Review: `Supply & Demand,' Playaz Circle
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Playaz Circle, "Supply & Demand" (DTP Records/Def Jam)
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Crowds at Times Square Toys &#39;R&#39; Us find what they&#39;re looking for -- after getting in line at 4:30. By Deshundra Jefferson, CNN/Money Staff Writer.
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Creative Technology doubles its number of MP3 player product lines. Also: IBM makes the design of its 'blade' servers widely available & hellip;. Video game publisher Acclaim Entertainment files for bankruptcy & hellip;. and more.
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NEW YORK (Billboard) - The first few months of the year are an ideal time for rising acts to grab their share of attention and, they hope, sales. That's true for upcoming releases and new promotional boosts for sets already on hand.
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By Barnes, Phillip E  Consumers
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Today's customers are increasingly demanding, in Asia as elsewhere in the world.  Henry Astorga describes the complex reality faced by today's marketers, which includes much higher expectations than we have been used to.  Today's customers want performance, and they want it now!
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Google leads the charge of indexing information outside the web as it turns to TV. Also: Video-game maker Take Two buys a chunk of Sega & hellip;.  Google hiring practices raise eyebrows and speculations on future projects & hellip;. and more.
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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 company is in a phase of explosive growth, and that costs money.
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Tycho:  Having already purchased two fifths of The Orange Box over the last few years, the level of value I have derived from it is "fantastic" but not "supernatural."  For Gabriel, who never finished the second Half-Life and never purchased the first episode, the aforementioned Box represents an intimidating and possibly even brutal level of content for one's holiday dollar.  It's hard enough trying to keep up with all the games that are coming out, but when you start putting more than one game on the disc the difficulty is compounded.   We're lucky, then, than the best thing on there can be completed in only a couple hours.     I've tried to make my rounds through the disc, but I kept coming back to Portal until I'd completed it.  I expect every part of this strange collection to be full of virtue, in the way that Valve's anomalous position in the games industry allows: self-funded development in their sky-high Bellevue commune until each product sings.  But Portal is strange, even for them.  Risky on every axis, we may now say that the "first person puzzle comedy" has now been proven out as a genre.  The gameplay is strong, but Portal's unique combination of hilarity and menace elevates it, resulting in a few perfect, indelible hours of gameplay.          My TeamFortress 2 experience so far on the console has been fairly uneven.  Coming from the PC beta, where I sometimes battled with stability concerns but the games played smooth, I'm now grappling with the reverse.  I love the play experience, as I've already expressed, and I'm rarely of the opinion that having more players automatically improves a game - so the differential between the PC and 360 platforms isn't as important to me as it might be to others.  No, the problem with TF2 on the 360 (and likely the PS3, as well) is that peer to peer hosting just ain't cutting it.  There are games that seem to manage it better, but with Vista PCs authenticating into the service now peer to peer games should be an option.  This needs fixed overnight.     I'll try to complete the second Episode over the weekend, interleaved with finishing the writing on my own game, which has become more difficult since completing Portal.  I'm starting to think that Precipice needs a greater concentration of synthesized ladies.      I would be abdicating my duty if I neglected to mention the EA thing, which is really the EA/BioWare/Pandemic thing.  I was under the impression that BioWare and Pandemic had merged precisely to give themselves leverage over monolithic publishers like Electronic Arts, but who knows.  The biggest fallout in the short term is that, beyond the first Mass Effect, a multiplatform release is almost certain.  Of course, I wholly endorse that kind of thing, but I imagine that Microsoft might hold a different opinion.  After spending years promoting the series, enduring delays, and now having spent months beating the shit out of it in test, it's fair to say that MS was investing in a larger trilogy - one that gamers would associate exclusively with their brand.
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Users demand 'erotic entertainment' Mobile users are demanding more "erotic" entertainment as industry analysts forecast a surge in growth in the industry.â¦
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Napster is rocking, even if it's doing so before smaller crowds.
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Gabe: The Penny Arcade store has been updated with some new items. First we've got a brand new zip up hoodie.    It's got a slick PA logo on the front and Tycho's speech from the comic strip "I Hope You Like Text" on the back. We've been getting requests for a zip up like this for a long time. I don't want to sound like a used car salesman but my guess is that these will not last long.     We've also added a new sticker pack. This pack includes Tycho, Gabe, Annarchy, Charles, The Merch, The Fleshreaper, The Fruit Fucker and two bumper stickers.  The sticker pack is $10 but we've got a special deal going right now. If you spend $50 in the store we'll toss in the sticker pack for free.    Also, don't forget that you can now purchase prints of just about all our comic strips. If you're looking for strips with specific characters or games, Pennypacker is a great way to search our archives. I've had a few people ask me what my favorites are or which ones I think would make for especially nice prints. Tycho and I are each working on a list of our favorites but off the top of my head I'd say "The Hawk And The Hare" series would look pretty classy all framed up and hung on someone's wall.     -Gabe out
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"Come Out and Play Festival" to bring together out-of-the-box designers, techno-philosophers and utopian free spirits. Oh, and gamers too. Photos: Playing PacManhattan
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Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bit stream. By Chris Anderson from Wired magazine.
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A simple, "pay what you like" offering breaks all the rules and helps set the stage for the splintered future of the music biz. Bands need to treat marketing and management decisions as a valid part of the creative process. Commentary by Eliot Van Buskirk.
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Category killers don&#39;t usually exit gracefully from the markets they establish. By revolutionizing the toy industry and driving every mom-and-pop store off the face of the earth