black holes are fun

I've logged quite a lot of time into SPORE by now and despite some less than favorable response to the game, I still think it is amazing! Here's a video I made of traveling through a black hole, an important mode of covering distance in the ridiculously huge galaxy.

electronic arts lets go of take two

After 8 months of talk, Electronic Arts has withdrawn its $2 billion hostile takeover bid for Take-Two Interactive. EA says they ended the bid when it became clear that it was going nowhere fast in time for the upcoming holiday season.

Take-Two has said that the $2 billion price undervalued its shares and long-term potential.

“What was presented to shareholders was not acceptable,” Strauss Zelnick, chairman of Take-Two, said Sunday.

The deal would have combined one of the industry’s largest companies, Electronic Arts, with arguably the biggest game franchise, Grand Theft Auto, which is published by Take-Two.

Electronic Arts Ends Bid for Take-Two Interactive

how scary is the joker in arkham asylum?

Most of the time when a movie (especially a blockbuster) has a companion video game, it seems like the game is pretty much just the movie except broken into actions and decisions to make. Sometimes they can be great - I enjoyed the Harry Potter game for the Wii, though I had the good sense to just rent it - but often they are rushed to market, shallow, and boring. That's why I think it's super cool that following the huge success of The Dark Knight, we're going to see a game that references back to the original comic stories in Batman: Arkham Asylum. The new movie was a fun and scary shift from the Batman films of the 90's and this game looks like a similar appreciation of the dark original storylines. I love the idea of the Joker on a Lecter-style hand guerney at the asylum. I'm sure we'll end up buying this game when it comes out.

we're a 2 system household now

My boyfriend was in a slump yesterday and finally broke out of it by deciding to treat himself to the XBox360 he's been sweating for awhile! He picked up Mass Effect and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and traded in his Wii Madden NFL 09, which he finally declared himself sick of. I still can't believe how huge the 360 is... I guess I have just gotten used to the very petite Wii, and the XBox totally dwarfs the Wii. The wireless controllers are very cool though... I would have loved to try out such a thing on the ol' GameCube but am really more inclined now towards wasting more money on Wii games.

Maybe I will have to try out Braid sometime now that I've got the option right at home.

sims 3 videos online

One of the best resources out there for Sims stuff, Snooty Sims, has compiled all the current Sims 3 preview movies onto one page, including a foreign one that doesn't seem to have been widely released yet. Check them out: Sims 3 preview movies. A lot of Sims sites out there have a good range of custom content, cheat codes, and discussion; Snooty tops them all for a wealth of Sims information probably more expansive than anything EA or the Prima Guides have ever offered. Above left: Sims 3 will revolutionize body type, a great improvement on the current Fit-Fat-Pregnant spectrum available.

cool game commercial

I'm not big into fighting/shooting/blowing-stuff-up types of games - for example, I generally preferred to peek out from under a blanket cowering in fear when watching my boyfriend play through Resident Evil 4. Still, every time I see this commercial for Mercenaries 2: World in Flames featuring its insanely catchy theme song, it almost is enough to make me want to try the game :D Almost.

studies show: cheap is a good thing

I feel a little like a snobby gamer when I brag that the Wii was a mere $250 and the games are typically $40 and under, $50 for a brand-new release. Really though, all I am is low on expendable income. Seems like more game companies are targeting those like me out there with limited bank and (less like me) limited time to engage in button-mashing and eyes-glazed-over gaming. The New York Times features a small piece on the latest installment of the Ratchet & Clank series for PlayStation 3, "Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty". This title is different because it is exclusively downloadable for the PS3, and it only costs $15. What makes R&CF:QfB stand out from most cheap downloadable console games? This one utilizes the engine already designed for the full-size physically purchasable games so that this downloadable title, which only takes 3 or 4 hours to complete, looks, sounds and plays very similarly to its extremely popular already existing titles.

"Booty succeeds because its developer, Insomniac Games, has been able to employ the artistic and technical resources it built to support its major retail releases to cook up the piquant, juicy little nugget of gaming that is Booty. As Ratchet, our furry wrench-wielding hero, battles goofy interstellar pirates in search of his lost robot friend, Clank, the lagoons and caverns he traverses look, if anything, better than the environments in Tools of Destruction.

And you’ll still be able to afford a decent dinner."

Download the Game, Then Keep the Change

SPORE video

Well my last post was about SPORE and since then I have played quite a lot of it (and so has my boyfriend, we have never been such computer nerds before, I swear!). It is truly a great game and it seems like the years of development that went into it paid off. It's very complete, intuitive yet challenging, and really cute and fun. I made an herbivorous creature that ended up sort of centaur-like, that proceeded to convert everyone else to its religion before blasting off to space. I made a video (my first non-Sims movie) from some clips I took of the creature's "spirit" in the Civilization level converting towns on the continent through religious persuasion.


My boyfriend's game looks very different - his creature from the beginning was pure evil, running around slaughtering all the other innocent tribes and developing into a horrifying fly monster looking thing. Now that he is in the later stages his goals are all about the military, rather than religious like mine has become because I don't like to kill other creatures. You can also end up with an economic focused game I think if you start out omnivorous. I plan on starting a new world fairly soon and making more craaaazy creatures!

nytimes puts the spotlight on SPORE

This game is gonna be yooge... very interesting article in the NY times:

“You’re just attacking them?” he asks as Dr. Near tries to eat a fat purple worm that looks too dangerous to bother.

“If you kill them, you unlock their parts,” Dr. Near explains. But then the purple worm sticks its syringelike mouth into Dr. Near’s beast and begins to drain its innards. “Uh-oh, I’m about to die,” he says. The screen fades to black.

The next time, Dr. Near’s luck changes. He gains enough points to move to the next level of the game. His creature grows a brain. “Oh man, it’s like I graduated college,” he says. Dr. Near can now alter his creature. He stretches the body to give it a neck. He adds a pair of kangaroolike legs.

His creature — or, rather, a swarm of his creatures — charge out of the ocean and onto land. Dr. Near pushes back the laptop as his creatures find a place to make their nest and lay eggs. “So that’s pretty cool,” he says with a grin not often seen on a professor.

New Computer Game Spore Takes Cues from Evolutionary Biology