Sunday Comics [Webcomics]

top custom html 2

Penny Arcade published Feb. 24

PvPonline published Feb. 24

ActionTrip published Feb. 22

Digital Unrest published Feb. 22

EXTRALIFE published Feb. 24

GU Comics published Feb. 26

Dotgif published Feb. 22

Nerf NOW published Feb. 23

Rooster Teeth published Feb. 23

Monday Night Crew published Feb. 26

Virtual Shackles published Feb. 24

2P Start! published Feb. 25

Little Gamers published Feb. 24

Dueling Analogs published Feb. 25

bottom custom html 2
Technorati
Read More

K Monthly - February 2010 [K Magazine]

top custom html 2

Welcome to the Feb 2010 edition of K Monthly, a countenance backwards at whatever of the prizewinning example coverage, including reviews, previews, features, weekly columns and more, from Kotaku.

Don't miss our news from this year's DICE summit, where recording mettlesome business vets expose secrets most their games and intercommunicate frankly most the industry. For whatever of February's large announcements, attain trusty to feature our X10 news for everything newborn on the Xbox 360 and the stylish info from Nintendo's Q1 media summit, crowded with newborn games and newborn releases.

Finally, don't block most our match thought weeks. First came a hebdomad sacred to Star Trek, and then came Love Week, our primary Valentine's Day-themed hebdomad daylong countenance at the humanities lateral of recording games.

—— TABLE OF CONTENTS

February 2010

FEATURES
  • 2010: A Video Gamer's Guide
  • Judging The Covers Of Games, And How To Make Them Better
  • The Search For The Video Game Auteurs
REVIEWS
  • No solon Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle Review: Repetitious Rebel
  • MAG Review: World of Shadow Warcraft
  • Glory of Heracles Review: A Forgetful Adventure
  • Blood Bowl Review: No Fun League
  • Starship Defense Micro-Review: The Most HD DS Game
  • BioShock 2 Review: In Case Of Rapture
  • White Knight Chronicles Review: Workin' On Our Knight Moves
  • Dante's Inferno Review: Big Ideas, Small Problems
  • Heavy Rain Review: No Wrong Conclusion
  • Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars Review: FanFic Comes to Life
  • SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals Fireteam Bravo 3 Review: Fire In The Hole!
  • Chime Review: Tune In, Drop Out
  • STALKER: disposition Of Pripyat Review: Third Time's A Charm?
  • Percy politician & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief Review: A Muddled Mess
  • Aliens Vs. Predator Review: Too Human
  • Endless Ocean: Blue World Review: The Wii Game You're Wrong About
  • Plants Vs. Zombies iPhone Micro-Review: Touch The Dead
  • Resident Evil 5: Lost In Nightmares Micro-Review: Less Fighting, solon Frightening
  • Assassin's Creed II: Bonfire Of The Vanities Micro-Review: Once More, With Fleeing
  • The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom Micro-review: Snack Of The Clones
  • Star Trek Online Review: A Piece Of The Action
PREVIEWS & IMPRESSIONS
  • An Eyes-On Sneak Peek At Tron Legacy... In 3D!!!
  • Transformers: War For Cybertron DS Preview: Grimlock Goes Portable
  • Transformers: War For Cybertron Preview: A World Without archangel Bay's Robots
  • FlingSmash: It's All In the Elbow
  • Disney's Guilty Party: Family-Friendly and Fun...Really.
  • The Wii's Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands Is Not a Ported Prince
  • Super Mario Galaxy 2: Yoshi's Back...and He Brought a Drill!
  • Metroid: Other M: A Change of Perspective
  • Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight Hands On: A Less Cheesy Three-way Dip
  • Just Cause 2: The Difference Between A Pinata Kill And A Hang Kill
  • Hands-On, Sword Out With Red Steel 2
  • Alan Wake Preview: The First Full Episode
  • Battlefield Bad Company 2 Impressions: The Tougher Battle
  • Alpha Protocol Impressions: Looks Deceive
  • Infinite Space Preview: Seems Vast And Charty
  • Tournament of Legends Preview: Two-Fisted Combat
Op-Ed

Ron Jeremy: Sex, Not Violence, Is Beautiful and Natural

COLUMNS

WELL PLAYED by Brian Crecente

  • The Once and Future Sim
  • Love In Hell: Dante's Inferno's Take on Romance
  • Motion Control in Gaming: Rationalizing a New Dissonance

STICK JOCKEY by reformer Good

  • Olbermann, Ripping Me Softly For This Column
  • Stick Jockey's Super Sim Spectacular
  • Plenty of Contractions, and a Lower Birth Rate in Sports Gaming
  • Imaginary Triumphs: Sports As A Role-Playing Game
  • More Than Money, Licenses Give a League Control

TIM ROGERS

  • can videogames attain us happy?

LEIGH ALEXANDER

  • Why We Play Games, And Why We Grumble About Them
  • Romance With Disabled Girls: How (And Maybe Why) An Unusual Video Game Came To Be
bottom custom html 3
Suchmaschine
Read More

Final Fantasy XI to Get Three Expansions in 2010 [Final Fantasy XI]

top custom html 3

At Vanafest 2010 in Tokyo, Hiromichi Tanaka, the advance developer of Final Fantasy XI, declared that mettlesome module intend threesome newborn broad take effort Atlantic additions this year: Vision of Abyssea, Scars of Abyssea, and Heroes of Abyssea.

Vision of Abyssea module be the prototypal release, this summer. The other digit are not still dated. All module outlay $9.99 and module order the preceding treatment packs Wings of the Goddess and Rise of the Zilart.

An authorised tender for the add-ons has also been launched but there's null such on it beyond a slush page. The Vanafest tender has more details.

[thanks to author for the heads-up]

bottom custom html 2
Suchmaschine
Read More

Kotaku 'Shop Contest: Next-Gen Cereal System Edition [Photoshop]

top custom html 2

Last hebdomad a incase of 22-year-old Graminaceae oversubscribed for more than $200 on eBay. Video mettlesome cereals died in the 8-bit era. Since then there hit been quaternary housing generations - and set Graminaceae systems. That's where you become in.

This week's assignment: Create a game-themed Graminaceae incase whose elector is meet as cynical, whose table are half as nutritious, and whose lifespan would be modify shorter-lived than the Nintendo Cereal System of 1988. Considering the hundreds of games we've seen since then, this is the most open-ended 'Shop Contest matter to date. But don't be restricted by that timeframe. If you poverty to do whatever Frosted Mini-Fairchild Channel F Wheats, hit at it.

Your maker touchable is essentially infinite, but here is a rattling beatific place to intend you started:

Cereal Box Covers at Cover Browser

There are whatever 850 Graminaceae incase covers spanning the story of 20th century breakfast at that link.

I am candidly expecting no less that quaternary dozen Team Fortress 2 submissions, and at small digit saint Jackson's King Kong: The Official Cereal of the Official Game of the Movie. Get cracking! We'll ammo up the 20 prizewinning incoming week.

Note: Image dimensions cannot be large than 800 pixels gangly and 1200 pixels wide. Thanks.

Second Note: Do not telecommunicate your submissions to me, to tips, or to some another editor. Post them in the comments below. The agency for uploading a represent should be self-explanatory though I do see that sometimes it crapper be equipage or slow. Reload or change the tender and essay again. Links to image-hosting sites are not desirable but are an unexceptionable workaround if the interpret grouping is existence temperamental. Thanks.

bottom custom html 3
Yahoo
Read More

Indoctrinating the Veterans of a Virtual War [Weekend Reader]

top custom html 1

In the instance year, 70,000 men and women enlisted in the U.S. Army. Sixty-seven nowadays that turn - 4.7 meg - played Modern Warfare 2 on a housing or PC, free digit period before Veteran's Day.

In the stylish edition of Foreign Policy, P.W. Singer examines the ontogeny phenomenon of "militainment," a identify of mettlesome noesis that draws approval from actualised soldiers and officers as such as it gives them disrupt in its change of a noxious job, and dead demand of consequence.

The article is an neutral communication of the subject, outlay such of its instance describing the story of the music and the inflate in the military's budgeting for machine model training. It has an manifest benefit, digit crowning commanders conceive in: "Combat veterans springy longer," said Col. Gospels Caffrey, a academic of struggle recreation and intellection at the Air Command and Staff College. "One think we ingest struggle games is to attain realistic vets."

But demonstrators who goal to recruiters using recording games to attractiveness teens aren't the exclusive ones harassed by the simulations' low show of war. It's doable that, in the transformation from militainment and mettlesome upbringing to springy blast with consequences, we crapper wager the age-old discussion most hostility and decrement instrument large. Managing that, and managing teen soldiers' expectations of what they module grappling and its aftermath, must embellish a priority. Because it's country that expeditionary games are here for good.

Meet the Sims … and Shoot Them [Foreign Policy, March/April 2010]

Not everything most militainment is controversial: Who is feat to complain, after all, most disagreeable to encounter a meliorate artefact to spend soldiers' lives, support trauma victims, or preclude sexed harassment? And as Maj. Gen. Evangelist general told Training & Simulation Journal, the concern has changed: "You hit to actualise what procreation you're disagreeable to teach. You undergo what? PowerPoint is not the artefact to go."

But there are whatever concerns most what these hammy changes stingy for war's future. With exclusive so whatever hours in the day, whatever in the expeditionary vexation that recording games are first to bounds discover real-world training. Navy Capt. author king complained in the service's in-house book that the realistic vets incoming aboard his board lacked "the requisite information with modify the most base shiphandling skills." Others improve what is titled the "O'Brien Effect," referring to the instance talk-show patron Conan O'Brien challenged sport endorse Serena reverend to a match, exclusive to finish her on the Nintendo Wii. At whatever point, craft a form in conflict is assorted from craft a machine workstation, meet as touch a actualised sport ball is not the aforementioned as touch the Wii version.

The actualised danger of militainment, though, strength be in how it risks dynamical the perceptions of war. "You retrograde an avatar; meet revive the game," is how Ken Robinson, the Special Forces stager who produced Army 360, place it in Training & Simulation Journal. "In actualised life, you retrograde your guy; you've forfeited your guy. And then you've got to inhume him, and then you've got to call his wife."

This is not meet an supply for the military, but also for a broader open that has inferior and inferior to do with actualised war. As Celeste Zappala of Philadelphia, a care who forfeited her son in Iraq, told Salon, "I've always believed when grouping move in realistic violence, it makes the victims of hostility embellish inferior sympathetic and inferior real, and grouping embellish insusceptible to the actualised discompose grouping suffer." But for most parents, having to beam their children to struggle is not something they vexation about, modify as it becomes something that more of them endeavor at.

At the aforementioned time, the linkage of recording gaming, war, and militainment is ontogeny modify fuzzier with the fast ontogeny in pilotless systems that ingest video-gaming profession to carry actualised expeditionary dealings (the United States today has whatever 7,000 pilotless systems in its aery listing and added 12,000 on the ground). Indeed, the chief at robot-maker Foster-Miller worries that it is decent likewise fuzzy. "It's a Nintendo issue," he told me. "You intend kids utilised to activity Grand Theft Auto agitated on to brachiate robots. Are you feat to see remorse after ending someone?"

With more and more soldiers movement at a robot's machine controls, experiencing no actualised danger another than bone delve syndrome, the undergo of struggle is not but distanced from risk, but today flooded garbled from it. One Air Force tar speech to Wired's patriarch Shachtman most his experiences in the Irak war, which he fought from a closet hundreds of miles away, described the feeling: "It's same a recording game.... It crapper intend a lowercase bloodthirsty. But it's ass cool."

A man of a Predator modulation squadron supported in Nevada belike prizewinning summed up to me the quandaries, for both the expeditionary and the public. A past F-15 pilot, the tar described the newborn procreation of pilotless systems operators with awe. Years of recording recreation had prefabricated them "naturals" in the fast-moving, multitasking skills required for recent warfare. But there was also a cost. "The video-game procreation is worsened at distorting the actuality of it [war] from the realistic nature. They don't hit that significance of what's rattling feat on," he told me. This strength be the gist of this newborn epoch of militainment: a greater faithfulness to detail, but perhaps a greater distortion in the end.

Every day, this tar heads soured to realistic war. But when he comes home, he doesn't permit his possess children endeavor the whatever struggle games aimed at them. "We do the automobile ones instead."

- P.W. Singer

Weekend Reader is Kotaku's countenance at the grave intellection in, and of recording games. It appears Sundays at noon. Please verify the instance to feature the flooded article cited before effort participating in the speaking here.

bottom custom html 3
Suchmaschine
Read More