wbr1 writes “Electronista reports that Sony, Nintendo, and Electronic Arts have all pulled their support for SOPA, but have not issued any statements as to why. The house.gov list of SOPA supporters is here.”
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hypnosec writes “The UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) has begun updating its Battlespace2 and other simulations to bring them in line with commercial wargames like Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3. Andrew Poulter heads up the technical team behind the war-game and said that while back in the ’80s and ’90s, military simulations were state of the art, today they have fallen far behind commercial alternatives in terms of graphics and plot. With that in mind, the MoD has been investing heavily in what’s known as ‘Project Kite’ (knowledge information test environment), designed to bring the training software to the forefront of military shooters. Some of this is down to the current generation of new recruits having been raised on shooter titles from both the Call of Duty and Battlefield series. This means they’ve gotten used to high-quality first-person shooter games. Taking a step down in graphics and immersion is hardly a way to train a soldier how to react in certain situations.”
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First time accepted submitter nzyank writes “The other day I bravely (foolishly?) volunteered to conduct a video game development workshop at my boys’ HS. This in Smallsville, Vermont with an average graduating class size of about 20. The idea is to meet once a week and actually create a game, start to finish. It will be open to would-be programmers, designers, artists, etc. I worked on a bunch of AAA titles back in the ’90s, but I’m pretty much out of touch nowadays and I’m trying to figure out the best approach. The requirements are that it has to be one of either Windows/XBox or Android, since those are the platforms that I am current on. It has to be relatively simple for the kids to get up and running quickly, and it needs to be as close to free as possible. Teaching them to use stuff like Blender, C#, C++, Java, XNA, OpenGL and the Android SDK is probably a bit much. I was thinking of something like the Torque Engine, but they want $1000 for an academic license, which is never going to happen. I simply don’t know what’s out there nowadays and could really use some suggestions.”
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theodp writes “In the world of virtual goods, reports GeekWire’s Todd Bishop, it looks like there’s no such thing as a Second Amendment. According to a forum post by an Epic Games community manager, a new policy will remove ‘gun-like’ items from Microsoft’s Xbox Live Avatar Marketplace on January 1. The policy reportedly applies to accessories for the avatars that represent Xbox Live users, not to games themselves, and owners of virtual weaponry like the Gears of War 3 Avatar Lancer purchased before the policy goes into effect will be permitted to continue to wield them.”
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Freddybear writes “A study of online gamers in the Steam community finds that those who are friends with cheaters are more likely to begin cheating themselves. From the article: ‘First up, cheats stick together. The data shows that cheaters are much more likely to be friends with other cheaters. Cheating also appears to be infectious. The likelihood of a fair player becoming labelled as a cheater in future is directly correlated with this person’s number of friends who are cheaters. So if you know cheaters, you are more likely to become one yourself. Cheating spreads like flu through this community. Finally, being labelled as a cheat seems to significantly affect social standing. Once a person is labelled as a cheat, they tend to lose friends. Some even cut themselves off from friends by increasing their privacy settings.’”
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What’s hotter than watching a cute princess kiss a fat, middle-aged plumber? Well, anything really, but given the headline above, the answer should be obvious: watching a cute princess kiss another cute princess. It’s sexy, it’s vaguely taboo and it’s pleasantly devoid of bristling mustaches and lingering sewage odors.
It’s much more common to see girl-on-girl kisses in other media, but it happens in games more often than you’d think. To prove it to you, we’ve collected the very best ones and ranked them in ascending order of hotness. Still don’t believe us after reading the article? Then hit play below and load up “Top 7 Girls kissing girls” to see them all in motion. (Warning: definitely not safe for work, and full of spoilers to boot.)
donniebaseball23 writes “Amazon’s entry into the tablets market has gone probably even better than they expected. And now the Kindle Fire is quickly becoming a viable games platform. Developers have come out in force to lavish praise on the Fire for its price and ease of use. ‘People are fired up about Fire because they know it’s part of a service they already use and trust,’ said Josh Tsui, president of Robomodo. ‘It becomes effortless to buy and use because it does not make them break their usual buying patterns. It enhances it.’ Added Igor Pusenjak, president of Lima Sky: ‘In many ways, the best thing about Fire is that you barely feel it’s an Android device. Amazon built its own closed-system OS on top of Android.’”
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New submitter Etrahkad writes “Trion Worlds, publisher of MMORPG Rift, has announced that somebody broke into one of their databases and gained access to user information. First Sony and now Rift… my identity has probably been stolen several times over, now. From the e-mail: ‘We recently discovered that unauthorized intruders gained access to a Trion Worlds account database. The database in question contained information including user names, encrypted passwords, dates of birth, email addresses, billing addresses, and the first and last four digits and expiration dates of customer credit cards. … there is no evidence, and we have no reason to believe, that full credit card information was accessed or compromised in any way.” Are game companies not concerned with preventing these attacks?”
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MojoKid writes “Rumors of AMD’s Southern Island family of graphics processors have circulated for some time, though today AMD is officially announcing their latest flagship single-GPU graphics card, the Radeon HD 7970. AMD’s new Tahiti GPU is outfitted with 2,048 stream processors with a 925MHz engine clock, featuring AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture, paired to 3GB of GDDR5 memory connected over a 384-bit wide memory bus. And yes, it’s crazy fast as you’d expect and supports DX11.1 rendering. In the benchmarks, the new Radeon HD 7970 bests NVIDIA’s fastest single GPU GeForce GTX 580 card by a comfortable margin of 15 — 20 percent and can even approach some dual GPU configurations in certain tests.” PC Perspective has a similarly positive writeup. There are people who will pay $549 for a video card, and others who are just glad that the technology drags along the low-end offerings, too.
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Ian Bogost is a professor of game theory at Georgia Tech, a game designer, a prolific writer, an entrepreneur, and a bit of a prankster. These roles which sometimes overlap, notably in his surprise success satirical Facebook game Cow Clicker, which you can think of as the Anti-Zynga. Wired has a fresh article up about Bogost (which cleverly embeds a sort of micro version of Cow Clicker). It also mentions another game — my favorite of his projects — that should be on the mind of every TSA employee, the 2009 release Jetset. Ask Ian about clicking cows, being an academic provocateur as well as a participant in the world of gaming, and breaking into the world of social gaming. (Please break unrelated questions into multiple comments.)
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