Is that just some game? No, it's a cultural artifact
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Also: Microsoft's Mundie: Consumers driving tech trends. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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Health care experts are convinced that games can help people get and stay well, but they don't agree on what's the best approach. By Noah Shachtman.
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A professor at East Carolina University is trying to determine whether some video games can be good for you.
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This is turning out to be more like a game of snakes and ladders than anything else. Or perhaps an analogy with chess would be better.
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It's shiny. It's new. It might be just for you.
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Western knockoffs and Islamic bling: Debunking some popular stereotypes of life in Iran.
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When I compare the current attack of the Olympics with the original Games in ancient Greece, a theme emerges. Back then, athletes were occasionally disemboweled and those who stepped over the line were flogged.
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Survey shows 14% of respondents play games during business meetings or conference calls -- but they claim it's not just all about fun.
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Sometimes learning about the culture and traditions of another country involves a verbal slap on the wrist.
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Chinese gamers react angrily to a Japanese video game they say besmirches the heroine of a classic Chinese novel.  Whether it does or not, this latest cross-cultural tiff does nothing to help the historically lousy relations between these two Asian nations.
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People find weird ways of raising controversies. And most of the time it is aimed to get cheap and free publicity from the media. Same concept has been used by the Scotland-based Traffic Games, which developed a game on John F Kennedy named JFK Reloaded.
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One thing you learn over the years is how Indian spectators love to get involved, even when the match is as dead as this one. It places them in a unique position and the pity is that a game that offered so much turned out the way it did.
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Tycho:  Heavenly Sword is, as you will soon discover, the very definition of a rental title.  Clocking in at somewhere between five and six hours (depending on your appetite for overwrought cinemas) it's a decent game saddled by impossible expectations.  It has silly ideas and grandeur in close proximity to one another.   It tries hard.  And it's not bad, by any means.  But it's not excellent, and perhaps unfairly it had this onus placed upon it.  I've said that Lair is not the Playstation 3, and nor is Heavenly Sword, but taken together one must come to the unmistakable conclusion that the Playstation 3 is a game console and not the supernatural artifact they have presented it as.  That however many processors and however many gigs of space are not especially relevant when put in the service of middling entertainment.    It has a decent combat system, and using this combat system you will progress from locked room to cramped, locked room until you come face to face with some jeering asshole.  You might kill them either because of the jeering or because you think that death might cull their interminable monologues.  There's a mean snake bitch and a pervert and an oaf.  Oh!  And en evil king.  The only thing running through my head during the lavish and no doubt expensive mo-capped cutscenes was that these kings and bitches and so forth should form a band.  It never seems to know if it wants to be a hilarious comic circus or a stark medieval saga.  Play it, and you'll know what I mean.     There are successes, though:  Kai, the mostly deranged sidekick, charms from the outset.  Her feral animations and nuanced delivery really make her stand out against this batch of also-rans.  Any object that can be thrown can also be thrown and then guided in slow motion, including corpses, which is something you must see to believe.  We didn't even have a target; we would just throw bodies so that they flew like Superman head-first into gongs.  This is something you can do for a half an hour - or more - without tiring of it.  This guided firing is called "Aftertouch," and it's about fifty percent of the game.  One wonders what the game's length would actually be if you didn't play half of it in slow-motion.        Some measure of your enjoyment will be bound up in whether or not you "buy" the story that they are telling.  I've heard it described as epic, when it's pretty rudimentary fantasy-by-numbers bullshit, so who knows.  It's all a matter of perspective:  are we judging it against only PS3 games?  If so, things are shaping up!  If you own more than one console - or a personal computer - your standards for grand storytelling were recently adjusted upward.
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It's not hip-hop. It's blip-pop. That's what the Gameboyzz Orchestra Project calls the sounds it squeezes out of a half dozen Game Boy consoles. [Missing Links]
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Tycho:  The news that Mass Effect would feature an uncompromising, high-res simulation of alien lesbian sex was sweet, and hot, like spun sugar.  For Gabriel, at any rate.  Some of the community reaction is dedicated to demanding gay parity for the male persuasion of this sexual equation, lengthy treatises by oiled men who crave starborne sodomy.  The rest of the dialogue is just boring.  Boring, terrestrial, and (quite frankly) myopic.         Where are the bipedal crustaceans in this calculation?  The swirling, aroused gasses?  The lonely, sentient space station whose hermetic bulkheads hold secret clusters of erotic delights, provided your character has both the skills and equipment?  Carpe astrum, you Goddamned backwater clowns.  There must be an entire universe of thrilling, dangerous, sometimes razor sharp genitalia that slavers beyond the Horsehead Nebula.      You might have noticed that we're advertising an Everquest game, an act that I'm aware places us in significant rhetorical peril.  If I had not found the game completely electrifying, I would have turned down the buy.  Of course, what I find electrifying has somewhat strange parameters.    I used to enjoy a deeply indie online CCG called Star Chamber, which was eventually purchased by an online CCG company called Worlds Apart (which did, among other things, the Lord of the Rings online CCG).  As does happen from time to time, World Apart was eventually purchased by Sony Online Entertainment, becoming SOE Denver.  Since then, they also delivered a Stargate CCG that we liked enough to advertise.  Legends of Norrath: Oathbound is a game within a game, similar to Final Fantasy's Triple Triad, that you can play against other players directly in the client.  It's tied into the loot systems for both EQ games, so that cards you get in packs are actually equipment and so forth - I find that interesting, but as a person with no investment in those systems it doesn't motivate me.  What motivates me is a rock solid, deeply tactical card game, which Oathbound absolutely is.  It plays in a stand-alone client which you can download, and comes with a fairly elaborate tutorial that is worth playing all the way through.  I had no interest in it, I felt confident dismissing it out of hand, and it won me over.  You may find yourself similarly surprised.    I have a very high opinion of Eurogamer, but I don't know how a person could possibly have reviewed Team Fortress 2 already.  We put time in both at work and at night, and I don't feel like I'm any smarter about the sometimes extraordinary interplay between the game's nine Goddamned classes, which mesh in real time to create some kind of shuddering Chaos Engine.  I have a lot of fun playing it, though the Medic brings me the most joy, so I've focused on it almost to the exclusion of all others.  A healing "gun" - like the repair module present in Tribes, almost a decade ago - is an immensely satisfying way to model that relationship.  Anytime your medical gun is attached to a player, your "Overcharge" ability is building up.  When unleashed, both you and your target become invulnerable to enemy attacks.  It's an incredible siege breaking technique, and it's earned simply by embodying the virtues of your class.  But where to use it, when to use it, I'm still learning this - and what's more, other players are still learning that I can do it.  I always love the early period in these multiplayer offerings, before the hard limits are known, when players seem to be magicians and anything is possible.
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ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. -- OK, so now the Patriots are 3-0 on this exhib-, no, wait, these games actually count , don't they?
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Game addicts meet a potentially addictive new game. Will profit ensue?