed around the Clone Wars cartoon, all wrapped in a social environment that lets players customize a character, buy pets and compete against friends in daily challenges.

While kids can play for free, a monthly membership fee will get them even more stuff to do — and there will be FarmVille-style microtransactions using Sony’s Station Cash system.

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If you are and avid gamer like me. Well I should say I am more a casual gamer. Either way I love to game, and I have had a MAC for a little over 2 years now and the one aspect I miss is having the games I like to play, like Counter Strike Source, Portal, and other various games available through Steam. Well check out this article regarding Steam coming to MAC. Looks like the Beta will be opening up in April. Although I did purchase an XBOX and game as much as I can on it, to me there is nothing like having a mouse instead of a console controller to take down NOOBS.

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A new scientific study has found that the size of certain brain structures predict achievement, and gamers have been found to have bigger brains and more success.

According to a study published in the science journal Cerebral Cortex, scientists can predict how well a person will perform on a video game just by measuring the volume of specific brain structures.

Within the study, 39 adults (age 18-28, only 10 of whom were male) had their brains scanned before playing “Space Fortress,” a game developed by students at the University of Illinois in which the players were required to destroy a fortress without losing their own ship. (Sounds thrilling.)

The results were that gamers with a larger nucleus accumbens (”the brain’s reward center”) did better on the initial levels of the game, while those with larger caudate nucleus and putamen (center for learning “procedures” and “new skills”) did better at playing with more variables and distractions.

Maybe video games are good for kids after all? Well, don’t throw your kids in front of a TV and the gaming console of your choice just yet, since it’s not clear that if playing more really makes your brain any bigger. Now the task is how researchers will use these findings, possibly for special education – especially patients with learning disabilities or dementia.

What do you think about the findings? Think you’ll be sharpening your video game skills anytime soon?

Source…

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My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-5f326296829f38f45088bd0da7129f00}

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To explain further let’s say that within the game on each server or realm that there was only 1 trillion exchange currency available and this was earned by means of creating and selling goods or completing quests. So the question lingers that how does a player get this money, if one cannot go out and actually kill things to get drops then how is it they get money, hmm this is a good question and although I do not necessarily have the best answer, I do have a few ideas.

For the “New Player” have them go to Non Player Characters (NPC) which would give them quests to complete and pay them for completing, now this may negate what I just said, but hear me out. This money falls into the “original amount” the 1 trillion I mentioned above, give this NPC’s say like 1 million credits a day or 100K a day, but when it is depleted it is depleted for that day, and if that amount was not used only replenish what was not used keeping the currency accurate. Once a Player Character (PC) reaches a certain level i.e. Level 10 then that NPC will no longer give any more quests and/or “exchange currency.”

Players level 10 and beyond: if you have completed all the required quests that were given then you should have money, whatever that set amount is it should be enough to survive on by getting the proper basic armor, basic weapons, basic housing (talk a little about later), and the right amount of money to get started in your profession, now what about if that player needs more (which they will) what do they do? How does a PC increase their amount? The most obvious is to get a skill create and sell or trade. However, if you spend your money like I do in real life and save as bad as I do in real life why would the MMO be any different? What then? Well have banks/loan sharks so that as a player you can borrow with interest and have to go into debt, payments have to be made each month on that loan and if it is not paid back you have a warrant and or a bounty (just created a job) within the market. You could work for the government or an underground “mob” whom you owe money too. You could work as a law man who collects bounties on warrants or you could work for the underground and collect bounties as well (more on this later as well).

Government – this could be started out as NPC banks, but because it is a free market anyone can start a bank to loan money. There would be a market involved and trades and services that are created within the market fluctuate as any economy would.

There would also be an underground to this, mob boss, legions of underworlds clans and factions of their own would come into play here. In other words think about the Hatfield’s & the McCoy’s where a feuding family is in hatred of the other. With this underground can rise to glory or fall to grace.  The closest MMO that I know of that had this type of system in place was Eve Online.

So how do you hold others accountable and pay off their debts? Slavery, Death, and even freezing of credits as an example. You could then even have slicers or hackers that will have the ability to exploit credits within the game or a way to unfreeze (for a price of course). I think the ideas are unlimited. Government Vs Free World – Underground against Free World & Government.Player Housing and trades that create them. Although I may get some major slack for this because everyone who already plays MMO’s were somewhat disappointed in how Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) turned out, but I am here to tell you the original release on how it was put together with the Crafting and Engineering side was brilliant.The process was this – My character eventually was made to be a Master Architect – and in order to achieve making in game items such as houses, factories, harvesters, etc you had to first survey the land with a surveying tool and find out what types of resources were available on the planet(s) that you were surveying, but it would only survey the area you were at. Once you found the spot(s) where that had the resource you were needing you then would place a harvester to get minerals, but not too fast, you had to get power to power the harvesters and in order to this you had to use generators – wind, diesel, or radioactive type power was required to run the harvesters. You then took the power from the generators (which you had to keep up with maintenance using credits) and put that power into the harvester(s) to get the minerals you want (which you had to keep up with maintenance using credits). Every 7 days the resources would shift and you would again survey re-set rinse & repeat. This was so much fun; I mean I made so much money in-game doing this. Because with these resources I could craft all types of things and sell them in my vendor that was in my own house (which also fixes the too much stuff not enough room problem).Another great feature SWG had was Payer Cities. You could be Mayor voted by the township. Although this had many loop holes it just made more for an opportunity to be player driven. Instead of cookie cutting and the game is created as the devs intended instead of allowing the users to modify and change the outcome.

Make Hardcore servers, I know that WOW and other various MMO’s have PVP servers, but they are not really hardcore they are just PVP. The Player Vs Player (PVP) system in just about every MMO never has been that good. I know the argument would be that the PVP arenas are the answer and although they do work and have their place that is not a Hardcore approach. That is great for role playing and casual playing, which has its place. However, I want to see an MMO that really embraces the factions and hate for the different factions is prevalent. In WOW the Horde and Alliance are suppose to loath each other – that is the point right, so unless you flag yourself for PVP nothing happens & in a hardcore environment this needs to be played as such. Yes, you may die a lot, but you may also win as well, a chance to show mercy or none at all.  This brings up my point again about player bounties, if someone is constantly Ganking you, you can place a bounty on their head as well. Seek out the underground or the law, just brings in more aspects to hopefully avoid this type of behavior (Ganking Behavior).

Transportation – I hate that when you first get into the game to get transportation you have to wait for a certain level – it should become available as soon as it becomes affordable. Weather it is player created crafted by players or from the “Government” it should be available immediately, what sense does it make that you are level 40 for example and you just now are able to get around faster, instead of walking or running around. This just does not make sense to me. I can kill an Elephant or Crocodile and/or even a Droid that was this major boss but I have to walk home to tell someone about it.

This is not by all means the best way but it is a way that I think would make it more fun and less likely to become a grind. MMO’s seem to all be the same, why is WOW successful? I am not 100% sure, but I do know that they figured it out and pay’ed attention to the little things. I was a WOW  player but truly never like it all that much it was OK, not bad just OK. My hope and dream is that Bioware is coming out with a new Star Wars MMORPG which I am so looking forward too “The Knights of the Old Republic,” and I hope some of these things that I have mentioned above are looked at, I do not claim to have the end all answers but I have been playing MMO’s for a long time and there are just a few missing elements that I hope are looked at. I am tired of the same – let’s hope they make the next best thing not the same thing different name.

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I am highly anticipating this game there is not even a “Beta” release date yet, but this is hopefully a great MMO.

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See it made here..

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Well, it’s almost certainly not a signal that Apple is opening the door to emulators of all sorts on the iPhone, but the newly (and finally) approved Commodore 64 emulator is still a fairly notable first for the platform — representing not only the first officially-available emulator, but perhaps the first app that actually runs code (even if it is a couple of decades old). In this case, that first bit apparently wasn’t too big a point of contention for Apple, considering that the app had all the necessary licensing rights lined up, but the second issue was, and ran right up against a clause in the iPhone 2.0 SDK that prevented apps from containing their own executable runtimes. As it happens, the key to bridging that divide around that was none other than iPhone 3.0, which contains a new feature for in-app purchases that the C64 emulator will take advantage of to let folks purchase additional games, rather than load arbitrary game code downloads. Interestingly, while this newly-approved version of the emulator also no longer exposes a BASIC interpreter, Manomio has added a note to the app that it “should be resolved in a future update,” although it’s not quite clear if that’s just wishful thinking or not. In the meantime, you can grab the app right now with five bundled games for $4.99.

Found on Engadget…

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