Choose your side in the Transformers DS games and fight on the Web
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Movie tie-in games tend to suck. Hope springs eternal, though, and the allure of giant transforming robots is keeping me at least a little bit hopeful for the Transformers games.
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Imagine the simple queries that separate you from your online bank accounts forming the basis of a nightmarish game show. Let the interrogations begin! Commentary by Lore Sj&#246;berg.
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Transformers donât care about people, period. That's what I learned growing up in the 1980s, religiously watching a race of robot Titans from outer space wage a secret war on Earth.
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Tycho:   The foe revealed, Armadeaddon is now almost complete.  Monday will see the promised epilogue, so at this point you have very nearly survived the ordeal.  We have endeavored these past weeks to reward the true "enthusiast," that man or woman who, brow heavy, has faced such cruel abuse at our hand for the last seven years.  It is apparently our policy to honor such dedication one every decade.    Since it was announced a couple days ago, the revelation that MS would be actively courting the hardcore boardgame player is something I've thought about almost constantly.  It may be that you weren't aware there was such a thing as a hardcore player of boardgames if your last experience with the context was playing Sorry! with your sister when you were eight.  Things have progressed.   There's a million experiences in this space I could use to lure you in, but one company in particular - Days of Wonder has already decided to make electronic variants of their tabletop crack, so they occupy a twilight space between the worlds.  I hope they see an opportunity to take their (already completed!) games over to the 360, or that Microsoft offers them a locked case containing an unspecified amount of untraceable U.S. Currency, because I'd love to see this prescient move by MS turn into a new era.   Days of Wonder makes a game called Shadows Over Camelot that could quickly become a dangerous obsession, obscuring biological realities with a single-minded focus on grails.  Well, grail I guess.  There's just the one.    But it's a completely cooperative boardgame, so every player is working toward the same goals - fighting back invasions, questing, all of it.  Except there might be a traitor in the group, determined by a hidden draw, who tries to derail the effort.  He's not always there, but the potentiality of that nefarious force can create unbelievable social tension.    The gaming table's fixed coordinate in space is its asset and its obstacle - managing space and time is actually the primary challenge of any gaming group, as opposed to banishing necromancers, though that also ranks up there.  Boardgames are so rich in design that, when one of these gets dropped in front of them on Live, I think many gamers will be shocked at their sophistication.    My thumbs hurt.  (CW)TB out.
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"War" is a well-known and well-worn term in the tech industry. Witness the browser wars in which Microsoft and Mozilla vie for control over how you view the Web. The gaming wars refer to the three-way fight between Microsoft (a frequent combatant), Nintendo, and Sony, each of which sells a next-gen gaming console that flew off the shelves in the shopping frenzy of the 2006 holiday season.
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When it comes to power games, some in Hollywood are beginning to learn a basic lesson of digital politics: the Internet plays rough.
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The first video game to mimic a presidential election
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A producerâs online forum became a destination for Transformers fans to vent frustration with a filmâs production executives.
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Tycho:  Stop whatever you're doing right now and watch this video - offered in HD for Windows Media or Quicktime.  That's Level 5's White Knight Story, and I must stress for readers that Level 5 is in no way fucking around.  That's how you sell us a Goddamn Playstation 3.  We are almost impervious to many of the brands that define Sony's hardware:  for us, Metal Gear Solid and Gran Turismo emit no will crushing pheromones.  Compare that to the White Knight clip, which is a fairly comprehensive tour of my private desires.
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Gabe: Wired has a pretty big article about Penny Arcade in it's latest issue. We've done a lot of interviews but Wired actually sent a writer named Chris Baker out to spend a few days in our office. Sort of like a geek version of Jane Goodall, He hung out with us all day and took notes while we played games and made the comic. Chris interviewed everyone here and even found time to question our wives and friends. Living with us the way he did I think he managed to get some pretty candid stuff out of Tycho and I. Things we might never have divulged during a standard interview. By the end of the week I think we all considered Chris a friend and a valuable addition to any Halo 3 team. The resulting article is a pretty complete look at our little company here as well as the most honest interview I think anyone's ever managed to get out of us. If you're interested you can read it online right here.   -Gabe out
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Tycho:  To fully communicate Lair, you really to need a video component - and the review over at Gametrailers really sets things straight.  The abrupt storytelling, technical stumbles, and strange behavior are all much better delivered by the game itself than by my hyperbole.       (CW)TB
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Sims, FPS, MMOs...and now Xbox 360 controllers for war-bots The convergence between videogaming and real-world warfare (at least, war as seen from a Western perspective) continues to advance.â¦
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Interlink Electronics sues the game company, saying Wii's remote infringes on a patent for a "trigger operated electronic device." Plus: Homebrewers
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Tycho:  When I started reading articles about Senator Brownback's bill - the one that would require that the ESRB play through games in their entirety - I expected to agree with it in principle, but take issue with its execution.  The shrill phase of the site, where I would don armor and ride under the aegis of the true gamer no matter how mild the incentive, now rests in the reliquary with Xbox Controller Jokes and Jabs At User Friendly.  I had chosen a singularly poor moment to become reasonable.  Upon further examination, the Senator's plan (which I think may be rightly called a machination) is the sort of thing one might forge in the fires of Mount Doom.
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Tycho:  Kotaku carried a story yesterday that is (basically) the Nintendo DS version of that Playstation Pornable scare from six months ago.  You can see it here, and you should, because it's awesome.  It depicts a scenario so imaginative that it juts into the realm of speculative fiction:
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You have a motorcycle, you're besieged by demons, your head is on fire. How could a video-game maker botch a winning formula like that? By Lore SjÃ¶berg.
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Tycho:  Ever since I closed the lid of my DS, sealing the Pokemon within and stunting their development, I have been expelled from polite society.  I think Gabriel might have imagined that we would engage in furious battles during Recess, out on the Big Toy, until the bell rang for lunch.  For a time, I hoped to take on a coaching role for other players, wise with my years (or perhaps weeks) of Pokemon husbandry - but Gabriel exclaimed that "a Pokemon trainer's strength comes from within," which I assume means not from me.  Through some strange reversal of polarity, I am being ostracized for not befriending electric mice.  It is a world dipped - perhaps even double dipped - in madness.