Review: 'Sid Meier's Pirates!'
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Shiver me timbers! Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum! Pirates, those blights of the high seas, have been ingrained on our consciousness in such broad ways.
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Over the years, George Lucas shares his grand vision for the space opera. Plus: photo galleries, game reviews and other great stuff from the archives.
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In which our intrepid gaming reviewer recounts space marauders, evil warlords and ancient zombies that have left the biggest impression on him -- and invites you to weigh in with your bad guys.
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Jeffrey Katzenberg believes in his company's franchises -- and the HD-DVD format.
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By Lore Croghan, Daily News, New York  Sep. 13--Now playing at an iPod near you: "Pirates of the Caribbean" and  more than 75 other Disney movies.
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Tycho:  Having played collectible card games since the original printing of Magic - taking my dishwasher's tips across the street to Dragon Tails to secure boosters for the coveted Arabian Nights - seeing Gabriel take up the pastime has warmed (but not thawed) my black heart.  It's always a portion of myself I've bridled in his presence, kept hidden, suppressed may be the word.  To have him take it up so freely makes me wonder which perversion of mine he'll take up next.    When he started talking about his "Firestarter" deck, whose dancing fires were stoked by a mysterious device known as "The Holon Engine," I began to worry.  The dangers of Netdecking are fairly substantial when it comes to friendly play, a corrosive force that turns friendly pick-up games into ostentatious displays of wealth on par with rap videos.  If you're playing in a competitive venue, building on prior art and making loads of precision purchases is probably your only recourse.  But if you're just playing at lunch, let me be clear:  you are consorting with devils.    I took time over the weekend to hit the level cap in Call of Duty 4, and then just to be sure that I understood what was going on I played for several more hours.  I'm not the most skilled player you will encounter, with a roughly equal number of kills and deaths, but I prefer to think of my work in an assassinative context - the removal of key players at key moments.  Please let me have this.  In the absence of the game's deeply integrated progression scheme, Infinity Ward would merely have created one of the best shooters available today.  It would have staunch proponents, and they would be right to praise it.  Is there a substance within cream that can rise to the top of itself?  This substance has been discovered.  As a distillation of the Infantry FPS, this is right down to it.  This is brutal, unrepentant, bathtub fucking hooch.  It is tight and smooth, it is lethal.  Unrelenting in its intensity, your first rounds - indeed, your first few levels - will be spent without the succor of CoD4's rich rewards for continued play.  But you'll see them on the killcam, every time you go down:  this one has increased health, of course that would help.  This one does more damage.  This one, after he's killed, pulls his sidearm and takes a few final shots.  This one's shots retain more of their damage after they pass through a wall.        You earn these for leveling up, with the experience you gain for every kill, for every round.  You also earn experience for Challenges, which are (collectively) "awesome things that you did."  I completed X-Ray challenges last night for killing people behind walls, which dished up bonus XP - this is displayed with exultant audio and video cues at the very moment of success.  Killing while crouched, killing while prone, taking down an enemy helicopter, this is all gravy.  There are challenges specific to your weapon, as well:  for kills and headshots with that firearm, you travel down an upgrade path unique to that weapon that reveals sights, camouflage patterns, and other tools to customize your equipment.    Watching videos of multiplayer play online, you'll get the impression that it looks better than it does.  It looks fantastic, don't get me wrong, but it's not completely photorealistic.  What it does have is an extremely reliable framerate and excellent level design, so that during the experience of play these fantastic visuals are transmuted into something sublime.  Here's what I mean:  if a friend is over, and they are watching you play, they'll be able to detect flaws here and there.  Level geometry isn't especially fanciful, and blown paper or leaves look a little strange.  But for the player, movement is just right, player models are just right, and the environments are right so that moment to moment everything gels.      As I said on Friday, to bring this thing into the house of Halo is pretty ballsy - but it'll carve out its proper due.  On the Playstation 3, what force could stand against it?  I have a high opinion of Haze, but I've never played it - that's based mostly on my gut.  Call of Duty 4 will fall hard on that system, like shrieking artillery.
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The world's greatest detective takes on the ultimate incarnation of cosmic madness through video games and literature. In Table of Malcontents.
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The videocassette in film: an unsettling innovation, a romanticized artifact, an LP in an MP3 world.
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Will you kill the Little Sisters and steal their genetic bounty? Ethical conundrums make this beautiful, brainy new game a must-play.
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First impressions: Favorite games benefit from high-definition display.
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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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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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Tycho:  Rhythm games aren't my forte, but I have a lot of inbuilt experience with meter which helps me fake it until I can build genuine skill.  And, as rhythm elements have crept into the entire medium, Tycho stock has been in a boom phase.  It's understandable, then, that while I soar and illuminate - and Gabriel sputters, bound to earth - tensions related to my prowess have begun to burn red-hot.  That is, until they cool again.  These things have a way of working themselves out in the fullness of time.          There's an incredible article over at Wired this month (and possibly also in the magazine?) about the Bungie's psychological approach to game design.  What a tremendous challenge it must be to retain authorial control in such a case!  As someone whose output is rarely screened by any agency, the whole thing gave me chills.  The right to fail nobly in a creative endeavor (as we sometimes do) is such a powerful luxury.  No such luxury may be extended to them, upon whose toil an entire platform rests.  God keep me from such a fate.          I keep hearing that Metroid Prime 3: Corruption isn't being promoted very well, but the person saying this always seems to know about it, and then when people share this complaint in the thread those people also seem to be "in the know."  It ships on the twenty-seventh of August, if you weren't aware - but since you almost certainly are, we needn't dwell on it.  What we should be dwelling on are the series of teaser vids that Retro has been trickling out.  Metroid's largely mysterious heroine has always been a huge draw for me, and going into deep detail about the character would actually damage the mystique.  But the universe she operates in need not be vague, which is why these clips are such a rich meal:  there's the Aurora Unit trailer that modernizes ancient Metroid canon in a classy way, and there's a treat at the end of the Valhalla trailer that ties it all together.  They both cover a setting that has gotten darker and more sophisticated, tones we don't typically associate with Nintendo.       We like to get kicks in on the post-Harmonix Guitar Hero, partly based on their "wacky" multiplayer concept - which ordinary gamers will probably love - but also out of a sort of tribal loyalty.  This having been established, they've built an authentically heroic tracklist that really has a lot of beef.  Going from the most recent Rock Band announcement out of Leipzig, both versions appear to have Radiohead's "Creep" and the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," which is something of a comfort.  After seeing different songs on each game from Metallica and The Rolling Stones, I wasn't sure if they were already traveling down the catalogues securing exclusive weaponry.  I hope that the labels in this case see the old wisdom of arming both sides.
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Tycho:  I was in a guild with the guy who started FigurePrints, and when he extended coupons to the old crew I snapped them up and gave them as Christmas presents.  None of my characters ever reached the highest echelons of Azerothian Fashion, so it seemed like they were better invested in Gabriel and Keek, who poured night after night into Battlegrounds and Active Volcanoes fighting dragons and whatnot. The coupons I have described are difficult to secure, only available in random drawings at random intervals, or if by some twist of fate you happen to have been guildmates with a cunning entrepreneur.  It's really a way to ennoble the lost years you plowed into that game.  It's the sort of thing you'd think a person would appreciate.
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Fans of classic computer games won't give up their habit without a fight. Some even faithfully remake their favorite games. The legality of the new versions remains murky, but some game creators are awed by the players' dedication. By Jacob Ogles.
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Net law professor Michael Geist takes a close look at the contested world of camcorder piracy.
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A hard-boiled detective thriller for the Nintendo DS convincingly blurs the boundaries between reading and playing. Commentary by Clive Thompson.